Something a little different (who says you can't play games in the library?)
Super Mario Galaxy for Nintendo Wii
The Plot: Like its predecessors in the Super Mario series, Super Mario Galaxy finds Mario on a rescue mission to save Princess Peach from Bowser's evil grasp and defeat his arch-enemy - this time, releasing trapped Power Stars along the way and stopping Bowser from creating a mega-galaxy to rule malevolently over all. Aided by Rosalina, the guardian of the skies, and her adorable Lumas, Mario (and Luigi!) roam the galaxies completing puzzles, winning races, playing chasey, and collecting coins in a bid to find all 120 stars.
The Review: I started playing this game sometime in December '11, a week or so before Christmas, and I have only now finished the entire thing, one week into February. Looks here definitely deceived me - the cover makes it seems like you're about to start on a cutesy, intergalactic sojourn in brightly-coloured levels with shiny tokens and sweet-as-pie NPCs like the Lumas and the Toad Brigade. How wrong I was (sort of)!
The design of the game is brightly-coloured and shiny and looks amazing, the spherical levels in particular which allow for almost total 3D gameplay. On some levels (called galaxies, although it would be more appropriate to call them planets), you can run all the way around the playing field, hanging upside down on planets that have their own centre of gravity - it's here at the bottom of a planet where you can find most of its secrets! The graphics are fluid too, which is helpful, especially when you're speeding around in all dimensions and the last thing you want is any kind of lag (I know consoles are good for lack of lag, but it's a big bonus with this game). But - and this perhaps the one thing that ruined the fun for me - the camera is terrible. Just at the moment when you want it right behind Mario to try and execute a difficult move, it refuses to shift, either only moving slightly to where you want it or not moving at all. It's possible to manually adjust the camera using the direction pad on the Wii Remote (as an alternative to the automatic button on the Nunchuck), but in most, if not all cases when you need it, the direction pad means there's too much stuffing around. This is, I would say, Super Mario Galaxy's biggest flaw, and can make playing some levels an extremely frustrating experience.
This building frustration in some levels ruined the fun for me, turning what should have been an afternoon's entertainment into a grudge match between me and the game. The worst level for me was 'Luigi's Purple Coins', a race around a flat platform in the shape of a jumping Luigi, made up of a combination of tiles that disappear or rotate on contact - meaning you can only go in one direction, with no back-tracking - and it's timed, too, like you need added pressure on this level. The disappearing tiles means that you only have a second or two to reorient yourself ready for a long jump across a gap in the tiles, in an attempt to collect a whole set of coins in one go. And when the camera doesn't get quite behind you as much as you'd like, and you press the button combo for a long jump, and it goes askew and you fall into the black hole for the 100th time that afternoon... talk about a time suck!
For this reason, I felt like I wasn't totally in agreement with the reviews written by mags like GameSpot and IGN, who were declaring it the best Mario game in the series. While some may see this as a challenge and a sign of a good game, there's a point where a challenge becomes a chore. On the other hand, there are some levels where you would expect some difficulty and not get any, like the Bowser boss levels - by the time you've met Bowser in-game for the second or third time, it's become all too easy, as he attacks in each level with exactly the same moves as the one before it. Even in the final Bowser battle the moves are rehashed, making the completion of the game a little anticlimactic. The real challenges are the races, especially the Cosmic Mario runs, some of which can take an entire afternoon's play to finish in first!
That said, Super Mario Galaxy is not a bad game, not in the slightest - claims that it's the best platformer created so far are not without merit. It's definitely innovative and once you get the hang of the controls it sucks you in and you're playing for hours. The basic plot is nothing new, as any fan of Mario will know, but the addition of Rosalina and the Lumas is enough to keep you interested as you go from observatory to observatory. Maybe the biggest indicator that Super Mario Galaxy was really a great game to play was the fact that, even though I said aloud that I wouldn't bother putting myself through the entire thing all over again, as soon as I'd unlocked Luigi as a playable character I was back in the fray, going over all the levels one more time (but not in exactly the same way, of course!).
Out of Five:
4 out of 5
(or should I say Lumas?)
