Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Super Mario Galaxy 2
Platform: Wii
Played For: 16 hrs
Our knowledge of space has in some ways limited our imagination. Before people first made it into orbit in the 1950s, it was anyone’s guess what was really going on up there. Science Fiction and Fantasy writers had a great deal of fun envisioning different situations. Cordwainer Smith, for example, speculated that being up in space could be somehow inherently painful to humans… so agonizing, in fact, that you have to have all of your senses of touch, hearing, taste and smell removed to navigate it (read his famous short story Scanners Live in Vain.) On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have Fritz Leiber’s Crystal Spheres, a completely different, whimsical cosmological structure than that understood to be in place today. It is hard, knowing the facts that we know, to have the freedom to make up other ways things could have been… which is part of the reason I like Super Mario Galaxy 2 so much. Throw out all those notions of vacuum and darkness and cold that come with thinking of space… in Mario world, space is a colorful, shining wonderland crafted from the stuff of childhood dreams.
Let’s just say it right away: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a fantastic game. Bright, polished and consistently fun, Galaxy 2 does everything a proper sequel should… it revisits all the successful mechanics of the original adventure, while introducing new and interesting concepts that are artfully consistent with the previously established theme. Never redundant or frustrating, Galaxy 2 plays with notions of space and gravity in ways that few games can compete with… Portal is the only one that immediately springs to mind.
Galaxy 2 dispenses with the storybook approach of its predecessor in favor of the standard plot… save Princess Peach from Bowser. Mario encounters the “lumas” again and he is soon piloting his own spaceship… strangely shaped this time as a giant model of his own head. It isn’t often possible to get into the heads of video game characters, but Mario must be pretty weird to want to travel all over the universe on a giant version of his own cranium. Adding to this bizarre situation, new pipes, creatures and other surface features pop up under Mario’s giant replica nose, or behind his ears, or on the back of his scalp, and so on. They remind me of cartoon versions of so many zits and bacteria on the greasy face of a real pizza-eating plumber. But you can’t blame Mario for developing a few stress-related pimples while he’s on the job… at least in my hands he’s constantly getting squished, immolated, dropped into black holes or smacked around by pudgy little monstrosities with perpetually smiling faces… scary!
Luckily, Mario is given a few advantages to help him out. Power-ups from the original game return, such as bumblebee Mario, fire blossom Mario and so on. Added to this roster are a bunch of fun new abilities. Boulder Mario gets to roll around squashing his foes and crashing into things. Cloud Mario is lighter than air, and can provide himself with up to three cloud platforms to stand on. Drill Mario is really cool, allowing Mario to tunnel through the center of various planetoids, emerging on the diametrically opposite side (I’m going to have to use that one as an example when we talk diameters in Geometry class sometime.) But most importantly, Mario is joined this time by that most mysterious of reptiles, the alien creature known only as a “Yoshi.”
What is the noble Yoshi, and what do we know about it? There appears to be only one Yoshi, even though he is constantly hatching from eggs scattered throughout the Marioverse. Yoshi is born with a saddle, indicating a servile mentality… in fact, when not under Mario’s direct control Yoshi completely falls into a total panic and charges off the nearest cliff like a total nutter. This is particularly strange, as Yoshi has little to fear from Mario’s enemies. Yoshi eats most of them, his peculiar digestive system working instantly to poop them out in the form of star bits. In Galaxy 2 Yoshi also demonstrates the ability to blow up like a balloon when eating weird blue fruit (talk about having a case of gas) and he can run across water when fed a hot pepper. Finally, Yoshi continues to have his odd but incredibly useful ability to temporarily ignore gravity by waving his two little feet around like crazy. Yoshi hovering comes with what has to be one of the most amusing little noises ever made in a video game… it is worth it to hold him in the air from time to time just to enjoy his funny little Yoshi mewling.
The physical structure of the Marioverse continues its delightful trend of making no sense whatsoever. Mario pilots his nogginship (which is steam-powered, by the way, because that makes it more FUN) to Worlds, which in fact look like galaxies. However, it is in fact within each World that you travel to Galaxies, which actually consist of random assortments of planetoids floating in air or in space. In each Galaxy, you find Stars. Oh, and sometimes Prankster Comets land in Galaxies and make new Stars appear! All of this is enough to make an astronomy teacher break down in tears, but serves well enough for the rest of us (as a math teacher, I think I’m okay with this.)
Galaxies come in a wide variety of entertaining motifs. Some are there principally to show off a new ability for Mario, or to run with a variation on gravity or shape. One world consists of giant replicas of desk supplies floating in the sky. Others enforce the toy box motif… the imagined worlds you’d build using those bright plastic toys that babies like the chew on. Through the course of the game Mario will swim and ice skate, glide with the assistance of giant birds, roll around atop a large marble, slide down ramps made of sand, explore ghost-filled haunted mansions, and in short do most of the things I’d rather be doing whenever I’m forced to grade papers. Oh, and the ever-popular Toad Squad is back as well. They show up scattered around various levels, offering Mario somewhat useful advice or at least a quick laugh. We have got to get Nintendo to market some Toad Squad figurines one of these days. Or at least lego versions. Hmm…. Lego Mario…
After the sometimes grueling experience of the New Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Galaxy 2 comes as a welcome relief. Not that there aren’t some pretty tricky challenges in the new game, but the lack of time limits, the freedom of movement in three dimensions rather than two, and the absence of other players knocking you into hazards is, well, like a refreshing vacation amongst the stars. It is rather amazing that after so many years of so many incarnations, the sights, sounds and symbols of the Mario franchise can still feel so fresh and so fun. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the kind of video game that generates that magical feel of participation and achievement that makes watching TV feel so damnably passive in comparison. Like those who attend a truly special event or really appreciate a great work of art, we who are lucky enough to have shared in the experience of Super Mario Galaxy 2 can come away a little changed for the better and more informed of what is possible in dreams.
