So I have been playing Mario Galaxy on and off, when I'm not playing Mass Effect. Tangent for a moment: Mass Effect isn't really a game for weeknights, is it? If you play for 20 minutes, you get, like, nothing done -- not to mention that there's just so much detail there. I'm only a casual sci-fi fan; I prefer odd genre blends rather than straight sci-fi or straight HIGHLORD REDCLOAK fantasy. But the one thing I do like about the genre, when I like it, is the mass amounts of depth and detail in the plot. Space governments, zillions of different races, planets, lore. So when I play Mass Effect, I feel I'm cheapening the experience by trying to chip away at it in bites; in other words, I need a good couple of hours with nothing else on my mind, I think.
Moving on to the other space game -- I wish, for the same reason, that Galaxy had a save-anywhere, but other than that, I've been marveling at the game design. The sheer nuts-and-bolts of design has always been where Miyamoto's Angels have excelled, and in the past I have sometimes found myself overlooking the simplicity of that genius in my quest for more innovative intangibles -- stories, characters, themes -- in games. Forty years from now, we'll probably still have Mario and Zelda. You could get in a time machine right now, zip forward into the future, get out, look around and not recognize a single damned thing in your changed world, but when you see Mario and Zelda, you will know right away what they are, because they will be the same as they've been. Many times, at least since the advent of Wii, I have aired my fatigue at Nintendo's old standbys, rolled my eyes at Mario sport, racing, puzzle and gimmick titles, and after the tooth-rotting glut of initial praise for Galaxy, I had, despite my best intentions, become a bit of a cynic.
After all, I have never felt as if Nintendo ever properly migrated their classic formulas into 3D. I realize I'm a bit of a minority in shunning the N64. It came out when I was fifteen years old, and clinging desperately to my loyalties to Sonic and the Dreamcast that deserved better, I wanted to hate that hideous little brick. And when I played it over my cousin's, I essentially picked it up for a few seconds -- Majora's Mask, could have been -- and put it down a second later. The 3D was awkward. Just awful, awkward. I hated it. I only bought a GameCube for RE4, and except for a Pikmin phase, that was really the only use it got. I couldn't platform, couldn't goomba-stomp in that chunky 3D.
Scarred, I was suspicious of Galaxy -- especially with my recent retroactive fixation on a few unusually difficult 2D sidescrollers. But just the other day, at the Montreal Games Summit, veteran Nintendo designer Yoshiaki Koizumi was talking about this very subject -- the difficulty in transitioning Mario to 3D, the fact that people were frustrated by their own depth perception -- and gave a very in-depth talk, which I helped write up at Gamasutra, about how they conceived the spherical planet design angle that characterizes Galaxy and makes it the first 3D Mario I enjoy.
I've mentioned before I've no knowledge of or experience in game design at all; if I were to be instructed by someone to "make a game," I'd sit down and brainstorm what I wanted it to be about, what I wanted you to be able to do, what I wanted it to look like. The way that game developers think, in this from-the-inside-out way, just fascinates me.
That said, I haven't yet decided whether my original assertion -- that Galaxy might be over-rated by a sentimental bunch of reviewers -- is or is not correct. I have to play it some more, and the truth is, I don't find it that engaging. It doesn't make me want to keep picking it up. But then, I said that about Rondo of Blood, and I'm now obsessed with it, so it looks like this is another case where I may have to gear-shift my mind into a different type of play mode. We'll see.
