constantly repeatedly is the closest even though I haven’t played it since I borrowed it from busted. I like to do a casual 120 star run every few years tho
this and shadows of the empire were the only n64 games I owned so I have it memorized, but I never got into speedrunning stuff
my problem with vanilla Mario 64 is in spite of the fact that i’ve probably only played it through twice, i’ve seen so many speedruns of it by now that there’s no mystery to anything in it anymore. it feels so quaint at times. and having something like B3313 blurs the line further between how i remember vanilla Mario 64 and what comes from elsewhere. like i’ve probably played through Banjo Kazooie more times on the whole too so that gets mixed in there as well - partly because i never actually owned a physical copy of Mario 64 unlike with BK and only ever played it on emulation.
still like Mario 64 a lot tho! it’s just always a lot simpler than i remember.
this was actually my first experience too, a rented n64 & game from blockbuster on one weekend. i almost got 120 stars before the rental time was up because i played it for 2 straight days
i have played this game on and off for almost 30 years, beaten it many times, 120 starring at least 5 or 6 times but i think this is gonna be the first year where i start playing hacks of the game that seem interesting. also might try to do one of those speed running tricks like bypassing the stairs
i can never have a non bias non nostalgia soaked opinion about this game because i feel like it’s so captured in my gamer imagination. the fact that it currently only feels a little clunky compared to its contemporaries and even some current day platformers is a testament to how much they got right that first time. it still feels like you’re wandering around in a weird and abstract dream.
I first played Mario 64 at Sears a couple times. Mostly fucked around with the giant Mario head but would aimlessly run around the castle a bit too.
In the 90s, I spent a lot more playing the Croc demo I had on PC. And then Banjo-Kazooie once my sisters got a 64 for Christmas in 1998 or 1999.
I saw it played a couple times at the house of a kid I knew from church once. He was flying around.
I actually spent a stupid amount of the late 90s hating on the 64. I thought the 3D was kinda awful-looking, the big polygons irritated me. Though I did eventually get into Majora’s Mask and Mario Kart 64, and Goldeneye.
I didn’t really play it until it came out on Wii Virtual Console in 2006, which means I played it a few years after I played Mario Sunshine. I played it through shortly thereafter. I liked it, though I really struggled to enjoy the camera and had some issues perceiving depth that I found frustrating. I still think it’s funny that Mario punches.
I’ve tried to replay it a few times since then but I never stick with it long. I really admire a lot about how it feels and how big its ideas are, but it’s not one I find myself wanting to get that deep into still
you could say it’s a
I’m pretty confident in saying that Mario 64 was the first videogame I ever played when I was probably like 3 or 4 (yes, I am but a baby).
My memory of the first time playing it was being kinda overwhelmed by the number of ways in which you could make Mario jump and then trying desperately to use the triple jump to make it over one of the big green hills and escape from the courtyard (I had yet to understand how games worked, I assumed there was a whole world out there…)
I think I eventually resigned to enter the castle but Bowser’s laugh gave me the heeby jeebies and as soon as I entered a painting I kinda hated the difficulty of the individual levels and didn’t really see the point.
I think when I got a nintendo ds years later I played the ds version and completed it, which then eventually led to me going back and trying to finish the original.
I have a real fondness for the game, what with it being my first one, but sometimes I also think my initial reaction to it was the most honest and that it maybe means something that my first instinct when playing a videogame was to try and escape from it…
my brother bought an N64 and played a lot of Mario64… never really clicked w/ me, and i stopped playing after getting 10 to 15 stars.
Brother got all 120 stars and teased me that he had more than 100 more than me, so i did what any big brother would do — getting 21 stars and quit/never looked back.
For me this was the volcano in the background of Battlezone.
I know you can get there… if you just keep driving…
i did know a couple of n64 owners back then, but against all odds, none of them owned mario 64
the N64 was the first console I ever got at launch as a kid – we got our NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, Game Boy each a few to several years late and second/thirdhand – but I don’t have a ton of affection for it tbh. played a ton of Mario and Star Fox in that first year but we got a PS1 in late 97 or early 98 and I didn’t really look back, and I was getting to discover other stuff in ZSNES and mame by then too. I’m pretty sure I beat Mario 64 by the end of that Xmas break but it is not like, a precious memory
When Mario 64 came out I was a 4th grader living in a suburban Florida cul-de-sac. There were just a few other kids in my neighborhood. One of them was the archetypal Edgy Older Kid. I didn’t see this guy all that often, but somehow his software made it to me… My memory is vague but I guess maybe his parents and my parents talked or something, and I’d occasionally get floppy disks full of sketchy shareware with no context at all. I never really felt comfortable around this kid, so it felt like real dangerous samizdat type stuff. One day that kid was caught shooting birds with a BB gun and I was no longer allowed to associate with him.
But right before that happened, he lent me his Nintendo 64 for an extended period, for some reason! Maybe he was going on vacation or something? But I ended up with a loaner console complete with Mario 64, Star Fox 64, and Goldeneye. What can I say, the kid had good taste!
I’d had a NES and SNES before then, but this was a truly wild way to be introduced to 3D gaming. A futuristic console just showing up in my house! I can’t remember how long I had it, but it feels like it must have been at least a week or two. Goldeneye was the favorite at the time because the most FPS I’d played til then was, like, a PC Gamer demo disk demo of Hexen. But I played a good chunk of Mario 64 and had a grand old time.
I later got an N64 of my own and always wanted to get 120 stars so I could see Yoshi, but I just didn’t have the gumption. I also never made it to Green Hill Zone in Sonic Adventure 2. Some things will always remain just out of reach…
I remember renting both a N64 and PS1 from a local rental place as a kid to try and figure out which was the better purchase. Got the N64 first and remember Mario 64 controlling like a dream, just a great game to run around in. The levels themselves seemed pretty good but moving was the true standout. The thing is that this was early in the N64 lifetime and every other N64 game tried was poor while the PS1 had a murderers line-up of games to play (passing the controller back and forth with Mario 64 is fun, but both being able to play Tekken 2 and Twisted Metal 2 at the same time was better.
Picked up the PS1, got a N64 some years later and while I played Mario 64 on it again a few times the N64 was a multiplayer machine, 95+% of the time went to Goldeneye/Perfect Dark/AKI wrestling games/Mario Kart.
Eventually went back and played through Mario 64 some years later (got to the ending but not 120 stars) but by this point I had already played through Mario Sunshine and… stripped of nostalgia I find that to be the more interesting game of the two? Much more interesting moveset, levels had some nice “sequence breaking”-esque possibilities, both games had cameras that would utterly fail at points but Sunshine had better options to try and fix it.
There was a time in the 2000s where I ranked every Mario game and I think I put 64 last. Obviously I’d no longer do so in a post-NSMB world, but have always been a low voter on it.
My experience with Mario 64 doesn’t really fit into any of the available poll options. I was in sixth grade when it came out and that year for Christmas I got a PlayStation instead of an N64 so I kind of slept on that whole console unfortunately. I saw the commercials for Mario 64 and heard people at school talking about it but I didn’t return to Nintendo consoles until the GameCube (Sunshine was my first 3D Mario) and I didn’t actually play Mario 64 until the DS version.
I didn’t finish it then and in fact have never finished it. I’d like to at some point. I’ve played some of the early levels a few times but never just sat down and plowed through it in big chunks like I normally would with this kind of game.
The most recent version I got was the one on Switch that came with Sunshine and Galaxy. I’ll play through that version at some point for sure. Unless I get another Windows machine before then and can run one of the PC versions that have popped up since the source leaked a while back. But that’s all a pipe dream at the moment so it’s probably that Switch version for sure.
come to think of it I think the Gamecube was the only other console I ever got at launch and I liked that one much better
I played Mario 64 on the N64 many times. After a certain point I had to make up new stories for Mario 64. One of them involved stealing coins as a bank robber, another one involved Mario being an agent of the Zerg capturing stars so that the Zerg could spread to more planets. I wrote a lot of stories about the Zerg when I was replaying games to keep myself occupied.
Come to think of it back in the 00s I realized I could just play Mario 64 in my head, and mentally path out any star in the game. I only played the game one more time after having that realization.
It’s strange, I don’t consider myself a Mario-head and I don’t think I’ve ever actually owned a copy, but yeah I’ve played it many, many times, at a frequency of maybe once every couple of years since the 90s? Most often now I’ll just boot up the game and run around the castle grounds for a bit. This little guy’s just such a pleasure to control. I don’t know how they managed to get it so right on the first try.
I don’t know, it’s kind of like Tetris. A game to take for granted.
There’s still nothing stopping them from releasing one on the Wii U.
I feel like I keep seeing this being mentioned and I keep forgetting it’s a Mario 64 thing
i play through it an average of every 1-2 years. it might be my favorite mario game by pure vibes
ill never forget how it felt to find the wing cap course for the first time just what something like that does to create a feeling of Mystery out of the cramped fuzzy checkerboard textured castle