Danc at Lost Garden posts truly interesting stuff, so I'm glad to get to link to an essay about Super Mario Galaxy from him. He looks at games from the pure design perspective that reviewers like me, in a certain sense, just can't. We don't have the time and frequently just aren't encouraged to write about games that way.
He phrases this essay as a "break-up letter", since it's effectively about why Super Mario Galaxy works as a game despite completely alienating a good portion of the population that might want to play it. Still, I view his far-ranging criticisms as more of a game design analysis. By the end of the piece he's canceled out any negatives he might have said about the game with positives and the writing is very methodical. Oh, what the hell, just jump behind the cut if you want to see some highlights and my editorial responses.
So I plopped it in the Wii and sat through the drearily long intro movie. First impressions...the camera still sucks, but it is cool that you can tag the little star bits with the wiimote. Ooh, a spherical world. Wow, this camera really does suck! I'm suddenly navigating upside down and my head is cocked at a 90 degree angle. I barely know where my little dude is heading.
Now, actually, the way gravity works in Galaxy is consistent... but very subtle. Generally speaking, any surface you can stand on exerts gravitational pull. Unless you're under the influence of a black hole, you can expect to be pulled back toward surfaces you can stand on if you try to jump away from them. A black hole's gravity, of course, takes over if you get too far from the surface of an object with its own gravity.
There are some unpleasant exceptions to this rule, though. Mainly, any surface you can't stand on seems to negate all gravitational pull in the area; it makes you fall down immediately. So, effectively, it means there are spherical objects you can walk on all sides of, and other spherical objects you can't, and no way of knowing which is which until you've died a few times.
Super Mario Galaxy is all about mastering physical skills. If you map out the skill atoms, everything relies on movement and timing. This is reptile brain stuff that is learned in one very simple manner: repetition. Remember, Karate Kid? Wax on, wax off. The game design is a slave to this biological requirement. If you want to encourage the player to master navigate a narrow path above a black hole, you need to force them to perform variations on that action a thousand times. Each failure improves our muscle memory a fraction more.
I think Danc has pretty much zeroed in on all anyone who doesn't like Galaxy has to complain about. Yes, the game design is insanely repetitive. It's the nature of platformers, a genre that is otherwise all but commercially dead now (replaced by less repetitive ones). This is fine if the repetition doesn't bother you, but generally, any player who notices repetition tends to start thinking about putting the game down and doing something else. The less hardcore you are, the more likely you are to decide that doing something else would be more fun, since a casual gamer doesn't feel any special pride in "besting" a game.
The rest of the ecoystem hasn't quite caught up. That 98% score for Super Mario Galaxy on gamerankings.com is so horrendously polluted by a self-selection bias that it is laughable. What percentage of the reviewers fit any of the following criteria?
- Never played a 3D platformer.
- Mostly enjoy casual games like Bejeweled.
- Prefer social board games like Pictionary or Scrabble.
So, Danc has half a point here. Video game reviews do bias their coverage toward a certain type of player. There's a reason for this, though: people who read video game reviews are completely biased toward a certain type of player. This is the guy (95% of the time it's a guy, anyway) that the magazines are built around.
This would be fine, except it does leave non-hardcore gamers with, basically, nothing to read and no kind of review that's meaningful to them. I've long hoped for a more Consumer Reports-type alternative to game journalism as we know it, something that just evaluates games based around who is likely to enjoy them and basic production values. Some brave soul on the internet may yet launch a site like this; you can certainly find such evaluations if you pick through the right message board forums carefully enough.
Still, it sucks that you have to go there, you know? If I sit down and read a review of, say, Izuna, I don't really want to read about how the reviewer hates roguelikes and blah blah blah and gives it a 6.5 for daring to exist. I'd rather read a review written by someone who just talks about whether or not it's a good roguelike and if it's enjoyable to someone inclined to like that sort of thing. Instead every review is written as if every gamer can't bear to play games that aren't MMOs or FPS or RTS, and it's not really good for anyone, in a long-term sense, to do that.
In a way, all this makes me sad. There is an entire herd of twitchy game developers, trained for decades to worship fare like Mario Galaxy. They are out there, busting their beautiful balls to make more games that push the same exact psychological buttons as the pedestal lounging AAA titles of their childhood. They are building some great games, but those games aren't for me.
This highlights the part of the essay where Danc starts losing me. Scads of games imitating Mario Galaxy? Man, I wish. No, despite Mario Galaxy's tremendous success, there's just not enough of a platforming genre going now that there's even anyone to rip it off. We may get a brief flirtation with bringing back "six degrees of freedom" shooters out of this, or maybe some more spherical world flirtation in your crappy 3D kiddie platformers, but really I expect everyone to write off Mario Galaxy as "brilliant because Nintendo did it", with no intent of using any of its ideas except, perhaps, the physics.
Basically, there's plenty of room for criticizing modern AAA titles as being overly similar, and sometimes outright afraid to take any risks or to present players with genuinely new gameplay concepts. Mario Galaxy isn't really a symptom of this and I hardly expect it to contribute to the disease; it's a game that exists in a bubble universe where the platformer genre never went into decline.
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