Super Mario Galaxy

A Belated Review



The New Nintendo


Super Mario Galaxy is the New Nintendo. It's a landmark in Nintendo's history, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time a couple of generations ago or Super Mario Bros. 3 way before it. The DS Lite is New Nintendo, the Wii is unquestionably New Nintendo, so it's unbelievably exciting to see that in an era when Nintendo has released arguably the greatest hardware of its' entire games developing career, they still have the ability to make software to match. Twilight Princess showed some promise at the beginning but ultimately ran out of juice and suffered from being lost in replicating the experience, look and feel of Ocarina of Time rather than being a new game – some speculate this was due to fan pressure after 2003's incredibly innovative but highly divisive Wind Waker*. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption started out fantastic but as you may have previously read turned into a garbled, chaotic, overly western-influenced, escort mission having mess.


So because of what had come before I never expected as much as I've got out of Super Mario Galaxy. Plenty of people before me have said this already but it is a good way of describing this game: if you look at Mario's 3D games as a trilogy, in relation to the NES trilogy that came before it, then Galaxy is really the Super Mario Bros. 3 of the bunch. Aside from the obvious, it being the third one and all, Mario 64 first set the tone, Sunshine was then interesting with an emphasis on experimentation (and also unfairly somewhat badly received**), and then finally Galaxy refined everything that had come before while harking back to the spirit of the original, like say Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Galaxy is without a doubt the one of the three that will be the most revered in later years. Super Mario Bros. is still a classic but today is incredibly clunky to play, suffers from limited level design, and has almost no concept of a difficulty curve. Super Mario Bros 3. recently got re-released on the Wii's Virtual Console amongst great fervour and got many people enjoying it all over again, and for good reason: because it's still a damn fucking good game.

Super Mario Galaxy has a style and overall polish about it that I haven't seen since something like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This New Nintendo gives me great hope for a Starfox Wii title done right, or Super Smash Bros: Brawl being so much more than just a rehash of Melee.


Finally Settling In

One big part of the experience of Galaxy for me was that it feels like Mario is finally comfortable in the third dimension. Mario is synonymous with Platform games, so Galaxy is easily the best 3D platformer I've ever played because it feels like that by extension the genre itself is at last comfortable in the new dimension. Of course it took a Mario game to finally get us to this point.

In Mario's previous 3D adventures it broke down kind of like this:

Super Mario 64

Going in Mario didn't seem so entirely sure about this whole going 8 directions thing, and he had just recently entered the world of Acrobatics (back-flips, somersaults and the like), so he decided to do the whole adventure excruciatingly slowly. Seriously, go back and play that game and you'll find yourself long-jumping and belly-sliding everywhere just to get around at a decent pace. It's mind-numbing. Before 64 Mario mustn't have really been working out quite as much as he used to, he felt a great deal weaker. For instance when Mario would hit a wall, or even just run into one, this would cause quite a jolt and would often cause unnecessary deaths because of the reverb involved. In Mario's 2D adventures he'd just hit a wall and fall straight down it. The injection of quote unquote real world physics into the mix shouldn't turn a formidable action hero into such a lightweight.

Super Mario Sunshine

When it came time to have a vacation Mario decided to take things a little easier. So he quickly found Videogame's equivalent of Crutches, or even better Training Wheels, The F.L.U.U.D, and put it to great use, taking the place of many of his established and well renowned jumping skills. Being so excited at the prospect of his new water spouting safety-net Mario decided to run and jump around Isle Delfino almost as fast as Sonic on a bad day. When the Training Wheels came off (the Secret Stages***) his newfound love for speed resulted in many cut, scrapes, and booboos (deaths). Mario forgot how to jump in this game and relied too heavily on the power of his pack. He forgot probably the greatest jump in Platform Game history: The Long Jump.

Some of the jumps I could pull off in Sunshine using a combination of somersault, hover-nozzle, and belly slide I could just as easily pull off in Galaxy with the power of being awesome because the best designed piece of jumping in jumping history is back...and now it lets you orbit around planets.

Ever since the release of Super Mario 64 fanboys thought it was cool to say things like "Mario's really at home in 2D" and "when are we going to get another true Mario Game?" The most embarrassing thing for me is that I did agree with that line of thinking to a certain degree and I'm sure I've spouted similar phrases in the past. In 2006, ten years after Mario 64, the Fanboys got their wish with the DS's New Super Mario Bros**** which was very well received by critics and fans, however I was severely underwhelmed. The game felt somehow unlike a true Mario game despite trying so hard to be one. It was far too short and in some respects (namely music and animation) had decidedly poor production values. 
  I believe New Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess both fall in a period where Nintendo were trying so hard to echo their former success and glory, most likely brought about by the decline of the N64 and then ultimate failure of the Gamecube, instead of actually designing a future software-wise. As I said at the beginning Super Mario Galaxy is New Nintendo so therefore it is also New Mario. I'm proud to say that now I feel like I don't need any more 2D Mario games, Galaxy is better than 'New' was in every way.



Welcome to the Galaxy

In terms of presentation Galaxy looks and sounds perfect. It all fits in with that sense of overall polish. The Graphics don't need to be any better than they are. They're flashy when they can be but ultimately they just serve the gameplay perfectly, which is all graphics should ever really do. It is somewhat odd that the Mario Franchise was the first of Nintendo's to receive a fully orchestrated soundtrack***** but after hearing the results the decision was a great one. It seems as if Miyamoto's philosophy of CD quality music having a poor technical relationship with the action in the game (on a midi level) and thus creating a lack of immersion for the player has been challenged. Maybe now I won't feel like I'm listening to a Portishead record when I go into a dungeon in the next Zelda game.

This is the hardest part of my review to explain, stuff in my head is rarely in proper written form you see: Super Mario Galaxy feels...well...different. I had been playing it for about an hour or so, adjusting to its changes after coming right off the back of freshly playing and finishing 64 and Sunshine in the lead up to its release, and I got to the first star in the Battlerock Galaxy. When I first went underneath and then on the side of the moving saucer to dodge an electric fence I got an unbelievably powerful sense that I was doing something new.

You'll see what I mean.

Danny

* I don't really side with this idea but that debate is for a whole different article.

**Super Mario Sunshine is a great example of vg critics contradicting themselves when the 'next big thing' comes out. When reviews for Galaxy started rolling in many made a habit of comparing its strengths against Sunshine's weaknesses. However, many of the strengths they mentioned were very similar, sometimes almost word for word, to what those same reviewers had said about Sunshine at the time of its release. I feel sorry for Sunshine, it was received very well at the time, and deservedly so, but in recent years has developed a reputation as a bad game. It's not a bad game. It's a very, very, very, very good game. But there is definitely something missing. It's just not a great game. Galaxy is though.

***That now look like Galaxy beta levels.

****And to a lesser extent the year after with Super Paper Mario.

*****Super Smash Bros. Melee doesn't really count because it involves second party developers.

Unfinished Ludology

I've just finished Final Fantasy XII. (Sephira, mutation, rebirth signified through vegetation, yadda yadda yadda). I've enjoyed it immensely, but here's the thing.

Know that feeling where you're nearing the end of a book you're really liking, and you find yourself rationing it, slowing your reading so it won't be over? Well, I had that in spades with Final Fantasy XII. But it's not until I was watching the ending that I realised that that feeling is different for games than it would be for a book or tv series.

Not Vaguely A Spoiler: In the final act of Final Fantasy XII - as is customary in a Squeenix adventure - all the game's Big Bads are just sitting up there in a big ol' Mana Fortress waiting for you to go kick their faces in, and you get the choice anytime whether to embark on the final showdown or just keep on adventuring about. And of course you could, theoretically, finish ALL the extra malarkey - the optional dungeons, completing the bestiary, hunting down all the marks, etc - before going to beat up the inevitable mutant angel-man. But you don't, because there gets a point where you go, this is silly, I'm just gonna see what this here North Cave is like, and then before you know it, bam!, The End.

Which is a fucking stupid choice of words. It's not the end. It's far from the end. There's still loads of Final Fantasy XII I haven't done. But then, there's also loads of Final Fantasy X I haven't done, and Metal Gear Solid 2, and Castlevania DS, for gosh sakes. But I know I won't be going back to those games for another big marathon, just as I doubt FFXII will keep me interested all the way to true completion, just as I'm putting off the (frankly, rather easy-looking) final finale of Phantom Hourglass for as many more secrets, piddling and expected, as I can.

I'm pretty sure I got everything I could in Secret of Mana and Link to the Past. I know I got absolutely fucking everything in Super Mario World. (On a rental, no less!) Hell, Terranigma was such a cunt that I got damn near everything even though I didn't manage to finish it (that savegame, of course, is now long gone).

There's interesting points to be made here on the overreliance on narrative within the RPG genre, the self-defeatist logic of making a game that's an absolute ludological revolution within its field and yet is narratively both less than compelling (or sense-making) and imposing of an artificial end on the proceedings.

But they are all overhadowed by the fact that Dan and I played through like a half dozen times and got every motherfucking thing you could in Goonies 2, which in a very real and palpable sense makes it the best narrative-hook game ever.

Congratulations, you're at Uni

[Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.]

So begins man Joe McNeilly's essay on why "Portal is the most subversive game ever". Basically, what Joe's done is to note that a portal, in Portal, looks kind of like a vagina (that's your psychoanalytical signifier) and is shot from a gun held by the unseen protagonist (feminist film theory).

It's a nice theory, and he's right in that it's nice that Portal uses a female protagonist without either sexualising or providing her with an honorary dick, but... "most subversive game ever"? Surely that award goes to the first RPG to have an NPC provide you with control pad advice then ask what a B button is? After all, Joe, that would be intra-medial interrogation of the conventions of genre through a post-human window of materiality!