![]() The plot of Galaxy 2 is as base and pure as the Super Mario games of long ago: Bowser, the fire-breathing prehistoric turtle-like main villain, has kidnapped the sugary Princess Peach, damsel in distress, and Mario must save her. General Producer Shigeru Miyamoto has gone on record himself saying that he felt a heavily involved “story” wasn’t necessary for Super Mario games, that the act of doing, of performing, is where the importance should lie. This “faceship” becomes a repository for all of the secondary characters Mario meets and assists over the course of the game, a brilliant device to implicitly denote progress and boost the feeling of accomplishment that coincides with collecting power stars, the valuable currency of all 3D Super Mario titles.Īnother marked difference from the first Galaxy is the jettison of an involved plot or backstory, a point of debate among Super Mario vets. The sequel was able to subvert this pitfall in a simple and direct way: create the most charming, weird, and wonderful hub-world ever conceived, an organic planetary vessel-complete with wheelhouse-fashioned after the head of Mario himself. In the first game, a sterile space station fulfilled these duties adequately, but it was a tad too ambling and impersonal, an odd anomaly considering the amount of life and saturation present in the levels themselves. Take the “hub-world,” for example, the common area through which the player accesses new galaxies and their stages. It couldn’t have been done any other way. That deep precedent had to be met in order for it to be so thoughtfully exceeded. Galaxy 2 doesn’t radically change the foundation laid down by its predecessor, but that’s completely forgivable since Galaxy had to exist first and contain such a strong core in order to appreciate how Galaxy 2 impresses as much as it does. ![]() Nintendo’s masterful level design and gameplay twists, doled out in drips instead of globs, brought everything together in a sense that seemed both startlingly new yet assuredly familiar. Even though historically it isn’t entirely original, it was a revelation for the 3D “platformer” genre and especially for Super Mario games, as it required new methods of spatial thinking (time and space are perpetual mantras of the platform gamer), increasing the sense of surprise and alertness tenfold. In this universe, gravity is circumferential Mario will always land toward a land mass’s surface no matter which direction he faces, even if on the underside (the rule of thumb: If it’s round, downward forces are relative, and if it’s not, it’s absolute). Super Mario Galaxy, released in 2007, introduced the concept of “planet platforming,” with stage layouts resembling archipelagos suspended in foreboding space, many with their own unique looks and mechanics. In this case, however, the sphere is quite literal. So, like always, the sphere of Mario has come around to the same place again, and now here is Super Mario Galaxy 2. Nintendo has done quite a rare and amazing thing with the stout plumber and his army of supporting characters: As far as the medium of video games has come, both in terms of conceptual ambition and the technology developed and utilized to realize those ambitions, Super Mario games still matter. This could, of course, merely be an innocent by-product of perfect artistic composition, but we'd prefer to think that it's an example of deliberate design in-joke japery never meant to be discovered that has been well and truly rumbled.How many times have we returned to Mario, and how many more times will we be returning to him still? Nintendo’s beloved icon, as easily identifiable by his blue-collar duds and quiet, goofish mannerisms as his graceful athleticism and chameleon-like adaptability to peril, continually asserts himself as a permanent fixture of video games. It's like playing records backwards and hearing the words 'I'm Barney the purple dinosaur'. This is the kind of brilliantly unbelievable stuff that urban myths are made of and we are absolutely definitely using it in our next '101 things you didn't know about videogames'feature. Throw in some spaces and you've got U R MR GAY. If you scribble out all the letters leaving only those decorated with a star - as we've done in the right-hand image - it leaves you with the letters 'URMRGAY'. Have a gander at the left-hand picture below of Super Mario Galaxy's box art and look at the placement of the seven bright stars dotted on various letters of the game's logo. Eagle-eyed forum dwellers across the internet have discovered a hidden message/humorous design accident on the Super Mario Galaxy logo that spells out 'U R MR GAY'.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |