Super Mario Galaxy

Paul plumbs new and exciting depths

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Whilst it is unlikely that this is the first Mario Galaxy review you have read, and less likely still that you are unaware of the sort of scores it is amassing, you may be less familiar with some of the more intimate details of Nintendo's latest outing for their superstar plumber. So we'll leave the hyperbole and Mario love for the masses, choosing instead to pin-point the highs and lows of this undoubtedly uplifting game.

It is testament to Nintendo's understanding of their own game that they knew all along what was missed in the move from the densely populated vistas of Super Mario World to the wide open lands of Mario 64. With Mario Galaxy, Nintendo have put the exploration back into their platform game.

If you weren't playing close attention you probably didn't even notice it leave. But when Nintendo managed to pop-out Mario World's lovable two dimensions into 64's impressive three, a more limited world was invented. Whereas Mario World encouraged you to explore every inch, and go for broke on every jump, Mario 64 dissuaded such abandon from the simple fact that reality now had edges. Falling to your death a few times was enough to make the most ardent player throttle back on their exploration and focus on the platforming. This was accentuated by the technical fact that these three dimensional worlds could only be peopled with relatively less enemies and items. They had an unavoidable sparseness about them which subconsciously deterred players from pushing the exploratory boundaries as they were simply less likely to make discoveries.

Even Mario Sunshine didn't seem to have the will to really tackle this thorny issue. Sure it was now able to provide a denser habitat, but at the same time it still took platforming rather than pioneering skills to progress through the levels. It was all about the jumps and balances and backpack rides. There's no doubting the stature of Mario 64, or the subsequent Super Mario Sunshine, but these games scored highest for platforming prowess rather than delivering the exploration and discovery that was a lynch pin of the two dimensional Mario experience.

I'm aware saying this may well be unpopular, but as someone who has ploughed more hours into Mario than another moniker the modern world has to offer, it is my genuine experience of these later games. There is no escaping that seminal Mario experience of bashing through the ceiling in world 1-2 of Super Mario Brothers and discovering, with spine tingling consequences, that you could push the very boundaries of the game and find hidden coins, lives and levels.

To return to our point, in one fail swoop Super Mario Galaxy ingeniously answers the long unanswered absence of exploration from the series. Coming to the new game is entirely different to Sunshine or 64 for one simple reason: gravity. Both the people and the terrain of the game now exert a force on each other that transforms your interactions. Mario's movement is now freeform, gone are the old prescriptive rise and fall of each jump, now when you press A the results depend upon your environment. If jump from a large land mass you will rise and fall as before, but on the smaller bodies you find you can jump higher due to their effect on their diminished gravity. Find a suitably tiny world and you can literally jump off and orbit round it to your heart's content. This breaks the sense of operating in a bounded world, and opens up the environment to be pushed, pulled and (crucially) explored to within an inch of its physics.

We see this most clearly at the borders of each level. Now, if you tiptoe over the edge of the land, rather than plummet to your doom, you often find you can walk right round to the other side and discover a whole new part of the level. A new glee besets you as you can again happily skip around the levels, pushing and pulling at the design to see where those hidden zingers are to be found. All this adds up to a world that is not only more engaging and believable but ultimately a better play space.

This ingenious play mechanic is delivered in the game proper through a thousand bite sized lozenges that are the different galaxies and land masses there in. Each of them takes the basic tenants of the game, (platforming, exploration, gravity and dimensions) and remixes them into enticing puzzles and conundrums. Some are simply fun to run around and present no more challenge than that, whilst others stretch the genre to breaking point and have you struggling to keep pace and process what your eyes, ears and hands are telling you.

Again true to form, great care has been taken to meter out each experience so as not to overwhelm or stagnate. The game expands at a steady pace, and although the seasoned (hardened?) Mario gamer will find the earlier levels somewhat trivial; the majority of players have been well catered for. That said, this is not an experience that starts with a big bang. Mario Galaxy leaves the bravado and postulating to the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty. Here we find a slow steady dawning realisation that this is a place where you will want to spend a lot of time. In fact, I found it wasn't until halfway through that things really started to sing. Maybe it just took my psyche that long to catch up with what was on offer, either way I was impressed that Nintendo could maintain the quality and momentum right through the game.