Super Article Galaxy
This article was originally printed at gamasutra.com. Unfortunately, gamasutra could not include the game inside the article for technical reasons, so it appears here as it was originally intended. Gamasutra also edited several things I wasn't aware of, including the last sentence. For better or for worse, this is the article as I originally wrote it.
February 12th, 2008 at 3:49 am
the ’secret link’ is under Related Posts - ruined the fun of the last one for me =(
February 12th, 2008 at 3:51 am
[…] jangelo@racoma.net (J. Angelo Racoma) wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI played probably the last third of the game on low volume while I watched reruns of Fraiser and The Golden Girls on a second tv. (A less honest writer would not have admitted that!) … […]
February 12th, 2008 at 4:40 am
haha! Thanks for the message anyway…
Btw there is a missing letter. I hope you can find it.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:06 am
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]
February 12th, 2008 at 5:06 am
I was honestly surprised at what you get for getting 120 stars and beating the game again. It didn’t really make the game more interesting (like that Castlevania example you mentioned), but it was the same type of surprise for me.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:23 am
Also, I seem to be alone in that I actually liked the purple coin levels… at least, the ones that weren’t timed or otherwise difficult (I liked some of the difficult ones too, though). It was a type of easy fun where you just have to explore the whole level without doing anything overly difficult. I found it relaxing, especially since the coins weren’t hard to find, only a little tricky to get to.
Also, this is probably Sirlin’s most fun article.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Oddly, I figured out the last code quickly, but I never found the numbers anywhere. Could somebody explain them?
Anyway, Sirlin, you write like I did as a highschool freshmen when I was too lazy to organize outlines and references. Not to say there isn’t some structure. Infact, the structure is glaringly obvious at the beginning, with thesis statement and three topic paragraphs and all. Then it all falls apart at the end when you want the article to be a game review. Worst yet, like I did when I was a freshman, you pass off your ADD as a form of creative expression, pretending you had a plan to make your article like the game itself instead of just writing it all out start through finish in one sitting, perhaps spending more time editing your html than revising the article itself.
Now, I’m not saying you don’t make legitimate points, and I’m not saying that your writing is lousy itself. Well, alright, I think it is, personally, but my point is that’s not my point. You started this whose essay declaring it was analyzing Super Mario Galaxy in terms of Nicole Lazzaro’s four kinds of fun. That’s all well and good, but you really wanted it to be a review, and then you went nit-picking about things that completely didn’t matter and with no organization. It’s just plain bad writing.
To quickly wrap up, I’m sure you can make some good points, you just need to learn to write.
February 12th, 2008 at 5:35 am
@Deckard: I found it, but if I counted correctly, adding it back in would bring the total to 101 letters… I wonder how long Sirlin spent trying to find a message of exactly the right length before deciding to sacrifice his spelling and be done with it.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:28 am
@Jude: Maybe you didn’t understand the numbers because you were too busy looking for something to criticize (and then failing to make a compelling point). I don’t see anyone asking you to publish your bad writing, so why do you think anyone cares about your silly opinion of Sirlin’s writing? I’m sure you can convey an important idea if you try, you just need to find something worthwhile to say.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am
You have a typo in your alternate text of the star mission fields. When you hover over the text box, a message reads:
“Find this star and enter it’s number here.”
The sixth word should be “its”.
(Clandestine grammarians demand that upon correction, you delete this comment!)
February 12th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Galaxy impressed me with its new fundamental approach to 3D platforming. But the bad level design in a lot of places annoyed me. Best example I can think of is the Matter Splat Galaxy, where more and more of the level is revealed while the level behind you vanishes. Thus, you have to keep moving ahead, as the path you choose to take may suddenly end, and you’ll need to quickly jump over to another path. I enjoyed it. But halfway through the level, I chose a path which ended earlier, and noticed that I couldn’t jump over to the other path - I had to jump off the edge and start over. The game didn’t give me any advance knowledge as to which path was correct - I made a random guess, and the game punished me for making the wrong random guess.
Maybe I’m just bad at 3D platforming games, but there were a ton of other levels where the same thing happened: the game punished me for not having knowledge of what lied ahead. I would become engrossed in the game, and suddenly: “Oh, you didn’t know rocks were falling off the mountain? Oh well, start the entire mountain climb over again.” The game gives you plenty of lives, but it’s not fun to repeat a part of a level over again.
Most of the purple coin missions were boring and tedious. A few of the coins were hidden well, and it was exciting to find them. But about 90 in each level were in plain view, and required running around the entire level, checking every single inch. I had already explored the level from previous stars, so there was nothing new to see.
But despite my complaints, Galaxy is still an amazing game, for the reasons Sirlin highlighted.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:48 am
@Spanky: Being published (particularly in gaming literature) is hardly the apex of good writing. I’ve dabbled in the stuff from time to time, and I’ll admit it’s not my forte, but that’s entirely not the point. While all clear sense dictates I should ignore you and go on as I was giving Sirlin general impromptu (and admittedly poor, albeit general enough I hope it can be excused) criticism, this is a perfect opportunity to don my cockney accent and have at you. All in the name of good fun, of course, since clearly you’re not in the mood for relevant discourse, at least so far as you’ve indicated. Honestly, the way you fap off you sound like Sirlin’s self-proclaimed toady, you know, that little prick who hangs around the cool junior-high kid because he thinks that if he sticks around and deters enough second-graders than maybe he’ll be cool too. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t, and while people will generally follow your lead in siding with the cool kid who got held back a year and shaves, nobody will still give two shits about you, much less Sirlin himself, especially when you’re still bragging about his puberty and the rest of us are growing bigger, hairier balls, leaving you to squirm in self-denial about your irrelevance (and smooth ‘nads).
Alright, that’s over. I love a good Ad Hominem rebuttal.
Back to Sirlin, indeed I respect your position and accomplishments, but I honestly just don’t think you write well. Read William Strunk and E.B.White’s <a href=”http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/style.html”>The Elements of Style</href>, George Orwell’s <a href=”http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html”>Politics and the English Language</href>, and such stuffs. I trust you’re a big enough lad to look back and revise your habits if you agree there is room for improvement.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Alright, it looks like I dunno how to put links in posts. No matter. I see you’ve read them anyway, so I’d just like you to set aside a day or three to reread them. Or not, the choice is yours.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Sirlin wrote:
“(Incidentally, World of Warcraft Trading Card Game also managed to create a more polished, fully-realized version of exactly the same thing I was working on, so that’s twice now!)”
If I recall correctly, you were working on two card games: Yomi, and the one for Kongregate. Which one are you referring to?
~Z
February 12th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Jude: …
Avatar Z:
Card game 1: Yomi Fighting Card Game (progress being made!)
Card game 2: game you don’t know about yet, you will eventually
Card game 3: Game that is somewhat similar to WoW TCG, mentioned in the article above, not sure what to do with this anymore, needs reworking or to be dropped entirely.
Card game 4: Kongregate.com’s game (closed beta this week!)
I have no special interest in card games, but making them with little help from others is feasible so I did. Games 1, 2, and 3 are: very simple, medium, and complexity of mtg, respectively. Would be nice to make some other types of games too though. ;)
February 12th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
@Jude: Why do you assume I have balls (hairy or otherwise)? Being a woman made it easier for me to see through your inadequate penis issues. I’m sure Sirlin doesn’t care what you think about his writing, and neither do I. I don’t need anyone to think I’m cool, which is why I don’t mouth off about good writing to people who didn’t ask for my advice. But I did read the 3-article series about writing that’s linked in the “Best of Sirlin.net” section on this very page, under the heading “Thinking and Writing.” I also know that I don’t give a crap about how you write, because you, dear sir, came lightly to the blank page while Sirlin never does. (Since you didn’t read anything else on this site, I’m sure that reference is beyond your reach.) I only posted to see if you were stupid enough to respond, because I couldn’t be sure you were an idiot unless you revealed the fragility of your ego in a followup post. Go back to stroking your epeen now, but you might want to stop embarrassing yourself in public.
You’re right, ad hominem attacks are indeed quite invigorating.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I don’t see why he told me to read three books listed in my own “recommended books” section, linked at the bottom of every page on this site. I also don’t get where all these wrong assumptions come from, like me spending too much time on html? (What if I did? In fact, I spent zero time and had someone else do it.) Didn’t write first draft in one sitting? (Who cares if I did? In fact, I did though.) Didn’t have a plan before I started writing? That’s the craziest one, because the real point of the article was to make it start out to be about one thing, and then end up going a different way you maybe didn’t expect, just like I wanted the game in question to do. And then it ends by giving you a boring and tedious task for little reward, just like the game was. And he assumes this was accidental, due to me losing track of what I wanted to say? lol.
Maybe you don’t like what I wrote, ok, but this list of wrong assumptions isn’t helping much. The point was to reflect the actual game and my wish for the game in the structure of the article.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Amusingly, Jude Jackson probably can’t help what s/he’s doing. I suspect Jude has some sort of ingrained craving for order (or something like that) that is rooted in one of his/her talents, such that a lack of order is instantly noticed and a strong craving to fix it arises in Jude.
The problem is how Jude’s expressing this “talent” of his (bugger this “s/he” stuff — Jude, for simplicity, you’re a guy for the remained of this comment). I’ve seen this pattern again and again (in others and myself). The formula:
Subjective, specific talent/preference + objective world = desire to change world
The problem occurs when you apply that equation without knowledge that the world and everything/everyone in it doesn’t want to be like you or satisfy your talents/preferences, all the while passing criticism on the premise that what you’re observing is “flawed” because it doesn’t satisfy your talents/preferences (it isn’t, it just seems to be from your perspective).
Admittedly, I did this for a long time until I figured out that it didn’t work so well in the real world, but the answer is not to stop doing it — you generally can’t change your ingrained talents, only your knowledge and skills — but to more effectively target or “channel” the feedback your unique perspective of the world generates.
What this has to do with Sirlin’s article, I don’t know. Jumping on the “make a comment about Jude” bandwagon looked fun, though. ;)
- Bruce
PS. Sirlin, your star challenge is too hard. Clearly you are bad at game design and should spend less time editing HTML for your articles. ;)
February 12th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Bruce, you’re almost a little too enlightened for us mere mortals to comprehend.
Mario Galaxy itself is kind of too hard (damn that Luigi’s coins level), unless you’re a poster on gamefaqs.com, then it’s too easy. I think you’ll find my star challenge is too hard also, unless you’re a poster on gamefaqs.com, in which case it’s too easy. It works out nicely that way doesn’t it? If only I could have created some dynamic difficulty that adjusts itself to the reader’s skill level of finding stuff in text.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Why if the game is so good i found it to be completly boring and stupid?
February 12th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Aditionaly the two player mode in mario galaxy was nothing new, Sonic 2 had all the same advantages that the mario galaxy system. If sonic 2 2 player mode didn’t establish a norm why would mario galaxy?
February 12th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Why doesn’t everyone in the world like the color black even though it is a universally perfect color, why do some people hate Desperate Housewives despite it being a acclaimed show the nation over, simple no matter how great something may be(hence Mario Galaxy) somebody out there will always hate it, in this case you just happen to be that minority. As to why sonic 2’s system did not set a norm is simple it was flawed and vastly overshadowed by it’s single player system. The second player had no purpose and was easily left behind or separated from the first leading to moments to moments of futility for simple players and boredom for hardcore or even average players. SMG’s co op mode while obviously to simple for the average players gives as someone else said girlfriends and little siblings a chance to participate without getting in the way or being left behind and being able to leave or stop at will without quiting and restarting hence SMG co-op is superior to sonic 2 player. Sorry to say so much, I just got annoyed by such a meaningless post.
February 13th, 2008 at 4:39 am
I had to guess on the last number, in fact I got frustrated. Where was it hidden? I did a text search of both the html and the page, was it a joke? =P
February 13th, 2008 at 5:04 am
No, the third number is there, quite clearly, if you look in the right spot. I’m not gonna give it away, though, seeing how few days the article has been up. There’s some dark humor in it’s positioning, again relating to how Sirlin felt about the structure of the game, if that counts as a hint.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:00 am
I give up. I can’t find the third number anywhere. I’ve even gone through the source code for the page and found nothing. I figured the green text for “star” in a few places might have been relevant, but it would appear not.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:31 am
you’re missing a letter in your puRple letter challenge.
i also have no idea why the last number is what it is. i just hit some numbers and bam, star
(yes, i will admit i just guessed.)
February 13th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I was pleasantly surprised that the 100 purple coin collection wasn’t anything like the pain of the 100 coin stars from Super Mario 64. Some of the purple coin challenges actually took a slightly different approach to existing levels (e.g., the Battlerock galaxy, the ghost house galaxy, the various purple coin “races”), rather than just forcing you to run around the entirety of the levels you’d already fully explored, carefully collecting every coin and killing every enemy and losing quite a bit of effort if you happen to die (which was very difficult to avoid in some SM64 levels).
I was expecting the purple coin stars to be just like SM64’s 100 coin stars (which, as implied, were my least favorite stars of that game by far), so I guess I ended up with more than I bargained for.
However, I do agree that far the more casual gamer, the purple coin challenges are probably too light on fun and too heavy on frustration.
P.S. I was also surprised(!) that your article didn’t mention the second player’s ability to screw over the first player by forcing him to jump and/or spin at inopportune moments. The statement that “there is no way to actually fail at anything as a co-pilot” isn’t completely true, in my opinion. Overall, this is a minor detail, and I agree with the overall point you were making.
In fact, shortly after trying out the two-player mode of SMG, I proclaimed it the best/most innovative use of the second player in a platformer since Sonic 2. I don’t think either one is necessarily better or worse, as that depends on what kind of gamer your second player is and what he/she wants to do in the game.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I didn’t mention it mostly because while it can be used to stop the the 1st player judging from the manual description and my experience it wasn’t really intended to hinder the player at all but actually help them. Whether it works the way it was intended is a little questionable but still I think that is what they were aiming at. As to the comparison yeah maybe SMG’s co-pilot and Sonic 2’s 2 player are on par, maybe they are not I’m just going on personal experience and observation.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I found the purple coin challenges where you have to hunt down all 100 to be very annoying, especially when I died on 99 once.
However the timed ones were a lot of fun. Mostly because when you screw up you screw up in 2 minutes instead of 20.
Seems like a good design principle - fail fast.
Have not beaten Super Luigi Galaxy yet.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Regarding the article itself, it might have been intended to be like the game, but it most certainly doesn’t feel like it. Whatever else Super Mario Galaxy did, every single step of the way, each surprise - and surprised I was, make no mistake about it - was very carefully planned and equally carefully executed. It was like “whoa…………. Yeah, this is how it should be.” The article’s attempt to recreate the same feeling was simply messy. Nothing felt messy about the game. A couple of things were tedious, yes, but not messy.
Leaving that aside, it was of course not a perfect game, only pretty damn good. My own gripes are somehow different, though.
First, the swimming was still very awkward and boring. Secondly, while the camera worked well on its own most of the time, it did not work -all- the time. And what’s worse, quite often those times it didn’t work were also those times I would have appreciated being able to change the angle manually. Even if it wasn’t as necessary as in the past, it would still have been nice to at least have the -option- at almost all times (saving those moments when it went into 2D-platforming style)
The purple coins were a bit hit-and-miss. The ones that provided a challenge were really good, if sometimes a bit frustrating because they were pretty damn hard. But then again, once I managed to get that 100th coin in the Dreadnought Galaxy, it was so intensely joyful, making me shout out the primal scream of victory. Anytime a game makes me scream like that, then I call it “mission achieved”. But at least even on the boring ones (like the first beehive galaxy, zzzzzzz), at least every coin was placed carefully, and in plain sight. They were secrets meant to be found. Nothing like the “blue coin” fiasco of Super Mario Sunshine.
And speaking of purple coins, that leads me to the points about the rewards, because this is one aspect that gets really interesting with regards to single-player games.
I mean, Sirlin himself comments that the reward for getting all 120 stars in this game seems rather small. But on the other hand, I know he also knows quite a lot about the “dual goal” that most games seem to have incorporated. And getting all 120 stars in SMG would indeed be the hardest goal to achieve here. Luigi’s Coins, the 1-life challenge of the Melty Molten Galaxy, the Dreadnought Coins (I found this one much harder than Luigi’s coins), all of these can be ignored for the main goal (to beat Bowser, in which getting to him is much harder than actually beating him), but if you want a complete game, better get your gaming muscles flexing.
So, not everyone who’ll beat the main game will get the 120 stars. I would indeed think that less than a fourth of the people beating this game will complete it. So just how much more of a reward can we get, those of us who managed to do just that? It can’t be too big a reward, because then it’ll be like withholding important content away from a big part of the audience for no good reason than being a sadistic jerk about it. Of course, I know as much as anyone that it’s nice to get something really good. I’m just saying that I think that if one cannot balance this reward for a Complete Game properly, it’s better to give too little rather than too much. Main rewards for the main game, bonus rewards for bonus challenges.
And in this case, I actually liked what I got. Of course, I’m the kind of gamer that, if I really like a game, then the first thing I do is to play through it again. I don’t see why not, after all, I liked it, so why should I stop at playing through one tim?. And SMG then gave me an excuse to do just that, with the added challenge of a slightly differently controlled Luigi. And not only was he slightly differently, so where the “Cosmic Luigi” challenges, with the Cosmic Luigi being far faster to the goal than Mario. Still, I admit that this struck home with me because of the kind of gamer I am. And frankly, some aspects of my gaming style isn’t all that… well,
Anyway, when I beat that too and got the final reward, well, I was satisfied that I got this evidence to send my Wii-owning friends that I’ve fully beaten the game. Because if not many people will complete it in Mario mode, even less people will complete it in Luigi mode (those Cosmic Luigi races are tough). Any reward bigger than what I got for beating Luigi mode would be - while definitely satisfying for me, of course, I -did- beat the challenge - a travesty against all those that were perfectly happy with simply beating the game.
A final note is , I’m slightly confused that Sirlin had something against how the stars were spread. Yes, so almost every galaxy had 5 stars (6 with the purple one). I mean, remember the previous Mario game, Sirlin? The one with the blue coins? This time, the challenges of the stars weren’t so much about trying to figure where the hell I look for them (although in a couple of galaxies, I did spend a few minutes searching for where to find the hidden ones) as to actually getting them. It was localised puzzle to the hilt, and having a set number of challenges on each stage made it so much easier for me to keep track of. Maybe it could have been done even better (after all, nothing’s perfect), but it was done well enough that I find no complaint about it.
And perhaps if the SMG team were caught too much up in the “make it surprising” rush they already were having, they would eventually incorporate a bad surprise? And if that bad surprise had been the main structure of the star collection, what then? Yeah, I know, I know, this is probably gonna be dismissed as being afraid to do the unknown. I’m just saying that at least it worked, and if you have something that works, then you need to be pretty damn sure that whatever you replace it with works even better. Would a differently set number of stars in each galaxy -really- work even better, just like that?
February 13th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
For all the lazy people out there the secret url is “http://www.sirlin.net/” fallowed directly by the 3 numbers for the first, second and third stars in that order. I’m still not sure how you’re ACTUALLY supposed to find the last one though.
February 14th, 2008 at 1:58 am
Hawk one wrote:
“So, not everyone who’ll beat the main game will get the 120 stars. I would indeed think that less than a fourth of the people beating this game will complete it. So just how much more of a reward can we get, those of us who managed to do just that? It can’t be too big a reward, because then it’ll be like withholding important content away from a big part of the audience for no good reason than being a sadistic jerk about it. Of course, I know as much as anyone that it’s nice to get something really good. I’m just saying that I think that if one cannot balance this reward for a Complete Game properly, it’s better to give too little rather than too much. Main rewards for the main game, bonus rewards for bonus challenges.”
Even as someone who got all 242 stars, I agree with this statement. I believe that giving too much of a reward for full clearing the main game twice (once on Mario and once on Luigi) — a task that I guarantee a majority of SMG’s owners will (understandably) never do — would be a mistake.
It would be sort of like locking away the most important story lines and lore characters in raid dungeons that only a minority of the player base in question will ever experience…
February 14th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Sirlin, I hate you. I hate you and your stars and your purple letters.
I agree about the wall jumping. It was a pain because you actually needed to be able to do it on a few sections, which could be frustrating when ones not extremely dexterous. The only game I think did hard walljumping well was Super Metroid, as it was more of a ‘bonus’ you didn’t ever need, but could blow the game wide open. Even then though, theres still a lot to be said about accessibility.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I found them all you tooltipping bastard! Not before I checked the file name and tried the file size of all the images on the page though…
February 16th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Wow. took me a while to find the last number. I have no idea if what I did was SUPPOSED to be how I found it. Wow. I was just about to say something but just realized something about those purple letters…
February 16th, 2008 at 6:38 am
Hm I can’t seem to find a missing R in your purple stars. Oh well. I give up. my eyes hurt lol.
February 16th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I think Sirlin’s writing is clear and has a nice style. Admittedly, this article didn’t flow too well for me, but I think that’s because I spent half of my ‘thought cycles’ on finding the stars (still missing the last one!)
I disagree about the purple coins being tedious and predictable. It was rare that a purple comet *didn’t* change the way that I looked at a level: the coins turn Loop Ocean from a linear, underwater racetrack into a treetop scavenger hunt, while the immensely wide-scoped and constantly-changing Toy Time environment becomes a narrowly focus platforming challenge where thoughtless platform-flipping burns bridges to the last few coins. Ghostly changes from a slow-paced haunted mansion into a frantic, elastic time attack, while Hell Promenade develops from a series of discrete challenges to an energy-pacing marathon that forces players to think about the level as a whole.
On the contrary, I see SotN’s inverted castle as tedious and boring. Because it is just the same level design reversed, some areas become awkward (upside-down staircases) and the majority are just rectangular rooms that play the same either way up. The asymmetrical placement of doors would make progression impossible if the player-character didn’t have (actually multiple) ways of fly by the time he reaches the second castle, but these same abilities destroy the relevance of space, along with the careful, Metroid-like progression that accompanied their gradual acquisition in the first. And Alucard is so powerful by that point that rather than blocking off areas, enemies are mindless mashing fodder on the way to revisiting every room for 100% completion…again. On paper the second castle is a fun surprise, but as live gameplay, it is redundant.
Contrast this with Mario’s transformation into his brother’s form, Galaxy’s real answer to SotN’s inverted castle (both seem to exist outside of the game, not appearing until completion, yet both are perfectly justified by their respective narratives). Slippery Luigi makes the game harder, not easier to play, and his effect on the control system and mechanics is so fundamental that it is felt throughout. But the longer reach of his jump, far from breaking the game, adds another layer of risk and reward by allowing the most skilled and imaginative players to take shortcuts through areas that would be tedious to repeat in full (in Shadow Comet races, this kind of play is explicitly required). And that ability makes some of the most basic ‘easy’ fun, like looping around smaller planetoids, even more easy and fun.
February 17th, 2008 at 2:17 am
asym, you are really mis-characterizing the upside-down castle. In BOTH the regular and upside-down castles, you start without the ability to get around and must find the bat form, wolf form, and the other things that allow you to explore more. You do not just start with all that in the second castle. The second castle has the exact same “careful, Metroid-like progression” as the first.
Also, you do not start all powered up as you imply, either. The enemies are *significantly* tougher in the second castle. They are not fodder for your powerful weapons because (relative to your strength in the second castle) they are harder to beat than the enemies in the first castle (relative to your strength back then).
There’s new exploration, you have to do everything in a different order, find all the exploration powerups cleverly put in different places, and much tougher enemies. It is entirely a new game. Far moreso than just swapping in Luigi. Yeah his jump does all those things you said, but the final measure, it is no where even near the level of newness of a second castle (which is basically an entirely new game).
I’m fine with anyone who says “but Mario Galaxy has so much in it already, it doesn’t need something like an entirely new game,” but don’t pretend that the Castlevania upside-down castle was somehow less than swapping in Luigi. And if someone did say that quote, I’d say to take out the last half of Mario Galaxy and replace it with something more surprising. ;) Or at least something that drew me in enough that I didn’t play it while watching reruns of Frasier and the Golden Girls.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I don’t know what to say except to point to this playthough video - www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCAQhzbIaao - which clearly demonstrates Alucard using the Bat Soul, double-jump and high-jump within seconds of defeating Richter and entering the inverted castle. The item progression lists on GameFAQs also show that the inverted castle is limited to offering health boosts and similar items rather than exploratory upgrades; indeed, the second half of the game is structured around finding five basic keys that only give flat stat bonuses and can be recovered in any order. This non-linearity, along with the huge number of over-powered weapons and items that the game throws at the player, and the fact that many enemies and bosses (including the ultra-secret two screen tall demon) can easily be defeated by trapping them in lockstun, prevents there from being any rising difficulty curve in the inverted castle - let alone a challenge level relative to the beginning of the first, before the game’s chaotic power-up distribution spirals out of control.
To make flipping the castle upside-down worth as much as having a second castle (or game!), 1. gravity would have to be a meaningful limitation (so that the difference in the shape of the floor and ceiling has a significant effect on gameplay) and 2. there would need to be a well-paced progression of exploratory upgrades. But because Alucard starts off with everything from the previous loop, there isn’t any interesting gameplay development. Only if the game did everything that you remember it did would the inverted castle add the same level of value to SotN that Luigi adds to Galaxy, by making the game more challenging while removing player limitations in a way that doesn’t break its structure. Purple coins again don’t serve a comparable purpose, in that they only change the way individual areas play in a variety of way rather than the whole game in a single way, but still add more value than you give them credit for (see my previous post).
I do think it’s slightly unfair to knock a game for something that it doesn’t even attempt to do, but it’s much less fair to fail to credit it when it does *exactly* that thing, and executes it much better than (at least the real world implementation of) the ideal example that you are holding it up to.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Having just played SotN for the first time, I gotta agree with asym here - while the enemies in the second castle are significantly tougher, at first, by that point in the game you start getting a variety of context-specific weapons (particularly swords that deal a certain type of damage), so that they only pose a challenge once you first enter - in fact, probably too steep a challenge, considering the enemies directly before and once you start getting some way into the castle. There’s basically no areas that are ‘blocked off’ like in the first castle - you can go to any area of the castle so long as you don’t get hit, and only real obstacles are the reprise of the Clock Tower, always one of the more difficult parts of a Castlevania, and the Reverse Chapel, which has some unique enemies that usually manage to get the first hit. Note that these are the first two areas a player can visit - once a player passes these two areas, it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there. There are some structural differences, some rooms that have spiked ceilings in the normal castle are significantly tougher in the reverse castle, but most of the architectural challenges are nullified by the fact that you can <i>fly</i>.
Not to cast aspersions on how well it works in context - it’s a big surprise, and the new bosses add a lot to it, even though the bosses are in the same place as the first castle - but that it’s not a trick that works as well today, and I’d be surprised if as many people play all the way through Mario Galaxy with Luigi as people played through the reverse castle.
February 17th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
About ‘Bonus content’: I do understand the point of not locking content away from anyone, that’s the basic Nintendo-position which Sirlin already wrote about (SM64 allowing you to go on without getting all the stars in one stage). There is still also the position of the designer that not only wants the player to ‘consume’ his product and go on with the next game. He wants to give the player something for exploring the depths of the game like a new world to release all the abilities developed to the ‘normal’ end of the game (SotN) or to test his skills and gain special bonus equipment/abilites (that might also be used in multiplayer) and maybe even a piece of exclusive storyline (MegaManBattleNetwork, Bomberman64). Nearly every player that misses the bonus content has already missed a lot of the real game so he probably dooesn’t care if there’s more beyond the game’s ending (especially if it’s focussed on concepts he didn’t even understand).
I would like to also comment Sirlin’s short paragraph about inertial frames. In fact it’s not difficult to add this effect to any game (chances are it is there by itself at the very moment you’re able to stand on anything that moves), it’s difficult to tell when not to remove it. You want it, when you’re fighting on a train, even if it’s not realistical due to the fact the air above isn’t moving with you (still it’s in nearly every NES-Game featuring trains). You also want it on any platform you need to land on again after jumping. But you don’t want it if it makes you miss some platform moving at a different speed than the one you’re currently on. Especially in 2D-Games it is often removed because it can make hard to estimate the distance your jump covers.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:40 am
I gotta go with Sirlin on the comments about SotN. Playing through the inverted castle is basically a new game. Yeah, you’re right, you aren’t as literally restricted about where you can go as soon as you enter it, though for your average player, enemy difficulty really sets up a specific route you should take to allow you to level up. Regardless, as you guys mentioned, it’s basically all new enemies, and bosses. And even when they reused enemies, the architecture does significantly alter the challenge. I still shudder about those skeletons that throw the invincible gold X-shaped rebounding bones that fill that stairwell at the lower left.
Replaying SMG with Luigi just doesn’t even come close. In fact, many Castlevania games did exactly that too… SotN’s Richter, Castlevanie:CotM’s 5 unlockable classes. At least CotM significantly alters your strategy… one class has insane magic regen, and can barely do any melee damage, so you have to learn how the game’s magic works much better than normal. One has ridiculous luck (item drops), and poor stats, so you end up using all those stupid attack items that SotN was full of to progress. Compare that to replaying a game with a character who can jump slightly farther… there’s just no comparison.
February 18th, 2008 at 3:58 am
I’m not sure if got some facts wrong or something, will look into that sometime. Anyway another difference is that it took about 10 hours to reach the inverted castle, so I was still really wanting to play. Rather than extra content at the end of a super-long game no one will see the end of, it was more like main content.
By the time I got Luigi in Mario Galaxy, I was ready to stop playing a long time ago. More like a job where I punch in, get some purple coins, punch out. Luigi really is “extra content” tacked on to the end of a long game that not many people are going to get to.
The ideal thing would have been a dramatic change in course about halfway through Mario Galaxy, rather than a tiny change at the end of a very long experience. I don’t mean to rail on it too much though, I mean it’s better than 9.0 quality overall, it’s just disappointing they didn’t *really* do something super amazing. Like I said, it’s jerky for me to even bring that up.
February 18th, 2008 at 5:08 am
I read that stuff about SotN quite some time ago but I didn’t really understand the impact of such a game-turning event… until I remembered a game I played as a kid - Final Fantasy VI. I’m going to go ahead and spoil this really old game right now.
FFVI has the exact thing that Sirlin was hoping for in SMG. FFVI is a pretty standard JRPG, so much so that at one point you’re chasing the villain through an epic area that seems pretty final-area-ish to prevent him from destroying the world. Right before you meet up with this villain, you fight the largest boss yet and it has much more sinister music than the other bosses. So this seems like it’s near the end of the game.
Then in a twist that I’ve never seen before… the villain succeeds. He blows up the entire world. The world is completely scorched and the map’s layout changes in many significant and subtle ways. Some old areas completely vanish, and some new areas take form, but all the old towns are intact. Then you wake up as one of the main characters, and after almost committing suicide, you travel this new world searching for all your party members. You eventually get 2 to 3 of your 11 other party members back, then find an airship that you can use to go anywhere you want to.
What makes this part so cool is how the game changes in its core philosophy. The first half of the game is almost purely linear in nature with a progressing story, but after a bit of linearity in the new world (up until you get your airship, basically), you are free to explore this new world however you see fit, find all your party members and uber-equipment/abilities, level up your party for however long you feel is necessary, and attack the *real* final area/last boss whenever you bloody well feel like it. The first half of the game was really well done and entertaining, but the second half is what makes FFVI what it is.
So I know exactly what Sirlin means. It’s not that something of this nature is *missing* from SMG, per se… but wouldn’t the game have been absolutely mind-blowing if it included something like this?
February 18th, 2008 at 5:12 am
I don’t know… re-reading the article just to find the purple letters just isn’t the same as reading it upside down…
February 18th, 2008 at 9:22 am
PoisonDagger: What’s really interesting in FFVI is you’re allowed to immediately enter the final dungeon after getting the first 3 characters, and the airship. So, you can immediately beat the final boss without the rest of your party members. What’s even more interesting is how that changes the final fight. Remember the 3 goddesses, where you have to split up your party members… you have to fight those with 1 character each to win this way. And if you succeed, think about the credits animations, where it shows all the characters working together to escape the now collapsing final dungeon. Each character does something heroic to open a pathway for the other character’s as you watch the credits. If you win with 3 characters, you get all new animations of them escaping where, for the other character’s scenes they say “Boy, I wish X were here now”, and then work together to somehow manage accomplishing the same task.
It’s some really cool ‘extra content’ for winning in a different way, but I’ve only met one other person besides myself who ever saw those scenes so far, lol.
February 18th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
On the note of mentioning games which provide “extra content” after beating it… Chrono Trigger allowed the player to attempt beating the final boss fairly early into the game. Of course, doing so would almost certainly result in the player dying… however upon completing the game. The player and start over from the beginning with all his items, levels, and progress. Thus he is able to beat the game at various points for a total of 12 different endings, with variations.
February 19th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Great column. I enjoy the discussion of the nuances of game design, particularly great games like SMG. I definitely experienced all the good things you mentioned. I didn’t find the camera 100% perfect though, there were a few times where I was running upside down at awkward angles (chasing the bunnies on the snow-covered planet springs to mind). And the camera didn’t stay behind Mario when he was swimming, which is the only way to handle the camera IMO.
Like most others, I found the purple coin challenges hit or miss. I do take issue with complaints about Luigi not somehow doubling the playtime of the game, especially in comparison to SotN. I viewed it as superfluous content, there if you’re interested, but not really necessary. The breadth of content in the first 120 stars (or if you only count the “good” ones, ~100) exceeds that of SotN.
I don’t know how anyone plays a game with the sound turned down. I need to hear the audio cues and it doesn’t feel right without them. This is especially true with Street Fighter, but also applies to Mario games. And music in the game is great. I loved the theme that plays for the “special” purple coin challenges.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I’d like to mention another, much earlier game that also included a ‘girlfriend mode’. It’s Jet Force Gemini (N64, Rareware).
About 3/4ths of the way through the initial character’s levels (which may come sooner or later, depending on which order you play the characters), you get a small flying robot buddy who usually just floats alongside you and gives a warning sound when enemies are near. But if someone else wants to join in your game, you can save&quit, and then reload your save file in 2-player coop mode.
In this mode, your partner gets his/her own set of crosshairs to aim and fire the robot buddy’s guns. Now the robot’s guns are not that strong (only as powerful as your basic pistol), but unlike your character they have unlimited ammo, and the robot can’t be hurt by enemy fire. So you can keep playing as you normally would, while your partner can have fun being along for the ride and giving you a little extra firepower.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:41 am
I loved that feature of Jet Force Gemini… my little sister would play as the robot (as that game came out before I was old enough to have a potential girlfriend around). Too bad the game was so fatally flawed. You unlock that mode far too late, and the gameplay was just bloody impossible even with someone good controlling the robot… I never unlocked the “real” last level (stupid tribal monkey collection quest >.>)
February 19th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Impossible gameplay in terms of difficulty? Having beaten it without a partner (the last level is murder for the unprepared, by the way), I found myself wishing for a harder setting (with fewer health and ammo pickups). But I guess that’s a universal feeling when you beat just about any game.
And yeah, it seemed like Rareware’s designers had a collective fetish for annoying scavenger hunts. At least in JFG they experienced a modicum of sanity and limited it to just two must-get collectibles (Tribals and ship parts).
February 19th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Well, one game I muted pretty quickly was Mario 64… with my two siblings playing it before I did, I heard most of the music, and that ultra annoying voice acting every…… single…. time…. Mario…. jumps…. was getting to the point where I would have preferred to gouge my ears out than hear it again.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:04 am
“PoisonDagger: What’s really interesting in FFVI is you’re allowed to immediately enter the final dungeon after getting the first 3 characters, and the airship. So, you can immediately beat the final boss without the rest of your party members. What’s even more interesting is how that changes the final fight. Remember the 3 goddesses, where you have to split up your party members… you have to fight those with 1 character each to win this way. And if you succeed, think about the credits animations, where it shows all the characters working together to escape the now collapsing final dungeon. Each character does something heroic to open a pathway for the other character’s as you watch the credits. If you win with 3 characters, you get all new animations of them escaping where, for the other character’s scenes they say “Boy, I wish X were here now”, and then work together to somehow manage accomplishing the same task.”
That sounds really cool. Is there a video of this anywhere online?
Of course, beating the final dungeon and boss with only 3 characters would pretty much require a cheat device or the abuse of glitches.
February 20th, 2008 at 1:15 am
“Well, one game I muted pretty quickly was Mario 64… with my two siblings playing it before I did, I heard most of the music, and that ultra annoying voice acting every…… single…. time…. Mario…. jumps…. was getting to the point where I would have preferred to gouge my ears out than hear it again.”
Isn’t SMG pretty much the same? I could swear Mario’s general movement sounds between the two games are almost identical, but admittedly I haven’t played SM64 for years.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Forty: I have no idea if there’s a video around. It’s not that hard to do… but you do have to be a pretty high level. My roommate in college was actually the one who did most of the legwork. He basically setup one of those super nintendo ROM programs on his computer (he tried to transcribe the credits music for a while, so we were watching the escape animations one day, and he just suddently looked up and goes “I just noticed this character is optional to enter the final dungeon… what happens if we don’t get him in our party?”), and for like a week while he was doing homework, he’d set it on max speed, and run around in the “brontosaurus forest” part of the world map, killing stuff to level his guys up enough.
It probably takes enough time that few people would actually attempt it on a console, but after he’d levelled up, he made it through the final dungeon without needing to cheat. I don’t remember offhand, but he probably ran away whenever possible, and the 3 goddesses might have taken a little bit of luck to beat, but it’s not like you need some obscure trick to pull it off.
February 21st, 2008 at 6:33 am
*sniff* good ol’ Brontie Forest. Vanish + Doom = Good Times! Actually I wound up spamming Merton while wearing the Flame Shield. But…ya know.
Back on topic: I’ll figure out that code later. And no, SLG != SoTN second castle.
February 21st, 2008 at 6:47 am
Oh right, I forgot.
In addition to the second castle, SoTN has two character swaps, where you play a plotless game through the 2 castles as 2 other characters.
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:12 am
Sirlin I was just thinking about the different types of fun, and you nailed it on the head here. You make me want to go out and buy a Wii and Mario Galaxy. But I aint talking about that Wii.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:27 am
ok… ive been trying for a week and i cant find the last mario star
March 5th, 2008 at 12:02 am
I figured out the last number, but it was just by dumb luck. I don’t know what methodology one was supposed to employ to determine it.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Sirlin you should either place the answers on the bottom of the page upside down or submit a guide to gamefaqs. This last star remembers me those stupid places to hide coins in Mario64 that took me a week to find it. You’re making me hate Super Mario Galaxy for the wrong reasons :p
March 19th, 2008 at 1:15 am
The article has been out for over a month. I think it’s time for a reveal. :D
March 28th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
try a mouse over =)
March 30th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Yeah right, but over what? That is the problem =P
April 8th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Another person who found the last number by guessing, but couldn’t find it by looking… until I checked out the javascript file. That definitely describes how it would have been to slooooooowly run the mouse over the entire rest of the article.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:39 am
The only javascript references I could find were for ads. :(
April 9th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Carefully read the page source for the third section. You’ll probably find something that sticks out at least a little.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Ah, gotcha. Sneaky span.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Aha! Finallly my impulsion for scrolling the mouse around the text while reading was good for something!
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
That last one was boring and tedious.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:46 pm
you missed the r in purple in your purple message
July 7th, 2008 at 5:38 am
I know it’s an old article and I apologize for bringing this stuff up. I am not a professional game designer, but I’m humbly interested in the ‘art’ to the point where I actually pay more attention to structure minutiae than all the sweet entertainment I should be focusing on as a consumer.
I don’t believe Galaxy’s Purple Comets are the bane of humanity as Sirlin wrote (at least not if we already consider them shameless playtime extension solutions, which most scavenger hunts are, anyway). We have to realize that there was probably a line of thought from designer to player — in a way, I can see them trying to figure out exactly what we’re doing as we do it, so they provided some goal leeway. First of all, Purple Comets aren’t necessarily the last thing you’re gonna solve in the game. We should always keep in mind that there’s a clear objective flashed our way every single time we get a Star and return to the Observatory: we need 60 of ‘em to save Princess Peach. I really doubt that players weren’t itching to view the ending as soon as they got 60. Purple Comets may appear as early as with 61 Stars or as late as with 105, so our perception of this feature might vary a lot.
My personal instinct was to save Peach and then worry about collecting all 120 Stars, something already suggested in Super Mario World (well, all the 96 exits), Mario 64 and Sunshine. In a nutshell, my proverbial ‘predictable’ Galaxy structure was shaken with a few collect-a-thon challenges here and there, so I had a lot more variety on my hands. When I didn’t feel like trying Rolling Gizmo again, I went on a relaxing hunt for Purple Coins in Beach Bowl Galaxy. And it was great fun. Maybe doing ‘em all in one go is what makes them so tedious for some players. Luigi’s Purple Coins is by far the best Star in the entire game, in my opinion. It’s a pure platforming challenge with fast path planning. Genius.
Nintendo’s real sin, the way I see it, is to have funneled all the Purple Coin challenges together in one group. Their actual merits are quite evident because they’re really solid challenges at heart (even here people seem to praise the timed ones, which I wholeheartedly agree). If you ask me, some of the other Comets are a lot cheaper than Purple, because they essentially force you to complete the objective again in the exact same way. I mean, seriously, Speedy Comets? Wouldn’t it have been easier and more ‘replayer’-friendly to add time trials for every single Star instead?
Another thing I feel iffy about is the structure predictability, something I predictably foreshadowed in one of my paragraphs above. We start ‘large’ Galaxies thinking we’ll have to find three Stars (as it appears on the map), and then the game suddenly throws a secret Star and a maverick Comet Star at us. Luigi being saved and aiding in the quest with pictures was a nice twist. Purple Comets are unlockables. Battlerock, Dusty Dune, Gateway and Buoy Base Galaxies all have one extra Star to collect aside from their usual 6 and 1. The three green Stars were valuable enough to be considered something special to seek, and the prize was very much emphasized as a big thing by the game. (”Trial Planet.” Sounds scary…) The final dome is somewhat unexpected, seeing as the game barely hints on another post-Engine Room nexus. While the basic skeleton remains predictable (generally five Galaxies per dome), there are still many surprises to be found as we advance.
[ ] Agree
[ ] Disagree
[ ] Heretic