BEST UNAMBITIOUS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE STATE OF THE ART: HALO 3 AND SUPER MARIO GALAXY

Super Mario Galaxy presents similar questions. Galaxy is finely tuned and a worthy member of the Mario pantheon. Almost anyone can have fun playing it. But as with Halo, Galaxy is at some level mostly a reinvention of classic play modes. In Halo that means battling killer aliens. In Mario that means jumping and dodging and collecting stars to free the princess who, as she has been for more than 20 years, is locked away in a cartoon-style castle. That’s fun as far as it goes. But now that the Nintendo developer Shigeru Miyamoto has gotten the Wii incarnations of his Mario and Zelda series out of the way, perhaps he will turn to creating something genuinely new. (Wii Fit, the fitness system coming to North America next year, could just be it.)

You crazy, crazy New York Times.

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