If you cast your mind back a few weeks you will remember that Fayyaad Hendricks was the lucky winner in our Super Mario Galaxy competition.

Well now that he has had the chance to take the game for a spin, let’s find out what he thought about it. You can compare Fayyaad’s thoughts (below) to Pete’s in El33tonline’s review of Super Mario Galaxy.

Did the game live up to the hype?

It was expected that Super Mario Galaxy would receive good reviews; Nintendo’s chief mascot’s appearance on the Wii has been a well-anticipated game. Thanks to El33tonline, I’ve been able to play around with this game for a bit to see for myself what all the hype was about. I admit that I wasn’t disappointed. Galaxy delivers in terms of sheer fun. But then again, this review wouldn’t be worth reading if all I did was praise the game. Other Mario fanboys have that angle covered. But for completeness sakes, the good points about the game are that it can be consumed in bite-sized, 5 to 10-minute chunks per level, saving occurs frequently, and the levels are, for the most part, varied and designed to a degree to present enough of a challenge, but I’ll get back to this point again later.

In a very tiny nutshell, if you’ve ever had more than a passing familiarity with any of the previous Mario games, then you’re well aware of the plot. The princess, in all her futile pink glory, gets kidnapped by Bowser—a giant anthropomorphic red-eyebrowed turtle of sorts—presumably in an attempt at marriage. This seems to be the only legal way to take over the Mushroom Kingdom, if anyone is wondering. It’s then up to Mario (when isn’t it?) to rescue the princess and return peace and order to the Mushroom Kingdom. The only major difference this time is that Bowser’s enlisted the help of a UFO, and Mario gets the help of Princess Rosalina instead of having to go solo. The rest should be familiar territory.

What frustrated me most about Galaxy is the same problem that has been plaguing me with most Wii games—I have very little control over the camera. You may call me a control freak (pun intended), but I tend to lose respect for a game when I can’t stop to look at any particular metaphorical rose I want to. Yes, I know that in some cases you’re allowed to use the D-pad to look around the levels, but this seems to be restrained to the more flat levels rather than the—and I use the term in its loosest possible sense—spherical ones. In many of the levels, it seems as if Nintendo purposefully intended that you bear left when the analog stick on the Nunchuk is firmly pushed all the way to the right. This frequently has Mario running in circles that I hadn’t intended him to run in the first place; circles that end up with Mario getting flattened by the convenient passing rolling boulder. A boulder that I hadn’t been given the opportunity to look around for in the first place, I might add.

I said that I’d get back to a discussion about the levels, and although the levels are varied and highly imaginative, there is a massive disparity in difficulty across levels. The normal expectation of games is that as it progresses, the levels become progressively more difficult. This presents a decent challenge to the player as the controls are slowly mastered, and results in the eventual visit to GameFaqs when you discover a boss you can’t beat. Galaxy, however, decides that difficulty is an outmoded concept, and some of the later levels are ridiculously easy. I’d easily finish the level with nary a push of the A button or a waggle of the Remote, but then find the next level presents so much more of a challenge that I’d start swearing at the screen. However, the game is never so difficult that I ever had to attempt a level more than three times before the inevitable “You got a Star!” Even the boss battles seem toned down, and, disappointingly perhaps, I haven’t had to visit GameFaqs even once.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m enjoying Galaxy, and I think we have a good many hours to go together. But the game is obviously not what it could have been. The extra difficulty in the form of comets seems tacked on, and don’t really present that much more of a challenge from the standard levels. It seems that a fair bit of pandering has been done to cater to the very young, with no way to turn the difficulty up a notch. Even the dialogue is unskippable, and it seems like arrogance on Nintendo’s behalf to make me read at their speed. Still, it’s a great game, and what it gets right, it does in a most spectacular way. So much so that I’m willing to overlook the negative points in favor of what it gets right: good, honest, clean fun.