Super Mario Galaxy is an embarrassment. It's an embarrassment for platform games. It's an embarrassment for adventure games. It's an embarrassment for Nintendo and an embarrassment for the Wii. What have we all been playing at in the ten years since Super Mario 64 came out? This is what gaming ought to be like.
Bright, bold, unrepentantly loony, Galaxy is everything you wanted it to be. It's beautiful and inventive. It's pure-blood Mario without being a retro indulgence. It's a stiff platforming challenge and a free-wheeling romp. It's the best thing on Wii, and the best traditional game Nintendo has made in a decade. The only thing about it which dulls your enjoyment is the memory of all the mediocre games you've had to play in the meantime.
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=86873&page=1 10/10
PROS:The great challenge in making a follow-up to Mario 64 was always that to do it justice, you'd have to make a game which is as much its own as Mario 64 was. That's no easy task when you also have to integrate the traditions of two decades of Mario games and the expectations of millions of fans. Sunshine, despite its dazzle, ultimately collapsed under that weight, becoming repetitive and sometimes cumbersome as it tried to find the balance. Where Galaxy matches Mario 64 is not quite in its quality of execution - alongside the brilliance of some stars are others which fall a bit flat, and there isn't the overall sense of implacable perfection that that game had - but in its confidence and originality. Another decade needs to go by before we'll know whether it will come to be as revered as 64 did. For now, all that matters is that the waiting is finally over.
CONS:These mild annoyances with the control are the worst of the small niggles that let Galaxy down. With the health power meter now reduced from six sections to three, experimenting with new enemies and tactics can be a little fraught - try the wrong thing twice in a row and you're in immediately danger of dying. Thankfully, generous restart points, an abundance of 1-Ups from Star Bits and regular gifts of extra lives from Peach mean that there's really no reason to see the Game Over screen at any point in the 15-20 hours it will take you to finish the game's initial story arc.
More disappointing is the lack of a strong sense of identity. Many individual levels are dazzling and unforgettable, but overall the game can feel a bit fragmented. The starship in particular doesn't offer the kind of playground freedom that you want in a Mario hub area - you're never going to feel like it's home, the way Mario 64's castle still does to those of us who are hoping to go there when we die. That slight incoherence is also evident when the balance starts to tip a little too close to adventure game and a little too far from platformer. It just doesn't feel right to have Mario lighting torches to open locked doors - Link's agents are surely planning to sue. The extra costumes and cap equivalents also feel a little flimsy in their implementation - no matter how adorable Mario's fat little bee booty is, these elements just don't feel well integrated into the main game
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