(5-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

You get to go on a slide and at the end you gotta beat Bowser, because you get to MOVE and MOVE if there's turns, and also there's a slide in the snowy place!

[Dad's note: She would use the Wii U gamepad to go do the secret slide in Peach's Castle over and over again, every day for the entire summer of 2020]

I played this game specifically to spite people in a Discord server who were saying it's bad in one sitting to 100% because I will not take slander towards this absolute gem of a game. Mario 64 isn't perfect. Rainbow Ride is mid, the bosses aren't anything special, some of the stars are tedious as hell and exiting a stage every time you get a star gets monotonous after a while. But despite those issues everything from the controls, to (most of) the levels, to the music, to even the visual style for being one of the first N64 games is absolutely stellar. There's a reason why this game is the golden standart for 3D platformers, and why it's remained that for so long.

trying to come up with the most fucked up review to get all the Mario fans pissed off at me

"Uh Mario is lame and a loser"

the crowd flies into rage as I'm drowned in my own blood, but the fellow Mario haters quietly nod their heads in approval

An experienced dev team's first foray into true 3D that, shockingly, gets it right all the way back in June 1996.

Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.

The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.

Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.

Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!

Possibly the most fun I have playing as a character in a video game. Oh, what's that? The camera's bad? The music (especially towards the end) is repetitive? Tiny-Huge Island in general? Easy to overlook when you're chaining long jumps and careening around the various open stages with the sloppiest grace imaginable. I highly recommend going for 100%, THEN replaying to see how you can better utilize Mario's moveset to get the stars more efficiently. Trust me, your third eye'll open and you'll become like me: Doomed to replay this classic once a year forever more!

i get the feeling many of the people on this site probably grew up more or less around the same time i did; that, personally, being the tail end of the "wild west" of the internet, in the blossoming world of youtube and the advent of the "online game critic". personalities like james rolfe, or juan "johnny" ortiz, or emile rosales presented a wide world of gaming and criticism - both celebrating the highs of artistic and entertainment achievement and the impossibly low drudges of the medium - to my younger, impressionable self that seemed comparable to great tomes of the medium's history finally being dusted and cracked open for my own personal expeditions. my familiarity with super mario as a franchise stemmed primarily from a family friend's copies of super mario bros./duck hunt and super mario bros. 3 (two of my first ever gaming memories), and not far after that, a nintendo ds and new super mario bros. not too far after release. i'd also get ahold of sunshine and i recall recieving galaxy the holiday season of its release, but there was that nintendo 64 title which i heard so much about like a distant dream, just out of reach, that plagued my curiosity.

my first hands on exposure to mario 64 came in the form of its remake, which my lifelong best friend i can only imagine poured hours into - proudly showcasing to me various glitches and oversights in the game; my first memories with the title being watching him clip through a staircase, or the bewilderment i had watching yoshi, luigi and wario bounce around in a world i'd understood you played solely as mario in. these were those golden days of machinima, too - and mario's 64 model became synonymous with goofy early parody videos i'm sure i'd die of secondhand embarrassment digging up now, or those early memories of my mind being blown watching m.u.g.e.n. character battles as mario's render was, er, "seamlessly" transported into that vast ocean of street fighter ii-based powerscaling insanity. but i still hadn't played 64. i knew so much about it, i'd heard so many opinions and facts about it, and at an age so impressionable, you listen to those "big brother" figures online like that with ardent ears - and something within me morphed from curiosity to sort of an abject contrarianism.

well, for starters, where were the power-ups? super mario bros. 3 being my home base for mario, i'd anticipated all sorts of crazy suits and flowers and whatnot that made mario's appearance change, or give him cool powers, and what i saw in 64 just looked... lame. and those graphics sure made mario and bower and the bad guys look really silly. and why was every location so weird? why did people prefer this to the cleaned-up look of sunshine, or heck, ANY of those 2d games? that's what mario was to me then.

eventually emulation entered my life and those of you who can recall early n64 emulation probably rolled your eyes at those memories. attempting to play mario 64 on a keyboard on a windows xp-era desktop is about as joyless an experience as it sounds but it was ultimately my first impression of the game in my hands. i probably got about 10 stars in and wrote it home as not for me - and based on that experience i can't really blame my foolish young self. but this is around when my neighbors at the time, still two of my closest friends, entered the picture - alongside their n64.

long nights would be spent in my early teenage summers at their small beach cottage on that nintendo 64, my first personal exposure to some of the true landmarks of that catalogue - smash bros. 64, kirby 64, star fox 64, my first tastes of ocarina of time, banjo, bomberman 64... it was a formative time for me, and through my own emulation i was gaining more context and appreciation for the 8 and 16-bit eras, exploring my first instances of games as ART pieces. this was my first foray with earthbound, or symphony of the night, or super metroid, and my pallet was shifting. an artist myself, i began to understand and appreciate games as very much a part of that experience. and as the years crawled on i'd begin to see mario 64 in more and more games that i played - titles before and after mario 64, and the landmark place it held in the space and time of gaming it existed in became ever-clearer.

finally, i set out to finish the game completely with those friends, and it finally clicked. i finally saw what everyone in 1996 must've seen with widened, star-crossed eyes. on those long summer nights, between the eerie hum and the static glow of the crt, i felt something i hadn't had the intuition or the gift of feeling, seeing, or hearing, in any of my years. i saw the uncanny beauty and wonder of the wild expanses of the painting realms. i felt one with the controller and the unbridled joy in moving mario in tandem with my hands, i fell for the secrets and intrigue, tinted with koji kondo's defining score, i didn't want the journey to end, all 120 stars in. and it would be the first of, jesus, maybe a dozen full playthroughs i'd take on over those next years. even when i don't intend to complete the game again, i just get satisfaction from being in that world, from hopping, sliding, flipping, swimming, and flying through that technicolor dreamscape - and i'd like to think it's primarily mario 64's influence that has led to those late 90s consoles - the playstation, the n64, the saturn, the dreamcast - becoming my favorite to explore and experiment with. mario 64 is the ultimate platforming sandbox, it is the timeless, constant replayable toybox that lets you pick out how you want to spend every last saturday afternoon with it, and by god, it's one of those few truly good, heartfelt, and tender experiences in gaming i don't know where i'd be without. it wasn't my childhood game, it's not the one i have the most nostalgia from, but it might the game that, upon reflection, has watched my tastes mature and my appreciation of the medium evolve the most over time, and it's a game i think truly defines me as an appreciator of the craft and as a sprouting artist myself the most.

and the thing is, i'm sure there's millions of you who have that a story like that etched into your cartridges, too.

trying to come up with the most awesomed up review to get all the Mario fans loved off at me

"Uh Mario is cool and a my friend!"

the crowd flies into happiness as I'm drowned in my own love, but the opponent Mario haters quietly nod their heads in disapproval

Shigeru Miyamoto has gone on record saying that Mario “isn’t the kind of game you necessarily have to finish, it should be fun to just pick up and play,” and as a kid I often really would boot it up solely to jump around Bob-Omb Battlefield for a bit and feel myself or whatever. A pattern I’ve observed with a lot of gamers is that, as they get older, they slowly prioritize finishing games over simply the inherent fun of playing them — and while I definitely feel that was accurate for my late teens/early twenties as well, I’ve since returned to craving those more innate pleasures.

It’s wild how much Nintendo got right about Mario’s animations and the overall sound design on this first attempt, conveying that perfect sweetspot between weight and nimbleness, something I honestly don’t get as much out of 64's successors. Similarly, the level design also manages to find this nebulous since-unmatched middle-ground between open-ness and tight pacing, with many of the stages presenting you with vertical, spiral-shaped layouts, made up of multiple digestible paths that intersect so seamlessly that you never stop to think about them as anything other than one cohesive whole.

Aspects that feel like obvious limitations, like being booted out of the level when grabbing a Star or the rigid camera, end up aiding the game’s pacing and overall structure the more you actually think about it. The way you bounce between different paintings within Peach’s castle, completely at your own leisure, mirrors how you tackle the obstacles inside those worlds; loose and free-form and whichever way seems enjoyable to you at the moment without even having to think about it. It all seems so simple, and yet I’m still waiting for another platformer that is this immediately fun and endlessly replayable.

You know it's not often I play something with any kind of modicum of popularity these days, I have a soft spot for being the demented weirdo who plays the most random garbage that spans god knows how many systems. I like to celebrate the obscure, whether they're hidden gems or entertaining garbage that gets non-stop chuckles. It's very off-brand for me I know, but I've been interested in giving this an honest replay for a while.

It might be shameful for me to admit, but I was one of those edgelord kids ten years ago that went "ugh, why do people like Mario 64 so much?!" Often citing uninspired stage design, the camera being unhelpful at times during careful platforming, and just generally not liking it's philosophy of constantly booting the player out of the stage and have them experience the same stretches like groundhog day if they wished to 100% it.

Unfortunate for me to say, but I still don't enjoy 100%'ing this game. You're gonna need to threaten me with some kind of power drill to make me collect 100 coins on some of these stages. I think maybe that's why Spyro ended up aging better for me in the long run, as it's easier to just go through levels in one visit and collect everything and move on. Meanwhile Mario 64 kicks you out of stages like an angry pet owner constantly, and collecting 100 coins in one life just isn't as fun as collecting gems at my leisure. It's all subjective of course.

It's not to say I didn't enjoy my time with it. They really struck gold with Mario's movement in this game, just kinda bewildering how they managed to get it right and still give us a few useless moves. Do you use the little breakdancing kick from the crouching position? Nah, you're lying. It's worth full respect that they went out of their way to make sure every position had some kind of additional movement or attack, regardless if they even had any realistic use. It's the last thing I'll ever complain about, because well....movement good? Except sliding, I don't like the sliding bits much. "Mysterious Mountainside" my ass, that shit originally took me years to find.

It's weird, you'd think I'd have more nostalgia for something I played on Christmas with my dad when my family got me an N64. Probably because all of it is front-loaded into Peach's courtyard at the beginning, where I just had a barrel of laughs jumping around, and Mario hoot and hollered like a funny guy. Couldn't imagine a reality where Mario kept to himself in this game, don't think it'd be as fun. Trying to envision a scenario where Mario tries to walk up to a signpost, and instead clumsily runs into it and doesn't go "OOF!". It just isn't funny anymore.

For all my complaints I still see it's place in history despite being a Jumping Flash stan. At the risk of upsetting the speedrunning and A-Button challenge community, I don't think I love it as much as others do, but I will say my opinion has improved on it. If you ever get tired of me complaining about Rainbow Ride or the scab Lakitu they got doing the terrible camera work just throw this piece of music at me. I'll be instantly disarmed, not gonna lie. I tear up every time.

Thanks Koji Kondo, I'll forgive you for composing the slider theme that got spammed near the end.

Super Mario 64 is a game that means a lot to me.
It was one of the first video games that I came into contact with! Back when Google Videos was a thing, I remember coming across a TAS Speedrun of this game, and that's how I was introduced to it. I thought that all of the tricks the guy was doing, like backwards long jump, was all part of the game. Silly old me.

I remember when I was in the 4th grade, I used to play with some friends of mine roleplaying us going to various locations in Super Mario 64, and exclamating stuff like "Oh, it's too hot!" or "Brr, it's too cold!" depending on the painting we went to.
Good times.

Funnily enough though, I wouldn't get around to play the original Super Mario 64 until many years later. Before then, I only had access to the DS version, which I'll review one day.

In spite of the many stories I have with this game, and how much it means to me, it's interesting I don't consider Super Mario 64 to be one of my favourite games of all time. I think it mainly stems from other games just having an even bigger impact on me.

Mario makes his jump to the 3rd dimension, having full analogue movement and being able to do all kinds of moves! We've got Double and Triple Jump, the Wall Jump, the Long Jump, the Flip-Jump, a 3-hit punch combo, a Jump Kick, a Slide Kick, and for shits and giggles, we've got the Breakdance move, which I only use to make fun of the game's enemies. lol

It may seem complicated at first, but because all of these moves are tied to only 3 buttons (A, B and Z), you'll get to understand how Mario plays in no time. He's really fun to play as, and I'm glad Nintendo made him how he is!

The level structure has seen a bit of change from Mario's 2D titles. Instead of going to a stage, getting to the goal post, and moving on to the next stage, now in a level, you have Power Stars to get!
Power Stars are scattered all throughout the levels, and to beat the game, you only need 70 of them, out of 120.
Because of this, you have a lot of leeway in how you want to approach levels.

Levels are naturally designed to be sandbox-like in nature. So it's up to you on what you want to do, and how you want to explore a level.
Stages in general, aren't really too big, so most of the stars are easily obtainable.

All of with the exception of the 100-coin Stars. It's exactly what you think they are. They are stars that only appear when you gather 100 coins, and there is one of these in each of the game's 15 levels.
Now, not every one of these stars is hard to get. There are definitely some levels where it's easier to get it than others, like Course 2.
But some of these are an absolute grind!

So, here's some tips from someone who has played this game too much:
1. If you're going for 100%, make these the first stars you get!
I know that sounds odd, considering they're the most pain in the ass to get, but trust me, if you take care of them ASAP, you can comfortably go through the rest of the level without many problems.
2. Red and Blue Coins are extremely important!
Red Coins give you 2 coins, and Blue Coins give you 5. Whenever you see a Blue-Coins button, make sure your surrondings are clear, and that you immediately book to the blue coins that spawn so you don't miss any of them.
3. Unlike other stars in the game, 100-coin stars do not kick you out of the level, so that means you can get the 100-coin star of that level and get another star, like the Red Coin star of that level. 2 birds in 1 stone, as they say.

Outside of that, Princess Peach's Castle acts as your hubworld, and it's relatively small, but pretty fun to travel through. You need stars to unlock more levels, but many of the stars early in the game are relatively easy to get, so this shouldn't be much of an issue.
There are also the 3 Bowser levels, that you'll need to beat. These are more linear than the game's main 15 levels, and they are a great platforming challenge, with a fun boss at the end.

Which leads me into my next point, the boss fights!
They're okay. Yeah, most of these are very simple and don't provide many interesting mechanics of gimmicks. Outside of the Bowser fights... there's not many other bosses that will challenge you.
Even Bowser himself doesn't get challenging until you final encounter with him.

Bowser's model does look a bit funky, but the rest of the game is actually pretty nice to look at! Yeah, some of the game's textures are a bit too simple, but for a Nintendo 64 launch title, I'd say the game's charming low-polygon look still looks decent to this day!

Continuing with the presentation, there's also the soundtrack. A lot of songs here are very iconic, and well composed!
But... there's a lot of repetition, especially later in the game. No, game, I don't need the final 2 levels to have the same goddamn song.

Also, this game was the first one to have Mario speak!... in a mainline title.
Charles Martinet does a really good job as Mario, because inventing the iconic voice we still hear today, even if now we have a different voice actor for Mario.

Additionally, this game was also one of the first games to include a manual camera. Actually, I think it may've been this game that named the concept as a "camera", because Super Mario 64 contextualizes it as a Lakitu recording Mario's adventures on television, and that is really charming!
The camera itself is not bad, but it certainly can get stuck easily in tight spaces. I'll give the dev team a slack, because this was one of the first games to have a manual camera, but it definitely is one of things that hasn't aged gracefully.

In conclusion, there are a lot of things I love about Super Mario 64, but there are also some growing pains in this title that future games would fix. I have a lot of nostalgia with this one, so that's probably this review came out as big as it did, so despite the criticism I have with this game, it still holds a special place in my heart.
Rock on, Super Mario 64!

i hate discussing this game with fans because they always move the goal posts. no, this isn't the first time i've played an older 3d game, and no, i don't dislike this game because i can't appreciate them. i greatly enjoy and love games like resident evil, tomb raider, crash bandicoot, and sonic adventure; those were all early 3D offerings that were rough around the edges. they had very thought-out mechanics with intentionality behind their level design and were consistently engaging to play. i cannot say the same about this game. super mario 64 is not fun for me play because i do not find the mechanics or level design engaging. additionally, the camera is atrocious and has aged poorly. there's also this weird pseudo-tank controls aspect that changes how mario moves without warning and killed me several times in the later levels like TTC and RR. movement is actively one of the worst parts of this game, which is the kiss of death for a platformer. i don't dislike this game for being old, i dislike this game for being bad.

i respect what it tries to do, and i think there is some level of admiration game devs of the time express for it that i understand. i get why this was such a groundbreaking game in some ways. but, i grew up in this era, and even as a kid, this game didn't connect with me. finally sitting down and playing it as a fully grown adult, i can understand and verbalize what it is that fucks me off from this. am i impressed with the attempt to focus so much on momentum as a platforming principle? yes. do i think this game hits the mark with that lofty goal? absolutely not. again, it's not that this game is old; i had this same exact feeling when it was still a new game. i do not enjoy super mario 64 not because it is dated, because dated things can still be enjoyed. i do not enjoy super mario 64 because i do not enjoy super mario 64.

1.5/5.0 feels harsh, but it's a combination of not enjoying my time with this game as well as resenting this game's legacy. i don't understand how this is still regularly discussed in contention for greatest game of all time. i hate how it's still seen as hipster and contrarian to say this game isn't the second coming of christ. and, most importantly, i am very tired of this idea that the games that we love cannot have flaws and cannot be criticized.

It's been a while since I last visited my Retro Games Bucket List. I swear I didn't push off the last entry to coincide with some sort of arbitrary milestone (my 500th review if Backloggd's metrics can be trusted), but it was either this or Sonic Origins Plus. No, I just find it very difficult to discuss Super Mario 64 and have struggled for a while with how I want to approach it.

My apprehension doesn't come from the fact that Mario 64 and its legacy have been so thoroughly discussed, at least not necessarily. That certainly does pose a challenge, after all it is one of the most influential and historically significant games in the medium, and it's been documented to death for good reason. All I can really add is my own personal experiences with it, but that's where the real difficulty comes in, because I've so deeply linked the game to my late grandfather, and framing a whole review for a Mario game around parsing his death just sounds a little bit silly.

I could instead talk about how my first exposure to Super Mario 64 didn't actually come from my grandpa despite how much I tie it to him. When the Nintendo 64 came out, the arcade I used to hang out in had one hooked up to a big TV and roped off with velvet. Ten bucks for ten minutes with Mario, a damn good racket. The save already had all 120 stars unlocked, and the very first thing I did was jump into the cannon outside Princess Peach's castle, which takes you to the castle's roof and face-to-face with Yoshi. The next day I kept insisting to all my friends that Yoshi was in Mario 64. I was called a liar and relentlessly mocked. I knew what I saw, damnit! There's a Yoshi up there! He's gave me 100 lives!!

Anyway, I really hate Yoshi games for some reason.........

It's snowing out, and there are elk roaming in my grandpa's backyard - his house is large and remote, the massive fenced off satellite dish he gets TV from is bordered by miles and miles of pure nature. I'm playing Dire Dire Docks, and by that, I mean I'm mostly drowning to death over and over again, but the music and atmosphere is serene. Grandpa laughs warmly when I die, then he offers some advice, but mostly he just watches and lets me figure it out, as he did whenever we played games together. I don't know it at the time, but I would never be there again.

Ah, yeah, that sounds kinda dumb. But the most insightful thing I have to share about Mario 64 isn't some hot nugget of development history, or a unique perspective on its mechanics, how Mario handles or the way its levels are designed. As much as I would love to tear into it as I would any other game, I can't. Every time I try to write about how important the game was for establishing analog controls or the way it shaped the next several years of 3D platformers, I just get lost in a nostalgic haze, thinking about how much fun I had on the title screen alone, molding Mario's face like that scene from The Hundred Days of the Dragon. Mom walking in, asking "what the hell are you playing," and grandpa answering very curtly, "Mary-oh." I'd correct him. He'd never get it right. To the grave, it was "Mary-oh."

Nowadays, the scene around Super Mario 64 is still lively, though its greatest contributions are so codified in the medium that you'll likely take them for granted. Instead, it lives on more fervently through trite analog horror and speedruns which may or may not be influenced by stray cosmic particles. It occupies such a weird space; one I would've been far more fascinated by as a child. "L is real" captivated me, if you told me back then that every cart was personalized, my eyes would be as wide as saucers. I'm pretty dumb, but I was straight stupid in the 90s.

Super Mario 64 felt like an impossibly huge game to me. Peach's castle was large and full of secrets, and though I eventually got a Nintendo 64 of my own, I could only explore Mario 64 when visiting my grandpa. It was a strange omission from my collection, yet that always left me excited to play more when I visited his house. How much further had he gotten? What cool new things could he show me? What new games did he have, did he get any more promo tapes? The last one had a couple of guys put Mario's head in a damn vice, that was pretty fucked up!

There's a reason Mario 64 was the last game I wanted to get to in my bucket list, as the whole impetus behind making one in the first place was a form of retreat. It felt somehow appropriate to close the whole thing out with it. I really appreciate everyone who stuck with me as I went through my list, reviewing classics like Contra Hard Corps and hot liquid shit like Aero the Acro-Bat. I promise I'll get back to reviews like that soon.

Super Mario 64 is a great game. Bad camera, and it's gotten trendy to write off other parts of it that are antiquated, even despite the fact that for what it doesn't get right, it was still one of the first to do it. But I can't go in on that, even if I see a lot of those rough edges, too. I'm just too emotionally invested in it.

Has any other game given us something like Watch For Rolling Rocks in 0.5 A Presses? And if they haven't, could they? A lot of games when taken to their outer limits feel like breaking them; like you hotwired the machine of Pokemon Red or Ocarina of Time to spit you out at the ending. There's fascination in that, sure. But for all the non-Euclidean twists and taffy-stretching it has been exposed to over the past two-decades-plus, Super Mario 64 in a sense remains whole. You can pull at the seams of this game on a quantum level in the name of not pressing the A button and it doesn't ever really split, but rather reveals another wrinkle to tug. On top of that, this magic is achieved not through behind-the-scenes manipulation but instead through a small Italian man gleefully performing acrobatics and building up enough speed to phase through gaps between atoms.

Its place at the dawn of 3D console video games only strengthens its pull in this regard. The new dimension begged so many questions about what was and wasn't possible that it feels like we'll never hit the end of them in this single game, let alone in the medium. Equally important is the meticulous commitment to making basic locomotion feel so easy to grasp yet hold remarkable depth that people would care about it on its own, inventing convoluted challenges because they got bored of playing the game as it was designed but not of playing with the game as it is. It was always going to be The First 3D Mario Game and thus would always have a pull on people, but I don't think that accounts for just how deeply people have studied and stretched and scrambled this game. There's something deeper there.

Think about the general recognition that the stacked "mario-yahoo" sound effect of backwards-long-jumping has reached. What once sounded like something going wrong now carries a sensation similar to an older sibling asking if you want to see something weird. A signal that you are about to unravel something previously solid and follow the loose tendrils to new places. Maybe not the most emotionally resonant or life-changing type of depth, but one that feels largely distinct to video games as a medium. Though I'll never personally dip my toes in those waters I still find enjoyment in watching others diving to the bottom of this game's ocean, and in my own time spent floating in the comparative shallows.

this game is super cool. it's a high-grade experiment that barely cares about the (already not that established) Mario tropes in exchange for nonsense tiny playgrounds that have more ideas than they have "levels" inside them. i think that's cool. it barely feels like you're playing a videogame sometimes. the floating pieces of land that you walk on are there almost entirely to take advantage of a piece of Mario's movement options, so they actually feel like those 2D Mario levels where every single thing is there in the name of the core game. but i unfortunately kinda hate that part.

i've never been a fan of nintendo's utilitarian approach to design. it just means that areas must be in some way useful more than they are actual places. in 64 this means that you're forced to care about Mario's (conceptually cool) moveset at every opportunity. i can't even enjoy my abstract nothinglands in peace without having to engage with some random setpiece to get a star.

it's the structure as well… yuno.. i'm not one to usually care about intricate challenges when a game cares about it more than anything. even considering how loose some star objectives are, they're still filled with specific little challenges that completely ruin any sense of hanging out i could've had. yeah, i also really dislike the way almost all stars kick you out of the levels. they sometimes linearly change the level to different versions of themselves that make other stars possible and some others impossible, but sometimes that just makes the levels way too bite-sized to make an impact. like, i have to get at least 70 stars in this thing, so i have no time to keep playing around because that shit takes time to do. i get a similar feeling when i'm done with 4 worlds in 2D Mario games and i know that i still gotta make my way through another 4 worlds. i'm already dreading to do the rest before i'm even there.

when you get used to a level's flow in Mario 64, it gets a little better - but then you gotta consciously go through that all over again and see some new tiny setpieces in another level. and it's gonna really suck when you realize that you can only get all the red coins (of which you already spent some time looking for) when the level changes to another star and a path to that last one opens up.

but it's such a magical game with magical lands… these understated little boxes of characters and structures made tangible only by Mario's presence are a thing to behold. the level Tall, Tall Mountain, for example, is just this huge chunk of a mountain that you gotta climb multiple times to get different stars in different situations. it feels monumental because it's one of the few levels that takes the game's trend toward up/downhill climbing to the foreground of the play. in this level specifically, stopping to smell the roses feels positively uncanny because, since everything is there for a mechanical purpose, it loses itself in the absence of interaction. that's kinda awesome but it makes my head hurt a little.

it irks me because i genuinely enjoy the landscapes in here. they're the extreme version of the visually agnostic Mario levels that feel completely alien because of how random and generic their assets are. by setting the levels up as these random paintings that you stumble onto and not holding on to even some basic staples like the turtle guys and pipes, they made something that feels really uncanny.

i don't really get how people frame some games like Majora's Mask as being "mysterious" when they feature some really charming and normal-ass writing, full-on cutscenes, and NPCs with schedules walking around the world. it feels way more deliberate than the surprising nothings that Mario 64 gives players. there's a vague sense that Bowser took over Peach's Castle but absolutely nothing that contextualizes the bonkers structure. for me that's what makes it interesting! it just really loses me when those cool aspects are stuck with nintendo's approach to games.

Mario 64 is stuck in an impossible equation in my head bc it's at once the coolest game by nintendo that i've touched because it's made by them and also a game that i dislike playing because it still tries to follow their design pillars so much. goddamnit now i wanna play more nintendo games to satisfy my curiosity. please help me

One can't overstate the historical impact of Super Mario 64. Its analog-stick controls and adjustable camera set the stage for 21st century gaming. Its 3D platforming has as many imitators as a mid-1960s Beatles album. And there's still nothing like the surreal invitation to stretch the features of Mario's big face before the game even starts.

But I still hesitate to call Mario 64 great. Once you acknowledge the major leap in presentation and get over the thrill of moving in three-dimensional space, you're left with a Mario that overemphasizes the collection of items in levels that you must play to death. Before Mario 64, Mario games had a momentum to them. Mario 64 feels more like a scavenger hunt without stakes. There's little urgency or pressure. By the halfway point, I'm already disinterested.

And whatever happened to the creative thinking behind Mario's abilities? The conservatism started with Super Mario World, which merely updated how the hero can fly and gave him a gimmicky dinosaur buddy. In Mario 64, the most notable addition is the expanded repertoire of jumps, but let's not forget this more acrobatic style already showed up in the greatest remake of all time, Donkey Kong 1994. The effects of the special caps in Mario 64 don't spark my imagination: another flying ability and two passive abilities, one of which corrects the stupid regressive rule that Mario can't breathe underwater. It's almost as if 1990s Nintendo threw up its hands after conceiving the wide array of game-changing powers in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Yoshi's Island.

I also despise Mario 64's patronizing, one-dimensional tone. This is a case where the massive influence of Mario 64 has short-circuited the gaming world's memory of what pop games could achieve emotionally. No matter the stage, Mario hoots like he just won the lottery as he jumps about. This creative decision smacks of the condescension Nintendo trotted out with the smiling clouds in the remakes within Super Mario All-Stars. It's clear Nintendo stopped trusting the emotional reactions of its audience with the release of Mario 64. Now people expect to hear the cute yelps and get showered with praise for finding a star under a rock. Would our tails no longer wag without these features?

I'm very emotional as I write this. This is my favorite single player game ever - it's not even close. I could talk about some of it's flaws, but while they might be flaws to most people, they're not to me. I love everything about this game.

Tonight I finally did it. I wish I had an audience to witness me. My 120th star - 100 Coins in Hazy Maze Cave - and I went outside, got shot out of a canon and met that scum bag rat fuck son of a bitch bastard Yoshi for my very first time!!!

My childhood is complete <3 this is a true coming of age moment for me.

Soundbox Companion

Ok you can so what you want about this being another dumb Nintendo game or just a shitty outdated platformer or a childrens game or whatever but let me speak my truth here.

Teaching somebody the 16 star speedrun at my dingy home would unironically be more intimate than the most depraved sexual fantasies I could think of. Teaching somebody how to BLJ would be so hot, I would kiss their feet after they succeeded at it.

This is not a joke, if you haven't tasted the speedrunning world of this game you're missing out on a huge part of its appeal. If you're a really close lady friend of mine I would show you how to do it no questions asked. I been thinking this in the back of my head for over a month now. It will probably be a genuine part of my dating life going forward and I'm not sorry for that in fact the reason I'm even saying this is to make room for the fact other people might also feel like that. It also has the best sound design I've ever heard in my entire life. They gave the pirahna plant a lullaby theme song that you activate by stepping into its aura. This is an incredibly experimental sound design decision that you dont see in contemporary gaming. They would try to imitate this lullaby effect 10 years later with Galaxy via a cutscene transition into Rosalina reading a book for to the lunas but because of the diversion in interactivity, it left Rosalina feeling like a maternalistic overlord. In this way I would argue a lot of contemporary game design is extremely parental, its having an event happen towards you that you have to accept. The pirahna plant lullaby is spontaneous and you only have to accept it as long as you are within the boundaries of that space, you can leave it whenever you're tired of it. I think there's a genuine romance in the design of SM64 that's worth exploring, but it cant be done by me alone.