I haven't bought SMG2 yet, so SMG1 is my choice. I liked SM64 and Sunshine equally, but I somehow prefered SM64DS over the original, even though it had weird controls.
NOTE: I'm writing this having not made my way through SMG2 yet. I'm only at 30 stars, so I'm saving judgment until I've completed all 120 stars. I voted for Sunshine. For me, I liked the raw feel that Sunshine had. Every Mario game other than Sunshine has that "polished to perfection" look and feel about it, which is obviously what the world expects from a Mario game, and the reason why Mario games are held to a higher standard than almost any other game from any other franchise. That said, I thought Sunshine's raw, unpolished feel was very refreshing. The biggest complaint everyone had about Sunshine was the camera. To me, the camera added something to the strategy and difficulty of the game. I never found that it inhibited my ability to do something, I just had to make sure that I got the camera where I wanted it before I was going to go do whatever it was. Also, even Sunshine's biggest detractors would have to admit that Mario has never controlled better than he did in Sunshine. Another thing about Sunshine is the difficulty. I like games to be difficult. Not so difficult that you want to throw your controller through the window, but difficult enough to keep you saying "dammit, I'm going to get through this." Sunshine delivers here, and it's genuine difficulty...not "we've run out of creative ideas so let's make the level super hard to compensate for it" difficult. I think out of SM64, SMS, and SMG1, Sunshine is definitely the most difficult. Some of those moving platform puzzles were crazy tough, nevermind levels like the poison river, the giant plinko board, just about any level in Pianta Village, etc. In terms of difficulty, Mario 64 was close, especially in the later levels, but I don't think Galaxy even comes close to Sunshine in the difficulty department. I can never remember losing 30 lives on a level in Galaxy. I'll give you that some of the purple coin stages in Galaxy were tough (think the giant 8-bit Luigi in the Toy Time Galaxy), but you couldn't even get to those levels until you beat the game once. I like all the 3D Mario games, but if I had to put them in order, I say Sunshine > Galaxy > 64. Right now SMG2 is totally resonating with me, I absolutely love it, and I think it's better than the first. We'll see if I still have that opinion when I finish it. Who knows, I could end up liking it better than Sunshine. We'll see. :) In the end it comes down to this...if Sunshine didn't have "Mario" attached to it, it would be seen as a stone cold classic in the eyes of the gaming world. But because it wasn't the "polished-to-perfection" masterpiece that the world has come to expect from Mario games, it got slighted, and very unfairly so in my opinion.
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