Your statement about Mario getting bland and "kill the bad guy by jumping on it" tells me Mario simply isn't your variety of platformer. Whatever it is about Galaxy that rubs you the wrong way, you're one of an extremely small group that feels it.

Slowflake, while I agree it's the worst of the (3D at least) Mario games, it still did have more challenge than Galaxy and it still did have a less linear format than Galaxy did, which people appreciate. By the same token I thought it was hard to complete for all the wrong reasons, and also why I had no intention whatsoever of getting 120 stars. I almost wonder if Galaxy had so little stars dealing with coins (the purple coin ones were, let's face it, obligatory) because of the awful mess Sunshine made with them. Someone tallied them up and found there were 56 shines, all earned by collecting coins. The red coins I didn't mind so much; the blue coins were fucking excessive, and thanks to the brilliant idea of making them appear only in particular levels it was unreasonably difficult to find them without a guide. And what the hell kind of gamer plays Mario with a guide?

I was able to get all shines not related to blue coins and after getting around 10 shines from blues, I had had enough.

A lot of people hated what FLUDD did to Mario's acrobatics, but I welcomed it for the most part. It was a fun twist on the formula SM64 set.

Another big thing Sunshine was under fire for, which I didn't hate per se but agreed it was a fault- the overcentralized tropical theme. It wasn't until I played Galaxy and noticed just how diverse the environments were that I stopped appreciating Sunshine for its visuals.

I suppose one of the reasons I like Galaxy so much is because years ago when we only had the trailer of Mario flying through space to tiny planetoids I was expecting it to suffer from the same mehs that Sunshine garnered, even moreso because all I saw was Mario moving uncontrollably through an empty void, to a round shape with sparse activity. And then as the game is further developed, I start to like what I see. Then I actually play it and am almost surprised that I was expecting to be slightly disappointed but instead really enjoyed myself.

For that matter, I'm not a big fan of Space Junk Galaxy. Boring shit right there, though the thing with the bridge forming and deforming as you approached it was pretty cool. They just spent too much time having us follow pull stars.

Being born in the early eighties I was rased on games that usually did little more than define what killed you and what didn't. You made it to the end of levels and if the game was made well you had fun doing it. So I guess I've come to expect as little character development and depth as possible from my Mario games. Sonic and MegaMan have tried to do that and at times it's gotten a little out of control. Though honestly I only like the Genesis Sonic titles and Sonic CD and 3D Blast. I manage to still like Mega because it happens to be my favorite franchise since the NES days, so I make an effort to play the sidescrollers to the end.

I enjoy the Paper Mario games but I think at times they get way too dialogue heavy- I mean useless dialogue. Super Paper Mario has so much of this.. this diarrhea of mindless text. I'm not talking about the humorous stuff like that dragon in world 1 going haywire; I'm talking about crap like getting Dashall. We get it, Dashall, you're a spaz. Shut the fuck up and join us already. It feels like everyone in that game, at some point, talks one or two paragraphs too many.

I thought people were crazy for saying Thousand Year Door was too heavy on dialogue at first, but when playing it after Super Paper Mario, my patience was slightly damaged and it too managed to get on my nerves at points.

The Mario & Luigi games are worth it just to see Luigi mistreated in whatever ways the developers came up with. The games would lose a lot without the voices. Now that I think about it, Partners in Time could get a little too chatty also, though it doesn't help that I hated Stuffwell from the very beginning.

Really? Galaxy seemed a little on the easy side to me. At least, I never had trouble with it. Sunshine didn't have the good kind of difficulty, though. A lot of Sunshine's levels were just flat out frustrating. I'm looking at some of Serena Beach's and Pianta Village's levels. I still have nightmares about the Manta Ray boss in Serena Beach. That thing was damn tedious.

I had more trouble with Galaxy the first time through... the big 3 you just mentioned was even more of a pain than the harder obstacle courses in Sunshine. Oh, and did I mention the purple coins in Toy Time and Dreadnought?

That being said, I consider Galaxy to be a much better game than Sunshine, not only because it's more of a struggle, but because as you said, half of Sunshine was fetch quests. The Noki Bay blue coins were especially tedious. Meanwhile, you have all kinds of interesting twists in Galaxy that stop the game from getting old.

Also, the boss fights in Sunshine never posed any problem whatsoever to me (especially not the freaking manta ray), whereas I lost a few lives in the first Petey Piranha fight (the FIRST BOSS!) in Galaxy, and it only got worse after that (hi2u Bouldergeist, and then the game throws Daredevil Bouldergeist at you!).

Speaking of supposedly hard boss fights, the other day on GameFAQs there was a top 10 list of the hardest RPG fights ever, and for some reason final Bowser in PM1 was in there. Excuse me? The battle's long, yes, but it's practically a freebie. Shadow Queen in PM2 was a pain, though. Hardest boss in the Paper series (unless you consider SPM as well, where final Mimi takes the cake). But final Bowser in PM1? To be fair, the music kicked ass, so it's fine. Especially since the battle stretches on forever... would be sad if the music sucked.

Oh yeah, Ken's Labyrinth part 6 coming later tonight.

Edit: Here it is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35FKcsQ--9Y

Oh, the frustrating parts are frustrating all right, whether because of the tedium or the difficulty. My main bone with the game is that the hover nozzle just makes things too easy... it's fairly easy to make jumps you're not supposed to do when you do it right (especially certain massive shortcuts), or salvage otherwise deadly situations. It's no wonder that the only hard parts of the game for me are those where you don't have FLUDD.

Ken's Labyrinth part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRVJ6D1ESCo

Eh. The hub can entertain for only so long. As I said, any fun I miss from scouring the place for inconspicuously hidden stars is completely offset by the fact that Galaxy makes you play whole levels for all of them. Rocky Road, Big Eel Outbreak, Watch Your Step, Star Bunnies in the Snow, Scaling the Sticky Wall, Buoy Base, all filler stars, and while Sunshine does toss you a small handful of brief courses amongst the hub, they're not quite on the level of those (well Rocky Road and Star Bunnies are brief, but they expect you to fail repeatedly.)

For activity, Sunshine wins hands down; for actual appearance though I find myself more drawn to 64. Something about the pictures serving as portals to the various worlds strikes me as awesome. The design isn't better. No argument there. Sunshine at least manages to actually resemble the makings of a town. I just happen to like the castle more.

Looking for new ways to beat levels came with all three games; Sunshine can't claim to that as one of its perks. 64 and Galaxy players do that just fine without the addition of a few seconds' worth levitation or sudden boost of air.

For plain aimless dicking around, I think I'd give that to Sunshine, easily, but that's also not where I derive the bulk of my enjoyment with the 3D Marios, so it doesn't hold that much weight with me.

Sunshine also wins in sheer length. It takes 64 until Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Road to make you feel like a level is time consuming, and Galaxy throws you checkpoints out the ass. I can't decide if Galaxy would be harder than Sunshine without its checkpoints as opposed to more frustrating, but the checkpoints also prevent any feeling of artificial length.

I find all three games somewhat fun to watch, when played with skill. Hell, seeing someone beat Sunshine with no breaks or deaths almost made me want to play the game myself. Non-0 star 64 runs and 60-star Galaxy runs can be incredibly fun to watch for the optimal route factor and seeing what tricks they can manage to do.

Hate the edit glitch so much. SO MUCH.

Good point. However, I like to put some sort of quality into everything I do, and it's the viewers' job, not mine, to determine whether, in fact, that quality is there. But yeah, I shouldn't let it get to me.

Edit: Part 39 done... the last 30 seconds are the best bit in the entire run IMO, if only for the insane overreaction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLgE2UOIOXU

Well then, here's two more of them... a double-dose of Ken's Labyrinth! Yeah, the reason I did both together was in order to finish off episode 1.

Part 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH-XH4Dkw7E
Part 9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENaC8qZxZyw

I might have said this back near the beginning, but whatever you touch dies, including beehives. Maybe I should've stopped complaining about the dog long enough to say this...