DONE BY: Nintendo; produced by Shigeru Miyamoto

IT'S FOR: Wii

YEAR: 2007

Super Mario Galaxy is easily the best 3D Mario game, and it may be the best Mario game ever, depending on how you like your Mario. These are big statements, but easy to say. I’m not having any sort of internal debate over whether I should call Mario Galaxy one of the best games ever made. Once you’ve played it, you’ll find that calling it one of the best games ever made is as easy as flicking lint off your sleeve – it’s not something you need to think about.

In fact, Mario Galaxy – rather embarrassingly for most 3D games made in the past decade – makes it suddenly apparent how little 3D game design has progressed since Super Mario 64. There have been very few games that really justify the need for 3D – and Mario Galaxy surpasses them by leaps and bounds. It’s far from the first 3D game ever made – but it feels like it is. It’s a completely new experience, and you will have the time of your goddamned life.

Here’s a quote from Miyamoto (which you can read in context here) about his concept for the game:

So, what I came up with was gravity. In old movies, for example, they used all sorts of effects like people walking upside-down on the ceiling. Of course, no one can actually do things like that, so I thought that by creating this opportunity for the players, they can experience something strange and have fun just playing around like that. But when I told that to the staff, they became worried and asked me “Can we really call something like that a game?” So I told them that it’d be better to make something that everyone could enjoy that wasn’t a game rather than make something that was a game but wasn’t much fun.

In other words, start with a fun idea, then build your game on that foundation. Mario Galaxy proves that this is an effective approach to game design: Like Mario 64 before it, it’s fun just to move Mario around. Running around upside-down on a giant peanut; jumping so high that you enter a new gravitational field and land on a different planet – this sort of thing is just fun. Fun enough to be a game by itself.

But Miyamoto and his team didn’t stop there. Their new concept created a world of possibilities, and they picked up their shotguns, put on their pith helmets, and explored those possibilities. ‘Galaxy’ is the right name for this game – it is a nearly endless, continually surprising stream of completely different worlds; hundreds of crazy ideas, all of them refined and tweaked to perfection. Every step of the way, you’ll think the game has played all its cards – that the possibilities have been exhausted; that the game can’t get any more creative. And every next step, Super Mario Galaxy will outdo itself. It is literally breathtaking. Set aside a weekend to play Mario Galaxy, because the only reason you will ever stop playing is exhaustion.

I want to make special mention of the music in Mario Galaxy. The background music is excellent, of course, but what really pleases me is that it isn’t always ‘background’ music. Without spoiling anything, I can say that the Galaxy team has taken music into account as much as any other element of game design and presentation, which these days, all games ought to but few do.

If I were writing for Gamespot, this is the point where I’d force in a couple of paragraphs of boring nitpicking, so as to provide a ‘balanced’ review. And I could, but I won’t, because it would be just that: nitpicking. If you like games – even a little bit – you will love Mario Galaxy. You will love it so much. And that’s all that needs to be said.

Super Mario Galaxy is truly the sequel to Super Mario 64 in that it is a landmark game, the likes of which had not been imagined before. Although, whether Galaxy will be as widely copied as its predecessor is a matter of conjecture, since (a) the 3D platformer/third-person action game, while still very popular, is not the dominant form it was ten years ago, and (b) some parts of Galaxy borrow from other games – eg. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time; Zelda: Ocarina of Time – that have already spread their influence without Galaxy’s help. But nonetheless, Galaxy is such a massively, extensively creative game, it’s hard to imagine we won’t still be hearing its echoes in another decade.

FINAL SCORE: BEST GAME SINCE PSYCHONAUTS

SUDDEN, CYNICAL DISCLAIMER: Because this is a Nintendo game, all the characters are chatty bitches. I played the Japanese version and can’t read much Japanese, so I could ignore this problem. If you play an English-language version, your sense of wonder and discovery may be diminished by all the Toads unnecessarily explaining every detail of the game before you have a chance to try anything for yourself.

Fuck I hate those runty bastards.