Super Mario for Nintendo 64

It continues to amaze me that so many people love this game. If I get blasted for the things I'm about to say, oh well. Call me a biased sega nut, or call me uniformed, in my opinion, this has got to be the most overrated game ever.

When reading the reviews of this game, I usually always see that "it changed the face of gaming". This is both true and false. Mario 64 was not the first total 3d game ever. Jumping flash on playstation came first, and that was a better game.

Lets have a look shall we?

Nintendo has created some of the greatest masterpieces ever. All of the zelda games (yes, even part two), super metroid, yoshi's island (the first one, not 2), and mario 3 are among some of them. Mario 64 is not.
The mario games have always been great, albeit simple 2d platformers. Yoshi's island for snes was and still is the best mario game ever. There has always been great fun in running and jumping on top of creatures, trying to find a mushroom to make you big again, and fighting bowswer and all of his cronies. That magic is just missing from this game.

The first problem is that the game arena based. Every level has a barrier around it. Now, that be seem cool, but the way the levels were designed just doesn't make much sense as a mario game. While mario has always been about platforms, this game seems to be more like a 3d rendition of American Gladiators. There are just platforms strewn about in a very ugly fashion. In the 2d mario games, the levels moved foward, they were proggresive. There was none of the run back and fourth to different parts of one level action going on. The levels just look very disorganized, with a hill thrown here, a platform here, etc. And while the levels have themes, they all seem to be exactly alike. They take a pool of fire, throw some different shaped platforms about, then throw in a cage or two, and call it a volcano zone, lava zone :( It's really bad.

And unlike most mario games, there are very few levels. Now, a game doesn't have to have a huge amount of levels. No, but it does have make great use of the one's that it does have. Mario 64 just does not. The whole game revolves around the objective of recovering stars from each level. A certain amount of stars must be found in order to progress to the next level. This means constant running around in the same world over and over again. That is not fun at all for this type of game. And the levels are small. Compared to something like tomb raider, which does 3d levels right, this game has seriously small levels. Unless you want to have to replay the same exact level over and over, I wouldn't take the plunge.

But obviously some people would. What's funny though, is that the majority of people who love this game own n64s. Ask a playstation owner if this game is any good and you will get a *no* in heartbeat. Ask saturn or dreamcast owner as well. While most of the magazines gave it good reviews at the time, it was mainly because of the good graphics, with looked great compared to crash bandicoot and Nights. However, both of those other games were fun, and had great replay value. Crash had a huge number of levels, and Nights had fantasic music and control, great textures and graphics in general, and was just fun fun fun.

Mario uses mostly flst shaded polygons, which looked ok, but don't look so hot now. The only great thing about the graphics is that there was no texture popping or polygon clipping. That shouldn't make a game though. The music is terrible, and is just shoddy remixes of old tunes. The few songs that are new scream 16-bit cartridge music. The star music was good though, but that was it.

The enemies can be avoided all together and you don't even have to get all of the stars. Basically, the game gets boring really fast. And the ending. I won't even go there.

If you think I'm hating on nintendo products, you're wrong. I owend n64, playstation, saturn, snes, and genesis, all at the same time. I've played and enjoyed every mario game except this one, and I've fallen in love with other games of this type, banjo kazooie, Rayman 64, sonic adventure, and spyro the dragon. I owned this game at the same time as Nights and Crash. I can honestly say this game got little playing time.
There is just so much missing, some stuff that even hype can't hide. Even bubsy 3d gave this game a challenge, and that was totally terrible.

So in my opinion, which is what you want if you're reading this, this is the most overrated nintendo product that I have ever played. If you don't agree, just go read all of the other reviews, as they all seem to say totally otherwise.

bye