Why Super Mario Galaxy and SMG2 are Not Good Signs of Things to Come

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of single-player video games.

I don't mean multiplayer games with single-player aspects (StarCraft, any sports game ever, hell, even Team Fortress 2). I mean single-player games. Games that either don't have a multiplayer mode, or games with a multiplayer mode so pathetic you have to assume that it was included merely because someone higher up read a report saying multiplayer was a great idea, even though they had no idea how to implement it well.

I'm talking about games like Half-Life 2 or Donkey Kong 64.

Half-Life 2 is a quintissential example of a railshooter. In a railshooter, there are exactly two ways to go: forward, where the bad guys are, or backwards, where the bad guys' corpses are. It is a shooter on rails. Hence, railshooter.

Donkey Kong 64 is an RPG (Role-Playing Game). You can go anywhere and do anything, and a lot of the time you have to backtrack to an earlier area because you didn't have the skills to do something when you were there before. Your character levels up and gains new abilities and a bigger health bar.

Every real single-player game ever sits somewhere on the railshooter-RPG axis. StarFox 64 and all its not-horrible sequels were railshooters. When they tried to make a StarFox RPG, they crapped out Dinosaur Planet. The original Mario Brothers games were all technically railshooters. There was no levelling up, there was just "go to the goal and kill everything in your way." Banjo-Tooie was an RPG. I can't imagine it as a railshooter, and neither should you. The Paper Mario series was comprised of RPGs as well.

Super Mario 64 sits somewhere in the middle. Your health bar never increases past 8, and you know all your moves from the outset (mostly; you have to unlock the flying, metal and invisible caps). But you can go through the objectives in pretty much any order you like. Super Mario Sunshine largely followed this trend, though instead of caps there were nozzels. Simple, really.

Now let's just remember that Super Mario 64 was considered to be one of the greatest games of all time when it came out. It was the game that essentially launched the N64 and paved the way for superior games like DK64 and Banjo-Tooie. It was in 3 dimensions, yes, but it was also delightfully nonlinear.

Now you tell me, where do the Super Mario Galaxy games fall on that axis? SMG and SMG2 are railshooters. Yes, you can walk on the ceiling now, but that's it. For the Mario games, this is a step backwards. Hell, Team Fortress 2 had more RPG elements, and that's not even a single-player game!

Who the hell decided that Super Mario 64 was a step in the wrong direction? Who decided that we needed to remake Super Mario Brothers in 3-d with zonky physics?

...probably the same people who thought the problem with Super Mario Sunshine was that it wasn't Super Mario 64 2.

As the Sniper would say, "Buggah!"