Focus on: Super Mario Galaxy
Super Mario Galaxy is the game many Wii owner were looking forward to. Mario games are thought to be the end all and be all of platform games. So does Super Mario Galaxy live up to its legacy? In short, yes. Critics have given it ridiculously high ratings. Game Rankings give it a composite score of 97.2%, the second highest score ever. Metacritic gives Super Mario Galaxy a 97, making it their 11th best game of all time. So the ratings are good. AAA.
Gameplay is both fun and challenging. Princess Peach is stolen by bowser (again) with a huge array of airships and a UFA and taken into space. Mario has to make his way from planetoid to planetoid using stats to power his observatory to go farther into space. The graphics are great, rendering little mini-planets floating through space with beauty and artistic vision (although some anti-aliasing would be nice at times). Though out the game you play with bizarre concepts of gravity and weird views as you explore oddly shaped objects in space. All the core elements of Mario gameplay are present, but the added controls to take advantage of the Wiimote are great, and well integrated.
You can use the pointing function to point at the screen and gather starbits, useful for a variety of things including getting free lives. Your main method of attack, spinning (Mario’s hopping-on-things-head’s days are over apparently) is activated by shaking the Wiimote lightly. For non-Wii players, pointing while playing is totally new, yet fun. The controls are creative, making you feel like you are experiencing something new, while still keeping a shallow learning curve.
Super Mario Galaxy manages to be quite difficult, but not frustrating. Similar to games like Super Mario 3, or Yoshi’s World most young gamers probably won’t even realize that the game can be beat. But also like those classics, for some reason, this won’t bother them. For those of us playing to win, a heavy challenge lies ahead, in classic Mario format. So stock up on some lives and get ready for a challenge.
The game offers an interesting cooperative mode. Where one player controls Mario while another can collect and fire starbits. This, in my opinion is great for siblings of different ages. The older sibling can control Mario, and the younger who would normally just be watching, can contribute to the game. My younger sisters (14 and 8 years old) greatly enjoyed this cooperation as they played through the game.
All in all, I give Super Mario Galaxy a 10 out of 10. Great gameplay, beautiful graphics and classic Mario fun make this game the must buy game for the Wii. I’m looking forward to developers seeing what Super Mario Galaxy did right, because it really is the proof that the Wii is well suited for AAA games.
