• Games don't interest me how they used to. I feel as though they've sacrificed actually expressing something in order to gain a wider, dumber audience. The Mario series, however, has always been an exception to my hatred of modern games, until now. Super Mario Galaxy is the most highly reviewed, best selling, sequel wanting piece of crap Nintendo's ever produced.

    Music

    Music in Mario games has always matched the rhythm and atmosphere of play. These subtleties make the series near-perfect from a designer's perspective, but Super Mario Galaxy's music is either bland, uninspired crap which would lead you to suicide if it wasn't orchestrated, or poor rehashes of Mario songs. It's the same format as Super Smash Bros, which works for that series but completely ruins this one.

    Game Play

    The sad thing about Super Mario Galaxy is how much potential its core mechanics had, and how far Nintendo fell short of it.

    Most of the gymnastics-type freedom we enjoyed from Super Mario 64 has been dumbed down into some stupid spinning mechanic. Accurate physics and prediction have been replaced with punishment for experimentation. Mario easily falls off edges and platforms seem unpolished. You miss jumps you should have made so often that no flow exists in the game.

    In Super Mario 64, you'd read a level description and feel genuine interest in discovering how that relates to the star you're supposed to collect. Whether or not that's the star you actually got was often just a matter of coincidence. In Super Mario Galaxy, the level title is an order. Unless you find a "hidden" star, there's none other you can find. This only furthers the game's continued quelling of experimentation, and makes it feel more like work than play.

    For whatever reason, Super Mario Galaxy records the number of coins you collect in a level and provides that as your high score. This is odd because there is absolutely no point to the coins. They give you an extra life if you collect fifty but there's rarely that many in a level.

    A similar failure is that of Star Bits. They too grant you a life for every fifty you collect, and they're so many that you never really "lose" the game. Aside from shooting them at fat stars to unlock yet another tedious level, they're almost pointless. It would have made sense to make these the "one hundred coins" of Super Mario Galaxy, but I guess it made too much sense.

    The difficulty curve spikes sporadically. The dumbed down mechanics would make you believe the game is supposed to be easy, but inconsistent gravity, having only three health and random deaths due to bad physics and platform placements contradict this. The easy is too easy and the hard near-impossible, although I won anyways because I'm that good at games.

    I always felt that Mario games presented ambiance. The fourth wall was broken in creative ways to further this, remarkably. Super Mario Galaxy introduces an annoying star-shaped cursor which you aim at the screen with the wiimote. Unlike the camera man from Super Mario 64, it's not adorable or integrated into the game world. It feels more like a fancy PC cursor than anything else.

    There is absolutely no flow in the game. Awful platform design, dumbed down mechanics, sporadic difficulty spikes, unintuitive implementations of potentially marvelous concepts, disruption of ambiance through cheap gimmicks and many other things completely destroyed Super Mario Galaxy's potential to be the greatest game of all time. And yes, it had this potential.

    On a humorous note, there's a scene in the game where Mario invades a planet and embarks on an ethnic cleansing of about thirty "enemies" who's only crime, quite honestly, was minding their own business.