Some Thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy 2

I recently beat Super Mario Galaxy 2. This may not seem like something big to most people, but I'm not most people. I have a very serious problem. I rarely finish games. This usually comes down to one of two things: either distraction or difficulty. Distraction happens to everyone when playing a game, whether it is something completely outside of gaming(like work or relationships), or something along the lines of a new game coming out. This is completely understandable to anyone who has ever picked up a controller. The second root of my problem is the matter of difficulty. Games almost by definition need to have some sort of difficulty or challenge to them, as without it they are little more than moving pictures.

With implementing difficulty into games comes a whole host of problems on what is the appropriate level for any given part of a game. If a game is too easy the player becomes disinterested and walks off, but if the game is too hard the player becomes frustrated and walks off. Developers have tried to remedy this with the inclusion of multiple difficulty levels, but those open up an entire new host of problems (akin to multiplying the problem with one difficulty setting by however many settings you include).

So when I sat down to play Super Mario Galaxy 2, I sat down to win. I made sure I had no other games tempting me, and I essentially fell off of the Earth for a few days to make sure I wasn't distracted. This left the only thing stopping me from completing this game: the game itself. Recent Nintendo games haven't been known for their mind-blowing difficulty, but some have been enough to frustrate me to the point of quitting. So as I first began playing Mario I became overtaken with a childlike joy that made me know for sure that this game was different.

I continued to play for the next few days and never once was I bored, or frustrated, or aggravated in any way; I was happy. I was constantly intrigued by Mario's world and its constant stream of challenges. These challenges were actually, well, challenging. Instead of setting me up against increasingly difficult waves of enemies I was confronted with constantly changing landscapes and mechanics I had never seen before.

This was perfect for me. I died a few times, but never enough to dissuade me. None of these deaths ever felt like something that was wrong with the game but something that I could track back to one of my mistakes. This didn't lure me into the overconfidence that comes with any game that is too easy, as with every challenge I wondered if I would die and if this was the challenge that would stop me from progressing. I never stopped.

I think that this is Super Mario Galaxy 2's greatest achievement: not the beautiful level design, nor the simple joys of it, but the perfect level of difficulty that brings it all together. This is why it is one of the greatest games we have.

Some Thoughts on Lost Planet 2

This past Saturday I got to go down to the Destructoid San Francisco headquarters to play Lost Planet 2 with some members of the community and the Destructoid editors. I ended up playing the game for somewhere near 7 hours straight and it was a generally mixed experience.

The game itself is a third person shooter set in the future on a planet that is somehow both snowy and tropical at the same time. Once I got over that geothermal marvel, I got to fight some gigantic bugs (I later learned that these bugs heated up the tropical areas) and this was genuinely enjoyable. The enemies required the entire squad of people to work together in order to take them down. These were the best moments of the game; everybody got into sync and it became a well executed dance with people grabbing mech suits to target the boss' legs, another to shoot its weak points for damage, and the remaining two to climb inside and really lay the hurting down.

This lovely experience was marred by essentially every other aspect of the game. The single worst aspect of the game was the blatantly broken checkpoint system. The game is broken up into chapters and larger episodes. Whenever you die you are forced back to the beginning of the chapter, which itself is divided into several smaller areas. This means that every time you die you play through approximately the same hour. This happens to be a problem when the other three members of your squad have had quite a bit to drink. This of course happened to me and I ended up playing the same level for around 4 hours straight. The levels themselves were incredibly linear, while staying under the pretense of being open, and most of the paths that you were on ended up being incredibly confined, which became frustrating as you would be swarmed by a mass of giant bugs and require your teammates to shoot them off of you. This wouldn't be much of a problem, but when you are hit by an enemy you are knocked back which stops you from doing a number of things including shooting. This means that if you are all surrounded with bugs your group is invariably screwed.

This game felt like a bit like hiking; the trip there is hell, but once you get there it's great. I played the multiplayer a bit as well and didn't like it much, but it was at 3 in the morning with a bunch of drunk people so I'm not sure that my experience with that was representative of the whole. I can understand the reviews the game is getting (generally not favorable) despite my hopes for this sequel to sort out the problems the first game had.

I now want to play backseat developer (despite not having any game development background to give me any credibility) and try to remedy some of the problems with the game. The checkpoint system needs to be changed so that it does not force the player to slog down the same hallway 50 times. The co-op life system was a bit janky as well, due to the fact that the the group shares a collective number of lives that increase whenever a respawn point is reached. This system would have worked well if there were not so many instant deaths in the game (fish that happen to eat through your metal armor are in essentially every body of water). There were also too few lives to share between the group. I would fix this by giving the group more lives, but making the respawn timer longer or making the enemies stronger in general. The level design was too compact in most of the places I played, so the act of making a small hallway that was essentially single-file could be widened just a bit to allow for another tactic besides running and gunning. Also while I was playing I had the problem of not being able to see the grunt level enemies against the background. This meant that the only way I could progress in the game is to shoot where I saw giant red Xs pop up over where the game told me there were enemies, this could be fixed by re-skinning the characters in something that isn't the same green color of the trees/grass/bugs/every other thing in the game.

So really at the end of my night with the game I had to put the controller down and walk away. The game had good intentions, but that couldn't carry it far enough. I wouldn't recommend buying the game at a full retail price, but paying somewhere near $20 would probably be worth it.

The picture up above is the Sir Omnomnom plushie I got at the event.