Super Mario Fallacy

Recently, I've been playing The Official Best Game Ever™, Super Mario Galaxy.

I know it's the best game ever, because people in magazines keep telling me so. And they never lie!

There's certainly been no small lack of expectation for this game, which is not unreasonable, given that most of Mario's previous platforming exploits have also variously been hailed as the best game ever made at the time.

After the - apparent - disappointment of Super Mario Sunshine (even though I enjoyed it), there was perhaps a slight note of cautious optimism as to whether this newest outing would be a true return to form. Well, numerous 10/10 ratings and perfect scores pretty much across the board would suggest that is indeed the case.

In pure gameplay terms, Galaxy is difficult to fault; visually stunning, a ridiculous number of big, varied levels, and a good, if not infallible, camera, which considering the kind of gravitational and spacial gymnastics it has to cope with, is nothing short of a miracle that it works at all.

Here's the thing...

... it's just too damn easy.

I was certainly surprised to be watching the end credits on my second day of playing, but I had been hammering it pretty hard since I got it the previous morning. However, that's been the general pattern with me and new games for as long as I can remember, and this still may be the fastest I've completed a big, proper videogame. I hadn't found everything though, merely half the game had to offer in fact, and I knew that collecting the rest of the stars would be the real challenge.

When I eventually picked up the final star a couple of days later, that's when the alarm bells really went off.

I would never really consider myself some kind of demon games player, although I am certainly well-versed in the ways of Mario, but even so I remember battling on for weeks at least when trying to find everything Mario 64 and Sunshine had to offer. Apart from the odd tricky section, usually involving some sort of race or the collection of purple coins, I snagged most of Galaxy's stars on my first couple of tries.

I was half convinced there must be something else to do after finding every star, but aside from the opportunity to play through the whole game again as a different character (oh, cheers), that seems to be it.

I'm not saying it isn't a great game, and I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself hugely while playing it, but can a game so relatively challenge-free be truly considered the best ever?