Oh, I see!
:smack:
We are picking the stars at the start of each level. Meaning, each time you get a star, you unlock the next star.
This makes more sense and makes the game more linear. I thought all 3 stars were there on each level and we had to wander around and find them.
I generally hate platformers, and am a very casual gamer (like, I’ll maybe finish one or two games in a year. Many years none.) But Super Mario Galaxy is on the short list of games I finished. I thought it was a brilliant game. I lost interest playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and never finished that, but the original held my attention the whole time, which is very difficult for a game to do these days. Same with Super Paper Mario. To give you an idea, Mario games I have finished: SMB 2, SMB 3, Super Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy. That’s it. (I never finished the original, but not for lack of trying.)
Watching my son beat the Honeybee level(first star of it) was quite the experience. It’s hard to go back and remember what it was like to play video games when they were new to you. He’s 7, but he’s only played a lot of Ipad/Tablet games and a bunch of Zelda Breath of the Wild with me.
He struggled, but after a few full game overs*, he made it to the bee at the end and got the star.
*What is up with lives? I can’t believe this game still uses lives and 1ups, etc. When we Game Over, we have to reload the entire game. Even Psychonauts only kicked you out to the overworld.
Yeah, but remember, Galaxy is like 10 years old now. Odyssey doesn’t do lives any more, and it’s the better for it.
Late to the party, but I’ll join the crowd recommending them. They were probably the best games that made it to the Wii, The lives mechanic was slightly annoying, but you could farm up lives fairly easily and in a few different ways.
My favorite part of the game is something no one else mentioned, the co-pilot mode. The second player can collect and shoot starbits in the first one, and in the second game they can also freeze enemies. When I first played the game, my pre-school aged son liked to play with me as the co-pilot, and we had a lot of fun together. A couple years ago we fired it up again and switched, so now I play as the co-pilot while he plays the game. (I’ll never admit he’s far better than I ever was.) I think it says something that we still bust the game out and play it occasionally ten years after it was released.
Yup - you’ll soon find that there are a number of 1-Ups on the opening cloud level that you can collect each time you start, and that should help quite a bit.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about co-pilot mode. That’s what made the game great for an old guy like me.
I could never move Mario around as well as my son, but I could help out. I liked that!
My son got 5 1-ups from Princess Peach in a letter. It is helpful. Does this happen all the time?
Wow, that’s awesome and I had forgotten I heard about this option. I plug in/activate a second controller, does this happen automatically?
I think so. It’s been a long time.
It’s great being a “helpful luma”, if you don’t mind not being the driver. It’s especially great if you don’t want to have to give the game your full attention.
This talks about Lumas in general. Co-star luma is orange.
I can’t recall the specific behaviors. You can collect stars for Mario, leaving him to collect coins and move through levels more efficiently. In one of them you can shoot enemies with collected stars, briefly paralyzing them.
This describes costar luma for galaxy2. Much more capable than I knew.
According to my son, I’m pretty much describing “helpful luma” from galaxy 1. They gave a lot more capability to “co-star” luma in galaxy2.
We tried tonight. I could collect star-bits and I think help him jump a little(I think we did a little double jump).
Fun. We cleared the first galaxy entirely. I had to help with the bosses. My boy does badly under pressure and the bosses are high-pressure.
Anyway, lots of fun. Some frustration, but fun.
If it helps, its my recollection that you can beat the game without any major grinding or master ability. Each star you collect gets you a little closer to the end - but you don’t need them all. Getting 100% is really tough (and satisfying), but it’s not necessary to reach the end. It’s definitely a “I got 80% of the stars (or whatever the actual percentage is), and got to the final boss and beat him - then came back when I was in a mood to grind out the really tough ones one by one” sort of process. The more you play, the more you’ll catch on. You’re not missing anything by skipping that speed run you just can’t beat, or that triple jump star you just can’t get to. Have fun!
Have you tried stunning the bad guys in copilot mode yet?
Another thumbs up for the Super Mario Galaxy games.
Both of them are such good fun, the only criticism I could make (aside from the lives system) is that the second game is pretty much more of the same.
I never got to like SM64 and I didn’t try Super Mario Sunshine, but I really had such good fun playing both those games. The soundtrack is fantastic too.
It’s a pain, pointless outside of something trying to absolutely replicate the arcade experience. Especially since once you’re into it, you can rack up tonnes of 1-ups.
You can? Is there some kind of farming trick I don’t know about?
1up mushrooms are so iconic that Nintendo took longer than most to ditch the lives system. Even Donkey Kong 64 avoided it.
I’ve actually never beaten a game with a lives system–at least, not without an infinite lives cheat. I remember thinking Jill of the Jungle was revolutionary because death just meant I’d start the level over. And I played the hell out of Zelda games because of it. (Though, on my first one, Link’s Awakening, I knew the trick to not tripping the death counter. You just save and quit during the dying animation.)
Been playing very sporadically. Wow, this Spooky Sprint level was horrible.
They took one of the worst controlled mechanisms(grabbing stars) and made a race out of it. It took me tons of tries to beat that stupid ghost to the end. I was super frustrated and I can not picture my 7 year old son being able to do it in 100 tries.
This was the part that drove us nuts. The bombs at the end were almost impossible to avoid.