Super Mario Galaxy

Let me begin with a little something called dedication. This week I'm up to my eyebrows in assignments for university, and GTA IV has finally been released just today. Rather than spending all my free time between doing work playing a game I've been waiting the painful side of 2 years for, I'm here to bring you your weekly review. Granted Mario Galaxy has been out a few months now, but I've never had chance to play it.

The first thing I'll say about Mario Galaxy, if you haven't played it, is that it messes with your mind. Seriously, while I was playing it my eyes kept pointing in different directions, while everyone else in the room had to go and enjoy some narcotics just to cope. Bright colours... little Italian plumber jumping several times his own height... changing gravity... it's all very weird. And of course, being a Mario game, all kinds of realism have been locked in a cupboard in the basement of an empty house on the top of a hill, while everyone else moved out. Then they called a napalm strike on the house just for good measure, so I can't judge it on the nerdy observation of gravity fields and orbit etc. etc. ...yet.

Oddly enough, this isn't all that different from the opening scene of Mario Galaxy... fire, explosions and the most useless element of the series is surgically removed with a lot more fire and explosions. What's more odd is the soundtrack. For some reason, Nintendo decided that twenty-odd years was a good time to introduce Mario to Final Fantasy's composer. I was expecting more of the same cutesy, synthesized crap from the past that sets the mood fine for once. But no, the bulk of the game is accompanied by an orchestra rivalling the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra.. only you know, not butchering all your favourite movie theme songs.

I'll get this out of the way right now, there is a multiplayer mode but by Jack Sparrow's braided hair, is it pointless. Basically, should you end up playing it in the same room as a stoner, you're given the option of giving them an extra Wii Remote so they can point at star bits and help you collect them. Seriously, that's it. Considering this is a stoner we're talking about, you might as well just give them the old VCR remote, take the batteries out and give it to them, because it's still going to be about as useful and involving, but you can save yourself £30.

There's clear evidence that it's another attempt at the recreating the success of Mario 64 - aside from the fact it's bleeding obvious - in that Mario can still pull off the triple jump... for no reason whatsoever. I mean yeah, if they took a move off him, we'd all feel a bit cheated while all the Nintendo fanboys met up for a good old suicide pact, but the only reason for it in the first place was so that you could fly while wearing the wing cap. And that hasn't made an appearance outside of Mario 64 (don't say a damned word about the DS version or I'll brain you for your short-sightedness).

Moving on...

While supposedly receiving the title "game of the year" by someone/thing not important enough to warrant a spot in my memory, it isn't without flaws. One of the things that made Mario 64 a huge success was the fact you had to work to get the stars - partly down to the weirdest shaped controller ever made - but in Mario Galaxy, I had the feeling the game just took pity on me and threw an obscene amount of stars in my lap without much provocation. After a day I'd racked up 45 stars, surprise, surprise, you're collecting stars again, and only felt like I'd earned about 10 of them at most. And the only reason for that was my wrist had cramped to the point where I thought it was strong enough to get run over by a few double decker buses. I'm not sure exactly how many, but apparently using double decker buses as references puts anything into perspective.

If I may bounce off on a tangent for a second, I'd like to talk about this whole double decker bus perspective thing. Everywhere I see a statistic, I always meet up with someone explaining it to me in double decker buses, because I'm British, I instinctively know every minor detail about double decker buses. I know vaguely how tall a double decker bus is, and how long it is too, but I can't say I've ever seen them piled on top of each other. I've seen them lined up behind each other a few times and that's the main reason I haven't caught a bus in over a year. So when you tell me someone's made a cinema screen the height of 60 double decker buses stacked on top of each other, all I'm going to think of it a pile of rust, scrap metal and fire because some dipshit tried piling 60 rather heavy metal boxes with wheels on top of each other. You've seen what happens when a double decker bus goes under - sorry, through - a low bridge... and saying something weighs as much as X double decker buses? Who's ever tried lifting a double decker bus? Yeah, they're quite heavy, but I'm pretty certain a Challenger Tank is a lot heavier.

Hmm? Oh right, Mario Galaxy. I'll be honest, I didn't finish it, but I did play the crap out of it for a day or so while I was waiting for GTA to come out because my boss wouldn't let me buy a copy before the release date despite being surrounded by 500+ copies of it. What I did establish, however, is that Bowser and Bowser Jr. have stormed the Mushroom Kingdom while everyone was happily giving each other piggybacks and used a perfectly reasonable amount of force to kidnap a petite girl in a pink dress whose only protection is a bunch of cowards with mushroom brains and a short Italian plumber who hasn't actually done any form of plumbing since 1993. Of course, the reasonable amount of force isn't some Tom Clancy-esque stealthy infiltration, minimising the ammo budget to a magazine each member; it's an armada of flying ships with cannons coming out of every orifice.

As you progress through the game you come across various "enemy bases", which are all called "plants" of varying descriptions, which strangely enough seem to look purpose built just to injure portly Italian plumbers. Ignoring the total lack of productivity on Bowser's part, he claims to be steaming ahead with some plan, and to be honest this is probably just a bluff because all the power stars he has been blamed for stealing all seem to be jammed up the arse of various twisted mutations creatures, rather than any kind of useful place like some sort of reactor. Having said that, Mario did choose to retrieve these and shove most of them up his own arse, so nevermind.

Jumping back onto a point I mentioned earlier but couldn't be arsed stretching out, I have to talk about the whole micro galaxy thing. Unless the science behind Family Guy is to be used as a guide, then everywhere in Mario Galaxy is total bollocks, frankly (I wanted to link Family Guy, but I couldn't find the video I was looking for... it was supposed to show the bit from "The Fat Guy Strangler" when Brain demonstrated how fat Peter by proving he generated a noticeable gravitation field). Normally I wouldn't bother mentioning the innate problems with Mario jumping on a floating platform only slightly bigger than himself, mostly because I'm crap at physics but still an absolute c*nt. But when you star using gravity as a USP in a game, I'm going to try taking the piss out of it. Maybe everything in Mario Galaxy is just incredibly dense, to the point were a toy robot has enough mass to create a gravitational pull as strong as Earth's. Either way, I figured out that on one level if I could land exactly between two platforms, I could leave Mario perpetually floating and confused while I left for a nap.

That's all that last paragraph was leading up to, and I make no apologies. I'd rather be playing GTA right now, thankyouverymuch. Come to think of it, that's just about all I can think of to say about Mario Galaxy that hasn't been said by everyone else in the world ever. So yeah, if you haven't done yet, buy it. It's as unique as Mario's going to get without straying into the world of animé porn - but I can guess without looking that deviantart has already tapped that twisted pool of inspiration - and it's also demanding enough on your brain while trying to cope with the weird changing gravity that it can keep you off drugs... but only if you're the one playing it.

Mario Kart Wii

In the year 1992, the humble SNES was granted a racing game by the name of Mario Kart, and as the name suggests, it's a racing game featuring some of Nintendo's most famous characters. Since then, an executive somewhere around the upper rungs of the Nintendo ladder declared in their own blood that every Nintendo console made from this date would feature a Mario Kart game.*

(*probably).

That fateful day has partially resulted in Nintendo being pretty much franchise dependant, repeatedly remaking Mario, Zelda, Metroid and now Mario Kart games. Never mind that, though, it's a strategy that seems to be working for Nintendo, seeing as they're the oldest competitor in the console wars.

So, it's 2008 and Nintendo's current console line-up is the handheld DS (which has had a Mario Kart game since 2005) and the Wii. Now it's the motion sensitive device's turn at carrying on the Mario Kart torch, and if you've ever played a racing game on the Wii, you'll know this is tricky business. As far as sequels go, Mario Kart Wii has a lot of reasons to be pretty pissed off. Mario Kart: Double Dash has amazing graphics, beautiful levels, a solid control scheme and a really interesting mechanic of having two characters per kart that even reacted to turns properly.

Considering the Wii isn't that much more powerful than the Gamecube, any Gamecube sequels on the Wii will need some interesting features, possibly involving the player dancing around the room as if ablaze. You can imagine the scene already, Double Dash is talking to a crowd of fans while wearing a fancy cravat and generally looking very famous and successful. Then Mario Kart Wii comes storming in wearing the same cravat and punches Double Dash in the face, screaming "How can I be better than you?!" in frustration.

I'd love to be able to say that the problem has been solved with some good old imagination, but the only newish features I could find were the occasional boost-inducing half pipe (which is only really useful in one place), and a small segment of the Cape Kooper track, but is unfortunately a clean steal from a much cooler entire F-Zero GX track. We also get the exact same battle mode features as the DS version, and the same idea of 4 cups of new tracks and 4 cups of retro tracks. It's just a shame that they're the same retro tracks as on the DS version too.

If I were to compare the motion sensor control scheme to the Nunchuk/Wiimote scheme, I'd have to say that the former is quite drunk. There's also the fact that the Blue Spiny shell is still buzzing around, and yes, it still needs the arse nerfing off it. So it doesn't look too good for Mario Kart Wii then, it's a dodgy mash up of Double Dash and Mario Kart DS, and consequently suffers from the chronic "samey-ness" that cripples any new games in this modern, competitive world of interesting mutations. This is the point where I'd start thinking of rude things to say about a game suffering from this problem, but I wont. Read on...

Mario Kart, you see, is a game were everything is balanced precariously, and everyone towards the front of the pack is going to suffer like hell at the fortunate hands of the simpletons at the back. What this does is it keeps people playing together, no matter of how retarded some players may be, as is the whole point of the Wii itself, ewe si? This means that the game actually remains fun, no matter how much of an obnoxious, geeky obsessive you play against, because you'll always be able to ruin his life and laugh at it thanks to the game's seemingly ridiculously unfair weapons. (Actually, "ewe si" pretty much means "female sheep yes", not what I just said, but I'm making a point and playing with words OK?).

If you want to unlock all the levels and characters, and you do, then you should just ignore the free wheel you get with the game and play with the Wiimote and Nunchuk - but don't, by any means, go shove it up your arse or anything. In fact, go buy more for however many Wiimotes you have, because when you want to play Mario Kart Wii with other people, again you do, put the Nunchuk away and play with the drunk option. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it does actually work surprisingly well. I expected to pick up the Wiil (or whatever they call it), turn it and eventually go hurtling in the wrong direction; but no! It responds really well to turns, and although it will still send you careening off the edges of courses at embarrassing rates, it's just much more fun playing with your friends that way.

It's also fun watching people in general twitch and twist while holding pieces of white plastic, and that's exactly why I've made a sport of watching these people from the trees outside their houses.

In all fairness, you'll play much better with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller or Gamecube Pad, but by now everyone's already really good at playing Mario Kart, and it's much more fun getting used to steering with floating white wheels. What I'm trying to say is that Mario Kart Wii shines like, well not a diamond, more like amber because it assumes you only ever want to play in rounds of 4, but yeah, in multiplayer mode, Mario Kart Wii shines like amber, by bringing back the fun of Mario Kart.