We also got some time on Super Mario Galaxy for Wii, the upcoming new classic in the Super Mario series. Galaxy puts the Italian plumber on a strange planet, and tasks of him to progress through a whole galaxy of stars populated by all kinds of weird creatures. The demo on display was relatively short, but allowed us to play through several planets nonetheless, and get to grips with some of the trickier controls. Since all the planets are quite small, only a few times bigger than Mario himself, it can become quite messy as he’s constantly either walking either horizontally, vertically or diagonally, but thankfully a simple click on the nunchuck can center the view again behind the player; less thankfully, the game allows it to be centered upside down, so you’re walking bottom-up a lot of the time.

Small frustrations like that aside the game played a charm, and while the challenges posed on the planets and their insides became progressively harder, they were never any cause for frustration themselves and were well controllable. The Wii controller and nunchuck were put to good use as well, with motions on the Wiimote being used to execute moves like spinning to attack enemies. Graphics were as always crispy clear, and some of the best we’ve seen thus far on the Wii, as one would expect from Nintendo themselves. Super Mario Galaxy has its US release planned for Nov. 12 this year, European release is still TBA.

Next stop we tried the Wii Fit balance board. After the big announcement at E3, Nintendo also had the Wii Fit available at Leipzig Games convention. They had a little setup where you could try some of the games for Wii Fit. But they also found some non-healthy ways to have fun with the Fit board. They had a ski-jumping game, and a ball balancing game. With the skiing game you really have to simulate the movements from a skier.
You step up onto the board and bend your knees a bit and squat When going downhill. At the end of the lope, you have to jump and center your weight. If you do this correctly you will safely land the jump, and gain a (hopefully nice) score.

The ball balancing game was totally different. You will get a platform with one or several holes in it, and you’ll get one or more balls. The purpose of the game is to move the platform with your weight and get ball(s) through the hole(s). The first platform starts really simply with one ball and one hole, and just a simple round platform. When you clear the platform the level will continue to a second platform, and so on, and this continues ten times for ten platforms. To put you under a little pressure and make it a bit harder, there’s also a time limit. When you clear a platform you’ll get some additional seconds ready for the next one. I can say the game was hard and not just for everyone. There’s no word out yet if this is the final game, or whether it will be split between fitness and fun in different packages; the rep wasn’t sure. But it is nice to see that Nintendo are thinking of other purposes with the Wii Fit board, and not just using it to make healthy games. Just think of the games that are possible if you combine the Wii Fit board with Wii Remote and the Nunchuck.