E3 – Super Mario Galaxy

For the first time Nintendo had a playable demo of Super Mario Galaxy for Wii. Superficially, the game looks like Super Mario Sunshine, but there are enhancements over the standard Mario system. You control Mario with the analog stick and jump by pressing a button on the Wii controller. Instead of running on a 2D platform Super Mario Galaxy has Mario run on tiny planets. At each planet is a star point that can be activated by waving the Wii wand, which makes Mario jump to the next planet. The demo had lots of tiny planets and alternate paths towards finding shine sprites. The path we took ended up with a boss battle against a giant spider. Mario couldn’t punch or kick the spider like in Super Mario 64. Instead he has to grab part of the web, by holding down the trigger button on the remote. Then players had to pull the web by moving the remote slightly back. The control here was sensitive and it took a little while to get used to moving the stick slightly. By drawing the web back Mario would torpedo towards the giant spider, knocking it upside down and revealing its weak points. Check out this video of gameplay in Super Mario Galaxy below.