Super Mario Galaxy

It’s-a Mario! I’m-a your friendly gaming racial stereotype-a.

Super Mario Galaxy is the spiritual successor to the brilliant Mario 64, and being a Mario title, the story has been ruined already by virtue of sheer repetition. Princess Peach sends Mario a letter telling him she's baked him a cake or something, and just as our hero arrives she's promptly whisked off by Bowser to a location strategically placed such that it can only be accessed by repeatedly jumping on things.

This common (read: done to death) premise should make comparing Galaxy to previous Mario titles easy. Not so.

Like Mario 64, you're still trying to recover stars stolen by Bowser to power some device that will ultimately let you defeat him. But this outing mixes things up by managing to keep the freeform platforming of Mario 64 while getting rid of it at the same time. Let me explain.

You can choose to tackle whatever level you want, when you want, provided you have earned enough stars from previous levels to access it. But once you get into the level things get very linear. You pick a planet, then a star you want to snag, then launch to the planet. After surviving intergalactic travel and emerging from the impact of re-entry unscathed, you move through a map that has configured itself to veer you toward the star as you progress. The linearity of the levels gives you direction; the choice of levels gives you freedom. It's genius.



The levels are usually divided into small, manageable sections that you travel to via one-way slingshot. When you do, you'll have some time to admire the extraordinary level design. The artwork is astonishing and breathes colourful life into the sectioned levels; which themselves are inspired gold nuggets of unadulterated fun.

All the while there are throwbacks to old Mario titles, and not just the obvious ones like recycled enemies. Classic background music gets remixed and reused all over the place, there's a haunted mansion planet with you-know-who inside and those plants with a stem you can climb after killing them have made a triumphant return. It makes the massively different game so eerily familiar and, as a direct result, hugely enjoyable.



To mix things up even more, if you visit a planet when a comet is nearby, an extra star is put up for grabs. You'll be playing an old mission under one of many modifiers such as a single HP or racing the clock to a goal. It's a standout platformer because of its depth. Even after you finish the game you’ll sink hours into hunting down bonus stars and chasing that steadily increasing difficulty curve.

The Wii-mote controls work like a charm. Everything is fundamentally the same as Mario 64 in that you use an analogue stick and buttons to do most of the interacting, but the pointer and motion sensitive controls that have been added work so well and so fluidly that playing is instinctive. You can even recruit a second player to help you take out enemies, pause rolling boulders and collect star bits; pseudo coins that can stun enemies and unlock new worlds.



It’s so hard to fault. Every element in the game just fits together perfectly, so much so that it’s impossible to be cynical about it. I tried at the start of the review and failed. If every game that was released on the Wii had the production values and looked and played like this, we’d all explode with joy.