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Your initial impressions playing Mario 64?

rex said:
If you look at Banjo Kazooie and Sunshine (in the main stages) you'll notice one peculiar thing: an almost complete lack of traditional platforming obstacles.

Rotating platforms. Spinning blocks. Sinking stands. Ground that slips away and falls beneath your fit. From what I remember of Banjo, it has almost none of this. Sunshine has a bit more, but it's few and far between, and it rarely places a series of them deliberately between you and your objective.

The (top part) of the Pianta village level is pure Banjo. A flat, square grid with a bunch of hills placed haphazardly around the map. No platforming obstacles . Certainly nothing resembling a path you have to take. Gelato beach is the same thing. It's as if Rare and then EAD decided to make a bunch of hub levels as the main levels.

Mario 64 on the other hand is an extremely clever little bastard. Many of the levels are spirals with strong vertical elements. A hilltop. A fortress. A snowy mountain. A tall tall mountain. A clock. It takes a star, and it puts it at the top, or sometimes at the bottom of the level. You've got to work to get it. You have to pass the traditional obstacles the designers purposefully put in front of you on an obvious path. Off the beaten path are opportunities for exploration and hence your other stars.

But, that's only half the story. The tight spiraling structure of a Whomp's Fortress or Tick Tock Clock means endless opportunities for creative platforming. And Mario's mechanics allow you to take full advantage of them.

Mario 64 never forgot it was a platformer. Maneuvering up and down Whomp's Fortress, with its vertical structure and obstacles and enemies which are all trying to kill you, is a lot more interesting to me than meandering around Gelato Beach with its static trees and static beach houses and static mountain path. I still think Mario 64 is the only game to get open 3D platforming stage design correct.
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Superb observations and a big part of why the the game was so good.
 
Phediuk said:
Judging from that Super Mario World topic, there seems to be a widespread conception of this game as a religious experience that was universally awe-inspiring, and that it was singularly looked upon as the greatest leap in game design history.
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First home console to have native 4 control slots (iirc). Save pak for ghost that could be given to other people for a challenge. Mario Kart already had a following from the SNES title. Mix this with N64 other fantastic multiplayer games and you can see why Mario Kart 64 was 'magical' for most people.

So yeah, most of these elements were new or part of a new gaming experience. Remember that the competing console at the time was the PS1 and that had very little for multiplayer, even with a mutlitap connector.
 
NewGame said:
First home console to have native 4 control slots (iirc). Save pak for ghost that could be given to other people for a challenge. Mario Kart already had a following from the SNES title. Mix this with N64 other fantastic multiplayer games and you can see why Mario Kart 64 was 'magical' for most people.

So yeah, most of these elements were new or part of a new gaming experience. Remember that the competing console at the time was the PS1 and that had very little for multiplayer, even with a mutlitap connector.
Click to expand...

Was not the first to have 4 slots.
 
An intense feeling of wonder and amazement. I felt lucky to even be playing it. I was 10.

That feeling has never been matched since then, and I don't think it will be .
 
rex said:
If you look at Banjo Kazooie and Sunshine (in the main stages) you'll notice one peculiar thing: an almost complete lack of traditional platforming obstacles.

Rotating platforms. Spinning blocks. Sinking stands. Ground that slips away and falls beneath your fit. From what I remember of Banjo, it has almost none of this. Sunshine has a bit more, but it's few and far between, and it rarely places a series of them deliberately between you and your objective.

The (top part) of the Pianta village level is pure Banjo. A flat, square grid with a bunch of hills placed haphazardly around the map. No platforming obstacles . Certainly nothing resembling a path you have to take. Gelato beach is the same thing. It's as if Rare and then EAD decided to make a bunch of hub levels as the main levels.

Mario 64 on the other hand is an extremely clever little bastard. Many of the levels are spirals with strong vertical elements. A hilltop. A fortress. A snowy mountain. A tall tall mountain. A clock. It takes a star, and it puts it at the top, or sometimes at the bottom of the level. You've got to work to get it. You have to pass the traditional obstacles the designers purposefully put in front of you on an obvious path. Off the beaten path are opportunities for exploration and hence your other stars.

But, that's only half the story. The tight spiraling structure of a Whomp's Fortress or Tick Tock Clock means endless opportunities for creative platforming. And Mario's mechanics allow you to take full advantage of them.

Mario 64 never forgot it was a platformer. Maneuvering up and down Whomp's Fortress, with its vertical structure and obstacles and enemies which are all trying to kill you, is a lot more interesting to me than meandering around Gelato Beach with its static trees and static beach houses and static mountain path. I still think Mario 64 is the only game to get open 3D platforming stage design correct.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree with you! Mario 64 is the single open 3d Platformer game ever!
Rare games and Sunshine are games that you EXPLORE more than you "plataform".

That's why so many people loved Galaxy: because it sacrificed exploration and freedom to make a good platformer. Of course, they needed to add a mechanic to make jumping more precise - that movement that Mario do when you "shake" the WiiRemote.

Super Mario 3D Land was the first 3D Mario game that I felt that is really a sequel to the old 2D one. It requires more preciseness but it also limit the 3D movement.

About the graphics:

It's easy to us, looking back, understand and criticize the Nintendo 64 limits.
But at the time, the ugly filter was AMAZING, because every 3D game had so many pixels visible! I hated this at the time, so Nintendo 64 was the first console that gave me "clean" 3D graphics. Also, the flickering on PS1/Saturn was very distracting, and Nintendo 64 didn't have at all.

Actually, I was quite shocked when I saw FFX and realized that N64 games didn't have a problem that even PS2 games was having.
 
Couldn't believe my eyes. Spent several weekends in a row at the demo kiosk in blockbuster video hogging the machine until they kicked me out.

I haven't had that once in a lifetime experience again yet. In hoping VR will give it to me when I finally get to try it.
 
As someone who had already early-on bought a PS1 in 1995 and was pretty committed to it as the platform that I cared about during that generation, the first time that I got to play Mario 64 after all of the hype, I loved it, it definitely felt like it had a lot more freedom than comparable PS1 3-D platformers at the time (Jumping Flash is about the only thing that felt like it had a comparable sense of freedom and fun, and Mario 64 felt like a leap -- if you will -- over that).

I played it, was instantly hooked, just as I was with the NES/SNES Mario games, and decided instantly that I needed an N64 too. Didn't find that I had a whole helluva lot that I was interested in for the N64 afterwards, but still...
 
I was in awe.


It's my favorite Mario. The reason I liked it was the mechanics and being able to use them to creatively scale and get around the boards.

The fact that there were stars that I could jump at the camera and know i'd land right on a star was like the coolest thing to my 15 year old brain.
 
Mindblown as well.

The screenshots leading up to launch were enticing, but seeing the game in action had me equally as amazed as much as witnessing LttP, Mario World, and even SMB3 just a few years before. Then I got super bummed after unlocking all 120 stars in the launch weekend with relative ease...

Then it happened once again with OoT a couple years later.
 
I didn't go into the castle for awhile, I just ran around the courtyard climbing trees to do the dismount flip and swimming for an hour in wide-eyed amazement.

I didn't know games could do the things that Mario 64 did.

I was 10, played at launch, had an NES and then SNES prior.
 
A little trivia:
this summer I was lucky enough to have a dinner with Harry Krueger, mastermind behind Resogun and lover of gaming in its purest form.
Every game where gameplay is the focus and where the main character is well designed is in his book.
He loves all the best Konami and Cave and Nintendo and Treasure stuff, mostly shooters (even if he loves Sin And Punishment 2 a lot), while partially disliking every "cinematic experience" game with a few gameplay concepts drawn in neverending cutscenes.
We both agreed that as a game Mario64 was groundbreaking, but as a "Mario game", it was probably one of the least interesting and fun.

Edit: the fact that most of the comments I read are: "I spent the first half an hour in the courtyard jumping on the trees and it was awesome" is enlightening.
I think that noone stayed in the first screen of Super Mario World (Snes) jumping on Yoshi's back for some whole minutes... that's basicly what I meant
 
Aeana said:
I was really blown away. I first played it at a demo kiosk at Toys R Us before the system was actually released, and I spent the entire day there playing it with my mouth agape. I'd never played anything like it, and it was so fun too.
Click to expand...

Yep.

I poured over the Gamefan review of the Japanese version of the game. reread their feature article over and over. stared at the japanese launch photos of people waiting in line. i already had my N64 and Mario preordered but i had to have the game right then.

when i found out toys r us had the demo kiosks, my friend and me begged my parents to drive us 30 miles to the closest toys r us. they dropped us off at TRU while they went to the nearby mall. we played for hours. like everyone else, we just ran around the court yard while pulling off mario's gymnastics.

when i finally got the game and system... no other release in my history of playing games has remotely compared. i may not be as fond of the game nowadays as i was back then, but i'll never forget how i felt about the initial playthroughs of mario 64. while i think there are many games since release that are superior, nothing quite "feels" like it.
 
Had a Nintendo 64 before a PS and Mario 64 was my first game. It was the most addicting thing ever. I loved how it was graphically better compared to the games I had on the Super Nintendo and I was way young around 8 or 9? But I managed to get like 120 stars? Then I went on a trip to Greece for the summer to meet my relatives and when I came back I had found that my baby brother at the time had wiped my save. It wrecked my world. Ah those were the days.
 
First time played Mario 64 was at a video game shop that had imported an N64 from Japan and was selling it for 950 dollars.

I played the underwater world with the giant eel and the second I realized that I could actually explore all of the area UNDERNEATH THE WATER, with all those nooks and crannies and wasn't limited to 2D I freaked out.

I literally was thinking about it for days after. I must of put in hundreds of hours into Mario 64. GOAT.
 
Aeana said:
I was really blown away. I first played it at a demo kiosk at Toys R Us before the system was actually released, and I spent the entire day there playing it with my mouth agape. I'd never played anything like it, and it was so fun too.
Click to expand...

Basically this. I was 12 years old, and played it at a KB Toys demo kiosk prior to the system's launch. My jaw was on the floor and I only picked it up off the floor much later and with great difficulty.

No first impression before or after that has ever come remotely close.

It's on my very short list for best game of all time. May even be #1, but hard to say for sure.
 
I was 11 and tried it at Toys R Us and it fucked my mind up permanently. The exact memory is burned into my brain. I can still smell the store, hear the faint echoing of the game's noise in the open building, the feel of the foreign controller. The feeling of being able to run around freely and examine things at multiple angles in such clarity. The smooth movement and ambient sounds. The way Mario idled. The gorgeous music.

Fuck. tfw I'll never experience anything like it again. ;_;
 
Seeing Super Mario 64 for the first time is one of my fondest gaming memories. I haven't been that genuinely blown away by a game before or since. I still remember Christmas Day 1996 like it was yesterday. My best friend got an N64 that morning from Santa with WaveRace 64, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, and SM64. It was such an amazing morning that I didnt think could get much better. Later that day my grandmother came over to my family's house for Xmas dinner and had a suprise for me in her Cadillac's trunk.

It was an N64 and SM64. I miss her.
 
Until we get holodecks, this industry will never have another Mario 64 moment. There will be innovations in the future, but nothing as immediately groundbreaking as Mario 64 was in 1996.
 
i was 16 at the time. in the moment, i'm not sure i could have (cared to have) articulately described what was making me feel such joy at the time; it was all too visceral then. i do remember not being blown away by the graphics, though. i suspect the "wow" factor, at least in my case, was attributable to the fact that space had never felt so tactile in a videogame before. the flawless controls (still the best ever in a video game, in my opinion), game structure, and level design were at such a blinding degree of brilliance, without much precedence ... it was sort of like if a horny teenage male were to lose his virginity to salma hayek rather than some timid high school girl in her awkward stage.
 
rex said:
Unfortunately, we never got the sequel we deserved thanks to the pernicious influence of Banjo Kazooie and its subsequent impact on the direction of Mario Sunshine. And now we're into full Crash Bandicoot land with the series. A perverse irony for those of us who followed the development of the games at the time and bridled at any hint of a comparison between Naughty Dog's effort and EAD's masterpiece.
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This is exactly how I feel about the 3D World series and to a lesser extent Galaxy. It's disappointing.
 
I saw the game for first time from a japanese TV ad that someone recorded on a VCR tape and put the video on a amateur video game show here in DR. I was 14, my mind was blown for real. That's one of the games that marked my life as a player. Amazing times.
 
I doubted 3D action games could be good because I had only tried out the PS controller. It didn't feel right. Then Mario 64 showed what a difference the thumb stick made, it blew my mind. It was the single most awe inspiring moment in gaming I ever experienced.
 
I was 6 when it came out and all i wanted the next year for christmas in 97 was a 64.
I booted up Mario64 and that moment, the very beginning when mario came out of the warpipe...man..that was like truly emotional for me in a strange way. It was something I had never experienced before, like I truly couldn't believe it. When I think about my childhood, that's what I think about. Watershed moment in modern culture.
 
"oh man look at all that 3D holy shit"
And
"OMG i am pushing buttons and he's a ninja this is the best day ever"

Boy, 3D was pretty cool from then on.
 
jres80 said:
ik49VlPshlPIz.gif
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Pretty much my reaction too. As a guy whose first game was Combat at the age of two, this completely changed gaming for me forever...and I still hold Super Mario 64 in extremely high regard today.
 
My mind was blown , nuff said

It was insane to witness and play, just stretching Mario's face was worth it haha, my cousin spent like a half hour doing it


Never going to experience anything like that again, maybe vr
 
The first time I read about Mario 64 in one of those game magazines (probably EGM or something), it didn't quite register in my head as to how big of a change the 3D was.

The first time I played Mario 64, as a 12-year old in a Toys R Us on a demo kiosk, I didn't really like it that much because I couldn't control it - it was cool to look at, but I couldn't master the nuances of 3D analog movement in the 5 minutes or so I was messing with it.

Then Christmas 1996 came along, and I got to sit with it for extended amounts of time for the first time...the first time I surfed on a shell, fired Mario from a cannon onto the island in the sky, used the flight cap for the first time? Yeah, it was a "mind blown" experience for me. Messing with Mario's face at the beginning? All the crazy moves and mobility Mario had in 3D? I mean, it was a joy just to move around...and that's probably the first time I could say that in that post-16 bit time.
 
A friend brought a color print out to school one day (I was in 6th grade) and it looked cool, but I don't think I understood it. 3D games were completely foreign to me.

Later that year my cousin got an N64 for Christmas and once I played it I was blown away!

I wonder if I was a little older and more exposed to the state of the art in computer graphics on PC's if I would have been just as blown away. Although, I know even if I was older an knew more, I would have still recognized its greatness simply due to its superior controls for a 3D game. I still think the game holds up VERY well today.
 
rex said:
If you look at Banjo Kazooie and Sunshine (in the main stages) you'll notice one peculiar thing: an almost complete lack of traditional platforming obstacles.

Rotating platforms. Spinning blocks. Sinking stands. Ground that slips away and falls beneath your fit. From what I remember of Banjo, it has almost none of this. Sunshine has a bit more, but it's few and far between, and it rarely places a series of them deliberately between you and your objective.

The (top part) of the Pianta village level is pure Banjo. A flat, square grid with a bunch of hills placed haphazardly around the map. No platforming obstacles . Certainly nothing resembling a path you have to take. Gelato beach is the same thing. It's as if Rare and then EAD decided to make a bunch of hub levels as the main levels.

Mario 64 on the other hand is an extremely clever little bastard. Many of the levels are spirals with strong vertical elements. A hilltop. A fortress. A snowy mountain. A tall tall mountain. A clock. It takes a star, and it puts it at the top, or sometimes at the bottom of the level. You've got to work to get it. You have to pass the traditional obstacles the designers purposefully put in front of you on an obvious path. Off the beaten path are opportunities for exploration and hence your other stars.

But, that's only half the story. The tight spiraling structure of a Whomp's Fortress or Tick Tock Clock means endless opportunities for creative platforming. And Mario's mechanics allow you to take full advantage of them.

Mario 64 never forgot it was a platformer. Maneuvering up and down Whomp's Fortress, with its vertical structure and obstacles and enemies which are all trying to kill you, is a lot more interesting to me than meandering around Gelato Beach with its static trees and static beach houses and static mountain path. I still think Mario 64 is the only game to get open 3D platforming stage design correct.
Click to expand...

Brilliant post, eloquently explained.

I was trying to make this point in the other, newer 20th anniversary thread for the game. What Mario 64 focuses on is traversal, and the sheer joy of experimenting with the controls, mastering Mario's moves and coming up with new ways to traverse the environment.

Games like Banjo are great, but the focus isn't on sheer traversal, and its physics engine and controls don't allow for a near infinite number of possibilities to tackle each and every platform you come across. Banjo's core focus is on collecting various items, which also detracts from playing the game out of sheer experimentation. Mario 64 often never gives the player an explicit task to pursue, which means you, as a player, enters each level looking to experiment.

Mario 64 is such a playful game, a game that never gets old to play around with. It's why it's impossible to walk up to that castle door at the beginning without messing with the controls or pulling off a few moves.
 
mind blown
damn these controls feel good
awesome level/world design and star objectives
best Birthday present (including N64) ever!

Can't wrap my head around having an experience like OP. During that time I would also frequent arcades and I had a gaming PC as well, SM64 still felt like an amazing game.
 
themagicalkitsune said:
That large chain chomp scared the shit out of me.
Click to expand...

He was bad, but the Eel in Jolly Roger legitimately terrified me as a kid. I didn't even touch that level until I was a few years older. Hell, it took me a while to man up and go past the Boo in the downstairs hallway. I was a wimp.

And yeah, playing Mario 64 for the first time was the definition of mind-blowing.
 
Pretty mind-blowing coming from old consoles since my only experience with 3D games at the time were a few arcade games.
Somehow though it still felt natural to control Mario.
 
didnt like it that much.
havent had the urge to play it first thing next morning which is a bad sign.

All in all i feel mario should have never made the step into 3D
 
At first, around the castle, playing felt good. Nothing mindblowing yet. But as I went to the first level and saw another star behind the chain chomp and the bars, and that I was able to get that instead of the actual mission star, I was instantly addicted.

The freedom to explore and find stars "not meant" to find yet was amazing.

It's still one of the best games I've ever played.


I didn't own the N64 but my cousins loaned it to me. I loved playing Mario 64. Later, I was disappointed with Ocarina of Time though. Couldn't get into it at all. But Mario 64 was amazing and still is. Not because of the 3D gameplay but because of the game structure.
 
I was blown away, being put straight into the game was something. Having full control over collecting what star you wanted in (near enough) any order in each level, was certainly something else.
 
Do you know certain landmarks on your life, when you know exactly where you were, etc? Playing Super Mario 64 for the first time was one for me. I remember the exactly date: December 03, 1996. It was a sunny day.

I was 14 when one japanese N64 with Super Mario 64 appeared on a game store. We could pay to play through a certain amount of time.

Being raised playing Super Mario since the NES, so used to 2D platformers... playing at the first time on Cool, Cool Mountain (although I didn't even know the name yet, I was playing in japanese); feeling that perfect physics, the freedom of being capable of going anywhere if I wanted to... It was something awesome, incredible. Nothing, NOTHING, could beat that sensation, that feeling, ever since.

It blew my 14-year-old mind. And every time I replay the game, even now almost at 34, a very close sensation to that one returns.

Only Super Mario 64 is capable of that with me.



tl;dr:

jres80 said:
ik49VlPshlPIz.gif
Click to expand...
 
Aeana said:
I was really blown away. I first played it at a demo kiosk at Toys R Us before the system was actually released, and I spent the entire day there playing it with my mouth agape. I'd never played anything like it, and it was so fun too.
Click to expand...

Something like this. There was nothing like it. It was so playful, so full of joy. It's not my favorite 3D Mario, as a game I prefer the Galaxy games. But it was probably the most magical experience and a feeling that I will probably never experience again.
 
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