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North America

Super Mario Sunshine

by Daniel Bloodworth - July 28, 2002, 2:29 pm EDT

Bloodworth takes a quick break from showing Mario to everyone he knows to give his impressions.

So far, Super Mario Sunshine has been an absolute dream. There is so much to do and so many places to go, it’s wonderful. I’ve spent most of my time simply exploring the levels, and ignoring the shines for the most part, but despite that, even when I got to Story 8 on the first level I was still finding new things.

Unlike Mario 64, you really can’t go for any shine except the one you chose before entering a level, but in the end that turns out to be a rather good thing. For each of the different stories new areas and structures are often available, keeping it from feeling like the same old level over and over again.

I think the sense of discovery may be heightened by the fact that I’m playing the Japanese version though. Cinema scenes do give you a direction, but conversations with villagers are usually fruitless. Still if you have the import version, I recommend you try to talk to everyone anyways. Sometimes you’ll get another cinema to help you or you can get cool items like a pair of sunglasses. Not being able to read everything adds an interesting dynamic to the game. I like it, because games these days tend to give you far too many hints. However, I am missing out on some of the quirky things that the villagers say so it will be fun to go back through and talk to everyone when the US version comes out.

All of the graphical problems that Adam pointed out are pretty much moot points to me. I can’t even see the compression in the FMV. I’ve looked. I’ve tried. I don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s definitely not running at 60 frames-per-second, but it doesn’t matter to me. Without picking apart everything he said, the fact is that overall, the game looks wonderful. It could look a lot better though, and that’s what I think he’s pissed about. We all want Mario to blow everything else out of the water in every way. Graphically it doesn’t achieve that, but what’s there looks great.

Well, I don’t want to toss out any major spoilers in this, so I’ll cut it short. This is easily the best game for GameCube yet, and it’s just the start of a really big fall season. There are so many things that I love about this game: the creative boss battles; the super-challenging platforming stages; the return of classic Mario elements like the pipes and Yoshi; and the great new addition of Mario’s waterpack and all of its nozzles. It’s a very complete package, and I’m still only a third of the way through.

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Game Profile

Super Mario Sunshine Box Art

Genre Action
Developer Nintendo
Players1

Worldwide Releases

na: Super Mario Sunshine
Release Aug 25, 2002
PublisherNintendo
RatingEveryone
jpn: Super Mario Sunshine
Release Jul 19, 2002
PublisherNintendo
RatingAll Ages
eu: Super Mario Sunshine
Release Oct 04, 2002
PublisherNintendo
Rating3+

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