MARIO REVIEWED: Super Mario 64 (N64)

In this series of posts that I'm doing because I literally cannot contain my excitement for Super Mario Galaxy 2, I'll be looking back at the games in the Mario franchise. I'm primarily going to be concentrating on games in the main series, but there might be a couple of detours along the way, too.

The first few minutes of Super Mario 64 are almost as revolutionary, life-altering, and incredible as World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. Walking up to Princess Toadstool's (now called Peach) castle and manipulating Mario in a 3D space must have been just absolutely incredible for people firing up this launch title for the newly released Nintendo 64. That entire era was an interesting transition period. If you've ever seen or held an N64 controller, you must know how weird it must have felt to have all of those buttons and an analog stick to contend with.

Nintendo was writing a new console gaming language with this game – the camera system (literal, in this case, as a Lakitu follows you around with a camera on a fishing pole), the ability to traverse 3D planes in action games, and the complete change-up from the template laid down by 8 and 16-bit games makes Super Mario 64 a revolutionary game. Sure, a lot of these things had been done on the PC front, but console games and PC games were completely different beasts at the time.

In some ways, it's useful to consider the 3D Mario games as following a similar trajectory as the 2D games. The first foray into the new world (Super Mario Bros. and this game), the complete shift in gameplay and tone and mood (Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Sunshine) and the refinement and perfection of the promises of the first game (Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Galaxy). It holds up surprisingly well, and while I wouldn't say I enjoy Super Mario 64 as much as the NES games, one has to give it credit where credit is due, as it kick started a whole new era for Nintendo.

Rather than running in a straight line from the beginning to the end, Super Mario 64 introduced large, self-contained playpens that could be explored at will and in any way the player sees fit. Want to keep trying to use the cannons to get up to the floating island in the sky in the first world? Go ahead – there's no penalty for doing so. Some people have decried this as Mario games losing their focus, but those people are generally Michael Thomsen and don't need to be listened to anyways. Super Mario 64 just does away with any pretense of linear progression and story fidelity in favour of exploration and wonder, and while it might not make as much sense, it does make for joyous gameplay.

In addition to the old Mario standbys of fire worlds, ice worlds, water worlds, etc., SM64 introduced the "hub" world, where you can get from world to world in any way you like (provided you have enough stars collected to get in). Not only does this make the game incredibly free-flowing, but it also accomplishes something that endless tutorials could never do – a safe place to try out different moves with your character and learn how to play the game. Miyamoto, you're a frickin' genius.

I think that Super Mario 64 feels really personal to people who grew up with it (I didn't, unfortunately, only ever playing it over at friends' houses and for the first time, bizarrely, at my dentist's office) because it's a game where the player actually feels in control of how to accomplish whatever they're trying to do. While there is a set objective (get 120 stars), the way you can go about doing that is up to you. Of course, the choices you make here are fairly superficial, but the ability to just goof off and explore each world to your liking is this game's greatest strength.

I said earlier, however, that there are elements of this game that I don't really like. First of all, it was easily bested by Super Mario Galaxy – not that that's a knock against this fantastic game, but still. And actually just finding where you can get all of the stars is quite challenging, but not in a good way. I prefer how SMG does it, where you know how to get all of the stars in the game, and it's just a matter of actually doing it. Finally, I think that in its early 3D stages, Mario kind of lost a bit of graphical charm that his early games had. As sad as it is to say, this is the first Mario game that definitively looks dated.

Yet, it was such a bold and confident step in the right direction, and there's no denying that it's a fantastic game. People younger than myself consider this to be their Super Mario Bros., and all the power to them – for the 3D Mario games, it is exactly that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go plunder that sunken pirate ship. Damn you water levels!