My poor Wii has been sitting like an unwanted gift underneath my TV for the past few months. I last bought a game for it in late 2009, and I’ve only been using it to watch DVDs (thanks to the Homebrew channel) while my PS2 is on loan to a friend who’s playing an expensively acquired Shadow of the Colossus. Despite what I said in the run up to Christmas, the Wii’s list of top tier releases has been slim in 2010, and Nintendo has seen sales of its once world-beating console slipping while the Xbox 360 and PS3 are enjoying something of a renaissance. This leaves gaming fans like myself with buyer’s remorse, which causes lots of sitting around, sighing and pining for better days. So the arrival of Super Mario Galaxy 2 is like freebasing pure gaming cocaine into our weeping, Manga-sized eyeballs.
Nintendo seems to be the only developer that can actually produce decent Wii games, and thankfully Super Mario Galaxy 2 proves that a great Wii game measures up favourably to just about any other title on the market. It’s just a pity that the same few franchises are being rehashed ad nauseum, although even pointing this out has become clichéd by now, which says something about the extent of the problem.
The story behind SMG2 is leaner than that of the first game, which means you get a letter from Princess Peach and a few text boxes from your terrified mushroom pals before you end up in space, chasing down Bowser to rescue the frigid royal bint on a spaceship that is shaped like Mario’s head. The first few minutes of exposition are actually home to some very funny lines, and Nintendo knows that the story, and ultimately the setting, are both irrelevant here. It’s refreshing in a world where most games are packed with melodrama and sub-par hammy acting either delivered by a bellowing, bemuscled pork chop or a wooden, pouting ‘chick’, or whatever.
Once again the visuals are bursting with colour, with not a boring shape or shade in sight. Platformers have always been colourful, but in recent years the likes of Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed have watered down the pallet in favour of realism. Nintendo puts up two white-gloved fingers to realism, and no superlative can describe how that makes me feel. In SMG2 you get worlds that look like they were the result of force feeding a clown neon paint and skittles before popping a bottle of diet coke followed by a Mento down his throat and dancing about on the resultant day-glo chunks. In a good way. You might even forget that the Wii can’t pump out HD visuals, although I’d recommend getting a component video cable if you have an HDTV, as the colours are richer and the lines sharper than ever.
The gameplay of SMG2 is broken up into planet-shaped nuggets, and you can fly between different levels at will in your spaceship. Collecting stars is always the ultimate goal, and more stars unlock more levels. You’ll get a host of power-ups to aid you in your quest and add variety, and a few return from the first in the Galaxy series, along with some new additions. I used to think that Spring Mario was a real bane of the first game, but in SMG2 even this feels a little better, perhaps because the reward of controlling the constantly bouncing plumber is all the greater because of the challenge. Nintendo gets this balance of risk versus reward spot on in pretty much every way, and there is nothing more satisfying than achieving a star whether you’ve spent two minutes or two hours in its pursuit.
The structure of SMG2 is open enough to allow players to complete star challenges in an order of their choice, and there should always be enough options to allow you to leave a particularly taxing task for later, so teeth-pulling, gurning and inanimate object-swearing should be kept to a minimum. The control scheme takes a little getting used to if you haven’t played the first game, and if you’re left handed like me you’ll have to adapt to having the control stick for movement located in the ‘wrong’ hand all over again, but there are enough moves in Mario’s arsenal to tackle any challenge. You’ll know that if you can’t beat a level, it’s because you aren’t good enough, not because the controls don’t give you the right tools. Oh, and the gravity physics are a perpetual joy, unparalleled by any other game in any genre. Even Half Life 2’s gravity gun and, dare I say it, the Portal gun, are less fun than the mind boggling levels which use gravity in a warped but somehow logical manner. Although that link may sound tenuous, I will engage any man or beast in fisticuffs if they would care to dispute it.
There is basically no better platformer than Super Mario Galaxy 2, although in this barren market that statement isn’t quite the accolade that it should be. If you have a Wii, buy it now. Like the other first party Nintendo titles it is unlikely to drop in price, and even used it will still cost close to the equivalent of the RRP, so there’s no point hanging on to your cash. Edge magazine gave it 10 out of 10. They were right.
