The six stages of Galaxy we played were pure bliss.
It's drop-dead gorgeous, for starters. This is not just the best-looking Wii title by miles, it's one of the best-looking games in the world full stop, HD or no HD. It's as smooth and shiny as silk, the colours are unbelievably vibrant, it's smothered in lustrous effects, and you feel like you can reach out and touch its chunky, cute and tactile designs. Super Mario Galaxy makes most hi-def games look about as solid and convincing as photographs pasted onto empty cereal packets. The sound is superb too: a riot of bright tinkles, radiophonic zings and zaps, and electro-funk remixes of vintage Mario tunes.
The controls are as fluid and versatile as ever.
The camera is mostly automatic and flawless. You'll find yourself involuntarily laughing out loud at the mischievous tricks Mario Galaxy constantly plays with your perceptions.
Star rings, shoot Mario across vast tracts of space; they're the game's exhilarating and spectacular signature moment.
You get caught up in its unstoppable forward momentum, running and jumping faster and faster, high on the rush, chaining it like a drug. This is when it reminds you most of 2D Mario gaming.
Honeybee, was more like a Mario 64 level, only broken in half, Star Dust Galaxy was a brain-melting assemblage of beam stars, glass planets and platforms that zap into place out of nowhere and was our favourite level in the demo.
Beach Bowl had Mario dodging huge cubic Whomps that worked their way around the outside of shattered cylinders, and felt an old Mario Bros castle leaping out of the pages of a pop-up book. Cookie Factory required you to time jumps across fast-moving platforms with geometric cutouts, and it was fiendishly hard in a very old-fashioned way.
Mario Galaxy seems effortless and easy, centered much more on the sheer sensory pleasure of play than on setting taxing tests of skill.
When Shigeru Miyamoto suggested this week that games should be fun, it was easy to(swearword otherwise known as moaning) and accuse him of stating the obvious. But Super Mario Galaxy proves his point to perfection: it's amazingly, dizzyingly, idiotically fun, in a way few games are these days. We're not going to call it aclas-sic Mario yet - we simply haven't seen enough - But we are going to predict that it will plaster millions of big smiles on millions of faces come November, and that, if nothing else, makes it a worthy successor and a half.
EUROGAMER
BTW OneWing, my DS Lite broke this week, cost me $60 for a replacement. :( I could've used that Phat Brick I gave you. Treat it well *sobs*
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