Experiments with gravity, edition 2

Super Mario Galaxy 2 was my latest little diversion. I had actually forgotten that it was "Super" until I went to get that link. Nintendo kind of gets stuck with that sort of thing since they've been making these things for over 20 years. Anyway, it was basically the same game as Mario Galaxy 1 (and that's not a bad thing) with a different way to navigate the overworld map.


Wow, if this posts strangely or twice it's because my dog just bumped my laptop which apparently caused me to click the Publish Post button...continuing on...

You notice that Yoshi appears on the front of the box with Mario, right? I was pretty excited about that. It seemed like a perfect thing to add to the second outing. But I ended up sort of hating most of the Yoshi levels. Fortunately he's only available in certain levels and won't stay with you even if you finish the level with him, much like NSMBWii. What irked me was that the mechanism for using his dino-tongue was pointing the Wii remote at the screen to pick where to hit. I wasn't too thrilled about this since it meant you had to hold the controller in such a way that you were always ready to point it at the TV. And maybe it's just my setup, but it seemed to take a half second or so before it recognized that's what you were trying to do. Which is sometimes too long when there are goombas trotting all around you.

This game almost completely dispenses with any kind of story. There wasn't much in the first, but this has completely given up. Bowser steals Princess, Mario must go on a quest to get her back. Yada yada yada, you know the drill. I actually sort of missed Rosalina. She's my go-to girl in Mario Kart Wii.

I mentioned the new overworld navigation. While it made things simpler to find and navigate, I kept getting to spots where I'd have to backtrack and collect more stars than I really wanted to before I could move on. You see, I'm basically a tourist in this game. I just want to see all the nifty worlds and gimmicks. When you force me to go back through places I've already been and look for new things, I get a bit stabby. The worst were when it seemed like the only unfound stars were the ? ones. Which meant you had to replay a certain track of a level until you found the hidden exit. Well, more than once I never found the hidden thing and ended the level with a worthless clear star. So I went through this game fairly quickly, but not as quickly as I would have liked.

In summary, lots of fun, worth playing, but I found a few minor annoyances. Wow, all my posts come to that same conclusion don't they? Good thing I don't get paid for this.