Underwhelming multiplayer is easily overlooked; however, issues with the camera are harder to forgive. Maintaining simple control over the view or providing a faultless automatic camera is a must for platform games and Super Mario Galaxy falls flat in this regard. Everything else works wonderfully.
I don't usually read Gameshark, but that quote caught my eye over at Metacritic. It's how I feel about the game, reduced to lowest terms, now that I've "finished" it with 89 stars. Nearly 100% of the time that I felt frustration instead of enjoyment, the cause was my inability to look at the action from a good perspective. It's impossible for a developer to know what a good perspective is for everyone playing a game of this kind. Some like a side view, others want to be directly behind their little jump man. Sometimes a diagonal perspective is helpful. That's why it's imperative to provide the player with the choice whenever possible. Due to the warped nature of the gameplay, it's not always possible. However, SMG has a mind of its own about the camera most of the time, including on traditional levels that could have easily been a part of Mario 64 (with crappier graphics). Even on smooth wraparound terrain, it's very possible and not much harder to provide the traditional Mario 64 rotating camera & chase perspectives. (I talk about that above somewhere.) Unfortunately, the fault is worse than a sin of omission. Too often, the perspective will swing wildly as you run across a level, making the act of moving in a straight line a gratuitous challenge. Sometimes you have no choice but to walk and jump blindly toward the screen because someone decided you would never want to walk or jump that way, or just didn't think about it. That's the point. It's a fully open 3D world, and it's up to the player to decide which way to go, and to look, not up to the developer to restrict it.
I needed to get that said. Aside from this sticky, unfortunate problem, the game is fantastic. Technically, near perfect. The frame rate never wavers from 60 fps (480p), never loses sync with the monitor (no shearing, no stuttering, no jittering). Rarely, you will see a clipped polygon or an object suddenly pop in in the distance. The control, also near perfect. It's a bit more difficult to follow narrow paths at all sorts of changing angles than I remember in 64. That may be more related to holding the nunchuk with one hand than anything else, but I'm not sure yet. There are so many different actions, and they all work as they should. The artwork, impeccable. The level design, devious, highly creative, and quite varied. The enemies, as varied as ever. Same goes for Mario's powerups. The challenge, perfect. It's fairly easy to complete enough to get to the end, but the difficulty ramps up quite a bit to go beyond that, culminating in challenge levels where you take on a boss again, and only one hit will kill you. The normal-mode bosses are as challenging as I'd care to take on in a 3D Mario, which is to say not so hard that I'll pull what's left of my hair out, but certainly heart-pumping. The audio, excellent. Very little speech, and frankly, I could do without any. Charles Martinet grates on my nerves. The original music is perfect for the game. You'll also hear most of the tunes from the whole Mario series at one point or another. The sound effects are pristine.
What am I missing? Length? You can play this forever, although I don't know that you'd want to. Getting every one of the 120 stars is a huge challenge, both in terms of skill and exploration. High scores per stage are coin-based, and you lose all your coins whenever you lose a life. So to get the highest possible scores, you need not to die, not once. Then there's what has been called "the ultimate unlockable".
After completing the game with 120 stars, you unlock Luigi, and you can play through the whole game again. If you do that, you get a bonus galaxy at the end, I think, if I read that right. Luigi doesn't play much differently, except that he skids a long way if you pull back on the stick, leading to skids off the edges into black holes, where Mario had no such problem. (This can be prevented by a somersault leap back, or a quick shake of the remote or nunchuk, but it's hard to have that presence of mind so far. Need more practice.) I don't know yet if there's an upside to his gameplay. He may jump higher, but if so, it's nothing like his advantage from Mario 2 USA (Doki Mario). Yeah, I'm cheating. After finishing the game, and realizing I'm not good enough for most one-hit-death bosses, I grabbed a 120-star save online. The Wii surprisingly allows anyone's saves to work on your console, and saves can be easily transfered through SD cards. I really wanted to check out the Luigi game.
I went through a set of AA alkalines on this game, and I'm not close to really done. (I'll rant about freaking wireless controllers without any good power options in the Wii thread.) I hope the other few good games on the system don't feel like letdowns after the experience.
Edit: I think this summarizes the problem perfectly, although I don't agree that all the difficulty comes from the camera.
Odd camera angles do more than instill awkwardness into the levels; they also raise the level of difficulty. Simple actions such as jumping on a goomba are surprisingly difficult when traversing the spherical surface of a miniature planet. Enemies sometimes appear from seemingly out of nowhere, items are hard to locate, and the controls frequently invert when running upside or on walls. Getting used to the constantly shifting perspective is the game's greatest challenge. The levels themselves never seem difficult--in fact, it's always apparent what needs to be done--but the funky camera transforms simple sequences into awkward tasks.
http://www.gameshark.com/reviews/2830/Super-Mario-Galaxy-Review.htm
