Super Mario 64 Review

Mario 64 was a pioneer of the 3D platformer genre and did it extremely well, still holding up as one of the best 3D platformers to this day. It came with the Nintendo 64, which was essentially the first major console to truly support 3D games and Nintendo managed to knock it out of the park right off the bat. Aside from some unpolished and slightly sloppy controls, Mario 64 is a fantastically made game that is incredibly fun and enjoyable, and in this review I will cover every aspect of it good and bad.



First and foremost lets talk about the controls. The controls are not up to par with later mario games such as Sunshine, but they are not bad by any means. The side jump is hard to do and Mario has a large turn radius, as well as a little difficulty angling the wall jump, but aside from those the controls are pretty fantastic. The worse controls in Mario 64 are understandable, as it was a launch title on one of the first 3D consoles which was also one of the first consoles to use an analog joystick (excluding the Atari 5200), so looking at what it had going against it they were amazing. Playing Mario 64 nowadays is difficult because of the awful Nintendo 64 controller but paying 10 dollars for the game on the Virtual Console is a great investment as it is the best way to play the game.



The gameplay in Mario 64 was the first time Nintendo attempted to bring the Mario series to the third dimension, and unlike Sonic they hit the nail on the head. They made everything in the game fun, fighting enemies and platforming were enjoyable and felt natural, the boss fights were fun, and the hub world worked perfectly. Almost all the levels and missions were incredibly designed (with the exception of tall tall mountain) and I enjoyed myself getting 103 of the 120 stars for the majority of the time. My personal favorite level was Whomp's Fortress, which I felt was incredibly well designed not only in the actual area but also in that every single mission was fun and unique. Nintendo showed just how fantastic their understanding of level design was with how naturally their amazing level design of previous Mario games transferred to the third dimension.



There isn't much else to Mario 64, the story is typical Mario "the princess got kidnapped and you have to save her". The hubworld was incredibly well designed, because it did a really good job of allowing new players to have space to adjust to the controls and was especially useful for new owners of the console who had only played 2D games on the SNES or Genesis before, who could now get accustomed to movement on a three dimensional plane before attempting to tackle actual levels. The tutorials were almost entirely in the form of signs so they were optional and did not break up the gameplay which made the game much more enjoyable for people who don't enjoy monotonous tutorials. Mario 64 was an amazing game and still holds up to this day.



Overall, I'd rate Super Mario 64 a 9/10.