Perhaps you’re new to gaming and don’t understand how this works. Listen: every four years or so Shigeru Miyamoto and his dreamteam of coders, artists, designers and musicians release a new Super Mario game. It’s fundamentally a platform game but is so beautifully crafted, nuanced, creative and unfettered in its use of ideas that, like all true classics, it defies genre. A masterclass in form and function, these games show everybody else in the world how it should be done. It puts smiles on the faces of children and adults alike, raises the world’s expectations again for what is possible in videogames and inspires a whole new generation to aspire to create videogames when they grow up. This is how it is with Super Mario Galaxy…

So it's amazing - obviously - but it’s also better than we'd ever dared hope. The GameCube’s Super Mario Sunshine was excellent but failed to match the wonder and majesty of the previous title in the series, Super Mario 64. This consigned that game top the position of being ‘second best platform game ever made’. Now Galaxy arrives, dispensing with the rules and physics of a straightforward videogame world and exploding the form into a string of different galaxies to explore and it is, without any doubt, the best platform game ever made.

The premise, familiar to anyone who has played a Mario game before, is ancient and expected: rescue Princess Peach, collect as many Stars as you can, save the world. Except, that world is now a universe. You start with access to a single galaxy in space and, having entered one of its worlds Mario is propelled from mini-level to maxi-level across time and space, tackling each new landmass to find a puzzle and solution, collect the star it holds before effortlessly moving on to the next. It's like stream of consciousness game design where every single idea is perfect, self-contained, never repeated and there are ten thousand of them laid out in a line. When you’ve collected a certain number of stars a new galaxy opens up and in this way the game allows you to pursue different places and themed worlds as you so desire.

Mario’s tool set of moves is surprisingly complex with triple jumps, backwards flips, spin attacks (for taking down the cutesy enemies), stomp attacks and hover moves as well as a slew of power-ups that grant him unusual abilities (e.g. Bee Mario can fly). Controls are tight and fluid, split over the Wiimote and Nunchuck in such a way that is never unwieldy or confusing. Nintendo never overwhelm you with these moves, easing you into the experience and gameplay language with such expertise they make almost every other game’s opening chapters seem amateurish by comparison.

Talking about the individual puzzles, levels, bosses, races, time challenges and ideas is difficult because there are so many of them. Each one is perfectly rounded, distinct and interesting. The richness of the game design is unrivalled and will make you smile and feel that elusive childlike joy of exploration and wonder that is, to many of us, the reason we still play videogames.

The game’s comfortable, the camera angles always perfect and exact and you constantly feel as through you are in the hands of a master, in a genuinely classic world. There are many games it’s easy to recommend this Christmas: gaming has never before had such rich pickings. But there are no games to recommend over this one. This is a game that will still be referred to in a hundred years time, and even when the hyperactive hyperbole of over-excited reviewers has dulled, the unshakeable quality and depth of this experience will stand strong. What’s more, you can say you were there at the birth of it all.

5 out of 5