Though there are still star bits, coins, and a few other trinkets to collect and cash in for various power-ups and unlockables, your main concern is collecting stars, which is what throttles your progression from one level to the next. Cruising across the universe in this spaceship-or should I say, faceship-Mario follows a mostly linear, Super-Mario-Bros.-3-style map system from one level to the next. This time Mister Mustache teams up with a ragtag crew of lumas, those weird little raw-chicken-shaped star people from the first Galaxy, on a planetoid spaceship that looks like a topiary version of Mario's head. If there's any consistency between most Mario games, it's the jumping-off point, and Galaxy 2 stays true to the rich tradition of Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach and Mario giving chase. Maybe it's been just long enough since the first one came out for my memory to fade, but I still found the style of action as fun and fresh as I did two and a half years ago. So it doesn't have quite the same New Mario smell as the original Galaxy, but there are far worse games to draw favorable comparisons to. A number of appreciable new gameplay concepts have been introduced here, including that infernal dinosaur Yoshi and a whole new wardrobe of clever suits, and the levels are even more ambitious with the crazy ways in which they play with the relative laws of gravity.

While the game's development history-which saw it start its life as Super Mario Galaxy 1.5-might paint it as an also-ran, the finished product is about as polished and propulsive as any Mario adventure before it. If you look at the history of the core Mario games, it's actually rare to see as direct a sequel as Super Mario Galaxy 2, particularly over the past decade. I imagine this is the photo Mario gets taken at Sears.

Hidden stars super mario galaxy 2