just out of curiosity what other environments are there other than space? everything i can think of is a variation of one of those.

Man, this manual brings nostalgic tears to my eyes.

Almost makes me feel sorry for buying it digitally. Almost.

My Wii LAN Adapter solves that, at least it comes with HDMI cables. Wouldn't want to buy that separately.

Shopping Mall

Casino

Prison

Warzone

Brothel

Queue at Post Office

Something more specific that's interesting. Nintendo manages to do if for 3D Mario - Bob-omb Battlefield, Honeyhive Galaxy, Ricco Harbour.

You just know that any of the desert levels would fit right into World 2 of SMB3, NSMB Wii or NSMB DS. In fact the whole game could just be transplanted onto the end of NSMB Wii and no one would notice. I don't need a text-heavy story but can I have some in-game context and flair other than, "the devs threw these worlds together with an editor because it looked cool" which is very much the vibe I get from NSMB and even Galaxy 2.

So this game has a food theme going for it. Mite b cool.

Isn't at least one (likely more) of the desert levels dessert-themed? Melting cakes and all that jazz?

those are sub-categories (which we don't really know enough about to judge right now). Like Ricco Harbour (sounds like it) fits into water and Honeyhive Galaxy fits into grass. The general details stay pretty much the same, the specifics change. While I can't judge how much they change in this game (and neither can you) until release, the general overworld map doesn't give enough information to judge anything right now...

Looks like "meringue."

My only ambivalence is that Super Mario World levels were similarly food-named, but aside from making the ground chocolate-brown for Chocolate Island Nintendo did nothing with any of that.

It says meringue clouds

Very fitting actually