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Out of this world and into your Wii.

With the insane amount of spin-offs it's spawned, it's sometimes easy to forget that the Mario series started life as a platformer; The premier platformer, to be exact. It's hard to believe we've waited five long years for another Mario adventure, but at long last everyone's favorite plumber has returned to his roots once again. Keep your tray tables and seatbacks in their upright positions, cause' all you Wii owners are in for one helluva ride.

Given that Mario has already been everywhere (and everything), naturally the only place left for him to go....is up. Hence the title Super Mario Galaxy, which true to its name, takes place almost completely in outer space. While skeptics may have been lead to believe this game was going to merely be a second encore of Mario 64 with a tacked-on gameplay element, Super Mario Sunshine it is most certainly not.

So how does Mario go from romping around the Mushroom Kingdom to floating amongst the cosmos? It all starts when our hero receives an invitation from sweetheart Princess Peach to attend a comet festival at the kingdom. Big shock: Bowser crashes the party. The overgrown turtle who just can't let go arrives in a flying armada which bombards the area and proceeds to rip Peach's castle from its foundation and head into orbit with the princess inside. All the chaos is presented in a beautifully-rendered cut scene complete with a majestic remix of the Doomship theme from Super Mario Bros. 3, a game whose presence can be felt throughout Super Mario Galaxy.