MY IMPRESSIONS [From a short play session]
I was at WalMart tonight and played the first two levels or so and the game was just amazingly fresh. I can definitely understand why there are so many great reviews coming in.
I was immediately familiar with the controls and was amazed at just how easy they were to learn. You use the small "joystick" on the 'nunchuck' to move around and you will occasionally use the 'Wiimote' to perform actions such as your spin move, shooting from stars in order to reach nearby planets, pointing your cursor to shoot crystal-like objects wherever it's currently at, and even quickly corkscrewing your way up a vine after killing a piranha plant!
If you've seen any gameplay videos, you'll know that many stages in the game involve going from planet to planet, each planet which rotates as you walk on its surface so you can never fall off no matter what. If you walk backwards, for example, you will be walking upside down on the 'underside' of the planet but you will still be pulled to it via gravity as will all other objects! This is one of the many reasons the game feels so fresh and crazy; it's just really nothing that has ever been done (at least not that I've seen) in a platformer.
The awesome things about each planet is that they vary in size, shape, color, gravitational pull, terrain, visual theme, enemy selection, and more.
Just imagine the variety you could have with this many factors - and this is not going from stage to stage, but from planet to planet with no loading times. It's as if you're traveling to miniature stages within one stage that is continuous.
As I played, I noticed that to "shoot" from one planet to another, I had to collect 5 small pieces from a star in order to piece it together. Once the star is complete, you walk underneath it, shake the Wiimote from left to right, and you hop up into the star, begin to spin, and are launched out and onto the next planet. The fact that you can actually see the planets in the background before you ever reach them just makes it that much cooler.
Every now and then I killed a piranha plant and used its vine to corkscrew-shoot my way onto a planet rather than via a shooting star, and on one occasion I actually had to shake the Wiimote left and right TWO times because there were two shooting stars lined up - one which was on the ground of the planet I was just on, and the other which was floating in air (or space in this case). The first time I didn't realize I had to do it twice, and I just shot up, hit the second star, then shot back and landed back on the planet.
There were two planets I liked best:
One was a pretty small one covered with dark gray "tar" or "lava"-like material with a few very dark green slime pits here and there, and with what seemed like 5 or so big boulders rolling around all over the place. They were hard to avoid not only because of the way planets turn with you as you walk on them (it trips you out and can confuse you if you aren't concentrating!), but because those slime-like pits slow you down and can trap you just in time for a boulder to flatten you like a pancake.
The second was a short but good one. It was a bit larger than the one above, only it had a small fortress which I had to scale in order to reach a star at the top. The fortress was really only a concrete walkway that went left to right and continued to go upwards, but there were a few walkways that slid inwards and outwards and could cause you to fall all the way back down to the previous floor if you walked over them at the wrong time.
One last thing I noted about the game is that it's certainly not a "cakewalk" in terms of difficulty. Numerous times, I was down to my "last hit" before I died and I had to carefully hunt for coins (which refill your life) without accidentally running into a Goomba or lantern-holding Goomba-like creature.
Here's a challenge: Try jumping on top of a Goomba when you're running upside down on a planet's "bottom" side. Don't be surprised if you completely miss the jump the first time - it can be tricky!
Sorry to write a book. I just wanted to share my thoughts on this great but sadly overlooked game (at least there in the store, where most people were crowding the Rock Band demo.) It looks absolutely beautiful, too, and the musical score is perhaps one of the best I've heard of this generation of games. This Mario game is easily one of the best I think I've ever played - and my session was only for about 5-10 minutes.
I cannot wait to purchase this game - or this gem as it should be called.
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