Super Mario “Happiness”
So, this post is entitles, Super Mario Happiness. Well, why is this? Well, I found it fitting on many levels. First, there is the “URMRGAY” amusing coincidence discovered about the letters that appear to have sparkles on them. Second, and by far most importantly, is the fact that, well playing Super Mario games just plain makes me happy, be it Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, and no less, Super Mario Galaxy.
So, needless to say, I love this game. I did in fact play this game almost non-stop for the past two days (since it’s release), and I have in fact “beaten” the game (by which I mean, beaten the game first pass, which refers to the fact that I’ve beaten the game sans 100% completion… on which I’d like to add that I plan on doing it second pass later in the evening tonight.) The thoughts and opinions I am about to share came with much thought and insight, as such.
First of all, I love this game. It’s brilliant and it’s fantastic. So much platforming goodness. It takes me so far back, the feeling is so SM64. It feels so old school. There’s no stress about collecting this or collecting that, completing this objective, not screwing up this side-quest, blah blah blah, or anything like that, it’s all carefree and fun. It’s genuinely fun, at that; not like one of those things where you’re having fun going for a reward and a goal, and collecting the reward is fun despite the path their being riddled with bits of tediousness and the like, no you’re playing it for the pure joy and goal of playing it. It feels like SM64 in that the star is simply a hint at what you could try to do that might be a lot of fun.I love the new mechanics, the new gameplay, the visuals, the music, the powers, the level design, both aesthetically and functionally, the *snicker* voice acting, I love it all, and I love playing it on the Wii and with the Wiimote and Nunchuck. I feel it’s exactly what a Mario game should be. There were moments where I was surprised by what I was playing, where I for a fleeting moment thought that I was getting something below what I expected, but I found that they instead gave me what I wanted knowing more what would please me than I myself knew.
I’ve heard a lot of early critiquing for the game, such as the game being far too easy, well, I disagree with that notion. I think it’s the perfect level of dificulty: it starts out easy, gets more challenging, presents optional challenges for people not up to the task, and especially difficult ones for renown experts. Though, I rarely find a problem with difficulty in a game, or lack thereof… I know I’m pretty good at games, so expecting games created to give me a hard time would, in my opinion, be a game made far too difficult. Also I’d like to add, sure I could be one of the people boasting about only dying a handful of times throughout my entire adventure, but I’d be exaggerating for one, and two, the difficulty in most adventure games today can rarely be quantified by the number of times you were killed.
I’ve also heard some comparisons on the process of shaking the Wiimote to accomplish the spin when a button press could accomplish the same task just as easily. Well, after much thought, I think I prefer the waggling. It truly sends across the meaning of what you are doing in exerting the extra energy on your behalf to get that perfectly times spin and such. If it was just a button press, the action wouldn’t feel as significant, that little bit of energy that you have to yourself exert really truly makes the action feel so much smoother and better. And also, it really moves us into the new generation of timing movements of our body appendages along with movement of our thumbs/fingers/eyes/etc.My only “complaint,” which isn’t really much of a complaint, is that each “galaxy” has the luxury or being like a small level just connected with the launcher stars, so you don’t get to have those well designed large scale levels that you’d see in SM64. I mean, SMG has it’s own unique brilliant level design for sure, and it’s very impressive, and it’s at least as impressive, but I think it’s probably more challenging to do levels like you would see in SM64 than what you mostly see in SMG, which is the only downside to that thought.
Alas, I have not 100%’d this game yet, and believe me I will FOR SURE, but right now where I am with this game I will say this. I love this game, a lot, it is purely brilliant. It has some small flaws here and there that really make me wish for a teeny bit more. But anyway, this game is AMAZING, but it is not as good as SM64. Close, but not quite. Though it is the true sequel to that game in every way shape and form, and it is indeed SM64 reborn. To be honest, it’s almost everything I could hope for.
So, to describe a little bit of what I’m talking about, about doing more: I wish that you had to “earn” powers similar to how you would in SM64, which caused the powers to be unlocked all over the world. By this, new possibilities and areas would be opened in almost every world, giving you all sorts of amusing and interactive experiences. Also, as fun as the comets are, I wish instead that they were, “comet-stars” or something, and you could get one of each type on every level in the games, so like, 4 comet-stars per star basically. Sure, it’d be really hard, but it’d be for the uber-hardcore. And then instead of these stars-from-comets-stages, they had instead put in another 2 challenges on each level for stars, which surely they could have done. Though I must say, I’m glad the 100-yellow-coin challenges are gone. I never liked those.
Anyway, if I were to give this game a score, and though I choose not to do so, I would easily feel no regret about giving it a 10/10, but I feel a 9.5 is the score it deserves (hell, it’d be 9.9 if I believed in going by 0.1 increments)… which really makes me want to re-think the scores I’ve given other games in my mind. Honestly, it breaks my heart that this game has those shortcomings, because it really is so close to the perfect game, and having those extra little bit of tid-bits to make it that 10 really would have been a brilliant game to play, over and over again. Haha, I’ll be playing this one over and over for years to come anyway though. 
Add comment November 16th, 2007 by Anuj
