I received this game for Christmas in a year when we were at my grandparents' house outside of Phoenix. In anticipation of this, I'd actually brought my Gamecube with me and played the game during our trip on their big-screen TV.

This is widely criticized as one of the worse 3D Mario games, but I'm actually fond of it. It displays a lot of the relentless creativity of the later Galaxy games, and it expanded on Mario's acrobatic moveset. It has pretty good boss fights, a couple of infuriating and maybe poorly-balanced challenges, and a camera that could still get in the way.