super mario 64 - 5/10
super mario had a rough transition to 3D
tl;dr: mario 64 is a game that i did speedrun practice on for years. this time, i played it through in full, 120 stars. i truly did not like the experience. i respect this game and all it stands for still, even have happy memories from when i was a kid playing it the first time, but in this current moment in time, it is kinda garbage to play and the only thing that was holding me back from believing it earlier was rose-tinted glasses and a limited perspective of the game. my curse of being a sonic fan and being unable to like mario strikes again
well, as smarmy as it is of me to say this, i can't lie and say that i don't take great fucking pleasure in doing it:
super mario had a rough transition to 3D. seriously, i don't know what other than sheer bias could possibly be enough to make the cultural zeitgeist believe that sonic had the worse shake here??
super mario 64 features a smattering of sandbox levels, which, to its credit, i prefer somewhat over world; i would prefer to have a few multi-objective stages rather than lots of smaller single-shot stages that all feel the damn same, so fair enough. shame that a lot of them end up blending together in my head anyway; cool cool mountain and snowman's land so often merge in my head, as do jolly roger bay and dire dire docks, but where there are unique elements, here, they are memorable. the objectives are often the same sorts of things, though, which can lend itself to that same sense of repetition i feel myself getting stuck in with world, of having mildly altered terrain with not a lot altered in the gameplay. this is only made worse by the fact that power-ups have massively taken a back seat - gone are the days of simply hitting a block, getting one and being done, no, there's now an associated star count with each of the three - count 'em, three - power-ups at show here, with each of them being so entirely situational as to effectively render them little more than flavor-of-the-moment gimmicks. it doesnt really add anything to my experience that i cant get all the stars in bob-omb battlefield because ive got to go get 10 stars and look at a ceiling first outside of needless tedious busywork that serves only to make those few stars where you do need the power-ups feel like brick walls if you don't already have them, and if you do, they are the most baseline "do you remember the stage where you got this? do it again", bottom-rung tasks ever.
perhaps my detraction of this game comes from the fact that i got 120 stars in this playthrough. something that id never done, prior! most of my gameplay experience over the years has been of 70 (3 playthroughs), 16 (casually, around 10 or 11) or 0 star (4 or 5, albeit sloppy) runs done for fun. this time, i engaged with it fully, without any of my tricks or skips that ive done for years, not even a BLJ in sight. and holy shit am i fully a convert to the school of "this sux". its crazy how samey this whole game kinda feels and how there never really feels like theres any meaningful evolution throughout it, nor is there anything particularly too standout in the levels that make me explode with excitement over their additions or anything. sure, theres a difficulty curve, one that makes you wish that the entire game was like the first floor of actually playable levels that are even remotely fun or interesting, but the devs must have known that they'd shown their hand by the end of it, because the game just continues to nose-dive in quality as it trudges on. and, yet, there's little to nothing to show for it other than arbitrarily difficult courses that are largely a result of... well, not the level design itself, but we'll certainly get there. but other than that, there's not really a lot in the way with meaningfully cool shit? ooh, there's a pain in the tits slow bit with a snowman, wonderful. oh, there's a size-shifting gimmick, wish it added anything of real note to proceedings. oh, there's an autoscrolling carpet that i get to sit on for three minutes doing pretty much diddly dick all else, fucking sweet dude. oh, there's cannons in this one. just goddamned great, i wonder which star i have to do first to actually be able to access them?
and that greatly bothers me too. these levels effectively force you into replaying them, not with any truly meaningful difference, mind you, but with an asset or two changed or removed to contrive another star location after you already had to slog through probably five different times at this point, because each level kicks you out after you get a star. why this choice exists is baffling, especially when the 100-coin stars don't do it. a lot of the repetition feeling could likely be axed for me with that single change, because it would reduce my eight re-runs of a stage down to like, two or three. i don't know if 64 ds changes that? i never played that one, admittedly. perhaps something to check out far down the line to see if that makes playing this game better in any capacity.
mario 64 is only a fun game, to me, when its snapped in half and im doing cool shit with the movement. trying to play this game like a normal person has genuinely disenfranchised me with it to such a degree that i dont know how it still has such a high reputation. and speaking of that movement...
wow. wanna talk about "rough transitions to 3D"? i know that the n64 had its shitty little plastic nubbin that could just barely scrape by the definition of an analog stick for movement, and the c-buttons for camera control, but.. wow, it feels genuinely fucking godawful to play this game in big 25, man. i dunno if i fucked up how i set my deadzones on the port i was playing (which, for clarity, was as close to vanilla as possible, i just wanted widescreen!), but holy fucking shit, mario has the turning radius of a semi-truck in this game, and if you're not making liberal use of sideflips, backflips and etc., it is nigh-impossible to play this for any longer than about 15 minutes without wanting to drive my head through a wall. and admittedly, even then, mario's momentum feels fifty shades of fucked regardless, because of the control just feeling fucky in general. it feels like im trying to navigate both mario and my joystick simultaneously through mud, and that only becomes doubly true when im trying to navigate him through the air, which feels akin to navigating a balloon through a sandstorm. many a death was had by mario simply turning his little bulbous nose up at the mere thought of me suggesting that the little bastard should maybe do his ledge grab move that he's done in 18 different places that i didn't want him to do it in, in this precise situation, him deciding that me pressing Down on the analog stick actually should instead mean I'm Going To Do A Cool Little Spin Because I'm A Pretty Ballerina Watch Me Go or otherwise just outright not functioning in a way that i had been able to intuit in time to course-correct sufficiently, which lead to a great deal of frustration for me. the worst part is, this is the one i remember him controlling the best in and as such i am dreading playing any further 3D marios. may god save my eternal soul
it's funny, i suppose my lesson to take from this replay is that mario 64 is only fun when i play it in a speedrunning sense, which was almost definitely wholly unintentional. back to project64 and a stock rom for me after this playthrough if ever i come back to this on my own terms. and thats a hearty, very optimistic "if," there. i'm likely not going to re-visit this any time soon other than perhaps co-op with friends on the PC source ports, but holy shit, what a way to totally disenfranchise myself with this game, dawg. guttural disappointment in finally playing it in full.
cool cool mountain is my favorite stage, if you were wondering. whimsical fun in a snowy funland was nice
