Zack Burner wrote:jon wrote:Super Mario 64 to me is a game that’s hard to pigeonhole. I mean, there’s some great moments but a lot of fluff and boring levels. There’s some annoying stars like chasing that whatever animal it is twice. Very controller destroying inducing. Some courses after a while just seem so lame like Dire Dire Docks. Yet I can’t stop playing it. I don’t know if it’s incredibly great or average or maybe I just like it because it’s not too complicated.
Well said, I like it but I think time has definitely not been kind to it. Some good ideas and has some good moments but it suffers from redundancy and when stacked against other Mario titles before or after it like Super Mario World or Sunshine (my two all-time favorites) it feels kind of bare-bones. Remember fire flower, cape feather, and the ability to ride on Yoshi? You get none of that, though at least there are the three caps, but to get those you'd have to go through some tricky processes, and so far my favorite of three is the Vanish Cap as it renders you invisible without the weight issues the Metal Cap gives you, as for the Feather Cap, I feel that's too unwieldy for my tastes. I mentioned redundancy earlier and an example of this is in Big Boo's Haunt, the first two levels had you battles Boos until you have to face the Big Boo not once but twice, enough already. Jolly Roger Bay and Dire Dire Docks almost feel like Deja Vu. I think if I were to pick one level that IS my favorite I'd have to go with Shifting Sand Land as it makes me feel like Indiana Jones and the boss Eyerok gets points for originality.
I love this post. I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason you can’t ride Yoshi and that he only makes a “bit part” (I had to fit that in it’s a quote and title of a wonderful Lemonheads song) is because the game was running behind in development. That fact in of itself is absolutely astoundingly disappointing because we’d all been waiting for the freaking system to come out since 1995. I mean, did it take 2 years? Would it really have been that hard to have Luigi? I mean, make him a little faster and can jump a little further and there you go. But apparently there were deadlines and literally 2 years of development time wasn’t enough.
Then after the game you see Yoshi and he gives you 100 lives, as if a blind person couldn’t accumulate a lot of extra lives throughout the game. And Yoshi says the game’s over but not the fun. What fun? There aren’t any amazing levels pretty much. The game’s over. What exactly does Yoshi want you to do? Get the 120 stars again? It’s so obvious that they put that in because they had no time left to meet the launch deadline. The first thing I thought and I’m sure everyone did was where’s Luigi? And to have that Schtick by Yoshi at the end of a relatively underwhelming game (at least compared to expectations and the long wait for the launch date) was ridiculous. That’s why I always say the game feels like a tech demo. They just ran out of time. I mean, putting things in perspective and seeing how things happened with the N64 as a whole having literally it felt like 100 games or something, the blurriness, and a lot of genres missing. I’d be in arcades in 1994-1995 and reading GamePro and playing these amazing 3d arcade games and it was all, the “Ultra 64” is coming out soon and it’s going to be amazing. And to get from 1995 to even just 2-3 years into the N64’s run, it was unbelievably disappointing.
And I totally agree about Super Mario Sunshine. I love it and I love the graphics. It was so great to finally see a beautiful looking game again after the 5th generation.