|
Tuesday 19 February, 2008
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.
|
