Recycling its vintage "rescue the Bowser-napped princess" story (someone get Peach a bodyguard, for goodness' sake), players progress solo or with a partner, galaxy by galaxy, along networks of gravitationally discrete planetoids and clumpy space debris, contending for series-trademark "stars." Once sufficient numbers have been gathered, further outlying galaxies erupt from nebulous clouds, allowing Mario to automatically fly from one to another. Sixty stars are necessary to take on Bowser (the series' perennial turtle-like master villain) and complete the game, but as in prior installments, it's possible to collect slightly more than twice as many to unlock optional challenges and supplementary cutscenes.

The Mario series hasn't evolved much since 1996's lionized Mario 64, and that remains the case with Super Mario Galaxy, which sees Mario predictably triple-jumping, wall-kicking, flipping, stomping and twirling most of the time. The Wii-mote adds a nominal mechanic whereby one or two players cooperatively collect "star bits" by waving the Wii remote's cursor around to tag bouncing confetti-like particles, which can then be used to stun enemies or spawn new planets and galaxies. A few new transformations allow Mario to hover or turn invisible, while conventional ones re-emerge to let him fly, toss fire flowers and become temporarily invincible. It's also possible to pitch Mario between "gravity arrows," and gravity itself is localized to the extent that players must master awkwardly inverse or upside-down situations while avoiding falling off objects into black holes.

Great, but not extraordinary

It's not the Mario we deserved, but Super Mario Galaxy is pretty good anyway, and an easy "must buy" for casual Nintendo fans. It's child's play to master, relentlessly clever, politically and/or morally inoffensive, and it puts the lie once more to the notion that higher-powered machines pumping out Pixar-like visuals de facto outclass a superior design aesthetic. Super Mario Galaxy certainly proves for the umpteenth time why luminary Shigeru Miyamoto is the Steven Spielberg of gaming. (Take George Lucas with $200 million versus Spielberg with a hand-cam, and whose film would you rather see?)

It also reminds us that the most creative games sometimes come with serious, not-so-easily-bypassed flaws. Or at least serious if you come to Super Mario Galaxy expecting either an intuitive control scheme or a decent challenge.

For starters, why can't you pan the view freely with either the thumbstick or the pointer? Instead, you have to reach up clumsily for the D-pad on the Wii remote, then pan around with a cramping 180-degree headlock using a "down-is-up" vantage. It's like saying, "Pay no attention to that stuff over yonder, we know it looks crude and jagged. " And indeed it does, but so what? We don't care how it looks, we care how it controls. In a game so dependent on flipped and skewed perspectives, the fixed-position camera, which does an admirable job perhaps half the time but only a barely serviceable one for the remainder, should at the very least allow a third-person override. It's an option that would've harmed absolutely nothing.

Instead, Nintendo opted to make the game so easy to complete that precision maneuvers don't really matter, which is one way of silencing control critics, or to confuse critics who confuse the two. In practice, it makes the game seem passive-aggressive to the point of alienating accomplished vets. Yes, granted, casual gamers will probably find a Mario game to love here, but fans who cut their teeth on the no-waffling mechanics of the original Super Mario Bros. may feel a bit like shrugging and tying off once they've breezed forward to the game's optionally terminal 60-star mark.

Then there's the parade of nonsensical carryovers, like the klaxon that blares loudly and incessantly while you're desperately trawling and stomping for life-giving coins. It's simply an annoying old-school trope someone wasn't smart enough to design around. Another would be the exhaustively predictable "three hits, goes down" boss battle maxim, or the way you're on rails, automatically flying between planets in what should have been a clever, manually controllable mini-game of the sort that would complement (instead of ignore) the Wii's motion controls. Those motion controls? Reduced to lusterless shaking and waving. A game like Dancing With the Stars frankly puts the Wii remote and nunchuk to better use.

Instead we have a clever-seeming Mario game that's too easy and only artificially difficult because of its occasionally fuzzy camera and frequent down-is-up inversions. That's fine for a console with a storied string of casual-audience successes, but in aiming for universal appeal, Nintendo may be sacrificing old-school stalwarts.