6 Ways Super Mario Galaxy Could Have Been Fun

I finally gave Super Mario Galaxy a rental last week after being told that it was considerably more challenging than its predecessors and closer to recreating the classic Super Mario Bros feel than any of the other 3D Super Mario games. Rather than writing a review, which would inevitably just be beating negative aspects of the game like a dead horse, I decided to write an article focusing on specific things that would have made the game more enjoyable.

1) Hard Mode

The primary reason I didn’t have fun with Super Mario Galaxy was that the vast majority of the game was so mind-numbingly easy that virtually no effort or input was really needed from the player. It didn’t even feel like gameplay. Action Button described Super Mario Galaxy as evidently being created in ever-present fear of “a class-action lawsuit from widows of old men with overloaded pacemakers” and Capcom USA staff Dave Sirlin admits “I played probably the last third of the game on low volume while I watched reruns of Frasier and The Golden Girls on a second TV.” Personally, after the first 20 minutes playing the game, my eyes were literally glazed over and I was seconds from falling asleep on the couch. I had to run to the gas station and return with an arm full of Starbucks doubleshots, which I had to consume at a rate of approximately one per half-hour just to keep going at the game for the rest of the night.

The truth is, I really don’t mind if developers want to provide an easy mode for grandma and the kids, and for lazy gamers that just want to see all the set pieces and cut scenes. What Nintendo (and a lot of other developers) need to learn is that the gimmick approach to multiple difficulty levels, where you make the main portion of the game really easy, but then you insert extra missions and hidden features that will supposedly satisfy the hardcore gamer in the end, doesn’t work. The experienced gamer should not be forced to play the entire game in retarded mode first before he can start to enjoy it, and unless you actually provide a harder version of the entire game, the harder bonus missions at the end are going to be just that – a few missions. In essence the hardcore player only gets to enjoy a small fraction of the whole game.

The Prankster Comets were probably the worst offenders in this regard. They could have provided a way to challenge the experienced gamer from the beginning, but they appeared all too rarely and randomly. During the rare instances when they were around, they tended to always appear at the easiest early levels which you didn’t even want to bother with again, and then when you payed the luma star to move the comets in hope that they’d appear at harder levels, most of the time they would just disappear from the map entirely. The fact that the hidden levels like the Trial Galaxies were the only significantly challenging ones in the game, and were totally hidden, didn’t help either. The hardcore gamer is already going to be bored to death having to play hours and hours of easy levels just to get to the good parts, forcing him to then mess around with randomly appearing comets and scour the easy levels to find the difficult levels just makes it way too much work to actually have fun at the game.

To hell with “prankster comets”, I want to be able to activate “hard mode” from the beginning and play the whole game that way immediately. I want faster monsters, time limits, and other challenging features all the time, all the way through the whole game from the start. I don’t know how Nintendo can bill games like Super Mario Galaxy as one of their major “hardcore” titles, when hardcore gamers are not even given the common courtesy of selectable difficulty levels, and they have to go through hours of boring gameplay to actually start enjoying themselves in the game.

2) Old School Health System

Finally in Super Mario Galaxy, someone at Nintendo realized that the 8-part health bar from Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine was too fucking much, and they brought it down to 3 hit points. This was a step in the right direction, but given the pedestrian nature of the rest of the game, a less forgiving health system would have been more desirable, at least for hard mode.

Honestly, given Nintendo’s attitude as an “innovative” developer which prides itself on uniqueness, I don’t know why 3D Super Mario games are still using a generic health bar just like every other game out there. Why not go back to the original Super Mario Bros health system? You start out small, and one hit kills you. Grab a mushroom to get big, and now you can take 2 hits before dieing. Stack another powerup like a Fire Flower on top of that, and now you can take 3 hits before dieing.

Having to work for your health instead of having it handed to you on a silver platter is much more unique and much more challenging. Perhaps even more importantly, seeking out powerups as a key to your survival is considerably more fun and exciting than just collecting mundane piddly tokens like coins and star bits. That brings us to our next point…

3) Better Use of Powerups and Items

In Super Mario Galaxy, powerups are still used merely as keys to unlock not-so-cleverly disguised doors, instead of as ways to increase your survival and exploration abilities. They’re put on strict timers, and you can’t take them with you to other levels. When you find powerups, instead of being excited at the new abilities you’re going to acquire, you’re just disappointed that undoubtedly you’re just going to be put through another simplistic puzzle segment or lame obstacle course. The stupid torch-lighting puzzles you’re forced to “solve” with the Fire Flower in Galaxy make even the most insulting Zelda torch puzzles look like god damned Sudoku.

If powerups were taken off of their timers and integrated into the health system, the abilities they grant would be balanced by the fact that one hit will kill you if you lose them. Instead of being placed on pedestals to be used in puzzles, powerups could be distributed liberally across levels to be used regularly as a means of survival and exploration. Also, powerups could be put in question mark blocks, so those staples of the Super Mario universe weren’t so shamefully rare, and didn’t always contain something lame, like star bits.

Speaking of which, having both coins and star bits in the game is rather redundant. For starters, the whole star-shooting ability was a weak and misguided attempt to integrate multiplayer into the game, and was not needed as a means of self defense playing alone since the game was so easy. Removing star bits and just keeping coins as a means to collect 100 for an extra life and pay Luma’s to unlock stuff would be better. It’s not like star bits really contributed to your motivation to platform, since you didn’t have to actually go after them to retrieve them.

Lastly, imagine if the spin attack was only available as Bee Mario. That way, in other situations you’d be much more motivated to either avoid enemies or stomp on their heads; the old-fashioned, more skilled method of Super Mario combat. Then when you got the Bee Suit, you wouldn’t feel like such a panzy, and would be given an extra melee ability comparable to the Racoon Tail and Super Cape of classic Super Mario games.

4) More Robust Level/Scenario Design

Super Mario Galaxy’s levels may look cool, but even if you pile on stuff like faster monsters, time limits, and old school health, you’re still going to run into the problem that the levels were just not designed to be challenging. It seems that so many levels in the game aren’t even about platforming, but instead are simply about finding all the star fragments, solving some simple puzzle, or just wandering your way to the end of a trail of star bit breadcrumbs. If the sort of basic platforming seen in levels like Sweet Sweet Galaxy and Toy Time had started at the beginning of the game and built up from there, the end result would have been a much more consistent, lively, and engaging experience. Super Mario Galaxy has amazingly little in the way of actual platforming challenges for a platforming game.

Another point worth mentioning is that the enemies don’t present much of an obstacle in your path through any of the challenges. There has been an ever present habit throughout the 3D Mario games of placing enemies out of the way where you only really have to fight them if you want extra coins. By contrast, it wasn’t unusual in the 2D Mario games to encounter enemies right at the launch point for a jump, or right at the landing of a jump, forcing you to deal with them simultaneously with the platforming challenges. Had Nintendo put more thought into how they placed enemies in Super Mario Galaxy, it would have made for a more hair-raising experience, as you’d be forced to think faster to handle both the platforming and enemy obstacles all at once.

One argument I’ve heard is that enemies simply don’t work well in 3D platformers, since you have the ability to run around them instead of being forced to kill them or jump over as in sidescrolling games. This is simply lazy, unimaginative thinking. Does existence in 3 dimensions allow a football player to run for touchdowns without ever being tackled by his opponents? Does existence in 3 dimensions prevent a goalie in soccer from blocking the ball? No. The answer is that enemies in 3D platformers simply have to be a little faster and smarter to keep up with the player in 3 dimensions. While a simple speed boost would help Galaxy monsters to do this, it must be pointed out that making enemies capable of mirroring Mario’s movements in order to stop him from easily just running past them is very simple AI. The enemies are not as incompetent as they are in Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy because the game is 3D, they’re incompetent because Nintendo is afraid to challenge gamers.

As clever as Super Mario Galaxy’s set pieces and gravity gimmicks were, that’s no substitute for solid platforming action. Had the levels been designed with more platforming challenges and more threatening enemies, it would have offered more exciting gameplay.

5) Better Camera Control

Super Mario Galaxy’s camera is functional, but not as polished as I’d expect from a next generation 3D game. Operating via the d-pad, you don”t have a smooth range of analog motion with the camera as you did with PS2 DualShock and Gamecube C-stick controls. The levels are designed so that the camera is almost always unobstructed, but you can only toggle the camera digitally left or right. A much more prominent limitation is that the game only allows you to move the camera some of the time, in fact I found that in almost all of the situations where I wanted a better angle, I’d start pushing the D-pad only to hear a denial buzzer reply in every direction.

Except sometimes in the few indoor areas in the game, the camera is almost never blocked from view of Mario, but that doesn’t mean that you always get a good angle to see all the relevant info. In a lot of situations you can’t judge the distances between platforms properly because of the angle, and you’re forced to basically make a blind jump and hope you’re not overshooting or undershooting. Other times, the camera is positioned in a way that you can see yourself, but you can’t see what’s ahead of you, so by the time something like an enemy, incoming missile, or pitfall comes into view, you don’t have time to react to it.

Lastly, it must be mentioned that a lot of the scenarios are designed to deliberately obscure your view, so you’ll often be on a planetoid that’s so small that as you run across it, things don’t come into view till they’re 3 feet in front of you. The game frequently sets the camera up to emphasize when you’re walking “upside down” even though in space there isn’t actually an up or down, and if you could set the camera yourself, you could just put it right side up so you weren’t so disoriented. Of course, since the game isn’t actually hard at all, none of these camera issues really become a serious obstacle in beating the game, they’re just really annoying, and seem like sloppy design work. If the game actually was challenge, the camera would probably not be ttotally suitable for hardcore play.

6) Actual Multiplayer Support

Back in the day, my sister was my trusty video gaming companion, and while it was occasionally frustrating having to stop and wait for someone else to take their turn when you died, we had great fun working together to rip through the original Super Mario Bros games. Super Mario World was particularly good in this respect, as we could play cooperatively unlocking different secrets from the same level in succession, working different parts of the same world at once, and sharing extra lives. If one person was having trouble and was too far across the map to do it themselves, the other could make a run through Forest of Illusion 1 to score a bunch of extra men and fork them over to the dieing player.

Then the Nintendo 64 came out. We were not the kids you saw on Youtube, but the scene in our house the Christmas after the N64 launched was pretty much the same. And while we were at first quite excited to explore the 3D worlds of Super Mario 64, the novelty wore off after a while. Since there was no 2-player mode, we each ended up with our own separate save files. Super Mario went from a force which brought us together to one that caused arguments over whose turn it was with the infernal black system. Since watching someone wander around those big, empty uneventful 3D worlds collecting tokens and solving puzzles was almost as boring as actually doing it yourself, pretty soon instead of watching or providing hints and moral support while waiting their turn, the person not playing would just go off somewhere and do something else. Eventually when the marathon star-snagging session was over and the person playing got burned out, we’d pass eachother in the hallway and switch places.

And really, I think the N64 was the system that turned my sister off from gaming, as pretty soon I was the only one that bothered with the stupid black box. When I finally got bored of N64 too, I got a Playstation and played games like fighters and RPG’s which were not sister-friendly. So, with the exception of a few good 2-player games like Legend of Mana, we rarely ever played games together after that. At one time we were best friends, and now we live in separate states with seperate lives and only ever talk once every few months at best…:(

If my sister and I ever did have the opportunity to play Super Mario Galaxy together, the star-shooting lightgun mode would soon be discarded and regarded as even more of a joke than Duck Hunt’s control-the-duck gamepad mode (which we actually did try a few times back in the day). Particularly now that Super Mario Galaxy features tighter level designs and shorter missions which would involve less waiting around to play, the return of a real 2-player mode, where one player is Mario and the other is Luigi and you take turns beating levels, would have been awesome.

However, even cooler would be a true split-screen co-op mode, which is something we wished for with the 2D games as children, but always just assumed was impossible due to technical limitations of the early consoles. If the Wii was supposed to be such a goddamn “revolution” then why do so many features of its new Super Mario game feel like several steps backwards from Super Marios of yesteryear, rather than the several steps forward we’ve been dreaming of since childhood?

~ by Julian Gnam on June 8, 2008.