Super Mario Galaxy

I can't swim. I took lessons as a kid, but I never stuck with it beyond the beginner session because going to the deep end scared me. Yet, paradoxically, I love water--maybe it's because I'm an Aquarius, maybe not--and when my family went on vacations and I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of hotel pools or the ocean. There is something beautiful and uncanny about swimming in a pool and turning upside down, feeling weightless and confused because now what used to be below you feels like the roof--and when you look "down" it now looks like up. You see the water surface above you, and above that, the "true" roof, and your sense of disorientation is both delicious and mind blowing.

Stay with me.

My Mom taught me a neat trick during a bored summer afternoon when I was younger. What you do is you take a small hand mirror, hold it just under your nose, and go outside. Let's say you have a deck or a set of stairs outside you can use. So, with the mirror under your nose, look down into it and you see the sky. Jump or step off the deck/stairs. For some reason your brain thinks that you are going to fall into the sky and you feel frightened and free of gravity at the same time. This also works indoors, where you keep stepping over doorways and ceiling fans when you don't need to.

I bring both of these childhood memories up because they're exactly the kind of things that Super Mario Galaxy gets right. You're never sure exactly which way is up or down, or even if there is one. It is often completely subjective depending on which "ground" you are standing on. While Mario 64 may have brought the series into 3D, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy is the first "true" 3D platformer because there is a real sense of depth instead of simply moving up/down or left/right.



The first time you end up on a planetoid and you can run around the full sphere of it, wrapping around it over and over, doing Mario's jumps, spinning the Wii remote to attack enemies, using the remote to collect star bits to shoot at enemies, too...well, this feeling of "wow, this is so much fun!!" never goes away. Even the levels that force you to use the Wii remote's motion sensing to control Mario completely, such as the manta ray surfing level or the Super Monkey Ball-esque one, though frustrating at first, quickly become second nature. It is an immersive game, by which I mean you never have to look down at the controller and figure out what you're supposed to press to do what, it comes completely intuitively.

The other big thing that Mario Galaxy gets right is variety. I am tempted to call it a mini-game collection fused with Mario 64's core gameplay, but that's misleading. Simply put, every stage you play on is completely unique and you will always be doing new, interesting things you never thought you would be doing. Galaxy constantly surprises and pleases you, even with the stages which are difficult and frustrating--and there are some. However, this ties back into the genius of the game's variety: you don't have to play every level or collect every star to complete the game. If you get stuck on something, you can either skip it completely or come back to it later with a fresh mind.



Let me close this review with why precisely I bought the game. I wasn't completely sold on yet another Mario game until I was in Best Buy two weeks ago. I had heard so many great things about Galaxy, but it was only once I played it at Best Buy that I knew I had to have it. I ran around the main hub world part of the game, watching little star people gurgle and coo at me, soothed by the delightful music, and played half of one level, dying by falling off the stage and getting sucked into a black hole. I put the controllers down, walked over to the Wii games, and immediately went up to the checkout. If you have a Wii and you don't have this game, there's something wrong with you.