“Excuse me, but do you have any copies of Super Mario Galaxy left?” I asked hopelessly at the counter of my local videogame shop. It was ten minutes before closing time on the game’s launch day, and after the years of anticipation leading up to its release, I was fully expecting to be told that all of the copies had been snatched up instantaneously by rabid fans who had queued for hours before the store even opened, so that they could play it as soon as possible. I was in for a bit of a shock.

 “Any copies left?! We’ve got hundreds of them out back! They overestimated the demand again – I mean, it’s not Assassin’s Creed, is it? We’re all sold out of that. You’ll be the first person to buy Super Mario Galaxy if you get it now.” I stood silent for a fraction of a second, shocked at the explosion of rage that the clerk produced, and then said “Could I be the first customer, then?” He stomped off to a back room somewhere, muttering to himself. “Don’t mind him – he’s just a bit sore that it’s not selling very well. He’s a big Nintendo fan, you see.” another employee sorting pre-owned PlayStation 2 games on a shelf near me said in consolation.

There’s very little sales data about Super Mario Galaxy at the moment because it’s so new, but I sincerely hope that the game’s fate in my area hasn’t been repeated elsewhere, because it’s easily my favourite Wii game to be released this year. And what makes it so great? Mainly, the fact that it includes a hefty helping of every Wii developers’ favourite word: innovation. This is a term that I’ve become almost sick of hearing, because it’s used to describe the exact opposite so often. Just look at the hyperbole-laden press releases for almost any of the dreadfully uninspired and shallow games that lesser studios churn out for the Wii every few weeks, and I guarantee that they will laud their feeble efforts as “innovative” in some way. Usually when describing the completely useless and unnecessary motion-control systems they’ve implemented, which generally decrease accuracy over what could be achieved with a standard controller. But to describe Super Mario Galaxy as innovative would be truthful.

In fact, just about the only clichéd thing about the game is the story – which is almost exactly the same as every other Mario title in existence: Mario’s love interest, Princess Peach, has been kidnapped by the evil Bowser, meaning that the plump plumber must embark upon an epic journey across many different locations filled with devious platforming challenges to save her. No surprises there. The twist is that this time, Bowser’s taken Peach into outer space, so Mario’s quest will require him to visit extraterrestrial venues.

More specifically, hundreds upon hundreds of miniature worlds, each of which have gravitational fields of a unique size and shape. The constantly varying gravity and topography will of course have drastic effects on what you’ll be able to do, meaning that each location will play in a completely different way to the last. For example, this peanut-shaped planetoid has a very strong gravitational field, so it’s impossible to fall off it: even if you leap off into space from the top, it’ll just suck you back onto the bottom, allowing you to carry on your travels upside-down. However, the same rules apply for everything else on it, so the dangerous boulders rolling across its surface never drop off either – they circle around it perpetually, providing a constant challenge from every angle:

Before playing the game I was worried that small asteroids like the one above would count as entire levels, but this is not the case: almost all stages consists of dozens of them, and you move from one to the other by solving various challenges on each. However, some areas do only have a few planetoids in, but to make up for this they’re generally much larger than usual – some approaching the size of an entire level from Super Mario 64!