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Mario’s excellent space adventure isn’t just the Wii’s first absolutely must-have game—it’s also the equivalent of an interactive Disney movie, with rainbow-star bits plummeting from the sky and bursting from patches of grass and pummeled enemies. Manipulating an on-screen cursor with the Wiimote to collect and use the star bits to unlock new colorful galaxies is cool; pitching ’em to knock enemies on their asses is better than blasting aliens in Metroid Prime 3.
 Fly me to the moon: Every bit as classic as N.W.A. in our opinion, Nintendo’s timeless hero, Mario, goes interstellar on the wild and Wii-tastic Super Mario Galaxy. |
The story set-up is as familiar as Frank Caliendo’s Madden impression, mashing up two of Mr. Plumber’s most tiresome tropes. In the middle of the Star Festival, Mario’s on his way to the castle to score a gift from Princess Peach when Bowser and son crash the bash in a set of flying pirate ships, lassoing the castle and jetting off into space. Turns out our fire-snorting friend has also been swiping power stars from a comet observatory run by a Peach lookalike named Rosalina, and Mario’s recruited to play Space Ace and get ’em all back. Let’s see: Collecting stars and saving Peach. Let’s hear it for Captain Originality.
Fortunately, the story’s just a convenient prop to send our plumber pal hopping from one bizarre-ass, gravity-challenged galaxy level to another. In the course of the ridiculous number of galaxies you’ll visit, you’ll walk Mario along the curved surface of countless egg-shaped mini-planets, scale impossible heights, maneuver him through space like a slingshot and, in a move that’s familiar to more than a few Nintendo games, dress him up in plenty of stylin’, power-conferring costumes. It’s possible to turn him into a bee and a Boo, make him invincible and even into a human bedspring. Don’t mention this to Bee Movie actor Jerry Seinfeld, but the bee’s the dog in this group: Your costumed powers vanish if you touch an enemy or water.
There’s a huge sense of exhilaration that comes every time Mario slingshots through a star launcher—you rattle the Wii controller to make this happen—rocketing through space toward a new part of the galaxy and a new set of puzzles. Individually, the puzzles and boss battles don’t rise to the level of brain- or wrist-busting (well, except in the water-racing levels, and at the end, where it’s time to bash some Bowser butt) but that’s okay. When a game looks and plays as well as this one does, it doesn’t need to break your will, too.