After 10 months of waiting, Japanese gamers are finally able to play Super Mario Sunshine. You will know that Nintendo launched with Luigi, and as a result gamers had to wait for this game to control the most popular games character in his own GameCube game.

Nintendo was wise enough to place two GameCubes with Mario Sunshine at the Games Day, so that gamers wouldn't have to wait for hours before they could play (unfortunately you still had to wait a long time for Zelda, Star Fox and Metroid). You could play the full version, and you could select from several levels, so you didn't have to beat each level first before you could see what the next one was like.

So there I was, walking through beautiful 3D worlds, trying to figure out what the heck I am supposed to do. There were some weirdo inhabitants that you could talk to. Some were nice and told you to clean up the walls or spray windmills, others were less nice and kicked you. The latter was funny though annoying.

So cleaning walls it was, apparently with the watergun. Controlling the water from your gun turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected, it kept going the wrong way at first. But after a while I got used to the controls, and I can now call myself a qualified cleaner.

I never really completed a level, since I wanted to play the other levels as well, and I didn't want to play Mario Sunshine for hours, because of the other great games waiting for me. So usually I was jumping around a little, cleaning up paint or oil, jump a little more, try to reach a platform, fall off the platform, hence swimming now, don't know where to go, swimming some more, returning to a place where I've already been, select a new level.

The graphics were good. I can't say they were brilliant of fantastic because, well, they weren't. I'm pretty sure this was because of the fact that I was playing the NTSC version on a PAL tv, and therefore everything wasn't 100% clear. It still looked very good though, and I'm sure the PAL version will look much better.

What I really liked was the way Nintendo has come up with a solution for the camera-problem. If the camera isn't able to come behind Mario, you will see a shadow version of Mario through the walls. This is strange at first, but after a while you'll see that this is actually a very good idea. At least I liked it, though I heard some other people complain about it. I think this is much better than just removing the wall to film Mario from up close, like in Mario 64. This usally causes some problems when you're rotating the camera, and sometimes you see parts of the wall.

Again, there was no sound, so I can't give my comments on that.

On overall, a very good game. I don't think that it will make you as excited as Mario 64 did, because that game was just revolutionary. Still, Mario Sunshine is a worthy successor of Mario 64, and will definitely give you a lot of fun. A must have.