Is such disparagement fair? Perhaps not entirely, but at the same time, you could appreciate where the Sunshine detractors were coming from: a worthy sequel to Super Mario 64 it probably wasn’t.
Thus, something of a rescue act is required, and Nintendo will be hoping that’s where Super Mario Galaxy comes in. On display at this week’s E3 Media & Business Summit, the game has plainly left a hugely positive impression on those who tried it. “I can’t say a bad thing about the game,” gushed one American journalist to us on the shuttle bus to Barker Hangar, where the title is on show. “It’s re-affirmed my faith in the Wii,” raved another. High praise indeed, and they both have a point - Super Mario Galaxy is shaping up to be quite glorious.
Four levels were on display at the Hangar - in order, Gateway Galaxy, Egg Planet Galaxy, Honeybee Galaxy, and Star Dust Galaxy - and we got to try three of these. The first, Gateway Galaxy, also constitutes the very beginning of the game, and therefore serves as a tutorial and introduction to your quest. It opens up with a shot of our mustachioed hero, who’s laid out cold on a flower bed of daisies, only to be awoken by a small star hovering above him. The next thing you know, Mazza is tearing around the game’s opening globe, hunting down rabbits in a game of hide-and-seek.
The spherical levels could have been a royal pain when it came to the camera and controls, but they actually work beautifully.
A couple of things come to mind during your first steps with Mario. One: the game looks magnificent. There’s always been a sense that developers outside of Nintendo were adopting a half-arsed approach to squeezing the best visuals possible out of the Wii, and Galaxy emphatically proves this to be the case. The vibrancy and solidity of the game world, the flawless frame-rate, superior animation, and fantastic character modelling will, with any luck, become a standard-bearer that other studios aspire to. The water effects deserve a paragraph of their own, but we’ll restrain ourselves.
Two: the weirdness of playing a platformer on a sphere. As many of you reading this will know, Super Mario Galaxy is played out on a vast number of planets. This means that Mario is required to trek across complexly rounded surfaces, which means you’ll be spending a good deal of the game controlling the plumber while he’s upside down and running towards the screen, or at a perpendicular, 90º angle. It sounds like a recipe for nightmarish game controls, but it works. Occasionally, you’ll find yourself tilting your head, but you never feel out of control, and the camera - typically for a Mario title, it has to be said - is perfect, never cropping out what lies ahead of you.
A number of the game’s puzzles also take advantage of the spherical form of the game’s stages. For example, in the Egg Planet Galaxy, you encounter a newly born Baby Piranha (fresh out of its egg, which was cracked open by Mario’s landing). The creature immediately fancies having Mario for its first lunch, so begins chasing you across the planet. Neither a Spin Attack (performed by shaking the Wiimote) or a good old traditional punch to the chops floors it.
Just one example of Galaxy's use of puzzles based on lateral thinking.
Instead, the real solution lies behind your foe, for the hungry infant is the owner of a tail with a giant, club-shaped end to it (as seen in the screen above). By outpacing the Piranha as it pursues you around the globular level, you eventually end up right behind the peckish plant, where a Spin Attack sends the heavy tail smashing into its head. Two Spin Attacks later, and your nemesis is out for the count. Admittedly, it may not be a terribly tough puzzle to solve, but it’s a nice example of how lateral thinking plays a role in the game, and gives us faith that the rounded levels won’t simply be there for aesthetic purposes.
After a few more minutes with the game, something else becomes apparent: there’s just an astounding amount of variety packed into proceedings. In the space of about eight minutes, we crawled over the fuzzy body of a gigantic Queen Bee to locate the shattered pieces of a Star Ring and solve her itchiness, ran away from (and then knocked out) a ravenous Baby Piranha plant, and hovered about in the new bee suit as Bee Mario (yes, there’s a bee suit in this one, an excellent add-on that joins the Tanooki, Frog, and Hammer Bros. suits in the Mario universe).
Simply put, there’s always something going on, an important factor after the occasionally pedestrian pace of predecessor Super Mario Sunshine. If Nintendo can keep this level of diversity and non-stop action going for thirty hours, Galaxy will be some game.
Our only regret from the whole experience is that we didn’t get to try out the fourth and final level, Star Dust Galaxy. That will have to wait until our review code arrives, but we’re already counting the days.
Loading...
