Super Mario Galaxy, u r Mr Gay

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3164124

hey
i've been playing this for the last couple of days (yes yes illegally, i will be buying it when it comes out honest)
its VERY much like mario 64. in space.
the graphics aren't as good as metroid 3 imho (probably down to art style preference though)
i'm only a few hours in but its far too easy :(

ha me want this now

me too. I think this may be my gift to myself for going back to grad school and finishing a semester, in December.

hmm my post above seems kinda negative.
i should have also mentioned that this game is fucking brilliant, every stage brings something new, the levels of invention etc etc. the difficulty is finally beginning to increase, hooray.
oh and there is a method of introducing replay value on stages that is cut and works great.

cut = cute

...what is the method?

um, i didn't want to give any spoilers away on this thread.
so if you want to look away now...
from a central hub you can go to one of several observatories & check out a 3d map of different galaxies that can be seen from that observatory, and within each of those galaxies there might be more than one star to collect (ie like the paintings in mario 64). every now and then a comet flies past a galaxy, and depending on the type of comet a new challenge is set eg. one comet could be a time challenge, another could be racing against a rather creepy parallel universe mario that seems to be made of deep space marshmallow. there are at least five of these comets, and so far they've appeared at random.

10/10 http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=86873

...15-20 hours to finish the game's initial story arc!!!

how the hell did the UR MR GAY thing start? they had to lock up the wiki!

and anyway Fire Emblem and LEGO Star Wars should provide plenty of reasons for me not to need this right away!

If you look at the cover art, you will notice that certain letters (urmrgay) have a shiny star on their bottoms (sort of a photoshop lens flare effect)...

http://www.digitalbattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/galaxyboxart.jpg

it all makes sense now

It was first noticed by someone on the neogaf forums.

i finished this game. it's pretty amazing. slow start, but damn it pays off.

was it too easy? any replay value?

Does anybody know yet if this will be in stores in N.A. on monday morning or on tuesday?

I'll let you know on Monday night when I go pick up Battalion Wars ii or whatever

haha lol seriously please do not patronize gamestop or ebgames unless it is absolutely necessary

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/84/362694225_03d53207c3.jpg

lol

super mario galaxy, u r mr break heart all the time november 16 wtf can I even wait to the end of this week never mind the end of next NO WAI </moan>

I'll let you know on Monday night when I go pick up Battalion Wars ii or whatever

-- El Tomboto, Thursday, November 8, 2007 5:30 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ this game is great.

tell me more

it's not really like advance wars, more like... did you ever play HOGS OF WAR? it's real-time, you can jump between whichever units you like and issue commands to the others. like you can be running down the coast as an infantryman and order your battleship to bombard some tanks up ahead, or just jump into the battleship and do it yourself kinda thing!!

it looks pretty fun. Dunno about getting that vs lego or fire emblem though, those two seem like guaranteed winners in all categories for me although apparently this FE is EXTRA difficult. also BWii has online-only multiplayer whereas LSW has the classic pop-in pop-out shit. Nothing like blowing up the death star drunk with a bro after bar close.

ya i hear that. i'd rent bwii and give it a whirl tho, something tells me it might be right up your alley.

tom,

if i already have lego sw for gamecube (to play on me wii), why should i buy the wii only version?

do you have the "complete saga" or just the ep4-6 or 1-3 games?

at any rate I should have the complete saga by the weekend so I'll let you know if it rates me giving up both the old versions I had on PS2

anybody actually get mario galaxy yet?

Welp, I picked it up tonight and have played a bit (maybe two hours), and I'm a bit surprised that I'm enjoying it a a fair bit less than I thought I would (so far). It is a really nice looking game - colorful, fun and well animated - and the design of the planets / galixies I've seen so far have been great. I am enjoying walking around the planets and some of the ways the game has played with gravity. But what I haven't been enjoying so much is, well, so far it's a pretty laid back game - almost too relaxing - more casual exploring than action - and after playing a fair amount of 2D Marios in the last few weeks - that relaxing, easy feeling, just seems a bit wrong. And honestly, I'm not too keen on some of the tacked on wiimote mechanics - like pointing at gems across the screen to collect them - that's just not fun - it's nothing - and you need to do it quite a bit (a couple hundred times on each level). Also shaking the remote to do a spin attack, instead of a button press, why? And shaking the remote to warp yourself to a new planet? It's also a little hard to jump on the enemies head in 3D, especially when you factor in the curve of the planets, so you can now shoot some of them with gems, which makes them dizzy and now you just walk into them and they explode into gems???

But like I said, I'm definitely not very far into the game - and I still am hopeful that things will get a but more - uh - fun

it's fun... but i wasn't blown away

the big thing about Slocki is he's only into Mario hentai. Every time a game comes out he thinks it's going to be the one where Mario "blows him away". But it never is. :(

Peach took Mario's mushroom deep inside her as he grew...

can we pause for a moment and think about whether or not this thread would actually be improved by posting some big homoerotic mario porn graphics?

I just want to avoid the kind of spiritual debacle that happened yesterday after somebody posted "strawberry shortcake"

(felt convinced I was going to get xposted with some Mario of Finland img)

u all crazy.

this game is great!

a lot of the timed challenges are pretty difficult, and i have replayed the early levels a bunch to get all the comet stars.

i cannot finish the 'blow up the space junk' star.

this game does start slow. but later on its amazing. stick with it.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/128405

"No offence but your a prick. When i clicked I HATED THIS CRAP it said YOUR GAY. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GAY"

this is the only game I've been psyched about for a while and you guys are bumming me out!!!

has it got any better? what is it you don't like, too free-roaming? bee costume folx!! I mean, C'MON!

don't worry, its fuckin great. just a bit too easy.

I'm about five or six hours into this game so far and the bee suit is like fifth or sixth on the jaw-drop-ometer so far. Number one is probably just a generalized DANG THIS HERE GAME SURE LOOKS PURTY, because damn, do it ever. I actually ended wasting a few bucks on the game guide just b/c it already feels like a game I'm going to be compelled to %100 complete, and (1) it feels like a game GameFAQs is going to have trouble explaining to me without pictures and (2) the guide does A GREAT JOB at showing off the game.

srsly I have bought something like eighty squillion video games in the last few weeks and NONE of them are getting played right now except this one

a bee suit that makes mario fly actually made your jaw drop?

FUCK YOU, IT'S A BEE SUIT

Any bee-size wings that make an overweight plumber FLY are eminently jaw-dropping.

The water in this game made my jaw drop!

The bee suit, not so much. Fell off the fucking honeycomb planet to my death twice, trying to curl, grab and fly my way around it to collect some coins.

do you think it'd be playable on a gamepad using left stick for movement and right stick for the wiimote? or are there parts where you need mouse-precision on the pointer?

Getting the stars is such a huge part of the game you really kind of have to use the mouse for it.

OK sliding down the sand thing in front of that pyramid was effing FUN.

It is a good game

But once I got onto the bonus second half a game after the "final boss", there were too many tricky coins in earlier levels and I couldn't unlock everything :(

Balancing on the moon in one of the later ghost galaxies. AMAZING!

The scene is bending up and down like a pop-up book.

Ghost Mario is rad. Can these games get any trippier?

I'd say Super Mario Advance is the trippiest Mario

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAeumZj_m_s

* SPOILERS *

Ok the Bowser Space Battle was awesome. Flying through a space tunnel wormhole or whatever the hell that was and bashing him with asteroids. And the ending cutscene was awesome too, a big shiny fantasy anime with a ridiculous plot and super awesome live CGI. All the cutscenes and pre-animated scenes in this game are amazing, as is the soundtrack. Just flying to a level looks and sounds so cinematic and awesome. Bloomed out supernovas, sentient stars speaking in polygons, and this working-class silent film action stunt man defying the laws of physics. SO GREAT.

The only way this could be better is if every galaxy was connected seamlessly and you could fly between them without a menu at all. An open-world Mario game.

I also love how all the spoken dialog is always only one word or just a vocal inflection standing in for text.

* SPOILERS *

An open-world Mario game.

I'm not sure that would be better - in theory yes, and maybe for the first hours of playtime, but I loved how I could just go back to SMG2 and point at the level I wanted to play, unlike the first one. That's such a big part of Mario that I don't know how an open world entry would ever push the right buttons.

This team is infallible, though, and Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS packed some of the same visual flare and architectural wonder of Galaxy but a radically altered gameplay, and it worked incredibly well. Well enough to compete with those console games. They're working on a new 3D one now.

maybe it changes as you get older. when I was a kid I thought the open-world system in Mario 64 was awesome. with Galaxy I have less time for video games and it's hard to come back after two months and try to remember where you have to go (it's not exactly hard to figure out, but still, you just want to get to the level)

the mario 64 castle is my favorite overgrown menu ever: all the secret rooms and slides and locked doors and winding staircases and the courtyard and the basement and the moat and the stairs that never end and the cannon that shoots you onto the rooftop at the end of the game to meet yoshi. and everything so eerily silent and empty. i haven't played SMG2 but the overstuffed chirping secretless spaceship in SMG was Total Bullshit by comparison.

agreed

Oh fuck no, it is such a pain in the ass going anywhere in the castle. Mind you I'm of the view that SMG > SM64 anyway.

I'm not sure that the spaceship is secretless so much as some of the secrets it has are requires to finish (the three green stars that shoot you to new worlds, Luigi and his secret stars) - there's still a bunch of 1-ups hidden in odd places tho.

i do still feel the Mario 64 castle was pretty much the gold standard of this kind of thing

yeah there's "1-ups in odd places" and then there's "there is a trapdoor underneath the moat which you can discover after you get into the room in the basement with the controls that allow you to drain the moat and thus access the hidden level where you get a powerup that in turn allows you to get to a bunch of stuff you couldn't reach before in levels you've already been to"

i liked galaxy a lot (and from the above it sounds like SMG2 is prob a little better) as a 3D-ization of the pre-64 linear model of mario (the levels aren't as on-a-track as SMB3 or SMW and there is the occasional freeform part but there's way less "here is an environment" stuff than SM64; it's mostly about providing really nicely-flowing series of mechanical events) but the openness of 64 is kind of a holy grail for me. i mean it helped that i was 9 right.

i played 64 once at a friend's house and then i had DREAMS about it until i got it myself.

64 does a lot of really cool things that they haven't done again. mario's range of motion in that game is incredible and really tight to control, they came close to replicating this in sunshine but not quite and then galaxy with the new controller just regresses into clunky simplicity. the other is the open-endedness of the levels and the focus on exploration and getting the stars mostly in whatever order you could find them, with the star select screen acting more as 'hints' than 'missions'

galaxy with the new controller just regresses into clunky simplicity.

can you expand? I can think of his backflips being more linear, but the entire world's range of motion is so hugely expanded that this slight tradeoff in Mario's limberness seems inconsequential

Yeah i've never played 64 much, maybe i should try it. I agree that SMG2 is pretty linear. Difficult listening hour described it perfectly. There's all these cool stunts to do, but for the most part you are stuck in once area until you unlock the next, and you never really unlock more than one at a time. That said they are AMAZING levels that are ground-breaking and really quite brilliantly playing with the conventions of the genre in a hundred unique ways. I think my favorite was the ghost world where you are marching down a narrow hallway in space and the carpet beneath you is repeatedly scrolling between two event horizons in a loop. I was sort of sad there weren't more levels done like that!

That's a mark of great level design, to make you want more!

The green stars at the end were a neat idea, but there really didn't have to be three of them, or maybe they could have let you collect all three at once instead of closing the level out, going back to the spaceship, reading a bunch of prompts, going back to the galaxy, selecting the next green star, and waiting for the cinematics in order to start the galaxy all over again from the beginning. I probably wasted alot of time just clicking 'A'.

single worst thing about all nintendo games, right there

'Hi, Mario!'
A
'Boy, it's cold out here!'
A
'Sure could use some warmth right about now!'
A
'How 'bout you go fetch me some stars?'
A
'Oooh!'
A
'Hey!'
A
'Guess what?'
A
'Bet you'll never guess!'
A A A
'Princess Peach is inside of that castle!'
A
'And…'
A
'You…'
A
'Mario…'
A A A A A
'You can go save the princess!'
A
'Now go save the princess!'
A
'Ill be waiting right here!'
A
'Traaaaaaans-FORM!!'
A
'Pow!'
A
'You're still here?'
AAAAAAAAAAAAA

'Did you get all that?'
NO WAIT FUCK I MEANT YES OK FUCK THIS
*turns off wii*

it's the shitty quasi-american high school slang that nobody ever speaks anywhere ever that actively turns me off nintendo games these days

like you'll be in a ye olde tavern in hyrule and some canvas-clad dingbat will say 'wait up, I'll go check for you'

Just remembered those secret levels in Sunshine, the ones that didn't even pretend to be set in realistic environments or anything, but were just pure platforming. They were great, and influenced a lot of 3D Land.

Anyway my sister has donated a bunch of her old Wii games so SMG arrived in our house yesterday, am pretty excited about finally getting around to playing it (although I'm still in the middle of both New SMB 2 and New SMB U at the moment so might try to get those (which are both more fun than I expected tbf) finished off first).

that was IMO the best part of Sunshine. I agree that something never felt quite right about that game. It felt a little odd and glitchy to me. Certain missions were nearly unplayable!

the whole thing about Mario's range of motion in Mario 64 is really the main selling point to me. I believe Nintendo always used to talk about making games where you'd forget you have a controller in your hands and this one certainly did that. if you ever watch any of the speedrun videos it's really quite amazing how much is really possible in that game. intentional or not, nearly every area in 64 had a "linear" and "nonlinear" way to get there. like, you could always get from point A to point B very quickly if you landed the perfect moves. seriously if you haven't go watch some speedrun videos, you'll be amazed at what's possible; like 95% of what they do is shortcuts. Galaxy takes sooooo much longer to beat because the levels are so linear.

lollllllllllllllll autumn almanac

range of motion stuff otm; also, one of the things i loved about 64 (altho this is true of mario in general, almost without exception i think? maybe i am misremembering SMG) is that you never learn "new moves". like it's largely+justly forgotten now (not as a brand, but as a game) but when banjo-kazooie came out it was treated as a big platformer masterpiece, and every other level it stopped to have some anthropomorphic badger or something teach you a new button combination. in mario 64 you could do like six things, you could do them all from the beginning, and their applications expanded near-infinitely. the wall jump in particular, which took my 9-yr-old thumbs the longest to master, i remember just throwing the levels open.

ahhh yes - there is some of this in Mario with the caps and the new water pumps or whatever but that's totally OTM. one of the reasons why I quit playing video games so much was because of stuff like Metroid Prime where everything would be "grab the blue gun to unlock the blue door, get the booster pack to get over this cliff, etc. etc. etc.", and by the end of the game every single button did something unique but you'd never use any of them for anything but the areas you couldnt get to otherwise. even the original Mario games were kinda like this, I remember as a kid how cool it was to find out that most levels had areas above you could fly to, and it starts on the very first level.

also, maybe it's because the levels on Galaxy don't really unfold or "build up" the way the 64 ones did but I also remember Mario 64 giving me a weird sense of vertigo on the tougher levels (Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Road), like getting to the top and jumping off was something that really made me physically uncomfortable, but it was neat for a video game to trigger that sensation

thats a really good point about mario games not following the adventure game progression that metroid and zelda do where it's constantly get item, use item to reach new area. which is why the mission structure in sunshine/galaxy feels wrong to me, it's like the path of least resistance in forcing structure upon a game that doesn't have the adventure game progression

god tick tock clock.

kinda wanna do sm64 levels poll.

oh by the way the speedruns on Tick Tock Clock are INSANE

hazy maze cave is my favorite level i think

re sm64 overworld and level design: that game's jumping-castle joy was (as per miyamoto's later testimony iirc) shoved across to the zelda games by nintendo/ead, which sucks because there's so much that's uniquely wonderful about that castle. doing the same sort of exploration/gay abandon in a hyrule-based village or whatever is not even close to being the same sort of thing because (a) it's all grass and wooden carts and acorn children and so forth (b) you can't pivot or leap or somersault. it's not like a playground, it's like poking around someone's backyard.

where i'm going with this is that nintendo/ead missed a trick by moving sm64's whole sense of childlike wonder wholesale to the zelda games. the smg games are of course brilliant, and they're absolutely on point wrt super mario in general being a wholly skill-based platformer, but you really do just go through the motions now. arguably the best aspect of sm64 was that a pile of stars were just around all the time, and (with a handful of exceptions) you didn't have to collect them sequentially (as mentioned upthread).

i remember loads of people being properly angry when sm64 was new, because it took them ages to find *any* of the stars in some levels. they were all 'waaah i don't want to think or explore in this game'. nintendo responded directly to those people, who are no longer lost or bored, which is nice, but the rest of us don't get funky castles to be lost in anymore, and we don't have the pleasure of just dropping into a playground, running in literally any direction and having brilliant and rewarding experiences. you get dumped at the edge of something (usually a tiny glob of land just floating in space), and you can only go where the game allows you to go.

old man yells at cloud mario is where i'm going with this

" which is why the mission structure in sunshine/galaxy feels wrong to me, it's like the path of least resistance in forcing structure upon a game that doesn't have the adventure game progression"

Wait - how does Galaxy or Sunshine have this adventure game progression? It's just unlocking worlds through beating levels like the old Mario games. Also you can still finish a lot of stars in Sunshine in your own sequence, it's not that different from 64 structure wise.

I always speak against open world-ish Mario games whenever speculation about the direction of the series comes up. I still suspect EAD will go for something like it, at least on the surface to suggest a more epic scale to fit the new HD console.

I didn't like NSMB2, maybe the first Mario ever I was bored of before beating the final Bowser. Can't really remember a single level. Haven't tried NSMB U yet, hear it's better. Juxtaposed with 3DLand it's the biggest reminded yet that EAD and the 3D Marios operate on a different level entirely now.

I don't get why they don't do themed NSMBs. Imagine NSMB Galaxy - fully 2D but with the setting of the Galaxy games, levels inspired by the crazy 2D they pulled off there, gravity, up and down, madness in 2D. DO IT.

Yeah Galaxy was pretty close to SMB3 I felt, maybe a little more non-linear. Usually you would beat a level and have like 2 other ones to chose from. Still, the level of skill and just how fine-tuned all the galaxies are is just pitch-perfect. With a more open world i think it may be impossible to pull those off. How to do a non-linear gravity-switching up/down 2D castle?

I read a bunch before playing SMG2 and was somewhat afraid of people talking everywhere i went and having to stop and read a text box or watch a cinematic, but really if you just don't walk up to the NPC friendly's you don't have to deal with any of that. Yeah it's ridiculous to have a rabbit tell you "Press A to jump!" after you've been playing the game for 4 hours but then don't walk over to the rabbit and hit the talk button.

I don't get why they don't do themed NSMBs. Imagine NSMB Galaxy - fully 2D but with the setting of the Galaxy games, levels inspired by the crazy 2D they pulled off there, gravity, up and down, madness in 2D. DO IT.

― abcfsk, Saturday, 2 February 2013 13:11 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ead r&d probably has 8,000 test builds of super mario games that never made it to release

otm

yeah I remember a Nintendo Power that talked about Super Mario 64 2 and getting all excited about it, only to have it never come out

remember super mario 128?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/SuperMario128.jpg/270px-SuperMario128.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HuVp506Cl2w/Sjrm2LLI3yI/AAAAAAAAC4A/ioi4TfTtuts/s400/SM128_Image6.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgtFXXzE8bk

http://i50.tinypic.com/1jss5k.jpg

apparently the tech that went into mario128 ended up in pikmin

oh yes of coursr