video games
OK, so I actually finished it up. It's actually a pretty fun game (in much the same way as Mario 64), but it has some really frustrating moments and some annoying controls.
Gameplay: Pretty fun, though annoying in some places
Story/graphics/music/sound: It's a Mario game. These are basically filler.
Play time: Not measured, but I finished it in a weekend and a half. It's not a long game. Of course, I did not go for every secret shine. 65 shines and beating Bowser was good enough for me.
I feel that the water shooter thing was a net negative to the game. That is, I think they would have been better off creating another game with the exact same controls as Mario 64, but new levels. For those unfamiliar, in Super Mario Sunshine you have a backpack thing which stores and shoots water. It has two modes: One in which you shoot water ahead of you in order to hit things, and one in which you shoot water downwards in order to hover. You toggle between modes by pressing X.
I found the water shooter controls incredibly awkward in several ways:
-
Switching modes was annoying, because I would always forget which mode I am in. The hover mode lets you save yourself from falling, but you don't usually have time to think about what mode you are in when you are about to fall. Thus, I frequently found myself watching Mario fall into a pit while uselessly firing the water cannon. It seems to me that it would have been much more intuitive to just have the X button activate hover.
-
Aiming the cannon was annoying. It just never felt natural.
-
You shoot the cannon (or activate hover mode) with R. In cannon mode, if you only hold R a little bit, it shoots forward and you can continue to run. If you hold R all the way down, you stand still and can aim. I found this ridiculous, as in my mind it simply does not make sense for a button to do two qualitatively different things depending on how hard you push it. I could understand if holding the button harder caused it to shoot with more pressure -- i.e. a quantitative difference rather than qualitative -- but that wasn't the case.
What it all comes down to is that the designers managed to invent a control scheme where you have to think carefully about what you press to make it do the right thing, but used it in a game where you don't have time to think like that.
There were some areas where you didn't get to use the water pack. I actually enjoyed the controls much more in these areas. Unfortunately, most of these areas were the really annoying "Jump between blocks suspended in space and die 500 times" areas, which I hated for other reasons (see previous post).
Anyway, other than that, this game was pretty much exactly like Mario 64 and was fun in more or less all the same ways. I do consider Mario 64 to be one of the best games of all time, and Sunshine doesn't match it, but it's close enough to be worthwhile.