Skip to main content

Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

Our favouriate Italian plumber soars in his latest platform adventure out for the Wii. Traditionally, Nintendo excels at the platform gaming genre and Super Mario Galaxy does not disappoint.

If you're familiar with the other Mario platformers, then you'll know the story: the evil Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and its up to Mario to save her by hurdling through level after level. Nintendo doesn't deviate too much from this formula this time around. Clearly their Mario-platformers are all about the gameplay and not the storylines.

This time around, Mario is flying, jumping and twirling through planets and galaxies in hopes of collecting stars to open the way to his beloved Princess. In his adventure, Mario encounters all sorts of creatures, some friendly and some mean, and all sorts of environments, some heated and some frigid.

Galaxy never gets tired thanks to the variety of levels and all the different tasks that need to be completed. It's a far different Mario game than those of the old, where you start at A and head to B. This time around they shake things up a bit by mixing in levels where you have to race, where you have to hunt for different parts of a full star, and a slew of mini-games with a star to reward you for your efforts.

In total there are 120 stars scattered throughout the galaxies, hopefully enough to please the completionists out there. At the time of completion I had 80 stars, so there's still tons for me to do.

Nintendo takes advantage of the Wii-mote's technology by having you shake it to perform different functions for each level. It's a bit cheesy actually. If you think about it, the shaking of the Wii-mote to perform a function could be completely replaced by using a button to perform the same action. But they make you do so many different things all with the same hand motion that it seems to offer a variety. Well, it's still fun though.

Probably my favourite aspect of Galaxy is its soundtrack. Composed by Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo and performed by "The Mario Symphony Orchestra", the scores are brilliant and often pleasing to the ear. One can't help but get a feel for an epic adventure when the orchestral music hits.

Anyhow, I loved this game. It was beautifully designed and tons of fun to play. Definitely worth checking out if you have a Wii. Later geeks.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The League of Denial (2013)

The topic of concussions in sports is a dialogue that’s been growing the past number of years.  Do a search on ‘concussions’ and ‘football’ and you’ll get several thousand hits on the controversy that’s surrounded the sport.  It’s a challenging topic as the research is all relatively new, and the topic itself challenges the mentality and philosophy adopted by football loving Americans.  Now, I’m not a fan of football or NFL but when I saw this book lying at the local bookstore, my interest was piqued.  Although I’m not a fan of football, those that know me know that I’m an unabashed fan of prowrestling.  Talks about concussions are also quite a hot topic even within the prowrestling sub-culture.  Earlier this year, one of the hottest wrestlers of the current era, Daniel Bryan, retired early at the age of 34 due to a history of concussion related issues.  Interestingly, he was not permitted to return to the ring due to the disapproval by WWE’s medic...
1 comment
Read more

Finally, the Xbox 360!!

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I received an Xbox 360 for Christmas from my dad. A great present it was! I've had 3 weeks to enjoy it so I guess I can give you my impressions of it now. First the controller. In truth, I haven't felt a controller this comfortable in my gaming life before. As a child who grew up on the 8-bit generation, with just a directional pad and 2 buttons, there was quite a learning curve getting used to using two analog sticks at the same time. You might say, "Hey Lam, how bout the PS2? You have that machine, and that has analog sticks". True, but of the twenty or so games I have for that, all of them used either only 1 analog stick, or allowed the option to switch on to the directional pad. Using 2 sticks at the same time was at first just uncomfortable. This made for all sorts of trouble as I was playing Gears of War . Luckily for me, I had computer controlled teammates that watched my back. I love the Media Center capabilities...
6 comments
Read more

MAX PAYNE was oh so PAYNEFUL!!!

What a failure this was. An EPIC FAILURE~! And I'll tell you why. This movie had everything going for it which was why it made the failure seem so huge. It had star power. It had a very competent director. The visual style was there. It had a simple storyline... a storyline that was basically fuck-proof because it's so basic. The effects (when there were any) were also pretty great. So where did they go wrong? Pacing. If the first two-thirds of the film was like the last third, I think it would have been a fine film. Not great by any means, but fine. I mean, there was hardly any action in the first hour. It was all talk and build up. Every 5 minutes I was saying to myself, "okay, something cool is gonna happen now". But it never came. I think had they added 2 or 3 big action sequences during that hour, that it would have helped the film breathe and flow better. I mean, didn't they realize that the source material was an action game? Max Payne is ba...
7 comments
Read more