waffle

So I finally did complete Super Mario Galaxy, allowing me to throw this game as well on the stack of Mario games in which you must collect 120 stars shines stars. (Yes, something happens, and I won’t spoil it, but it’s good, although not as good as it could have been for me personally.)

The interesting thing this time around is that I did manage it without looking into an FAQ or walkthrough of any sort online, which is something I haven’t done for quite some time (I remember looking up some minute detail on Ocarina of Time over dial-up). Don’t get me wrong, it kills my inner child when I do so, but I also want to get the fuck on with the game. I think the newly added system of saying “Hey, there’s a hidden star in this galaxy, and it appears when you choose this ordinary star, but that’s all we’re going to say, and also there are two comet stars here but we’re not saying which types” was partially responsible since it drastically improves book-keeping while conserving the fun parts.

The game is fantastic. If a “souped-up GameCube chip” is capable of producing this kind of graphics, then it is certainly fine enough for me. (HD would still be nice, but as someone who visibly twitched every time someone thought the Mario from Super Mario 64 was a detailed 3D model, I’m satisfied.) The levels are imaginative. The planets almost never fall into the Sunshine trap of shoehorning levels into scenarios forced by the physical setting. There are round planets, regularly ordinary “level area” chunks and there are “seriously, what the hell” planets, and the level designers knew how to use it. The system of a number of big and small galaxies works fine and allows for good ideas to co-exist with the grand arc, even if they wouldn’t have fit into new copies of Noki Bay or Gelato Beach.

There’s a number of parallels you can draw to Super Mario Bros. 3 - like SMB3 it is the third game of its kind, and it revivifies classic musical themes from SMB3, but most of all does it offer some real innovation. Levels contain completely deranged ideas that shine in their brilliance to never again return in another level, like using an Ice Flower and wall-kicking up waterfalls, which would be really annoying if the game wasn’t littered with these kinds of ideas.

The worst camera bugs are fixed. There’s no back-of-the-Ferris-wheel-in-Pinna-Park nightmare scenario, but there are two real problems. Since the camera control has gone from GameCube’s driving-C-stick to a new use for the D-pad, you can only move the camera in notches, and some jumps are made unnecessarily hard because you need to use the precise right angle to jump a few meters. Instead of being able to line up the camera just behind you, you’re stuck with slightly to the left and a lot to the right, and instead of having to worry about jumping just long enough, you have to control your fudge factor to jump just a little to the right or deliver the plumber a VIP pass to Lava Town, after which he promptly returns, running around madly on the small platform for a number of seconds during which he’ll inevitably repeat the cycle enough times to drop the life meter to zero. In some positions, you can use the C button to center the camera right behind Mario, and in some others not.

The other camera problem may not even be a camera problem but simply one of intuition - sometimes when you run around a round planet or end up in some strange gravity field, your brain has to constantly remap itself to be able to correctly steer in any direction. In some situations where this happens, the camera (optionally) swinging around to a more comfortable position could help excise this problem.

Like Zero Punctuation, I’m a bit worried where the series will go from here. I think that a comfortable fate for the Mario series would be to drop the story lines - Galaxy’s story line isn’t bad even with its few loose ends, but I have a feeling they can only vary the concept for so long - and just confine the game to a number of missions between four and fifteen minutes in length with portions gradually unlocked. Nintendo certainly got the feedback loud and clear that FLUDD and (even more so) the consistent setting was crippling Sunshine and only kept the game engine and the a cappella platformer bonus stages, so this wouldn’t be a terrifying leap.

Overall, Super Mario Galaxy is definitely a winner. It has a sense of longevity to it, and both concept and execution surpass most of Super Mario 64, even normalized to be relative of what the technology will allow. It is enough to make me forgive Shiggy for Sunshine and the relentless corpse-plowing for irrelevant cheap franchises, and to prove that the real spark of innovation is still with Nintendo, Mario Party and Nintendogs be damned.

This site desperately needs change. Someone should remake it. And if I didn’t just finish getting up to 115 stars in Super Mario Galaxy (Luigi’s Purple Coins in Toy Land Galaxy took hours; when I finally got the star I’d earned 500 star bits, and I wasn’t exactly hunting for them) or wasn’t on the home stretch of a certain application of which you’re already sick by now, that someone would definitely be me.

There’s a comments form. Inspire me.

Gawker posts an internal Scientology propaganda clip, heavily featuring Tom Cruise.

I am honestly frightened that Scientology has not been declassified as a religion in most places yet; not because I find most religions all that sane either, but because the Church of Scientology is one of the worst entities in the world. It’s not about people paying money to sit down and be taught ridiculous “facts” — people are free to do with their money as they like. It’s not about this developing, somehow, into an addiction. It’s the relentless benevolence about everyone involved, like in any cult, to nail down everyone who leaves or opposes, to pose every piece even remotely critical as flawed and to kick off a witch hunt for the author’s head. Scientology differentiates itself from less dangerous cults by its terrifying abuse of the local legal infrastructure and by its size.

I’m hoping that in my lifetime, we will see some political leader — or, hell, a rioting population of common sense people that’s had enough — completely kick Scientology’s ass, dismantle it, and make sure something like it can never form again. There are few more deserving entities of that kind of treatment.

The Human Interface Guidelines, Leopard edition, is now live. (Or back from the dead.)

Thoughtfully introduces bottom bars and scope bars, as well as tries to provide some rationale for every possible transmutation in the interface (like capsule vs round-rect toolbar buttons).