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I'm playing Mario 64. Despite some irritations (like I'll never understand exactly what calls the eel out of the sunken ship, and Cool, Cool Mountain seems quite a lot harder than it should be at that point in the game) it's still a masterpiece. The fact that their first stab at Mario in 3d from 1996 is still fun to play is nothing short of miraculous.
Maybe I'll finally get around to playing Odyssey after these. Still haven't played it, and I'm very much in a Mario mood right now.
It had to have helped that, whereas some developers were caught flat-footed by the shift to 3D in the mid-'90s, Miyamoto had been designing a 3D Mario game in his head from the moment he heard Nintendo was making a machine more powerful than the Famicom. (The hardware engineers quickly explained to him it would be impossible on the SuFami, but the Super FX chip came about because he simply could not wait another hardware cycle to start making 3D games.)
Despite some irritations (like I'll never understand exactly what calls the eel out of the sunken ship, and Cool, Cool Mountain seems quite a lot harder than it should be at that point in the game) it's still a masterpiece.
Snow Man's Land is actually one of the easier levels (doubly so because it's one of the ones whose design basically prevents the stage from having any bottomless pits), with the only issue of its placement in the level order being that it's already pretty similar to Bob-Omb Battlefield except for the inclusion of the chill bully which breaks the pacing of the ideas taken from the basement area.
It had to have helped that, whereas some developers were caught flat-footed by the shift to 3D in the mid-'90s, Miyamoto had been designing a 3D Mario game in his head from the moment he heard Nintendo was making a machine more powerful than the Famicom. (The hardware engineers quickly explained to him it would be impossible on the SuFami, but the Super FX chip came about because he simply could not wait another hardware cycle to start making 3D games.)
It's not entirely without antecedent, however. Mario's moveset in Donkey Kong '94 expresses a lot of similar concepts (to a much different end, of course). In particular, the interplay between how Mario is moving on the ground and the altitude he gains from a jump is much more sophisticated in these games than in any of the mainline 2D games.I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be a developer then. You've just invented the wheel and then Miyamoto pops up in an SUV. For me it's the first modern 3D game.
Started up Galaxy tonight. Question: Is Nintendo aware of how phenomenal this game is? Fuckin' hell, this game is good. I don't want to give them ideas but I would have paid $60 just for this. I forgot just how utterly delightful and warm and fuzzy and charming the game is. It's almost embarassingly good.
It's amazing what top-tier art direction can do for a game!It's also incredible how good it looks. They upgraded the resolution and that's it. The game is 13 years old, from technology that was old at the time.
It really is remarkable how well Mario 64 codified the 3D platformer. It's like everyone struggled to figure out how to get their stuff working in 3D well, and Nintendo's like "BAM!" First try.