OMG Nintendo

But didn't Miyamoto say that the concept for Super Mario Galaxy dates back to when they were developing Super Mario 64? Wouldn't that pre-date Mario Sunshine's critical reception? I really doubt that anything in Super Mario Galaxy was an intention "disconnect" from the supposedly disgraced Super Mario Sunshine. That's like saying Super Mario Bros. 3 is an intentional separation from Wrecking Crew.

As far as that article goes... From what I can tell, Don Reisinger sounds like he doesn't really like video games. He's the type of person one comes across from time to time: a wannabe counter-critic who backs up his hopelessly biased opinions by using extremely shoddy rhetoric (I counted 10 rhetorical questions, for instance) to try and take down far too large a target. A particular clue of bias is how he heaps praise upon Mario Sunshine's fluidity and then comparatively calls Mario Galaxy "gimmicky"... in the same sentence, even!

I would (and would encourage others to) dismiss this dude entirely. Not because his opinions themselves aren't valid, but because he's simply not good at making them into words and sentences. He gives the game a 7 (the "safe average score") in his 12 psuedo-paragraph diatribe of already unreasonable nay-saying, and yet uses exactly half a sentence to describe how the game even earned a score as high as 7. If he hates the game so much, give it a 2 or 3. It's really hard not to dismiss criticism when it's so... non-critical.

Anyways, I'm not going to argue with any particular subjective point he brings up, because it's really not worth validating his inability to present his points accurately. I will say he'll have to do far better than nit-pick about the storyline in a Mario game if he's going to convince me that he knows how to call a game bad.

Miyamoto and the team have done some interviews basically talking about some design elements of Sunshine as "missteps", particularly its relative complexity. So I think in a way Galaxy is born from a view of Sunshine as a slight misstep, and it hews a lot closer to the feel of the 8bit Marios as a result of trying to make a simpler game.

That's a shame, because I quite like Sunshine AND Galaxy. If anything, I'd say they're like comparing oranges to satsumas, respectively. Sure the newer, smaller, more colorful satsuma is easy as hell to peel, generally seedless, and oh-so-sweet, whereas the peel of the much larger orange only comes off in small chunks, and you might break a tooth on a seed if you're not careful, but no matter which one you have a particular taste for, both fruits are DELICIOUS.

Is graphics everything? Is our children learning, sir?

I can understand the desire to knock down a bit of the hype, but this review definitely feels more like he's trying KNOCK THOSE ELITIST NINTENDO BASTARDS DOWN A PEG moreso than actually trying to write an unbiased review. I guess it can't be helped.

His points about graphics make absolutely no sense to me. All he says is "it looks ugly" -- which means what, exactly? Pushing polys, I guess, since past that, the game is pure artistry. I'd much rather look at a low-tech game with someone consciously pushing boundaries than a god damned 360 shooter they just slapped a million shades of gray texturing on and called it a day.