Self-Titled

I bought the Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy when it was released and I’ve almost finished it (ten stars left to get). It’s a superb game, with beautifully-executed graphics, sound, game play, and level design (IGN gave it 9.7/10). It’s the best game on Wii right now and I’d recommend it to anyone who liked other Mario games or wants to see the Wii controls done right. However, it does have a couple faults.

Camera

Perhaps the most notable thing about Galaxy is the gravity game play, in which Mario can run on and jump between objects of varying sizes, shapes, and themes floating in space. Each object has its own gravity tug like a planet, so “up” and “down” from Mario’s perspective change as he moves from object to object, or even from surface to surface on the same object. Unfortunately, the camera’s orientation (”up” and “down” from our perspective) doesn’t change to match Mario’s, preserving the orientation with which we started. As Mario’s orientation changes, it can be difficult to predict how the controls will change with his orientation. Moving Mario forward (up on the analog stick) may move Mario away from the camera when on one object, but toward the camera when on another object. Don’t even get me started on left and right. You grow a sense of what to expect after a while, but it never feels natural, and sometimes you guess wrong. The ideal controls would always be relative to the camera so that up, down, right, and left on the analog stick would always do what you’d expect.

Since some objects are very small, their surfaces are sharply curved. The camera doesn’t stay directly over Mario’s head, so sometimes you lose your depth perception and can’t tell where Mario will land if he jumps somewhere.

Level design

Many of the 120 stars in the game involve level remixes, where an extra element is thrown into a level to make it harder, like limiting Mario’s health, making enemies faster, time limits, races, coin collecting, etc. Some of them were fun and others weren’t. Some of the purple coin challenges (collect the one hundred purple coins throughout a level to get a star) were hard, frustrating, and tedious.

Some levels were just too hard. There’s no way you’d pass the first time or even the second. When you find yourself dying for the fifth or sixth time, you have to ask yourself what the point is. It’s just making you frustrated, and that’s not fun. Those levels needed more tweaking to balance out the difficulty.

This year is the first time I’ve been in charge of paying an electricity bill. Even though the bill is split four ways, I alone seem to go out of my way to turn off unused lights and electronics. I don’t go so far as patrolling the halls, but sometimes I feel like you could stand outside and see where I am in the house by the windows that go dark. I didn’t used to be so active about conserving energy with previous roommates, so I’m pretty sure it’s just because I’m the one cutting the check for the bill. The lesson to take away here is to avoid being the one in charge of paying the electricity bill, because it’s probably the most visible utility when it’s used.

I gave a fifty-minute lecture on the lambda calculus for a class last week. It was a topic I understood very well, but had never taught to someone else before. The length of the lecture was daunting enough, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to create a lesson plan. I could clearly see the ideas and their implications in my mind’s eye, but it was hard to impose an order and a rationale on them that would make sense from the perspective of someone new to the material. You have to say the right thing in the right way in the right order. Ideas and concepts have to progress naturally and logically, later ones building on earlier ones. With this new insight into teaching, I respect teachers who were able to clearly explain something to me all the more. You aren’t qualified to teach an idea to others just because you understand it.