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The Ferro's Super Smash Brothers (N64)
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| [February 19, 2008 12:43:55 AM]
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Summary
Mario 64 is the first of the Mario series where Mario is in a 3d world. Unlike the original Mario games where you run through a series of courses with a limited amount of playing time, Mario 64 offers many different worlds with a series of obstacles that you have to overcome. Each world has 6 different stars that you have to get. Each star has a different obstacle you have to overcome before you get it.
Gameplay 1
Within my first couple of hours of gameplay I was able to get through most of the stars in three different worlds. The gameplay was unique to the Mario series and was fun to play. Each star you have to get in each world is like a mission. You aren’t just running through a course for time. You can earn stars through boss battles, collecting 8 red coins, getting to hard to reach places, racing, puzzle solving, etc. Having more than one objective makes the game a lot more fun to play than the original Marios.
It was good to see the classic storyline and character list in Mario 64. You play as Mario, the Italian plumber who has the fight through wave after wave of Bowser’s minions and Bowser himself to save the princess Peach. I like the story, I feel that if Mario wasn’t fighting Bowser it would upset a lot of fans.
Mario in the 64 version is just plain sick. It’s a lot of fun to control Mario because of the amount of things you do. Mario can kick, punch, duck, dive, tackle, throw, leap far distances, jump very high, do back flips, front flips, jump off walls, get shot out of cannons, crawl and slide. As a Mario fan since the original Mario, being able to do more than just jump was awesome to see the first time I played Mario 64. Its sweet to be able to make Mario leap over a large gap and do a extra high front flip to kick-jump off a wall.
Something really cool I noticed while playing was the amount of little rewards you can find throughout the levels. There are certain objects in levels that trigger rewards like coins or extra lives, but there are a lot of hidden ones throughout the game. For example, in the first level if you ran around a certain patch of grass you would be rewarded with an extra life. There are even certain unmarked spots on the map that teleport Mario. Which come in handy when one spot teleports Mario from the bottom of the mountain to the top.
Gameplay 2
For my second couple of hours of gameplay I was able to complete a few more worlds and achieve some new abilities. I enjoyed how the challenges incorporated the design of the level. It kept things interesting. For example when you became metal Mario in the under water levels you get the ability to walk on the ocean floor, which is impossible to do while swimming. Introducing the new abilities later on in the game also helped keep things fun. Plus with the new abilities you acquire you can go back to previous worlds and use them there; like the floating island in the first level where there is a block you have to unlock first before you can use it
A cool feature of Mario 64 that other Mario games don’t offer is the order you play the levels in. In the original games you didn’t have a choice which level you played, you had a fixed order of levels you had to complete. In Mario 64 you don’t have to collect all the stars in a particular order, you have the option of jumping for world to world. You don’t have get all the stars in one world to continue to the next. Even in the world, you don’t have to get stars in a fixed order. This helps keep players intrigued and prevents bored from being in the same setting for too long.
One thing that I didn’t think was very good about Mario 64 was that there was little to no replay value for star missions. There is a slight record system of how many coins you collect with each star where your have a high score is the amount of coins you collected. I feel that this isn’t a good enough motive to play missions again. Time should have been recorded. It is a lot more fun to do things quicker than it is to take your time roaming throughout large maps for every enemy to kill and coin to collect. The problem with Mario 64 and all the rest of the Mario games is that there is little replay value.
Design
The level design in Mario 64 is nothing like the original Mario games. Each level is a themed 3d world where you are free to roam within the borders of the level. The levels are huge and can it can take several minutes to borders in each level are either walls you cant jump over or a fall to your death. I noticed some similarity in the first 3 levels I played though, each level was just a mountain, where you always find a star at the top. Mario 64 doesn’t restrict Mario from leaping from the top of these mountains either, and having the freedom to watch Mario fall through the air is cool.
The reward structure in Mario 64 keeps the player in the game. Each world is behind a door that requires you to have collected a certain amount of stars to pass through. After collecting stars you are rewarded access to new worlds to collect more stars. And with new worlds comes new abilities like Mario’s Wings and Metal Mario. It keeps players playing because they want to discover what worlds and abilities hide behind each door. The ultimate reward however is collecting all the stars and meeting Yoshi.
Mario 64 provides a lot of challenges not seen in previous games of the series. In fact, there are several different kinds of challenges such as, boss battles, solving puzzles, races, collecting items, and having to navigate through hard courses. The fact that there are so many different types of challenges makes Mario 64 a much more entertaining game than the original Mario games.
Although there are a lot of different kinds of enemies in Mario 64 I feel that there isn’t enough of them in each level. The levels are pretty empty for how large they are. I didn’t like how I would die from obstacles more than enemies. They were so easy to kill, there should be more enemies to jump on or punch. After playing for a while I started to get bored of just running and jumping through obstacles. There wasn’t enough combat in Mario 64. The boss battles where ok, nothing special. The lack of fighting in Mario 64 made the game more puzzle/obstacle oriented.
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| [January 26, 2008 10:00:19 PM]
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Summary
Super Smash Brothers is a 1-4 player fighting game that offers story mode and multiplayer where you get to choose from 12 of your favorite Nintendo characters to duke it out. With a character list of Luigi, Mario, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Captain Falcon, Nes, Kirby, Pikachu, Yoshi, Jiggypuff, and Fox how can this game not be great. Each player has a percentage meter, which is your health, and the higher the percentage your player is, the faster and farther they fly off the map. The goal of Smash is to conflict enough damage to get to your opponent’s percent high enough to knock them off the map. This game is my favorite 64 game of all time, it is so much fun.
Gameplay
Playing this game multiplayer with friends is so much fun. Even though this game came out several years ago I still find myself playing it today. The battles are very competitive, and with 4 players of equivalent skill level it’s a blast. And even if you only have 3 players, the 4th can be a computer player. They are always intense fast paced non-stop battles. Being able to send your opponent flying off the screen after beating him senseless is awesome. You have the option of either playing with Time or Stock and have it be either a team or free for all battle. If you decide to go by Time, the goal is to kill as many opponents as possible while staying alive as long as possible, within the time limit of the round. If you kill an opponent your score goes up by one, but if you die, your score goes down by 1, the winner is based on who has the highest score at the end of the round. If you go with Stock, you have a certain amount of lives and the goal is to be the last man alive.
The more I played multiplayer with friends the more I started to realize that characters where actually unbalanced. There seemed to some things that give certain characters some big advantages, for example, I noticed that Pikachu and Nes have some advantages that other characters don’t. There also seemed to be characters that where at a disadvantages, like Link and Jigglypuff.
Some of Pikachu’s forward attacks have the ability to hit an opponent behind him and is the only character that has a full swing with an item like the plasma sword, star wand, and home-run bat, he can bash opponents both in front and behind him. This makes it a lot easier to inflict damage during a chaotic 4 person brawl. Plus Pikachu is the only character with a move a double dash move, which gives his character a much easier time to run-away, recover from a big hit, get to items quickly, and avoid an attack.
If a player knows the right combo of moves to inflict on his opponent, Nes is able to deliver a series of attacks that leave his opponent stunned and helpless as long as Nes continues to deliver the combo. If done properly, Nes can easily get his opponents percentage high enough to finish them off with one strike while his opponent can only watch and wait for him to stop the combo.
Link is not the slowest character in the game but his up B move, which is vital in Smash to be able to recover from a devastating hit, is the worst in the game. This makes Links character easy to hit and even easier to kill. The reason Jigglypuff is a bad character to play as is because both of his special B moves leave him helpless for a good 3 seconds at least and one of those B moves is his most devastating attack. So even if you do pull of your big hit as Jigglypuff and nail one opponent, while your helpless, another has more than enough time to send you flying across the map.
Although there are some characters that are better than others, that has little effect of how much fun this game is. Multiplayer Smash can be enjoy by all kinds of players with different skill ranges. My friends and I can play this game for hours on end.
Gameplay 2
The single player story mode in Smash is fun, but it has some setbacks. You get to choose your difficulty setting and number of stock (lives) to go through 14 levels. At the end of each level you get a list of bonus achievements that either add to your score or take points away. Although the goal of the story mode is to beat all the levels, the score and bonus achievements just add more things to try and achieve and a competitive element to the single player game play.
Overall the single player Smash experience is great. There are just a few things that they could improve on, which for the most part developers did in Melee. But on the 64,
• Every level is the same for each character except for 2 levels; break the targets and board the platforms. And those have nothing to do with combat, they are more of obstacles.
• The AI isn’t that good. For the more experienced player, the computer opponent isn’t that hard to defeat, even on the hardest setting.
• With just 14 levels, the game is beat rather quickly. Its too short, beating the game with every character doesn’t take that long.
In terms of the actual storyline in Smash, there isn’t much of one. The only storyline that I can come up with based on the introduction and boss battle is the each character is actually a toy. And since the final boss is a giant hand, I assume that is the hand of the person who owns all of these toys. So you are a toy, who defeats its owner… I think.
Another thing that is cool about Smash, are the 4 hidden characters you unlock by playing the game. When you play Smash for the first time, at the character menu screen there are 4 blurry boxes where the 4 hidden characters should be. The fact that at first you don’t know who those characters are will keep a playing the game until they unlock those characters because they want to find out who they are.
Design
The fighting style in this game was very innovative for its release date and is still unique amongst fighting games today. The percentage health system allows players to viciously exchange hit after hit until a player percentage is so high that a hit will send them off the map. Every character has the ability to freely roam throughout the map as they please. Each character can double jump, so mid air brawls become a big part of the game.
What really makes Smash such a great game has to be the character list. Who wouldn’t want to see all of their favorite Nintendo characters duking it out in the same game? Each character has their own special abilities, Mario with the fire balls, Pikachu with the electricity, Link with his sword, etc. There had been no game like this when it was released, this one the first time that so many characters from so many different games came together on one game.
The levels in this game all have different themes. Each level follows a characters theme; Link with Hyrule Castle, Pikachu with Safari City, Fox with his starship, etc. On top of level themes, each level has a unique feature that effects combat, which adds another element to fighting strategies. For example, on Hyrule Castle tornados appear that if your caught in them, they will throw you up in the air and inflict damage. On Fox’s Starship fighters fly by and shoot, and if your caught by a fighters laser your going flying.
Another great thing about Smash is that it is a fighting game that incorporates items. Most of the items you will recognize from the previous games of characters, like the classic hammer in the original Donkey Kong. There are also items like the plasma sword that you can strike people with of throw at them. Item control is a key element winning a game of Smash.
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| [January 25, 2008 11:49:06 PM]
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The Ferro's Super Smash Brothers (N64)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 23 January, 2008
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