A chubby Italian plumber with surprising acrobatic ability who traverses colorful dreamscapes while wearing a Bumblebee suit... in space! This kind of conceptualization is part of what makes Nintendo the world's most treasured video game company. More than ever, we need games like Super Mario Galaxy to counteract the gray steel corridors and bloody war-torn battlefields of nearly every other commercially viable game released. When you're being launched through the glittering tapestries of space, swimming next to a tropical shore inhabited by arctic penguins, or just sitting back and absorbing the myriad symphonic delights of Galaxy's orchestrated soundtrack, you forget all about normal mapping, showers of gore, and Hollywood-level voice acting. Suddenly it's 1990 again, and none of the progress made in the last 20 years matters except for the advances in technology necessary to facilitate the Wii (or, really the Gamecube) and the disc that's inside it. To make all the doubters true believers again, Nintendo gave us the grandest, most innovative 3D platformer since it invented the genre in 1996. In Mario we trust.
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