Super Mario Galaxy

And now we get to Super Mario Galaxy. Things just got real. Real good.

I love this game. It's kind of incredible, but the only real way to know how incredible Super Mario Galaxy is, is to look at what came before.

Mario games started out looking like this on the NES and SNES

There was a nice progression in the graphics, sure, but things were normal. There were advances but then things changed radically in 1996.

Super Mario 64 came and changed all our world(s). 

This was unprecedented, and it was good, and it worked. Don't come telling me the graphics are terrible. This is beautiful. It was beautiful then and it's beautiful now, and the way it played?! Oh, my god. It was sheer bliss! I spent hours just running around outside Princess Peach's castle where there aren't even any enemies! It was fun just to run around in circles! And besides, what Super Mario 64 achieved in its day was still an amazing feat! (Bubsy 3D came out on PlayStation six months after SM64 and it was a stinking piece of shit. Don't just take my word for it: http://youtu.be/STKHAgTxCq8)

Super Mario 64 was hailed as the greatest game ever made and it deserved it. Maybe it had some camera problems now and again, so what? It still begged to be played, and it was fun as hell. The N64 was the first game console to come standard with a 360° analog control stick (Sega, Sony, and everyone else soon followed) and SM64 was basically designed for that controller. Simply put it was a masterpiece.

Unfortunately, it was followed up on Gamecube by this:

Super Mario Sunshine, which on paper, and even graphically, looks great. Sadly, this game was a disappointment. It broke away from what a lot of what Super Mario 64 had set up and introduced weird water mechanics and it just wasn't a whole lot of fun to play.

Super Mario Galaxy came steamrolling in with something completely new. 

Gravity.

Galaxy was not content with simply taking things from 2D to 3D. It revolved around the idea that locations in the game were like little planetoids and as such, had gravity that Mario was affected by. In the picture above you can see Mario walking "up" a wall. He's simply being attracted by gravity to the center of that cube structure. The result was a little disorienting at first, but once you get used to it, tremendously fun.

Super Mario Galaxy is the true spiritual successor to Super Mario 64. It is gorgeous graphically (seriously, you're playing a cartoon here.) Most of all, it is incredibly fun.

Right now I'm on my second run trying to beat it with Luigi, who has the added advantage of slipping and sliding everywhere. I'm on like 90 stars, and I can't wait to see if I can discover the 121st.

Woo!

Ha!

Yahoo!