Super Mario World was beat in a few months
Yoshi’s Island we beat in a week
SM64 we beat in a few days
and Mario Galaxy I beat over two days. I got it for Christmas and by 27 Dec I had the minimum number of stars to take out Bowser. And I never turned it on again. Ever. When Mario’s too easy there’s no payoff for winning. It’s a hollow victory.

But things will never be fixed because Nintendo is afraid of change.

What we need is a true 3D Super Mario Bros, but Nintendo has established all too well that all they’re ever going to give us is this slow-paced, over-easy collectathon crap.

I also have to confirm that the game’s design is so clumsy, that it sharply inhibits the casual ability to just pick up and play the game. I walked by it at Best Buy and tried to give it a shot. After several minutes of dicking around the stupid hub, I still couldn’t figure out how to actually get in a level and play the fucking game, and I knew it would just be more of the same kindergarden bullshit as SM64 and SMS, so I quit. The same thing seems to happen to everyone else, so whereas during the release of SM64, someone was always at the demo machine excitedly trying the game out, the Wiii with SMG at my local Best Buy today just sits alone and deserted auto-paused on the hub where the last person got bored and left it.

The fact that neither Tim’s review (yeah, I wish someone would give Tim a rope too) or David’s comment mentions the storybook wrt to Rosalina shows that the point of that facet of the game was completely missed, but that’s fair enough. That the game is trying to cater for a wide range of different priorities is a given. I’ve even see people complain about the rolly ball levels.

There are typically more levels open to the player at any point in SMG than in M64 or SMS, unless you decide to not open up any other galaxies or observatories until you’ve completely cleared the one you’re on (but why would you do this?).

I agree that there is too much dicking around with the hub between levels (‘moving the comets’ is a particularly needless embellishment).

“It’s not about videogames as internally consistent worlds of aesthetics and truth, born again in every instant its laws manifest in a fluid, immediate reality-condition. It’s “ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the marvelous, cran-tastical Video-Game!””

It should be (and has been) rightly applauded for this. Super Mario Sunshine proved that trying to graft the completely antithetical ideals of a sandbox game onto a 3D platform game was a dead end.

The gravity isn’t inconsistent, at least not in the way you’re describing. If you can see a black hole, you can fall into it. You’re given all the information you need. Well done on using 250 words to try to rationalise your unobservancy as a design flaw though.

Yeah, Portal was a really mind-expanding way to pad out a design mechanic which allows a whole three types of ways to solve a puzzle to several hours. I’ll take 120 stars of ‘superficial’ (by your reckoning) amusement over a one-shot game which takes an interesting premise and literally goes nowhere with it beyond using strong writing as a distraction and a crutch.

I don’t have a preposterous declamatory statement to end on, sorry! I thought SMG was quite a nice game, and about as good and relevant as a platform game has any need to be at this time.

I’m glad I read all this stuff before I actually played the game, because I was able to enjoy for what it was. It’s pretty fucking great! The stage design is better than Mario 64′s and there’s more of it! And they completely removed that whole ‘you can’t break this block yet’ mechanic that Twilight Princess reminded us we were pig-sick of. There’s also a fair amount of secret shit you discover on your own, I was happy to discover.

Plus 2 playering it with my dad and my sister over christmas was some of the most fun I’ve had playing a computer game. You know, it’s a shame the Mario series is supposed to bear the weight of all people’s hopes and expectations for the entire 3D platform game genre, but in the end it’s just one series. Like imagine if the only person producing decent comedy movies was John Cleese. It’d be pretty frustrating for a comedy fan. We’d all have our own ideas about what he should do for his next movie and where the genre should be headed and we’d all judge his work way too harshly when it turned out to be just a new John Cleese film. So that’s the problem, I guess- Mario is the only good example of this type of game and they’ve been doing it for 20 years. There needs to be more choice and more people experimenting so we can appreciate Mario for what it is, and at the same time not feel that the genre is stagnating.

You actually get to use a plunger! You use the Wiimote(TM) to use the plunger and get whatever nasty crap is in it and have to fight it and defeat it. Bowser could probably be putting weird stuff through the sewers. Maybe the platform levels could be some weird ass people’s houses upstate. And you use the plunger or whatever other plumber stuff or to just jump on people. And if you gain more credibility, you can get closer to the princess or something.

That would be an awesome game. I would seriously consider making something like that. It would eradicate the staggering plumber shortage we’re going through.(I haven’t seen the Super Mario Bros. movie, it would be horrible if the plot was like it, though it would be a lot better).

As for the menial goal potpourri, well. Mario’s never had twitchy, Treasure-esque self-focus. It gave you big pyramids so that you could break every last brick with your raccoon tail in World 2, just because you felt like doing it. Now they’re just giving you a star for it. You can go down a pipe and collect music notes to a certain pace to make a little song, and get a 1up for it. This isn’t much different from the giant ? blocks in Mario 3, which are a cool but pretty worthless reward. It’s just a bunch of cool little things to see and play with. Really, a tech demo of all the neat stuff they’ve been working on that’s shippable at this point in time. Even the director admits it, talking about how EAD is “projects”-based.

If you want the rope, well, good news. They already made that game, and it’s called Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. (There are actually a lot of ropes in it.) It’s so lean that there’s barely a title screen in it. Boot it up without your GameCube memory card in and start from the beginning each time.