Super Mario 64 Review

How could we talk about the nintendo 64 without mentioning Super Mario 64, starring the great mustache-wearing plumber himself, Mario.


Having made his first appearance in 1982's arcade game Donkey Kong, Mario was then known as Jumpman, because all he could do was jump to avoid the barrels Donkey Kong was throwing at him. The game instantly became a huge sucess, which led on to the Super Mario Bros serie that started in 1985 with super mario bros.





The game was an even greater sucess than Donkey Kong and Mario rapidly became Nintendo's main money maker. Since then, all Mario's titles released were a sucess (except for a few, like super mario bros 2 and Mario is missing).

In the two dimensional platformer genre, Super Mario Bros was the game every game developper pointed fingers at while saying :"If we beat this one, then money and fame will come". Fortunately this never hapenned and only Sonic The Hedgehog came close to beating the Super Mario Bros. In the end of 1995, the SNES was getting closer and closer to it's end and was going to be replaced by the Nintendo 64. The only difference here is that the N64 was a 3D console. Sure, Mario kicks ass in 2D but in 3D? Has Nintendo succeeded in making our 2D plumber a fluid and nice to play with 3D mustache man or did they fail the translatio in the scary three dimensional world? Stick around to find out. 

                                                          The Story

Well, what can I say about the story? You start the game by receiving a letter from princess peach who is inviting you to ther castle to eat a delicious cake. When you get to the castle, you learn that Bowser kidnapped princess Peach and is hiding in the top floor of the castle, of which you can only gain access by completing levels and obtaining 2 keys (that you get by inexplicably defeating bowser 2 times). To get to the boss battles though, you need to have earned enough stars to open the door to the boss stage. That's pretty much it, I mean, what else did you expect from a mario game?

 Here's where this game stands out from the previous ones. In the castle, there are numerous doors that you can enter (if you have enough stars, that is) and they lead you into differents levels. In those said levels, you have many things to do, like:
- Racing a koopa by foot to the top of a hill!
-Freeing a mean chomp-chomp.
-Defeating the [insert one of bowser's minions name] king.
-Finding hidden stars.
-Solving puzzles.
-Collecting secret coins (which lead to another star)
-Defeating numerous foes, and there's a ton of them.
-Swimming!!
 -Exploring sunken pirate ships.
-Sliding down mountains.
-Flying in the air!
-And the list goes on for a while...

 In each level, you get a star for collecting 100 coins, another one for collecting the 8 red coins, and the other 7 stars differ from one stage to another. That's pretty much how it goes. While doing so, you can even unlock power-ups (because what would a Mario Bros. game be without power-ups right?). One turns you invisible, letting you go through certain surfaces, the other makes you fly and the last one transforms you in a metal Mario, heavy as s**t.

Now, this all looks good on paper, but what happens when you put it in the game? Well, it's just fantastic.
As soon as you take control of Mario, you know this is going to be an intense experience. First off, Mario has a wide array of new moves like double jump, long jump, belly slide, butt-cheeks slide, punch, kick, jump kick, ground attack, hiding attack (where you just crouch and hit everything around you with your feet). He can bounce on walls, climb onto surfaces, hold on to edges, move while being crouched, slide along walls, get set on fire and start running around like crazy, triple jump and I'm probably forgetting some. The amout of new things they put into this game is just groundbreaking and would take me forever to enumerate. 

Now, what does it look like graphically? Well for the time, it was astonishing considering it was one of the first games released on the Nintendo 64  and 5 years later, when the nintendo gamecube was released, it still still was one of the best looking games on the system. The locations in this game are more than just a few bricks put on top of each other. During the time you'll spend playing this game, the locations will vary from a sunken pirate ship to an icy mountain, to a blazing hot desert to the inside of a giant clock, while of course putting you on a magic flying carpet flying in the sky before putting you in a poisonous underground where you'll meet the Loch Ness monster little brother, unless of course you're shrinked down the size of a shrimp and have to fight off a giant caterpillar. Maybe in the doing, you'll end up in a haunted mansion, or maybe inside a hot volcano, who knows? And the best part about this is that all those locations have their own music (or most of them) which are more than just some electronic sounds. For example:                      
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4TOM5Mitps

                           http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAXoL8TnE0I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POBbjyJKOy0

All these songs will stick into your brain until you die, guaranteed.
Now, the last element that needs to be discussed is of course the roots of Super mario: The platforming element. Does this sequel stay true to the previous titles? Well a big yes and an even bigger yes. The whole game revolves around it's strongest point, jumping. Even though they added a punch and kick attack in the game, it's pretty useless since almost all ennemies can die from a jump attack and it's a lot more deadly than charging with Mario's ridiculously short arms.

 Almost all the stars in the game, except for a very few ones, will require you to jump onto a LOT of things. They really upgraded mario's jump ability in this game which gives the possibiility of advanced platforming gameplay, and they exploited that possibility to the maximum. The biggest flaw of this game, however, is the camera system, which is just awful. Most of your deaths in this game won't be because you took too much damage, but because you will have jumped towards a big hole because you couldn't see the pole you were aiming for BECAUSE the camera was stuck behind the wall, minding it's own busines. The camera is not the only problem about the jump'n miss mania in super mario 64, it's also because there is no precise way to tell you where you will lend when jumping from a pole or a thin object, you have no indication at all except for the memories of your previous tries. Maybe that's just me and the game was supposed to be played like this but I figure the game would be a little bit funnier to play if I didn't keep falling in holes. This does not make the game hard, but a simply little bit frustrating at times. The last point I want to bring about this game is that the "small mario who eats a magic mushroom becomes a grown man mario" is gone. There is now a health bar system in the game since there are no more red mushrooms,flowers,capes or frog outfits. You can now take 8 hits before fainting, but be careful because bigger ennemies take away more than just one point at a time :).

 To replenish your health points, you can collect coins or go in the water but if you dive underwater, you gradually start losing health points (because you are making poor Mario suffocate). It's a great idea and it also led to some awesome underwater levels where you canstantly had to replenish your oxygen/health. The bad thing is that the controls underwater were not nearly as good as the controls on the ground. I often foundf myself swimming 10 times around a coin before finally being able to pick it up.

                                                  OVERALL SCORE

In conclusion, Super Mario 64 raised the bar once again and this time not just for the platforming genre, but for the entire gaming industry, using revolutionnary graphics and 3D textures.

Final score : 92%