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.