sb 64 pt. 8: pagan (voting ends december 2!)

Breath of the Wild
vs
Tetris

At this point, I feel more infected by @Rudie’s enthusiasm for Tetris co-op than I am by the Zelda I haven’t played through, but really want to play through. Also, I’m thinking about how Tetris seeped through the different Eastern European countries’ computer scenes with Czech, Polish, and Hungarian versions being some of the first outside of the USSR. As a global cultural phenomenon, it’s incredibly special for coming from this spot on the earth.

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Super Mario 64 to the top forever. It just so happens to be a Nintendo game. Truly, I am satisfied beyond my expectations that it survived a single round of SB voting. Que Sera Sera 64.

Outrun 2 is as close to perfect as a video thing can get I suppose. Playing it now. If a game mechanic could inspire a religious cult, it would be the drifting in this one. I’m going to have weird sexual dreams about Ferraris tonight.

Still. Super Mario 64 does NOT have in-game ads for Shell oil company.

Anyone played Coast to Coast?

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Coast 2 Coast is great, I’m not a true doom Outrunner but I know it at least adds a new full grid of stages.

I do think Outrun 2 is pretty overrated on here though, I much prefer Ridge Racer. You should play Ridge Racer 6 when you get to 360 stuff! The nitrous boosting and speed-drifting to refill the nitrous gauge is one of the great game mechanics.

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breath of the wild is kind of weird for me. I’m playing it right now. big games have a hard time grabbing me these days, but this one has managed to do so pretty successfully. when I look at its parts individually, I don’t see much. combat sucks, the shrines suck, weapon breaking is a lame mechanic, nintendo was 10 years late to the when-in-doubt-resort-to-physics-gimmicks party, it commits the RPG sin of everything important in every area occurring the second you arrive, it lifts the towers wholesale from some assassin’s creed shit. there’s an awful stealth section. this has no right being interesting. but it’s so beautiful. it has WIND. it manages to feel restrained. finding things is always interesting. the minimalist soundtrack works wonders. the writing is just the right amount of cute and cloy. gliding is perfect. climbing is perfect. it’s a confident game

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I’m voting for Crazy Taxi because the sword laser can’t point to KFC

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I don’t get the love and admiration for Mario 64. Sandbox platforming just isn’t Mario to me and it never will be. It has that N64 trademark “people only like this because it blew them away when they were a kid, not because it’s actually good” energy. Whenever I give it a shot, I just find myself to be so bored out of my mind after a few worlds. At least Sunshine’s got interesting traversal options. It’s like Nier Automata, one of those games everyone loves that I try to play in frustration every once in a while and will never understand why people like it. If I’m gonna play a sandbox platformer, I’d rather just play Spyro 2 or something.

The rebuttal to that is often “Spyro 2 wouldn’t exist if Mario 64 hadn’t invented the conventions” and that’s fair, but it’s pretty telling to me that they’re using Mario 64’s contribution to history to back it up instead of pointing to something Mario 64 actually does better than Spyro 2.

That’s not to say that linear side-scrolling Mario games are always better games than Mario 64. Mario 64 is okay at what it’s trying to be, I just disagree at its core that that is what a Mario game should be trying to be. Some of the NSMB games are worse than Mario 64 but they at least feel like they are trying to be Mario. My opinion of Mario 64 is worse because they released it as a Mario game, and I would be less angry about it if they had spun it off into its own IP instead of reinventing the series like that and making me unlikely to care about most future Mario games.

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On one hand the last Real Episode of Select Button Dot Net Podcast was A More Mario 64 Like Mario Game For Wii U

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I feel this. I actually didn’t mind Automata but it hasn’t stuck with me in the way it seems to with others. I feel like it kinda deviates from what Nier is all about a lot of the time.

Re: Mario 64 I think it’s just impressive that the game is still enjoyable given the challenge it faced as having to make a 3D flagship title that avoided the usual playability issues that plague a new wave of hardware and launch titles. I don’t know if it should be lauded for this and other historical shit but it’s still probably the best 3D Mario in terms of just exploring a 3D space as well. The primacy of having to get people to understand 3D is kinda baked into the minute-to-minute experience and still makes for an engaging time even if it’s very simple. The camera control is pretty rough sometimes though.

I don’t know if I’d get too hung up on what a Mario game should be anyway. Metroid Prime is serving very different aesthetic goals compared to 2D Metroids and they’re just different. Check out my above hypocrisy about Nier.

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Metroid Prime is a Metroidvania in the same way Dark Souls is a Metroidvania. It is trying to accomplish the same core goals as those games with a similar structure, just with a different coat of paint and spacial relationship.

2D Mario platformers are a linear series of challenges with a designed difficulty cadence, and that is immensely satisfying to me on a game design appreciation level. Crash 2 is an example of a game with 3D graphics with similar values, though that feels more like a Donkey Kong Country successor than a Mario successor in feel.

Super Mario 64 is a very different kind of game. It is an impressive tech demo that celebrates the freedom of movement afforded by 3D gameplay being viable on a console, but it doesn’t feel like the old Mario games or Crash 2 at all.

Old Mario felt like a tightly designed platforming experience, New Mario is just like “here’s an environment, go nuts, explore, make your own fun”. It’s like going from Gunpla to a box of Lego blocks. Yes, the verb is still “snapping things together” (“jump”) but they poke very different parts of your brain, and some people are way more suited to one style more than the other.

edit: anyway clearly I’m in the minority here but I needed to scream so that people actually realize it doesn’t have the 100% approval rating everyone thinks it does.

yeah I didn’t make it to the end of that one, it was too infuriating

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Scream on! All sacred cows need regular criticism. I wouldn’t really put Mario 64 in my personal favourites by any stretch but I do think it has clout for a reason.

The distinctions you make about the experience goals are extremely valid and it doesn’t really make sense to talk about Super Mario Bros. and 64 as being continuity of the same stuff when you think ‘what did I actually just experience’.

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As a counterpoint, I cannot understand this perspective at all. The game is the game. What is the purpose of insisting that games sharing the same corporate branding play the same?

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They should’ve made a 3D sequel to Donkey Kong ‘94 instead.

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yeah idk the Mario games have a rich tradition of weird sequels and spinoffs that get pulled into the continuity, not just aesthetically but ludically. SMB2 introduces the subcon crowd, but additionally the grab/throw mechanics got folded into Mario’s moveset in 3 and expanded with the multi-direction kicks and throws in SMW, and then the grabbing/spitting/throwing in SMW2…

likewise i think SM64 is bringing forward the more nonlinear level/scenario design from SMW and SMW2, and trying to figure out how to structure levels that are a mixture of open-ended exploration and more funneled, linear design in the brave new world of 3D. They took that forward to Sunshine which is expands on your freedom of vertical movement in full 3D, but also makes the level design more modular and linear (you can no longer seek goals out of order) so they can tailor the levels for specific challenges. Then Galaxy 1 and 2 winnows down to those more linear and directed levels, 3D Land/World basically directly improves on those types of levels and makes them more dense with incident, and most recently Odyssey gives you the big open world, but many of the goals you find are contained within specific challenges.

I also think the core 2D games, while sharing a common design language, are all trying to do a little bit of their own thing. SMB1/2J are forward momentum based platforming, SMB3 is a bunch of little bite-sized challenges exploring a single mechanic, SMW is based on opening up your own path through the game and finding all the hidden challenge levels. For a seemingly classic, conservative IP they’ve always been fairly elastic with what the “main series” Marios set out to do.

None of that is to say “you gotta love Mario 64,” really just wanted to muse about where it fits into the series designwise because i think it’s interesting. i definitely partly do love it because of nostalgia – i was a kid, it was my first full 3D game, it felt full of possibility and the low-poly 64 aesthetic and dreamy Mario logic (e.g. gaze into the sun painted on the ceiling of the castle lobby and be transported to a beautiful land in the clouds) really fired my imagination. It’s a comfort food game and i still think it feels good in the hands. And the music slaps.

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Under that logic, why shouldn’t the next mainline Mario series game be a Gran Turismo-style simulation racer? There’s only so much you can move the goalposts per release before you deliver something outside the expectations of your customers, especially if you choose not to offer any comparable substitute for an entire decade. I would love another Gran Turismo-style game, but it’d be a shit Mario game even by 3D Mario standards.

Pokémon Sun and Moon and Monster Hunter World are more recent examples of games I have this kind of issue with, and neither of those represents as significant a shift as the gap between 2D Mario and 3D Mario. Too often I feel like when there’s a turning point release for a series, the aspects developers choose to carry forward with them are not the things that [I feel] made the game great to begin with, and I lose confidence and interest completely. I think I’m just too sensitive to this stuff.

I don’t love Mario 64, but its structure is definitely lovable

Abstaining because I haven’t played Outrun 2, I adore one way overlapping bifurcation in games though, like in Darius

I agree that branding is, from the corporate perspective, meant to signal customers in order to induce them to buy the brand, but I don’t see why I should care about what’s good corporate marketing.

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We’re talking about corporate branding re: SM64’s merits? Good lord. I don’t get that at all. Like I said, I’m just happy the game made it one round. I’m taking nothing personally in these rankings but I also have no problem being a shameless shill for the game because it represents something that I find deeply inspirational as a video experience and that’s freeform treasure hunting via feel good physics. Nostalgia is always there but I’m self-aware enough to realise that’s a small fraction of it for me. You get out of this game as much as you put into it which is probably a cop out but I insist on calling it a playground game because playgrounds are the same. How many times did I go to the same playground as a kid growing up? A lot. The equipment was always the same but the games changed, my mood was different so I amused myself differently, set little challenges with friends (races with weird rules, floor is lava, etc.).

Ok, maybe if anything, this just illustrates how much of a baby I still am but booting up a fresh save file, coming up with a novel star route and trying to execute as fast as possible, parkouring like my pants are on fire, is a virtual motor maneuvering experience that surpasses even Outrun 2 for me (you can never mount a summit and look down and feel that special feeling of “I was just down there but now I’m here” (which is not what that racer is going for but it’s a big appeal of 3D games for me)). The machinery under the hood of this game is robust and accommodating and generous for those who like how it feels to play. It will meet your sense of wonder and desire for toy box bounce-aboutery at least halfway. It’s got some nice moods too.

I’ve watched some friends play the game recently. They aren’t very familiar with it and I sure have underestimated how tricky it is to get comfortable with the game but knowing that level of play is there (if you care to reach for it) is a great thing imo. I’m seeing the little moments of discovery and conceptual clicking fresh for the first time in many years and it makes me love this thing even more. This is a beautiful game. A joyful thing about jumping for treasure with terrific tunes. And that’s really all Mario needs to be.

P.S. Spyro got nothing on SM64.
P.P.S. In my many (probably tiresome) arguments in favour of the game, I think I’ve rarely emphasised the “it did it first” argument though that is a delicious icing on a hearty cake which ain’t worth nothing.

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I’ve been screaming about it because I’m convinced it has like a 25% approval rating around here at best lol. If what we’re doing is screaming though, I think screaming is just fine and dandy.

Watched the Champion’s Ballad DLC and was reminded just how much I despise the voice direction. I’m voting Tetris!

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Super Mario 64 was amazing back when it came out. I was absolutely mesmerized by it because I had never seen a game that was so open and sandbox-y and freeform and had such movement mechanics and felt so realistic in the way things moved and existed in a 3D environment. It really felt like a leap into a new dimension more so than other contemporaries. I really appreciate the way that the game is structured so you can go into whatever levels you’re more comfortable and hunt whatever stars are more attractive to you.

Nowadays though I feel very annoyed by its controls. I despise with a passion how Mario does a huge car turn whenever you want to slightly nudge him backwards to adjust your positioning or to make Mario face another direction. I am disgusted by how he bonks away from walls when you brush against them mid-jump. I feel sick to my stomach when he receives so much fall damage. I want to cry when the game decides to give me more straightforward and more precise platforming challenges in the form of Rainbow Ride and Tick-Tock Clock and the game’s controls just do not feel designed for it.

The controls feel like they were made in a vaccuum, just trying to make something that has really good-feeling kinesthetics and impart a sense of analogness and “realism” to control in. When Miyamoto said that he wasn’t sure whether it should be a game, that it should just be a space for you to fuck around with Mario, I totally get that. Mario turns like a car because humans can’t suddenly turn 180 degrees in place. Mario receives fall damage because you’d be damaged falling from high. Mario bonks against walls because you’d go “oof!” and bonk away from one if you jumped against one. But those are all things that go against traditional platforming and makes the game feel horrendous when it tries being more challenging and more 2D Mario-esque. All of it is also marred by camera issues.

I hate most of its levels. I think they’re bad. I love Bob-Omb Battlefield and Lethal Lava Land (well, not the inside the volcano part at least) and Cool Cool Mountain and Whomp Fortress are good, but I don’t think I enjoy any other level in this game. Maybe the Bowser levels I’d say are good or good-ish. So many tasks are so annoying if you fail them because they’ll send you all the way down to a distant part of the level or kill you and make you restart far from them (see: the sand slide Star inside the Pyramid that you have to jump and land between tiny blocks) and like I said, the controls just don’t feel precise enough and the levels don’t give you enough room or a good enough camera angle for the action so you can be really confident in what you’re doing. So many boring stars that feel like busywork.

Did you know you can get stuck in that section of the second snow world where you have to use the Vanish Cap to get through ice walls? That was fun finding out by accident in a 100-coin run.

I like the way the Wing Cap and the Koopa Shell transform how you interact with the levels but there’s only two other power-ups and they don’t really do anything very interesting. Metal Cap makes your movement so slow and restricted and boring. Vanish Cap lets you walk into only some very clearly delineated walls (and like I said, you can get stuck and forced to restart!!). Maybe this is why the DS remake added other characters with their own unique mechanics and new powerups (Fire flower, P-balloon). The game really needed more stuff to play and toy with.

Anyway, yeah, dislike or outright despise 80% of the levels, Mario feels good to “yahoo!” with the long jump and backflip and triple jump but terrible to try to be precise with, lots of stars feel like boring or annoying busywork. I don’t want to downplay though how much all the little secrets together with learning these levels and learning how to play the game better and learning how to traverse in 3D did so so much to me back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it felt like a window into a near-limitless world where every nook and cranny could be important. But they hold no meaning to me now that we’ve had so many other 3D games and now that I’m more game-literate and all that’s left is a game that I wish to enjoy but every time I walk away frustrated by it.

Also did I mention that OutRun 2/2006 has a mode called Heart Attack mode, like Score Attack and Time Attack but for impressing your girlfriend for doing cool stunts like dodging meteors and bouncing a giant beach ball with your car? It’s called Heart Attack mode. That’s incredible. I used to play OutRun 2006 every time I got myself a new music album and just virtually drove while I listened to it. It’s arcade-y driving at its finest.

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