I'm up to 78 shines in Super Mario Sunshine. The path to the final boss still isn't clear.

I was wrong about there being 20 blue coins per stage. I gathered 21 blue coins from the second stage (the harbor), and there are at least two more I know of that I haven't yet gathered. So, it's at least possible that the number of blue coins is different for each world, and that I might have truly cleared out the first stage.

It takes forever to get the 100 coin shines in this game, much longer (as I recall) than the 100 coin stars in Super Mario 64. In SM64, most of the coins were just out in the open. Getting 100 mostly meant that you could reach and survive every area in a world in one life.

In Sunshine, the coins seem a little more hidden, or at least take some special technique to get them. It's not enough to be able to reach every area in a world (often, in fact, that's trivial).

I think the worlds in this game are comparible in size to those in SM64. Part of me is almost tempted to say that they're smaller, despite that there are fewer total. On the other hand, some of them do have multiple sections (for example, for the hotel stage, there is: The beach outside the hotel. The inside of the hotel (which is at least 4 floors), which has some smaller rooms branching off. A (small) casino. Two platform stages. A small hidden boss room.) Certainly it's nowhere near as sprawling as Donkey Kong 64.

I haven't reiterated any complaints about the camera. I have mostly gotten used to it, but it's still not good. The normal stages have many walls, which are constantly getting between Mario and the camera. The camera also can't always rotate all the way around if a wall blocks its path, even if the wall is and should be completely off screen.

When you're standing next to a wall, it's frequently possible to rotate the camera in such a way that you can tell that the inside of the structure is hollow. This was common in SM64, too, but maybe less common in other 3D games.

The camera for Sunshine is more like that of SM64 than most other 3D platformers. The view tends to be from overhead, rather than from behind the shoulder. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to use what SM64 called the "Mario camera" (you can, however, go into first person mode while Mario is motionless), but that's just as well because it wasn't even useful in that earlier game.

That does remind me of one thing I like better about the Gamecube controller than the N64 controller: I think it's better to have an analogue C controller than buttons. You can adjust the camera with as fine a precision as you want (assuming it lets you rotate it at all). With, say, Donkey Kong 64, you could only have a few angles to choose from. Also, there were times when I played Goldeneye and wished the C strafe buttons let me move in smaller (or more controllable)increments.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell