I’m a little late coming into the current generation of videogames.  Between being recently married and having two children within the span of 5 years, my life has a gamer somewhat stalled out.  Now, having a vivacious and polite three and a half year old, (and with gracious consideration by my wife) we have gotten a Wii.  My son has been all about Wii Sports with boxing and bowling.  But we really didn’t get the full experience of the Wii until we played our first major game for the system:

I have to hand it to the marketing people at Nintendo.  Despite my son never playing a Mario game in his life, he could not avert his eyes from the brightly colored box of Mario taking flight into the cosmos.  He simply wanted to play that game.  And despite the fact of my wife being a videogame-virgin, she still knew Mario’s reputation of being family-friendly and fun for kids.  We agreed to take the game that evening and play it the next day.

When I got home from work, I found my wife jumping up and down, frantically waving the Wii controller, and yelping at Mario who was gleefully bouncing across the TV screen.  My son was cheering her on.  She yelled out, “How do you beat a fire-breating octopus???“  But before I could speak, she finished off the boss with a few well-placed spins.  After catching her breath, she explained to me how our son really wanted her to start playing it and told me that she had finished the first couple of sections of Mario Galaxy all by herself before I had even gotten home.

My wife doesn’t play videogames.  She has never played a Mario game, much less a 3D Mario game.  Even I missed out on Mario 64 and the Gamecube Marios.  Yet here was my non-gamer wife playing Mario Galaxy and beating level after level as the steady progression of difficulty climbed and she was slowly trained into perfectly timed jumps and spins.

I would call from work and I’d hear my wife and son playing in the background for “just one more star.”  And when my three year and a half old accidentally deleted her 87-star progression, she was mildly disappointed, but this was quickly dashed away from the opportunity to play the game over again and with greater skill and precision than the first time she played.

Everything about the game has a level of polish and detail that astounded me as for the first-time I was watching two new gamers being made.  The catchy tunes would quickly find their way into your humming or whistling in idle moments.  The visual style was so captivating that I would chuckle as I heard my wife cooing at the cute Lumas who sped across the castle and giggling at feeding the hungry ones.

But what I found most astounding was the gameplay itself – rediscovering its sheer simplicity.

Mario at its heart is a very simple game of timing jumps and spins.  Yet the sheer variety of this interaction is not lost in Mario Galaxy with its incredible wide variety of worlds, gravities, and camera angles – which may distract at first, but quickly become a unique challenge of rule variations and delightful visual distractions.  But the challenges were never so drawn out that it would frustrate the player – long enough to provide a challenge, but short enough that it enticed the “just one more” factor of addictiveness.

It then dawned on me that Mario Galaxy blends the strengths of both hardcore games and casual games.  It is a perfect amalgamation of the genres.

There is an elegant simplicity in the rules of the game.  The strength of gameplay is in learning its variations and unique applications to increasingly complex situations.  The levels are never too long.  And the challenge builds gradually as you learn and incorporate more skills.  The variety of gameplay allows the player to choose levels that cater to their strengths while allowing them to revisit weak skill sets at a later time once they’ve grown.  And there are great mini-game distractions.

And as I watched this magnum-opus unfold before my eyes in watching my son cheer on my videogame-virgin wife, I remembered what it was that I loved so much in videogames.  When everything just comes together in a harmony of sounds, sights and interactions, the game no longer is a game.  The game becomes a means of transporting you to another world of wonders and possibilities.  The game loses itself and becomes…

PURE MAGIC.

Super Mario Galaxy - Pure Magic