Super Mario Galaxy 2

What a peach!

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken of the "opportunity" for a new Super Mario Galaxy game as the company's "hardware technology gets better and advances".

UPDATE 1/4/15 13.40pm Super Mario 64 HD creator Erik Ross has admitted defeat and pulled all download mirrors for his free, Unity-based version of the platformer's first level.

Nintendo designed many of its recent 3D Mario levels using the four-part structure of Chinese poetry and Japanese comics.

Nintendo will begin selling digital versions of Wii games on Wii U, the company has annonuced.

Four University of Leicester students have examined the physics behind Nintendo's platforming hit Super Mario Galaxy.

The full power of Nintendo's superb art unlocked thanks to PC emulation of the Wii hardware.

The most pirated PC game of 2011 wasn't Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 or Skyrim - it was Crysis 2.

Nintendo won't port Super Mario Galaxy 2 to the 3DS because Mario looks like a "speck" on the smaller handheld screen.

Nintendo kept even the most senior internal developers in the dark about the capabilities of Wii U leading up to the console's E3 2011 announcement.

As we head into the season of sales, you'll want to keep your bank account tightly girdled lest you snap up every game under the summer sun. That's why we're here to guide you; we've got a few great bargains this week on some classics of the past few years, as well as some more contemporary greats.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops dominate this year's BAFTA Game nominations, released today.

Assassin's Creed has the most nods with six, followed by Black Ops and Galaxy 2 with five each. Kudos to indie underdog LIMBO for picking up four.

Wondering why GOTY contender Red Dead Redemption doesn't feature more prominently? Developer Rockstar Games decided not to enter it into competition.

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The 10-game shortlist for this year's public vote prize at the GAME British Academy Video Games Awards was announced this morning.

A series with as many epoch-defining entries as Mario is bound to mark a few special spots in your gaming history. My first videogame was Super Mario World. Super Mario 64 inspired me so much that I wrote my very first review about it, aged 8. But after that, as with any favourite series, it settled into a comfortable rhythm; you know what to expect, and you're delighted every time you get it, but it doesn't change your world any more. I didn't think that a Mario game could have that kind of impact on me again. But this year, it did.

Satoru Iwata has used a bunch of his favourite graphs to prove that Nintendo's Wii and DS are not doing badly in shops, despite posting a six-month profit loss of $25 million (Ł15 million) recently.

"I hope each and all of these charts will convince you that Wii, as a machine set to welcome its fifth holiday sales season, can never be considered to have lost momentum," Iwata said, splashing them liberally in investor's chops (as reported by Gamasutra).

His slides depicted impressive stuff such as Wii sales outpacing PS2 over a similar time-frame; Wii games having tremendously long sales tails; and phenomenal and unpredictable Christmas demand for Wii - 3.8 million were sold in the US last December ("The fact is, such unexpected things can happen when the seasonality throws its weight around.").

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Wonderful Wii platformer Super Mario Galaxy 2 has sold a whopping 5.1 million units worldwide, Nintendo has announced.

Mario's latest deserves its sales success: we awarded it 10/10 in our June review.

Phenomenon Pokémon: Black & White, though, will no doubt top it as Nintendo's best-selling game of 2010: the DS game is already on 4.07 million units having only gone on sale in Japan last month.

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25 years, not one u-bend fixed.

Blizzard's science fiction real-time strategy game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty obliterated sales of all other games released in the US in July, NPD said.

It sold an eye-watering 721,000 units at retail. StarCraft II was released on 27th July, so those sales were achieved in just five days.

StarCraft II is the fastest-selling strategy game ever.

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Nintendo lost money during the three months ended 30th June 2010, with worldwide DS sales down 44.7 per cent year on year to 3.15 million, while DS software sales slumped 22.9 per cent to 22.42 million.

The platform holder blamed "fewer new software titles", a lowering of the DS price and hefty foreign exchange losses for the losses.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 provided the only noted silver lining, recording 4.06 million sales worldwide since its May/June release. That helped Wii hardware sales climb by over a third compared to the same period last year.

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Red Dead Redemption maintained its horseshoe-like grip on the top of the UK charts this week despite the launch of Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Wii on Friday.

Nintendo's announced a midnight London launch for Super Mario Galaxy 2 next Thursday, 10th June [game's out Friday, 11th June -Ed].

GAME's Oxford Street store will be the location and Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario, the celebrity.

The event starts on Thursday evening at 11pm and ends on Friday morning at 1am.

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Super Mario Galaxy 2's composer Mahito Yokota - or someone purporting to be him - has uploaded the entire soundtrack for the game to a YouTube playlist. (Thanks, Kotaku).

Nintendo hasn't released a straight-up sequel to a Super Mario game in almost two decades. Ignoring nominal sequels Yoshi's Island and Wario Land, Mario's own adventures - from perfect World to muddy Sunshine and the transformation of old Super Mario Bros. to New - have been a cascade of revisions and re-versions, almost always familiar but never the same.

You could even say that about Super Mario Galaxy itself. The 2007 Wii classic hit the reset switch in virtually every level - sometimes several times per level - as it spun Mario's world upside down, inside out and round and round. Super Mario games have always liked playing with the rules rather than by them, but none have ever done it with such dizzy gusto.

By sending Mario into space, Super Mario Galaxy could ignore what little logic the Mushroom Kingdom ever had, taking its only immutable law - gravity - and twisting it around tiny 3D planetoids, or flipping which way was up in side-scrolling sections that almost mocked the series' roots. Levels could be one-off gameplay gags or fragmented mini-epics in which the plumber would slingshot through the ages of Mario, from impossible future to retro reference and back again.

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The Wii sequel acknowledges its roots.

Rock Mario and a little more Yoshi.

Super-sequel showcase.

Polly does not want a cracker. Polly wants to win!

Jolly green bro' getting involved in sequel.

Nintendo has confirmed that Mario's brother Luigi will be a playable character in the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Nintendo has revealed that Super Mario Galaxy 2 will sell with a bonus tutorial DVD.

Take a deep breath and hitch a ride.

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Straight off the bat, soon as I'm seated in Nintendo's cosy demo room, I'm told that Mario Galaxy 2 is largely comprised of ideas 'left over' from the first game. Concepts and quirks which just couldn't be squeezed into the original Galaxy's cavalcade of moons and planetoids.

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It's hard to imagine now, but the day Shigeru Miyamoto started work at Nintendo he didn't have a clue what he was going to do, let alone achieve. Yet what the designer - who has had a more profound, towering influence on the evolution of interactive entertainment than any other single figure - did have was a desire. And in Nintendo he found the company to help him fulfil it.

Super Mario Galaxy 2 will ditch the hub world and opt for a traditional world map instead.

A lot of people think that Nintendo loves America more than it loves Europe. Thankfully, it only appears to love America by about 16 hours more. 16 or so hours is the gap between Nintendo's latest media summit in the US, where it let loose with quite a lot of exciting information, and its media summit in the UK, where it did the whole thing all over again, except we mostly knew what was coming.

Nintendo Europe has announced European dates for Super Mario Galaxy 2 and other titles at its London press event.

Grievous bodily charm.

Nintendo has announced US release dates for Super Mario Galaxy 2, Metroid: Other M and Monster Hunter Tri.

Nintendo Australia has said that both Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M will be summer releases.

Asked by Official Nintendo magazine if Super Mario Galaxy 2 will use the Super Guide feature that makes its debut in this week's New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Shigeru Miyamoto said he "cannot tell".

Opportunities to interview executives have been thinner on the ground than usual at this year's E3. It seems everyone's too busy showing off their new motion-sensing control system / platform exclusives / pulse-measuring accessory / motion-sensing control system. Or perhaps they're just sick of us asking stupid questions.

It's-a him again!

Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that "about 90 per cent" of the content in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is new - adding that the figure could be as high as 99 per cent.

Nintendo has announced Super Mario Galaxy 2 - the second Mario game of its E3 conference after New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

Due on Wii next year, it looks to be chock-a-block with all of the traditional and much-loved Mario elements, in a style very familiar to players of the wonderful original.

Much of the action shown took place on the mini-planetoids and cylinders of SMG's universe, and we caught some of the star-launching malarkey which was the first title's hallmark.

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