6.37pm: Vegetables in stir fry forgotten and burnt.

7.17pm: Phone call from friend missed

8.45pm: Night on town rejected

10.00pm: Hungry cat moans at lack of food

12.00am: Eyes begin to sting

2.30am: Hands begin to shake

3.45am: Time for bed.

This, my friends, is no mere run down of an average night in my household (although to be fair most do occur at some point or another). No, there’s a culprit for all the above. He’s fat, he wears a hat and he spends his time running around brightly coloured levels jumping on walking mushroom’s heads. Yup, Mario’s back to ruin my social life (and my ears, if the ever-so-slightly annoying high-pitched SUPER MARIO GALAAAAAAXYYY!!!! on the Wii menu is anything to go by).

It’s been some time now since the world’s greatest known plumber has graced our tellies in one of his own proper three-dimensional platformers, and looking back at 2002’s Sunshine now it’s hard not to feel slight pangs of disappointment at the ditching of classic Mario themes for the whole tropical thing that it had going on. A bad game it most certainly wasn’t, but when held up against other Mario games it seems a little like the odd one out. DS platformer New Super Mario Bros subsequently gently scratched the itch for something a little more traditional, and now we’ve got a shiny new Mario game to twitch-jump our way around.

Not that Super Mario Galaxy is in any way or form traditional, mind, save for the fact that once again Mario finds himself on a quest to save the rather hapless Princess Peach from everyone’s favourite overweight dragon Bowser. Having seen Peach’s castle lifted off into space by Bowser and a supporting crew of flying saucers, Mario is hurled toward oblivion but awakes to find himself on a strange planet with an even stranger white star named Luma for company. Having indulged in a bit of elementary space hopping, Mario discovers a giant floating spaceship and learns that to power it – and hence to save Peach – he must gather stars from nearby galaxies. All rather familiar, yes?

Thus, off you go. Now, with Galaxy being on the Wii you’d be expecting all sorts of weird tricks and sports when it comes to controlling the fat lad, but it’s not just the controls – which we will come to a little later – that have changed. No, this time around the levels themselves have become broader and more varied, with most being comprised of a number of small, self-contained platform sections that link together through space. Each section usually offers the player a puzzle or simple challenge to complete in order to progress on to the next, be it via a star that shoots Mario off into space, a vine he can shimmy along or various other gravity-defying methods.

In doing this, Nintendo ran the risk of making levels feel too scattered and segmented, but in reality it hangs together as nicely as Kirsten Dunst in a swimsuit. Levels offer multiple paths that, whilst not necessarily traversable during one particular mission, add plenty of interest and varieties to subsequent repeat star missions that open them up. The levels vary in size and segmentation, too, with some being a collection of tiny planets floating around in space, others are much more imposing structures with a couple of extra sections floating around and on rare – very rare – occasions, some galaxies consist of no planet hopping at all. It’s a big pick-‘n-mix bag of level design, which helps keep you on your toes throughout.

In fact, it’s safe to say that most of the level design Galaxy throws at you is some of the finest, most imaginative platforming stuff to issue forth from Nintendo’s strange brains. Being lodged in space gives Mario a whole host of funky abilities to mess around with, be it jumping off the side of a small planet and falling onto the underside of it or running along a wall sideways. Getting your head around the fact that Mario can step off some ledges and not die takes a bit of getting used to, as does having to alter your control angle to adjust to the little guy sprinting along upside down, but it becomes pretty natural surprisingly quickly.

The great thing about Galaxy is that is isn’t afraid to put new twists on platforming, but at the same time it retains a lot of the elements that have made Mario games great in the past. Sure, you’ll love the way the gravity affects how you tackle levels and the satisfying feeling of hopping from planet to planet, completing objectives and collecting coins, star shards (to fire at enemies with the Wii-mote or feed to hungry Lumas to get them to open new paths for you) and the like, but you’ll also enjoy the power ups that see Mario transformed into a different form, be it the classic fire cap or new additions such as Bunble Bee Mario and Boo Mario. It’s a departure from past titles, but it retains more than enough of the good stuff to still feel like a pleasing nod to the past.

The range of settings is something to behold too, with plenty of classic Mario environments chucked in with some fantastically odd newcomers. Particular favourites of mine include the Sweet Sweet Galaxy, consisting of just the one – very tricky – run-and-jump galaxy over rotating biscuits and the like, and the wonderful Freezeflame Galaxy, which on one hand has a giant snow-capped mountain that is a joy to conquer and on the other has a bubbling, molten core you need to skip round to get another of the stars on offer. Wherever you travel throughout the game, each galaxy is packed full of unique design and quirks and will have you grinning like a 15-year old fanboy all over again.

Another great addition are the comets that turn up at various points to give Mario the chance to complete a previously-achieved objective with a different twist, such as having to race evil Mario around a level, complete a boss fight with only one energy portion or complete a section within a certain amount of time. It’s a neat way of basically rehashing missions, and some of the latter comet challenges are arse-hard too.

Something not quite as enthusing as the levels themselves is the main spaceship hub, which is divided into seven different subsections, each themselves containing a number of galaxies for you to work through. The problem is, the ship has very little exploratory value, merely opening up a new section upon acquiring the grand star from each subsection’s big boss battle. Whereas troggling around Peach’s Castle in 64 yielded a few extra stars and searching Isle Delfino on Sunshine netted you some shines, the ship itself doesn’t give up any secret stars on Galaxy, and despite there being the odd thing to do in the way of speaking to various characters and listening to a little bit of back-story in the library it just doesn’t quite match up.

Still, there’s plenty of levels to pilot Mario around, and as you’d probably have assumed the control system that allows you to do so is down to a tee. Whilst movement is sensibly mapped to the nunchuck’s analogue stick and jumping to the A button, waving the Wii-mote sees Mario perform a spin attack, whilst pointing and aiming it at the screen allows you to guide a cursor around the screen as you run, collecting any star shards you hit with it. The Wii-mote also finds itself being used in a number of one-off cases such as when Mario finds himself surfing on the back of a manta ray, but for the majority of proceedings you’ll be using the same analogue-tapping style that we were all introduced to with 64.

The game’s all the better for it, too. Mario games have always been about concentrating on what your little Italian buddy is doing on screen, whether it be dashing along a plank or hopping across precarious platforms, and not on what exactly you’re having to do with the controls you’ve been handed. With so much going on in the way of Mario gyrating his way around the planets and ending up sideways, upside down and pretty much every direction conceivable, chucking in a confusing control system could have sunk Galaxy without a trace. Thankfully Nintendo have proven once more that they know their onions in this regard, and on a personal level I quickly forgot I was even holding a Wii-mote and a nunchuck and became absorbed in what I was doing instead.

There’s plenty to be absorbed in of course, with a total of 120 stars for those obsessive types (read: me) to grab. That said, you can actually get to the main end boss having collected just 60 of the things, and given the relative ease that this can be achieved it’s reasonable to suggest that this is a little disappointing. Much as I said with Metroid Prime 3 last week, most of Mario games are what you make of them, with every Mario game since the year dot offering the more complete players a chance to indulge in additional levels should they wish. That’s all well and fine, but perhaps you could venture that allowing players the chance to complete the game with only half of the available achievements lodged within the game under their belts is a little too hasty.

The other issue that niggled slightly with me, particularly in the earlier stages but also throughout the game, is that Galaxy verges on being rather too easy in places. Collecting those 60 stars needed to complete the game as soon as possible is something that most players will be able to do without too much bother, and although some later levels are teeth-grindingly tricky (the daredevil comet on Melty Molten Galaxy being particularly tricky) most of the hard stuff is relatively late in proceedings and need not necessarily be even touched.

Yet, it’s still impossible to sum up Mario Galaxy without the kind of smile that you’d expect a knackered, over-cynical games journo to have lost long ago. It looks fantastically colourful, it sounds… well, like a Mario game, has some great design elements – most of which I couldn’t even start to describe for fear of ruining them - and is packed full of fantastically enjoyable platforming. The niggles do detract from the experience to a degree, but it’s by far and away the most fun I’ve had since BioShock and is something that I can honestly foresee myself repeating more than a few times in years to come. After all these year’s it’s good to see the little guy still going as strong as ever.