Before I begin I must preface that I took points off due to the 8 directional D-Pad being a huge hinderance on the controls and puts a huge limit on all the cool shit you can do in Mario 64. Otherwise it'd be 4.5-5 Stars. Playing with the Joystick mod alleviates 99% of the the movement issues (turning around's still a little off but you get used to it) and improves the game drastically. In short, Joystick Mod or die playing this game on DS is just playing it wrong, and everything going forward is using it.
Since I was getting close to my 1,000th game logged, I decided I needed to do a special game for the occasion, and what I ultimately settled on was the remake of one of the all-time greats...and it's still really good! Yeah you can't BLJ and there's no So Long Gay Bowser, but there were some things in here I wish Mario 64 itself had. While I don't care for catching countless rabbits to unlock minigames (and they don't go away after you catch them!), there are small alterations to the courses that are improvements, like Tick-Tock Clock feeling more varied in how you approach it. Some boss fights were made way cooler like the first King Bomb-omb fight, some were made worse like the Big Boo (the fight itself is cooler but getting to him is obnoxious), and some stayed the same like King Whomp (except that you can't cheese it). All the cool stuff I could do in 64 I could still feel here and it still made me feel smart for getting stars in seemingly unintended ways. The characters are hit or miss: While Luigi provides an alternative playstyle and is completely optional for 100%, Yoshi and Wario feel more like keys. For Yoshi it's worse since there's no Hat to become him so you have to enter a level as him.
The camera feels worse than 64 since you have less ways to control it (just L!), but it never became too much of an issue.
The Power Flower is neat, you can break a few missions with it since it's character based. Loved a lot of the new stars, especially the switched time ones and Silver Stars (though I wish you weren't stopped every Silver Star. The graphics and updated designs are generally good if a little washed out, and Bowser actually looks presentable here and got a bit harder than before (harder to grab, has more invuln time to prevent cheap shots, but to compensate the bombs are bigger).
All in all while my nostalgia and preference will still go to 64, there's still absolutely a lot to love about DS that had it not needed a mod to play properly, could go to-to-toe with the original. But get that Joystick mod going and you'll have a wonderful way to re-experience a classic!
I never actually rescued Wario. It's funnier this way.
Since I was getting close to my 1,000th game logged, I decided I needed to do a special game for the occasion, and what I ultimately settled on was the remake of one of the all-time greats...and it's still really good! Yeah you can't BLJ and there's no So Long Gay Bowser, but there were some things in here I wish Mario 64 itself had. While I don't care for catching countless rabbits to unlock minigames (and they don't go away after you catch them!), there are small alterations to the courses that are improvements, like Tick-Tock Clock feeling more varied in how you approach it. Some boss fights were made way cooler like the first King Bomb-omb fight, some were made worse like the Big Boo (the fight itself is cooler but getting to him is obnoxious), and some stayed the same like King Whomp (except that you can't cheese it). All the cool stuff I could do in 64 I could still feel here and it still made me feel smart for getting stars in seemingly unintended ways. The characters are hit or miss: While Luigi provides an alternative playstyle and is completely optional for 100%, Yoshi and Wario feel more like keys. For Yoshi it's worse since there's no Hat to become him so you have to enter a level as him.
The camera feels worse than 64 since you have less ways to control it (just L!), but it never became too much of an issue.
The Power Flower is neat, you can break a few missions with it since it's character based. Loved a lot of the new stars, especially the switched time ones and Silver Stars (though I wish you weren't stopped every Silver Star. The graphics and updated designs are generally good if a little washed out, and Bowser actually looks presentable here and got a bit harder than before (harder to grab, has more invuln time to prevent cheap shots, but to compensate the bombs are bigger).
All in all while my nostalgia and preference will still go to 64, there's still absolutely a lot to love about DS that had it not needed a mod to play properly, could go to-to-toe with the original. But get that Joystick mod going and you'll have a wonderful way to re-experience a classic!
I never actually rescued Wario. It's funnier this way.