Super Mario Galaxy Discussion

[Flip]

kirbychu said:

I saw the game over screen for the first time today. My own fault from heading into a difficult stage and forgetting to pick up my 5 1-Ups from Peach first. XD

I do have one last gripe with the game, and this is one I had with Mario Sunshine, too... why were the swimming mechanics ever changed? Swimming in Mario 64 felt so natural and easy, but now... it feels very awkward. Jumping out of the water seems somewhat hard to do, but maybe there's a new way of doing it that I'm unaware of. I'm used to doing it by holding back on the control stick and pressing jump, but now, when on the surface, holding back on the control stick sometimes works, and sometimes just makes Mario swim toward the camera. I don't know how the game decides which of these is going to happen, it seems to be random.

You have to hold A for a sec. It is very weird, but it is also the only way to do it. OH WELL

Galaxy has won the hearts of my roommates, I will say. A feat that Sunshine lacks (they thought it looked childish) and that even 64 couldn't accomplish (they hated the non-linear gameplay). Galaxy is, all in all, the Mario 3 of the 3D series--I'll say it once again. Everybody seems to be enjoying it, and having their own little "life" about it.

[kirbychu]

fliptroopa said:

You have to hold A for a sec. It is very weird, but it is also the only way to do it. OH WELL

Ah, okay. Kinda weird, but at least I know how to do it correctly now. Thanks.

[Spud]

kirbychu said:

I saw the game over screen for the first time today. My own fault from heading into a difficult stage and forgetting to pick up my 5 1-Ups from Peach first. XD

I do have one last gripe with the game, and this is one I had with Mario Sunshine, too... why were the swimming mechanics ever changed? Swimming in Mario 64 felt so natural and easy, but now... it feels very awkward. Jumping out of the water seems somewhat hard to do, but maybe there's a new way of doing it that I'm unaware of. I'm used to doing it by holding back on the control stick and pressing jump, but now, when on the surface, holding back on the control stick sometimes works, and sometimes just makes Mario swim toward the camera. I don't know how the game decides which of these is going to happen, it seems to be random.

I found Jumping to be strange too, though I usually just launch myself out while spinning.

My biggest gripes are the lack of use in power-ups you never see any, and Mario's partner, that little star guy you get at the begging of the game where is he during the game, I'll tell you cowering under my hat thats where. Is he used for co-star mode or what?

The game also leaves me disoriented and not knowing weather I'm standing on top of something or on the side of it

[Wildcat]

I beat Bowser at the end, and that was certainly one of my favorite boss battles ever. I was giddy through the whole thing. And I feel the same way about the game itself. I agree with a lot of what Flip has said so far - it's the SMB3 of the 3D Marios. The game's controls are brilliant, and the gravity aspect is so awesome. It's a trip to play this game, it really is. The camera hasn't given me much of a problem, either. I did notice that you can commonly change the camera when Mario is stationary...perhaps I'm just doing it in the right place but that has helped me out. My only gripe is the reversing of controls when you're upside down. For some reason, I can't quite wrap my head around that, especially in some particular instances where you're rushing to do something (a star in Dusty Dune Galaxy is a great example, when the sand is caving in and you have to rush through the maze). I have a lot more to do, though, but I am having a blast.

[f0x]

Clearly this is one of the best Mario games up to date. But of course Sunshine was awesome too. But as I see it, it are two whole different type of games. While Sunshine delivers some huge stages wich you can explore, and where you rather have to solve some puzzels to collect the sprites, Galaxy is more a rollercoaster ride full of action. I like them both, but Galaxy truely is a new revolution, again.
I also have had no problems at all with the camera, I even think the camera is just good, it always gives a view from the best possible position, (unless you want to make an unexpected action of course).
The best game ever? Of course it isn't. Best Wii game? Yep. Twilight Princess is still 'just' an evolution from OoT, as awesome as it was, but Galaxy is a new milestone for videogames.

[Sqrt2]

Now I've only got 30-odd stars so far, but this game is so much better than Sunshine. I especially liked the fact that some of the tracks, are taken fom the classic that is SMB3.

My only bad thing I have to say about Galaxy, is that the life meter allows for only three hits before a life is lost, compared with the eight hits needed in both SM64 and Sunshine. Which meant it took me a while to beat that Dino-Piranha creature.

As for camera problems, I haven't noticed any yet.

[Spud]

sqrt2 said:

Now I've only got 30-odd stars so far, but this game is so much better than Sunshine. I especially liked the fact that some of the tracks, are taken fom the classic that is SMB3.

My only bad thing I have to say about Galaxy, is that the life meter allows for only three hits before a life is lost, compared with the eight hits needed in both SM64 and Sunshine. Which meant it took me a while to beat that Dino-Piranha creature.

As for camera problems, I haven't noticed any yet.

I rather like that it's deliciously easy to die more reminiscent of 2D Mario games where you'd get hit twice and die. Mario 64 Made Mario seem too tough.

[Fryguy64]

That's something I really don't understand about Galaxy though. It's not a revolution in control by any means. It's not even close. It's a 3D Mario game. It controls like a 3D Mario game.

You have the large 3D stages similar to Super Mario 64, and you have the crazy platforming challenges, like in Super Mario Sunshine (the "secret" stages were clearly the inspiration behind Galaxy).

But it controls like a 3D Mario game, and even sometimes like a 2D Mario game. Sometimes you stick to surfaces you weren't expecting to. That's really the only difference.

A revolution rewrites what it means to play games now and in the future. Super Mario Galaxy is excellent, but it is simply the third 3D Mario game with some gravity tricks thrown in. The controls are the same, the gameplay is the same... Nintendo can't really use these mechanics again, and it's very unlikely that all 3D platformers will adopt this style. After all, Nintendo took the idea and bled it dry within a single game.

Like I say... it's a brilliant game, and great fun. But everyone's making out that it's something it's not. It's a 3D Mario game with a gimmick we will probably never see again.

[kirbychu]

Yeah, it doesn't seem particularly revolutionary to me. It's a brilliant game, and I'm having more than enough fun with it... but I can't see myself coming back to it much once I'm done. It's far less open-ended than Mario 64 or Sunshine were.

I have to say, I'm a little disappointed by the gravity gimmick. People were making it out to be new and amazing, but it's... well, not. It is, for the most part, just an entire game using the same gravity gimmick that every Sonic game since 1994 has used in one stage toward the end. Sure, it will occasionally throw in something cool and original, but not nearly often enough.

For the first few hours I thought it was the most amazing game ever. Then the novelty started to wear off... At this point I think it's a solid game, but still, in several ways, something of a step backwards for 3D Mario.

[Deleted]

You know, despite Mario Sunshine having a more maneuverable camera, I actually bore more issues against it than I do Galaxy's, because the Sunshine camera can get extremely claustrophobic. If you're looking at Mario through a wall or a building, you can see Mario's silhouette clear as day, but the game doesn't ever think that's enough on its own, so it creates a shading effect that leaves only a small circle of the screen colored normally. It made me feel suffocated, you know? And then there were areas, like behind the ferris wheel in Pinna Park, where the camera was an absolute atrocity to work with, so you wound up looking through the wall frequently whether you wanted to or not--and even then if you were looking at the area from the right angle, the camera still thinks you're watching from the other side of the wall, so you still get that shadow frame.

[kirbychu]

You usually get the shadow frame whenever the camera is inside another object in Sunshine. But really, I'd take having a shadow effect and being able to see where I'm going over not seeing where I'm going at all any day. I feel a lot more claustrophobic when I'm not allowed to see my surroundings. XD

Case in point, as this happened to me a little while ago - I was on... I think the second star of Deep Dark Galaxy? I've climbed my way up the cliffs around the surface of the water's entrance until I'm right above where I started. Falling here will put me back to square one. Now, standing at the very edge of the cliff, I can just about see the corner of something. It's red, with some yellow further in. Could be the next platform, but really, from all I can see, it could just as easily be a pattern on the wall. Can I move the camera and take a look, please?

Don't be silly! The camera buzzes at me when I try to move it. So not only do I have no idea if I'm lined up properly to land on it, I can't even see if it even is a platform. All I can do is make a leap of faith, and hope I don't end up back at the beginning. Luckily it was a platform, but moments like these should not happen. They never happened in Sunshine or 64, because the camera was so helpful. Now it's just stubborn and crotchety. 64's camera was a Lakitu, Galaxy's is Cranky Kong, complaining about how camera scrolling didn't exist in his day.

[Smashchu]

admin said:

I didn't mean the game was linear, as that's clearly not true. It's still not quite as crazy freeform as Super Mario 64 (where you could collect Stars in pretty much any order most of the time - you're still restricted to collecting the star whose chapter you're in, like in Sunshine).

OK, I see. It never really bothered me. In all of the game, it was getting from point A to point B. Now that path is smaller, but the goal is the same

Also, Kirbychu, the problem I'm having is that so far, you are the first person that has said that the camera is problematic and the worst ever. But I have not once heard that for anyone else and have experienced no such problems. So logically, it must be you.

I'm being a bit rude, so I will apologize for that. In the end, I think it's you and not it. What I have experienced is that the camera is annoying, but manageable. Annoying=/=inferior. It=annoying. I'll just leave it at that.

Now, you ask why the game is revolutionary, and I think both Fry and Kirbychu missed the reason why everyone claims it is revolutionary. It's not in the controls and the design. It's in the gameplay. The game changes platform games by making the element of gravity important. From the first level you can tell it's an important element. Try long jumping across the walkways in the Good Egg Galaxy. You don't jump off the planet but instead are pulled to the underside. Many of the game's challenges are based around staying on the planet. While there is a lot of normal platforming, a good deal is based around it's planetary elements. 2D platforms since Sonic 3 have used walking on the roof, but Mario Galaxy adds this to the 3D platformers.

At the very least it adds some fuel to the fire. It shows that we haven't done everything yet. You'll walk on many different percpectives and have to utilize this to be able to complete the game. It really throws convention out the window. Almost everything has an underside, making the player have to fight the fear and jump off the planet. But playing with gravity is also part of the fun.

Only downside is that they should have had planets with high or low gravity.

[Deleted]

Actually, I've found a planet that you can orbit around fully. If you go to the first or third stars in Space Junk Galaxy, right near the beginning you land on a blue crystalline cylinder; if you use the C button to align the camera so it's either completely vertical or completely horizontal, you can long jump around the narrow part and you'll actually go all the way around and then some. It's pretty neat, especially when you use Luigi's sweet extra-jump Long Jump power.

[TrustTheFungus]

I liked Galaxy better than Sunshine, and 64 better than both. SM64 had big levels that I could explore and could normally get whatever star I wanted. Sunshine had large worlds I could explore, but I could normally only get a star or two in each of the different version of the world. And I didn't even have to explore for them. When you started the camera would show you the exact path you needed to take to get the star. And then there were the blue coins. Exploring for them could have been fun. Except the blue coins weren't in some versions of the world. Exploring a world for that one last coin is fun. Exploring seven slightly different versions of the same world for that coin isn't. Sunshine is the only one I haven't bothered to get all the stars in.

Oops...Pretend I said "Shine" instead of "Star" in most of that paragraph.

[Fryguy64]

I didn't miss why you think it's revolutionary - I'm just saying it isn't revolutionary.

Read why I said this isn't revolutionary in my post above. A revolution has to rewrite the rules of the entire genre and force developers to adopt those rules or face being left behind. Super Mario Galaxy didn't do this - the gameplay is a typical Mario game set on smaller worlds. Being able to run to the underside of something isn't revolutionary - if anything it's counter-intuitive, and even the game developers struggled. I don't know about you, but I leapt to my death a number of times because the gravity effect just wasn't there on some platforms! It's inconsistently applied.

It's not going to happen ever again. It didn't revolutionise anything. It made for an interesting play experience - once. But that's all.