Mario Finds His Inner Beethoven

So last night while my wife was in the other room watching sparkly vampires not make out, I was actually using my Wii to play games.  "Wah? LOL Wii sux...", you say.  Yeah, yeah, I could devote an entire post to the sorry state of the Wii in relation to the hardcore gamer, but that would just be beating a dead horse at this point.  Usually it's just a glorified Netflix streaming box, but last night I was rocking out on some Super Mario Galaxy 2.  Mario and I have been through a lot together. The NES original was the first game I ever beat, the second game was charming in its drastic departure from the original, the third is an all-time classic.....blah...blah.  You get it.  I don't need to explain Mario's place in gaming history to YOU. 

Anyway, the Galaxy series is fantastic.  Music included.  Now, tunes from Mario games are known to be generally good, so pointing one out as such should come as no surprise.  I loved the approach in this series, moving to a fully orchestrated soundtrack as opposed to using MIDI.  It's amazing the depth and sense of quality a good score played by a real orchestra can bring to a game.  Here's the track that really stood out to me:

This theme really does a great job of separating the boss levels from the normal kind.  There is a sense of foreboding that the regular level themes don't have, but it's not so dark that you forget you're playing a Mario game, and darn it, it's supposed to be fun. 

This is a highly entertaining game.  The level design, music, and boss battles are all challenging and fun.  I finished the final level last night, but still need to go back to get all 120 stars.  Good tunes like this will make it fun to do so.