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 already knew plenty of things about this game before starting it. In the past few years, I've watched a bit of SM64 content on YouTube, especially speedruns...
It's unfortunate that I didn't go in Mario 64 completely blind, but hey, doesn't mean I didn't have fun!
And since the only speedruns I've watched are any%, I was still very unfamiliar with most of the levels.

I played an unofficial PC port of the game called "Super Mario 64 Plus"
The best additions of this port are the improved movements with Mario, and free camera control.

I've seen everyone and their mother complain about the game's controls, and how poorly they have aged. I guess this port did a wonderful job fixing the controls, because they didn't bother me at any point 👍

I love how fluid the movements are compared to Mario Galaxy, which is the only other 3D Mario game I've played. The Side Somersault especially is so much better. I often found myself using this move into wall jump to reach really high places. These moves are very flexible & satisfying to use.

Yes. I threw the baby penguin in the void after his mama gave me the Star 😈 evil laugh

"File Select", "Inside Peach's Castle" and "Dire Dire Docks" are my 3 favorite pieces of music in the game. It's just so good, I'm not surprised Mario 64's soundtrack has become so iconic!
I like how peaceful the exterior of the Castle is. No music, just the sound of waterfalls, birds & grasshoppers. Very calming ❤

For a game released in 1996, there were very interesting ideas in the level-design:
- The fact that they were already messing with the gravity, way before Sunshine & Galaxy (the tall pillars in Shifting Sand Land)
- In Tiny-Huge Island, the way you teleport to a shrunken version of the level gives the illusion that Mario shrinks after entering the green pipes. It was pretty clever.
- It's cool how some World's layouts change depending on how you enter the paintings! Whether it's Wet-Dry World with the water level, or Tick Tock Clock with the pendulum's speed.

This only occured to me after finishing the game, but the Worlds are really tiny. And what's great is that they all seem to be packed with content. There isn't any wasted space in any of the levels.
I also like how after unlocking the wing cap, vanish cap & metal cap, new stars become accessible in every level. It gave a satisfying feeling of progression.

After obtaining the 120 stars, you can meet Yoshi on the castle's roof and receive a sweet message from the developers. This was such a cool reward for finishing the game.
I don't know if I would have enjoyed the game as much as I did if I played it vanilla. This PC port made the adventure really enjoyable!

To end this review, I felt like ranking each World from most to least favorite:
1) Wet-Dry World
2) Lethal Lava Land
3) Hazy Maze Cave
4) Jolly Roger Bay
5) Big Boo's Haunt
6) Snowman's Land
7) Cool Cool Mountain
8) Tick Tock Clock
9) Dire Dire Docks
10) Tall Tall Mountain
11) Shifting Sand Land
12) Whomp's Fortress
13) Bob-Omb Battlefield
14) Tiny-Huge Island
15) Rainbow Ride

----------Playtime & Completion----------

[Started on April 28th & finished on May 1st 2024]
Playtime: 16 hours
100% Completion

I will never forget mine and my brother's disappointment with Super Mario 64. We could not believe this game was not similar to Super Mario World. At that point, our experience with Mario was with the 2D formula: get to the end of the stage, beat the boss in the castle, go to another world. Super Mario 64 was clunky, confusing and even frustrating in the beginning. The idea of 3D games was interesting in the magazines, but nauseating in real life. It didn't take long for me to fall in love with this game and to start appreciating the new. I still don't understand how we got this game instead of something more similar to Crash Bandicoot, but after some years and some playthroughs, I love Super Mario 64 more and more.

There isn't a whole lot I can say about this game that hasn't already been said about a trillion times by now, so I'll just leave it at this:

This game is a lot of fun if you're just going through it at your own pace and playing it through any%. The first and second floors are very strong in the level design department, although Shifting Sand Land's 100 coin star is pretty tedious. The third floor has some doozies, but I remember feeling like a genius for figuring out an unintentional way of getting the star on the far-off mushroom in Tall Tall Mountain as six year old.

The game really drops off in quality by the last two courses, which are not only super linear (contradicting the design philosophy of being more open ended that the game has used up to this point) but exist over a huge ass bottomless pit.

The beauty of this game's collect-a-thon nature is that you can skip all of the badly designed courses. You'll still have to collect more than half of the game's power stars, but there is more than enough leeway to ignore Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride (and then some). Go for all 120 stars, however, and it really puts things into perspective and suddenly all of those comments about the game aging poorly start to make sense. I have a feeling there's a reason that I never bothered to get all of them until a year or two ago.

I'll also highly recommend Super Mario 64 Plus for PC while I'm here. It's a highly customizable experience that lets you tweak the gameplay to be as close to (or as far removed) from the vanilla game as you'd like. Just want to play at 60 FPS with all of the growing pains in tact? Go for it. Want that buttery smooth 60 FPS with a side of no boot-outs and a much better camera? It's there too.

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!

The camera sucks half the stages suck walljumping sucks and dying is overly punishing this is one of the best 3D platformers every made and not enough games took the right lessons from it.

The lack of a double jump or gliding and the near complete lack of air control makes platforming actually rewarding unlike most other 3D platformers. I get that the genre is mostly aimed at toddlers but kids fucking loved Mario 64 so I don't want to hear any excuses.
Mario 64 also manages to avoid the "every collectible is just lying on the ground" problem that every other collectathon including mario odyssey has by having some platforming or exploring involved behind getting most stars.
What I'm trying to say is that I fucking hate Banjo Kazooie. Bitch fuck Banjo Kazooie and its fans hope they get exactly one new game and gruntilda marries a man.