Super Mario Galaxy and LA
“Work, work, work…” At least that’s what I think the Elite in Halo 1 was saying while trying to kill me.
But this Wednesday I’m going back to sunny and plastic Los Angeles to spend a couple of wholesome days smack dab in the ghetto, where I used to live while as a student at the University of Southern California. It’ll be like the good ole times except I won’t have any homework, which I wasn’t doing anyway — I swear to god, I still have some minor nightmares of being back in college and realizing I went the entire semester without going to class, taking a midterm, or doing any of the assignments. That was like that shit-ass-retarded database class I took, like I need more SQL in my life. It’s nice to be out of that rat race.
Who knows, maybe I’ll run into the General of God’s Army — I bought him some fried chicken at the Market 32 once, and I did it out of the goodness of my cold, cold heart. God bless that supermarket and the cockroaches that ran rampant under the shelves. The food was never bad, but I never once got posioned by their second hand wares and week old produce.
Super Mario Galaxy is awesome. I beat it. Here’s how lamer0z I am: that’s the first Mario game I ever beat. I had Super Mario Brothers, but I couldn’t get past Lakitu as a small child. His ability to drop spiked balls thwarted my stupid-finger joystick acumen and feeble young brain and I never did cross the threshold of level 4-1. I had Super Mario 3 (who didn’t after watching the Wizard) and Super Mario World. Played the hell out of them, but never finished either of them. I played Sunshine but the camera controls were terrible and I swore off games where the camera was total shit. I can’t stand running around and then having the camera face the backside of a blurry, low-resolution textured quad. If that’s your fear, Mario Galaxy has allievated it. The camera is 99% of the time, excellent. You can always see what you’re doing. You never have to futz around with the best camera angle or lining the camera up for a jump. You can just play, and that’s what I want to do. I don’t want to direct the game. I just want to platform. The levels are bite sized and manage to pack some mind-bending gravity defying puzzles. Excellent shit.
One of my good friends doesn’t like waggling the wiimote to do a spin attack or pointing at the screen. It makes me wonder, does Super Mario Galaxy really require the wiimote to be an excellent game? Most of the game seems to be playable with a regular Gamecube controller. Sure you can’t point at star bits, so you need a wiimote for collecting those. Waggling for spin jumps? Could they be replaced with just a “B” button press and we could all live happily ever after? Why not the waggle? I have to admit, sometimes when I was waggling like mad to spin jump and kill some enemies (and missing) I was annoyed that it wasn’t as responsive as I wanted it to be. I figured madly waggling would make Mario into the tasmanian devil but it only plays a pre-canned animation. Maybe if Nintendo changed it that the constant waggle motion would make him spin like a top the feature would be more in-line with what you’re doing with the controller. I liked point and collect for the star bits, the star pulling, and all that fun stuff. It’s really nice to be able to collect things like that.
Whoever says the Wii can’t do good looking graphics has to check this game out. Galaxy’s graphics are amazing. Everything is nicely lit, there are some shader effects at work to do specular highlighting, bump mapping, and making platforms appear metallic. Sure it’s not the Crysis Engine or Halo 3, but the color and lighting are amazing. Nintendo has a way of making a very unique look with their games and it’s such a breath of fresh air after the harsh and gritty worlds of Halo and Half-Life that I love to inhabit most of the time. I don’t know if I read the credits right, and if you beat the game, and how could you not, it’s not that difficult, check out the credits, I counted at least a dozen engineers who worked on this game. Granted those 12 folks probably had 5 years to work on the game and perfect every little bit of it engineering-wise, but come on, that’s damn amazing work.
Oh and I also enjoyed Rosalina’s storybook but then I like all sorts of fairytales. And Rosalina’s hot. There I said.
What’s the next game on my list? Assassin’s Creed.
P.S. There was a project I was working on for this month: Nanowrimo.org
I’m 27,000+ words into my 50,000. Will I finish? Will I let you read it?
