Notes on Super Mario Galaxy
I’m way behind on hip platforming games. Braid and LittleBigPlanet will make it to my thumbs soon enough, but these days, I’m still trying to get through the backlog of big hitters from 2007. Today: Super Mario Galaxy.
What really brought the game to my attention was this talk from the game’s director, Yoshiaki Koizumi. Specifically:
“The concept was to play with Mario running around on spherical objects … Why spherical worlds… What distinctive features attracted us to spherical worlds? Was it just because they were novel?”
[Koizumi] explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost.
With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.”
Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera – by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
This became the overall theme of development – “we should tune the game so people can play without ever having to think about the camera,” Koizumi said. “Frankly, it took a very long struggle, but we finally found the direction we needed.”
It’s long struck me that separate camera controls should count as an unnecessary complexity in third person games. On occasion, I’ve put a 3D game in the hands of a non-gamer friend and watched how they struggle to coordinate movement and controlling their view point. The consistent result was an inability to navigate the space, followed very quickly by frustration and then within a few minutes they would give up. However, since I’ve never seen a game remove camera controls without reviewers throwing up their arms in protest, it seemed that removing camera controls was a desirable theory that might never be satisfactorily borne out in practice.
It was fascinating to read of Nintendo’s solution - to alter radically the structure of the world around the needs of the camera. How successfully does Super Mario Galaxy realise these ideas?
To a large extent, it all works as intended, going by the eight or so hours I’ve spent with the game. Basic navigation is simple and intuitive. It’s certainly true that in many situations, I could keep going forward and come back to where I started, free from both walls and jarring camera movement. The sphere style means that different parts of the environments are broken up by voids, rather than walls, which opens up many more sight lines. Some parts of the environments are hidden by long flights through space, so that only the relevant parts are visible at any time. All together, this helps to make the spaces easier to understand.
I’m not really convinced that the sphere style has created a perfect camera, though. In many places, the camera angle made jumping onto Goombas harder than it should have been. Crisp, clear drop shadows are deployed to help here. However, watching objects’ shadows instead of the objects themselves creates a slight feeling of indirectness and disconnect - it’s a fix, rather than a solution. Several of Mario’s abilities make use of his orientation, yet sometimes the camera is too far out to get a reliable feel for which way Mario is facing. Colour coding and pickup trails are used frequently to help orient players and prevent them getting lost.
Overall, the camera is about as successful as I think you could reasonably expect - it rarely completely broke or felt unfair. What’s worth noting, though, is that much of the camera work seems tightly scripted, as if a designer has chosen a custom camera angle for each area. I’m not sure whether to credit the camera’s successes to the sphere style, or whether this handcrafting deserves more of the credit. Perhaps the spheres have created the extra space that the camera needs to do its best work.
Despite the diminished camera complexity, the game immediately feels just as challenging as any previous Mario. The overall complexity has remained the same: The improved camera enables a greatly increased spatial complexity. The surfaces Mario navigates are rarely just simple spheres. It takes real mental effort to get a sense of how the spaces fit together and how Mario fits into them, over more than the closest of distances. I could feel the game actively changing how I interpret and process 3D space. As I traced over the surfaces with Mario as my fingers, I got a very immediate, pure sense of constructing the geometry in my head. The incompleteness of my spatial knowledge led to some great find-the-objects puzzles, even over the smallest of spaces and with the objects hidden in plain sight.
The novelty of the spherical approach produces a wide and fertile landscape of new level concepts. The game does a great job of exploring these. There’s an incredibly rich variety of ideas throughout. Each level tries out something new. Some of my favourites are musings on gravity, where what counts as down changes again and again, over very small spaces and time spans. Much of the gameplay here pivots on understanding the complexity of the spaces, in order to navigate them successfully. This felt more satisfying than challenges built around timing and coordination skills and failures punished by death and repetition.
By far the most interesting part of Super Mario Galaxy for me is the ease with which it blends 2D and 3D space. At its simplest level, this manifests itself as throwbacks to the 2D Mario games - the camera pops to the side, and things progress like old times. What adds interest is the fluidity with which the game transitions between them. It feels so seamless and natural, yet I would be certain there’s a great deal of hidden subtlety and polish. Nintendo’s experience with Metroid Prime’s morphball, was surely valuable here, despite being a different team.
The best aspect of this 2D/3D hybridisation is the way in which the Wii remote’s pointer is used to interact with the world. It shoots star bits, grapples onto Pull Stars, blows bubbles, etc. While one hand on the nunchuk controller is playing in 3D world space, the other hand on the pointer is playing in 2D screen space. This is no great novelty for a first person shooter, but it’s inspiring to see it put to wider use here, and in a more accessible manner.
The Wii has been heavily stereotyped this year for its “waggle” control schemes. In some ways, that’s deserved. Motion detection here is relegated to just another button press, albeit one with a good, tactile mapping to its outputs. Yet, it’s a shame that this stereotype has taken hold, since I think it distracts attention from the brilliant opportunities of the pointer. Until Wii MotionPlus arrives, it feels like the true star of the Wii’s control innovations.
Some other bits and bobs I liked about Super Mario Galaxy:
- At a time when most consoles and console games are sliding towards a PC-esque obsession with knobs and dials, the simplicity and purity of the UI is refreshing. The important options are all there, and absolutely nothing else. No superfluous Options menu for changing a dozen pointless settings, for example. In particular, I liked the planet-Mii concept when starting a new game. Profiles can often feel excessively PC-ish and clunky, which is hardly ideal when they are the first thing a new player encounters. Here they felt intuitive and straightforward.
- The planet structure of the levels must have made them a joy to design. It must have been very easy to make changes and iterate on ideas, when working with such small, distinct chunks of content. If a particular planet in a series didn’t work, it could just be swapped out or skipped, with just a few tweaks to the star jump routes.
- The whole process of starting a level is full of beautiful details. The flying motif generates energy and excitement. Loading delays are artfully hidden. The short cutscenes establish the key aspects of the level, clearly and concisely. When Mario lands, he strikes a pose and whoops “Yes!”, while the screen declares “Welcome To The Galaxy”. It’s one of my favourite touches - the game immediately feels friendly and inviting. It’s as if you’ve already accomplished something before you’ve started, putting you in a good mood from the first instant.
