“Su­per Mario 64” Is Fun, But Dis­ap­point­ing Too

MISHAWAKA – Su­per Mario 64 is a stone-cold clas­sic of a game that, un­for­tu­nately, han­dles like a stone, too. 

I know I was the one clam­or­ing to play this game, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing its leg­endary sta­tus in gam­ing his­tory as pos­si­bly the great­est 3D plat­former of all time. I know that it was made in an era where Nin­tendo was on the bleed­ing edge of well-de­signed, re-playable and ac­ces­si­ble games. How­ever, I also know that it was made in a time where er­gonom­ics ap­par­ently had not been in­vented. To be fair, the con­trols of the game are my only real gripe. Sadly, for Su­per Mario 64, it does not have much else go­ing for it.  

What is im­por­tant to bear in mind is that I am crit­i­ciz­ing, specif­i­cally, the Su­per Mario 3D All-Stars ren­di­tion of 64. I rec­og­nize that any mi­nor gripes I have about the game can eas­ily be chalked up to the time’s in­ad­e­quate de­vel­op­ment tech­nol­ogy. How­ever, con­sid­er­ing this is a port, and that Nin­tendo upped the qual­ity of the game and al­most noth­ing else, I am es­sen­tially form­ing my com­plaints as a ques­tion of “re­ally, Nin­tendo, you could not have taken five min­utes out of your day to tweak this a lit­tle?” 

I am go­ing to get the easy one out of the way first, be­cause it is not de­bat­able out­side of the fact that “it is a re­ally old game.” The cam­era is su­per an­noy­ing be­cause it has a fi­nite num­ber of ori­en­ta­tions. I get it, Nin­tendo, it was a big game with not much space on the car­tridge, so you could not waste pre­cious pro­cess­ing power by let­ting the player look any­where at any time. How­ever, in a game that de­mands pre­ci­sion move­ment and full spa­tial aware­ness, re­strict­ing my cam­era an­gle to ei­ther a satel­lite view, a slow dolly shot or a won­der­ful closeup of the back of Mar­i­o’s head with barely 30% of the screen un­oc­cu­pied by a pix­e­lated plumber, is not at all con­ducive to game­play.  

Mario ei­ther con­trols like a dead tor­toise, or a dead tor­toise go­ing down a wa­ter­slide; his mo­men­tum in this game is in­cred­i­bly in­con­sis­tent. Con­sider me spoiled from the likes of Su­per Mario Odyssey, where every as­pect of move­ment is en­joy­able, fluid and pre­cise, but con­sid­er­ing Mario has to think about whether or not he is go­ing to move for­ward for a good sec­ond or two when I flick the con­trol stick up, I be­lieve I am jus­ti­fied in my com­plaint.   

Worse still, if I feel like I do not want to launch my­self full pelt off a cliff, I must stop a good ten feet back to give Mar­i­o’s ev­i­dently fric­tion­less footwear enough stop­ping time. In his de­fense, he is not wear­ing the best shoes for all the run­ning and jump­ing he does: those loafers have no kind of arch sup­port. Every move­ment just feels so la­bo­ri­ous; I feel like I am urg­ing an el­derly man on a hov­er­board along a school’s play­ground, as op­posed to con­trol­ling the world’s most ath­letic sep­tic worker on his quest to jump on a spiky turtle’s head three times. 

I do not think Su­per Mario 64 is a bad game, and I do know that there is a va­ri­ety of lev­els that make use of the clunky move­ment with­out the game be­com­ing un­playable. How­ever, I do think that it is nowhere near as air­tight in its fun­da­men­tal me­chan­ics as I was ex­pect­ing due to all the praise. To put it in per­spec­tive, this is com­ing from some­one who has made his way through only the first world, but af­ter ac­ci­den­tally fling­ing my­self off one too many cliffs, I know that the rest of the time I have with this game will be spent look­ing for­ward to the beau­ti­ful sec­ond I boot up Su­per Mario Sun­shine.