Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Super Mario Galaxy: lost

Arriving at the hub world, I was given five lives by a toadstool who shuffled over, breaking the cobwebs that had bound him. Peach had sent me a letter, despite being in captivity. I'm sure she's thinking that she'll never escape.

Rosalina asked me if I wanted to go to the special place. There was a sense of longing in her voice, as she pointed out I now had enough stars to go and rescue the princess. Longing and perhaps disbelief, that the hero had returned after all these years to complete the job that he had left unfinished.

But no. I spent a few minutes reacquainting myself with the space station, and found a chubby star thing (what are they called? Lumia? Or is that a Nokia phone?) who showed me a map. Where can I go to get new stars? It's not entirely clear. But there's a new galaxy in the engine room.

It took a while to find the engine room. Despite years of neglect, the robot inside was still whirring away, carving his trails into the mountains of dust. I jumped to the central star, and found that as well as the new galaxy, I had only collected one star from the toy-themed one. I elected to go there.

Mario meets Mario. The last part of the stage was a Mario-shaped floor with disappearing tiles. In order to get there, I had to navigate a complicated shape collecting jump star pieces, which took a while given the fact I couldn't remember how to ground pound. I was expecting the screw mechanism encountered half-way through to have rusted up, but someone's been keeping it oiled.

Onto the Mario floor, and I died several times as the yellow tiles flipped over and left me with nothing to jump from. Luckily there was a 1-up near the start. I had to collect five silver stars, which then became a gold star and was positioned at the start of the Mario floor. Unfortunately, I'd stepped on the tiles around that and they'd disappeared. Fortunately Mario has a long jump.

So I collected one more star. After I saved, as I turned the console off, I'm sure I heard a whisper. No, I won't forget, I'll be back.

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