A new Mario game (we're talking real Mario games, not Mario Party 17) is always a big deal, so the announcement that we'd be getting a sequel to one of the Wii's biggest game was the talk of E3. When we found out that Nintendo would finally be showing Super Mario Galaxy 2 at an exclusive event this week in San Francisco, we were pleased as well-cared-for Pikmin. Here's what we thought.


Will Tuttle asks: I enjoyed the first SMG, but I wouldn't even say it was one of my favorite games of 2007. Is there anything about Super Mario Galaxy 2 that really stands out as an improvement over the original? I get the feeling that it's nothing more than some new stages and items...

Anthony Gallegos: My time with SMG2 made it seem like it really is what your gut told you: more of the same with a few new additions. Still, the original SMG was fantastic, so I don't mind some new levels that also manage to throw in new twists like Yoshis to ride or new items to use. I don't want to sound like I have some sort of Nintendo-love goggles on, but because SMG was not a very story-driven game, I feel like Nintendo can get away with largely reproducing the same game with new worlds and abilities and still have it be as fun as ever. They say if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and Nintendo's direction with SMG2 seems to indicate agreement with that sentiment.

Will asks: You had me at Yoshi! Did they discuss how that little green bastard's going to be worked into the game? I have to admit that I'm a big fan.

Brian Altano: From what we played, it seems he'll be appearing in quite a few levels, or more specifically, whenever his long, grabby tongue is needed to progress further. Yoshi popped out of an egg and started gobbling up enemies like he usually does, but things really got interesting when we began to interact with some of the new power-ups scattered about the mad variety of levels found in Galaxy 2. One power-up inflated Yoshi into a floating blue ball, forcing me to create a chain of power-ups, grabbing each one so I wouldn't run out of air while I scaled a spiky vertical maze to find a star. Another area featured a strange new hot pepper item that caused Yoshi to automatically run at absurd speeds while dodging enemies and navigating a series of wild turns and falling blocks. And even without performance-enhancing foods, Yoshi's tongue can be used to grab certain platforms and connect jumps to get to hard-to-reach areas of certain galaxies. Yes, it's good to have the green guy back.

Will asks: How about the controls? Were they identical to the first game's from what you guys could tell? Any Wii MotionPlus support?

Anthony Gallegos: The controls seemed largely the same and no, Wii Motion Plus is not supported. But, really, I didn't have a problem with the large carry-over of ideas from SMG to SMG2. The controls worked just fine in the original and they worked just fine during the demo we played. People expecting SMG2 to be as drastic a change from its predecessor as Mario games usually are between iterations are going to be sorely disappointed. This isn't the leap from Super Mario World to Super Mario 64, but it's damn fun all the same.

Ryan Scott: Yeah, I suspect this game might wind up suffering from Super Mario Sunshine syndrome -- that game got kind of a bad rap simply because it wasn't the watershed moment that Super Mario 64 was. It was still a fantastic game, but critics gave it flak for being too much more-of-the-same. People need to remember that Nintendo's "more of the same" is usually a heck of a lot more well-executed than pretty much any other developer's.


And they also need to demand MORE KOOPALINGS ALL THE TIME in every Mario game, forever. But maybe that's just me.

Will asks: Um, yeah, it's just you. Anyway, what about the levels you guys saw? Is there an ice planet? What about a lava planet?

Anthony: The levels we saw were as varied as those in the original SMG, with Mario travelling between planetoids that were sometimes round, sometimes cylindrical, and sometimes more like floating platforms in space rather than a world. Often a level would mix all these various microcosms together, where one second we might be on a small planetoid covered in enemies, and another moment we'd be working our way along a path that was more akin to the platforming in Mario 64. And while I can't say we saw any elementally themed levels -- lava does make an appearance in smaller worlds, of course -- we did see at least one level that showed off the return of Big World. To me it was just another way to change things up in SMG2, but to Ryan it was a... special experience.

Will asks: Oh yeah? How special are we talking here, Ryan?

Ryan: It was SO BIG. OK, now that just sounds wrong. But it was cool to see what basically amounts to a 3D version of Super Mario Bros. 3's Giant Land (my favorite world in any Mario game). Super Mario 64 had a world where you switched from big to small (and vice versa), but it looks like this is full-on GINORMOUS WORLD with giant coins to do giant wall-jumps from. It was sweet.

Will: Okay, I think we need to stop now, before Ryan says something we can never unhear.