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E3 2007: Hands on with Mario's latest planet hopping adventure.

Aside from the new Wii Fit game that Nintendo was showing off at their E3 press conference, the other big game that was on display at the Nintendo booth was Super Mario Galaxy. This isn’t the first time that the game has been shown off in playable form, but the E3 2007 demo did show off some brand new galaxies to play through along with a new promising gameplay mechanic that is sure to add a whole new layer of depth to the game.

Before we get into the new stuff though, let’s get the basics out of the way. Super Mario Galaxy is everything you’d expect from a 3D Mario game, except for the fact that in addition to jumping from platform to platform, Mario will be jumping from planet, to asteroid, to space station, to anything else that has a gravitational pull strong enough to pull the fat plumber down to its surface. Where Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine had unique worlds that acted as the game’s levels, Super Mario Galaxy has actual galaxies for Mario to explore and traverse in order to track down those coveted Stars.

The E3 demo had a total of four galaxies to play through. I managed to get through three of the four before finally prying myself away from the Nintendo booth and reminding myself that there are other games at E3 other than Super Mario Galaxy. The first galaxy that I played was your standard tutorial level. My first objective was to find three rabbits that were hiding somewhere on the small planet that I was on. Since they’re spread out all over the planet, this was great for me to get used to the way that the controls behave once Mario turns upside down while he’s on the bottom of the planet. After spending an embarrassingly long time trying to find those damn rabbits, I jumped into the star cannon and launched off to the next planet. Here my job was simply to defeat all of the goombas that were roaming around the planet.