Don't forget to check out the rest of our Nintendo Fall Summit 07 coverage.

Super Mario Galaxy is a wonderful, and wondrous, gameplay explosion. It is a much-needed return to form for marquee Mario games--not slick and playable but unsurprising, like New Super Mario Bros., or ambitious in slightly misguided ways, like Super Mario Sunshine, but a joyously fresh and ambitious experience that is also eminently slick and playable. I was able to check out numerous levels from the game during Nintendo's recent fall summit in San Francisco.

Crucially, it is also a genuine 3D platformer in an age when the term "3D platformer" has been unfortunately twisted to mean "accessible 3D action game with some jumping." Super Mario Galaxy is no such thing. It is a game in which control of your character is the star of the show, something the best Mario games and other true platformers have always championed, and where bland 3D action platformer gameplay is nowhere to be found. To an extent, Galaxy picks up where Super Mario 64 left off; where Mario 64 showed how games should be taken into the third dimension, Galaxy shows how they can nearly dispense with traditional Earth-inspired physics altogether. Certainly Galaxy cannot hope to be the design-shifting landmark Mario 64 was, and its particular brand of game design brilliance is less widely applicable than Mario 64's, but it certainly has big waves to make within its own genre.

Down to Earth
Central to Super Mario Galaxy is gravity. In fact, at times the game feels like a series of gameplay explorations on the theme of gravity--were Bach a video game designer employed by Nintendo, Super Mario Galaxy might be known as The Gravity Variations. Not only are there plenty of planetoids suspended in outer space, as seen in much of the game's promotional material, there are even many 2D sections, which distinguish themselves from their classic counterparts by themselves incorporating unusual abuses of gravity.

Each planetoid features its own gravitational field, and many allow you to run all around their entire surface area without ever falling off. "Each time I get to a new orb, I just jump off the edge in freefall to see what the gravity is like," Nintendo's Nate Bihldorff explained to me as he flung Mario off a torus-shaped world, only to see the chunky plumber get sucked into a brief orbit around the planetary body before skidding back down to hard ground. That kind of sensation is nearly constant in Super Mario Galaxy, which sees Mario jumping, flying, and falling from one surface to another in a nonstop celebration of gravity and motion.

It is as if the members of the Tokyo-based development team, who last worked on the underappreciated Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (GCN), went back to the drawing board and asked themselves how they could provide a new experience that would be a true followup to Mario 64. Crucially, unlike with most sequels, they chose not to simply refine what the predecessor did, but rather deliver an entirely new experience that retains the predecessor's spirit. Super Mario Galaxy is certainly not the first game to experiment with this kind of relative gravity, just as Mario 64 was not the first game to go into full 3D, but it does feel like the first game designed wholly and organically around it. There's no "gravity level;" there is just the entire game.

Rather than a hub-based world, Super Mario Galaxy is built on a multi-tiered galactic map. There are the major galactic clusters, each of which contains several galaxies, each of which in turn has multiple "missions," a.k.a. levels. It is tough to tell based on preview impressions how much content the game's campaign contains, but it appears to be a fairly substantial package.

Gameplay Explosion
The best parts of the often-tiresome Super Mario Sunshine were its refreshing bonus levels, which were abstract pure platforming segments devoid of the game's water cannon, and Super Mario Galaxy seems to know it. With its space setting, Super Mario Galaxy has the strongest sense of visual cohesiveness of any Mario game to date, with the exception of Yoshi's Island, while also allowing the kind of seemingly utterly arbitrary architectural spontaneity for which the original Super Mario Bros. games were known.

One sequence is largely comprised of constantly-shifting obstacle-ridden floors--a true test of platforming aptitude--while another consists entirely of connect-the-dots-like mechanics that see Mario floating from point to point in space and dodges mines as the player directs him with the Wii remote. There are outer space levels with archipelagos of tiny planets as well as large, sprawling spacescapes with huge land masses. There are entirely self-contained indoor sequences in which Mario must fire himself through a cannon at large, crystalline targets, and "outside" levels featuring the cannon as well, with Mario aiming at stars while avoiding moving floating platforms. There are long, winding rainbow roads that twist and turn in loop-de-loops through space, and there are airships like those in Super Mario Bros. 3, with covers of the appropriate SMB3 music to match.

Essentially, based on what I have so far seen of the game, Super Mario Galaxy rarely locks itself into predictable patterns, though it does not feel scattershot or unfocused. Because the concept of relative gravity persists throughout, and because the focus is for the most part always on genuine platforming, it all comes together remarkably well.

To the Moon, Alice
Some of the most smile-inducing moments in Galaxy come during its seamless transitions into Super Mario Bros.-style 2D platforming. These segments are reminiscent of the throwback 2D morph ball segments in the Metroid Prime series, but while those were essentially well-produced nods to the series' history, Mario Galaxy's 2D segments are, like so many other elements of the game, insane exploitations of its series' history.

Fundamentally, they control like any other 2D Mario game, except that they tend to have gravitational polarity that points up or down depending on the color of the background at any given point. Given enough jump height, which can be achieved due to the triple-bounce high jump that has persisted throughout 3D Mario games, you can escape the pull of a downward gravitational pull and get sucked into an upward one or vice versa--doing so results in the goofy but great experience of playing traditional 2D Mario gameplay while entirely upside-down. The deftness with which this is all handled is a treat.

This playfulness with gravity of course has even more implications in the full 3D parts of the game. "When people get their hooks into this game, the speedrun videos are going to be insane," Bihldorff chuckled as he watched me play, explaining how I could have manipulated the gravitational pull and escape velocity of a particular spheroid to shoot myself over to another surface and skip some more obvious traversal.

Super Mario Galaxy is by no means an open world; geographically speaking, it's more of a midpoint between Super Mario 64 and the 2D Mario games. Each level is fairly straightforward overall, and there isn't real interconnectedness between them other than in a thematic sense, but the simple fact that the levels are suspended in outer space gives them an oddly open quality--from certain vantage points you can see much of what's to come, and if Bihldorff is to be believed, there will be physics-driven shortcuts aplenty.

I (Don't) Wanna Hold Your Hand
For a game with such a naturally integrated wide variety of inventive and exciting gameplay, it is too bad that Galaxy seems so often, at least early on, to fall prey to the Nintendo trend of recent years of overexplaining things in slowly-scrolling NPC-delivered tutorials. It's a minor point and one that has little impact on the apparent quality of the overall game, but Nintendo would do well to remember how little hand-holding it exercised in the original Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, and the next several followups to those games, all of which were played by a wide variety of gamers (and non-gamers) to great success.

Case in point: Galaxy's pointer mechanics. Though many of its functions are explicitly stated, it is perhaps surprisingly integrated in an extremely organic way to the game, and if one uses it and experiments with it regularly, all sorts of new functions make themselves clear contextually. Most frequently, it is used to shoot and stun enemies with collectible gems, but it can also be used to collect out-of-reach gems, send Mario rocketing off to other planets, fling Mario from slingshot-like growths, and guide him through space by grabbing onto floating "hooks."

The best thing about the pointer is how smoothly it overlays on top of the core game. Unlike many poorly-designed Wii and DS games, you are never switching back and forth between "pointer time" and "face button time"--you play the whole game using both elements simultaneously just as naturally as you might use two analog sticks, but since you only need to bring up the pointer for certain tasks and since it doesn't control your camera, you don't need to be holding your wrist in any particular position most of the time. It's not a game-changing element, but it adds more than one might expect, and is used in continually creative ways. Plus, a second player can take over a Wii remote for more advanced helpful tricks. No substitute for true co-op, of course, but an enjoyable way to shoot the breeze with a buddy or allow a friend with less game aptitude to join in.

Who's the Boss? (Charles in Charge) Along with the wide variety of platforming gameplay come some of the most varied and impressive boss battles to grace a Mario game--as with the art direction, Yoshi's Island is the only real competitor here. They range from fairly traditional brain-bopping bouts, to largely pointer-controlled encounters which see Mario being slingshotted at a large spider's weak points for massive damage. Then there is of course the enormous Shadow of the Colossus-like robotic boss that Mario must climb in order to destroy a critical point with the boss' own Bullet Bills. Screenshots also promise a rather imposing King Koopa Bowser encounter, which is a tasty proposition.

Plumbing the Pipes of Platforming Prestige
A Mario appearance in a video game is about the farthest thing you can get from a rare occurrance, but there is still a certain cachet associated with the next Mario game, which still manages to be a once-every-few-years event. Super Mario Sunshine probably takes more flak than it deserves--after all, it had some of the only genuine 3D platforming when so many other 3D platformers forgot to focus on actual platforming--but there is no denying it was a much less inspiring experience than it should have been. Many gamers are understandably hungry for a new game to show the rest of the genre how it's done. Super Mario Galaxy looks to demonstrate not only that, but all manner of other things none of us had thought of.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.