Saturday 19 January, 2008

Gameplay

So, my girlfriend and I did the classic "play until you die or beat a level, then switch" method for determining who was alotted how much gametime. As it became apparent that my skill was dramatically dwarfed by that of my girlfriend's, much of my gameplay experience was spent replaying levels to farm for 1UPs so we could progress through the game. If we had had a memory stick the necessity for this would have been lessened, but as it stood I was hearkened back to my days of playing Super Mario World, playing the first level over and over again for the same reason.

I found myself growing less and less nostalgic, and more and more frustrated as I remembered why I stopped playing 2D platformers, and why I never got into 3D platformers. Jump...grab...jump...grab. A fine way to kill 10 minutes, but not something I'd do for hours on end, at least not without the appropriate company. But the compulsion I felt to get the 30 stars needed to continue onto the next leg of the game was undeniable. There's just something about it, the need to save the Princess, beat King Koopa, to see at LEAST one star out of each of the levels. So I kept playing.

Design

As I said, this is one of the first 3D platformers ever made, and so its shortcomings are forgivable in light of its innovation. That being said, there are shortcomings. Movement is clunky, being manipulated by the awkwardly located control stick. The lack of an independently controllable camera is responsible for countless nightmare spots. The fact that there are no checkpoints in the levels means a wrong jump puts you at the beginning of the level. Throughout the game are a couple "bonus stages" involving sliding downhill. These games are difficult and tedious, and seem completely out of place. The basic gameplay is simplistic, often too simplistic, and usually every task that needs to be completed is explicitly spelled out in exact detail, leaving out much of the joy of discovery, and accomplishment when a task is completed.

However, Super Mario 64 does many things that even the platformers of today don't do right. The facts that many levels have more than one set path to beat them, that each level has different objectives to complete to gain stars (often mutually exclusive except for the extremely skilled), and that levels change depending on your progress in the game adds a great deal of replayability. Each level can be completed for the max number of gold coins, to complete the set of red coins for the level, to beat the boss of the level, or to complete the "quests" certain characters offer in the level. As I already mentioned, the goofy humor is spot on, and goes hand in hand with the cartoony, childlike feel of the game as a whole.

Yeah, I've noticed that you have an amazing drive to progress the story in the games you play, regardless of how ridiculous the game itself turns out to be =p

You probably didn't realize this because you never actually ended up losing all your lives, but the game hardly punishes you at all for losing all your lives. When you lose them all, you spawn in the main hall of the castle. For comparison, when you restart your game from your last saved location, you spawn outside the castle where you first started the game.

I didn't find the lack of checkpoints within the painting worlds themselves that inhibiting, as each world was relatively small and it only took on average 40 seconds to reach any point you would want to within the average world (except for the more linear worlds, like the mountain you have to scale).

You bring up both the triumphs and pitfalls of the game, and you do a pretty good job of explaining and justifying them. Of particular note is the fact that the desire to continue overrides the frustration of repeated failure. Not all game (in fact, fairly few games) have this characteristic. Why do you think Super Mario 64 is able to accomplish this?


- David Seagal (Grader)