Heh, yeah, I did figure that out. But, damn, I figured I'd have to save him more often than I did. I think he only got me three stars before I came back to him in the garage, and he said he was done searching. It made me disappointed. Yeah, I've collected 75 stars myself so far, and I went ahead and beat Koopa and saw the ending just for the hell of it. I remember in M64 Koopa had a slightly different end speech based on whether or not you had all 120 stars, so I wanted to beat it before I got them all to see if the ending would be different when I got all 120 stars. I'm amazed how quickly this game went by, though.

Zion, since you have about 20 more stars than I do, do you know what the seventh star in some stages are? I know I haven't finished some of the bigger galaxies because I don't have a crown on them. And I've gotten the Trickster Comet and the Hidden Star, but apparently I'm still missing at least one star for a lot of these. Please don't tell me there are 100 coin stars like in M64... don't think 100 coins even exist in any of these levels...

EDIT: And, just for fun, does the whole "journey to the center of the universe" thing remind anybody of Sha Ka Re from Star Trek V?