Super Mario Galaxy
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Posted December 14th, 2007 at 11:03am
by Kit Pierce
I was talking with a colleague about what makes a good game. Between the two of us we came up with two critical elements, which measured in various proportions concoct every delightful gaming experience we’ve ever come across: Story and Gameplay. The rest is just window dressing. Not with me yet? Here are some examples:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Not the best gameplay — actually based on decades old mechanics first seen in the groundbreaking D&D, but it has a killer story.
Geometry Wars. Story? Not as such, no. Gameplay? Natch.
Guitar Hero falls squarely into the gameplay category.
Marathon. Mac classic now available on the XBox 360. Gameplay was best-in-class FPS fare, but not by any means original. People are still talking about the story today, though.
But this is a writeup about Super Mario Galaxy, no? Well, sort of. This is really an article about why we love Nintendo. Where does Mario lie on that story/gameplay continuum? Pure gameplay, baby!
Story isn’t ignored in Super Mario Galaxy, per se. The game has the sheerest veneer of story that’s graced most Mario adventure games. Peach is missing. Mario to the rescue! This is, of course, a lie. Mario couldn’t care less about Peach. No, Mario pays Bowser some cash under the table to kidnap the Princess on a regular basis, just so he can solve some puzzles. See, Mario loves the game, not the rescue. Super Mario Galaxy makes this fact abundantly clear.
And this game is imminently playable. It’s a masterpiece of design. As the game progresses, previous levels teach you all the skills you need to move on. The difficulty ramp is so smooth that you hardly notice how tricky things are getting until you take a step back after you’ve pulled off an incredible run and realize just how insane that particular level was. And the skill acquisition is sublimely integrated into the game itself. Case in point: At a fairly advanced level of the game a penguin challenges you to a skating match without telling you how to start skating explicitly. But there are crystals which will break if spin-attacked — something the game has fully prepared you to attempt. Ah, but the spin attack will also launch the skating move, and this simple cause and effect yields a profound light bulb moment in the gameplay proper. That’s good design.
Here’s an example in motion: the first boss of the game prepares you with techniques that you’ll use for the rest of the game.
All the technical aspects of the game are in order as well. The controls are tight. The graphics are brimming with vitality. Even the second-player co-star mode, which has been decried as tacked-on and gimmicky, has a great place in the game, and well-coordinated teams can achieve feats of derring-do simply impossible by the single player alone. The music is rich and varied. The vocal performances are spot-on. Super Mario Galaxy brims with personality, and is a fantastic showcase for what the Wii is capable of both in terms of gameplay and visual design.
If you were to simply slam through this game, say in order to get a review written in time for a deadline, you’d miss so much of what makes this game lovable. The library sequences are a good example of this. Let’s get to that part.
Mario’s world hub in SMG is a space platform called the Comet Observatory. It’s run by a woman named Rosalina and peoples with little space critters called Lumas. As you play the game and unlock new worlds, Rosalina will tell you some of her story and how the Comet Observatory came to be. The story is beautifully rendered in pastel style, reminiscent of the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and utterly charming in its own right. A distraction to the arc of the game? Not really. Rosalina’s story helped me to realize very quickly that the SMG arc was less about hammering through galaxies collecting stars and more about the exploration and management of this little world-hub Mario calls home base.
Mario has to complete 60 levels (and gain 60 stars) before he can face off against Bowser and rescue the Princess. There are 121 stars in the game total. In other words, when you beat the game, you have unlocked less than half of what Super Mario Galaxy has to offer.
Appealing simultaneously to the casual and so-called hardcore gamer, Mario himself is simply an avatar with a great deal of style and personality you use to manipulate various puzzles in order to beat the game. You can do it easy or hard — it’s up to you. For people who want the challenge, the various built-in gameplay modes will appeal highly. In the narrative, comets will orbit certain galaxies, changing the rules of play within them. Some of the levels get converted into speed runs. Others involve Mario having to take out a boss while having only one hit point (hint: don’t get hit). Yet other modes involve Mario racing a shadowy version of himself to a star. Not to mention the hidden stars, discoverable only by going off the beaten path and leaving no stone unturned, no goomba unstomped.
Mario Galaxy builds on Mario 64 in a way that appears effortless. If you’ve never played before, no worries: you’ll catch up quickly. But old-school players will feel completely at home in this clear heir to the 3d-platforming paradigm established by Nintendo way back in the old days. It’s just plain fun in the right-sized chunks of clever discovery that kept me playing for hours on end. This game — Super Mario Galaxy — is a fantastic example of why we love Nintendo.
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