Best Level from Super Mario 64

no idea where i stand here but i think my shortlist is hazy maze cave / big boo's haunt / tall tall mountain / wet-dry world (the underwater village!). favorite bowser level is the last one cuz of the music.

gut says cool cool mountain

is it ok to post videos/pictures? everyone's talking about tick tock clock and i can't even remember it.

Coliflower @Coliflower_
Ok #atheists if God isn't real then please explain to me the Rainbow Ride level of Super Mario 64

'tick tock clock' is def one of those ones that was impossibly hard when you were a kid but like 5 years later on the replay you were like, this is easy as hell

bob-omb battlefield makes me wistful because it's like this idyllic english pastoral scene where all the bob-ombs can't stop fighting =(

yeah post lots! tick tock clock was the really merciless one that was all jumping from gear to gear while trying not to get hit by pendulums that all moved at one of three different speeds depending on how you entered the level.

shifting sand land though, fuck that level forever

i loved the pyramid interior in shifting sand land

monkeys on tall-tall mountain gave me a fucking panic attack, always

dark horse for me here is the really melancholy mist-on-the-water atmosphere of jolly roger bay, which was otherwise p uninteresting

rainbow ride is where I want to have all my dreams take place

dire dire docks is the one with the submarine and the cages yeah?

tbrr I would have voted for the cap level where you just fly from cloud to cloud. you get there by looking at the sun from the entrance room? iirc

xp yeah. pretty but basic. sub was cool.

when i was a kid my favs were tall tall mountain and wet dry world, i think i like hazy maze cave best now though. lethal lava land was and is my least favorite

haha i almost put in the cap levels cuz i thought someone would prob want to vote for that one (and yeah, after you get a few stars a beam of light starts coming down from a hitherto invisible skylight in the entrance room, and so you naturally look up to see what's going on -- most magical organic secret-level entrance ever) but then i was like no i want that vote to go to a real level.

the cloud to cloud level wasn't the wing cap level, it was another secret one up by rainbow ride at the top of the castle

cool cool mountain: racing the big penguin dude, baby penguin, momma penguin, wallkicks for the star (the wallkick was probably the most satisfying move to do, stringing together 10 of those fuckers felt so awesome)

i like shellsurfing on the lava in lethal lava land. hazy maze cave a really really serious contender tho because of how big and intricate it was. used to get a thrill every time i came to another shopping-mall-style map monolith.

tick tock clock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQfdWOUa4jI

This game was kind of like a theme park.

that's probably not a very good showcase of the level. dude is like a mad squirrel

come on tho big boo's haunt. the parts where the floor in the mansion crumbles and you assume it's gonna kill you but it just drops you into the basement with that horrifying calliope.

hahaha I was so fucking scared of that level as a kid

the worst though is any/every enemy that could take your hat

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6cDt2kcb4gw/TLZUQtrPMvI/AAAAAAAAAzQ/i50PM8oiTc4/s1600/Piano.jpg

RUN

probably why I hate shifting sand land: 1) dying in the sand around the abse of the pyramid and everwhere else 2) the big candyass buzzard

mario looked so genuinely unmanned without the hat.

the Lakitu cameraman looks on in horror

I spent a lot of time just flying around Bob-omb Battlefield.

demonstration of how well this game understood what was fun about itself: the big reward for getting 120 stars is yes "meet yoshi" but really it's "wing cap in the overworld".

i figured out how to get onto the castle roof without 120 stars but yoshi isn't there :(

monkeys on tall-tall mountain gave me a fucking panic attack, always

this plus the ones where you have to get to the mushrooms. plus it had a slide in it.

this is a hard one. Cool, Cool Mountain was my favorite as a kid but Rainbow Ride is such a cool level

while we're on this nostalgia trip BRB

mentioned this in the other thread but the secret greatness of Mario 64 was that you could really get to any place at any time if you were good enough

tall tall mountain slide was THE BEST. if only it had had a fat penguin.

any love for tiny-huge island? prob the coolest gimmick of the midgame variable-entrance levels (this, wet/dry world, tick tock clock, i guess that's it) plus the rly claustrophobic and alarming fight with "wiggler".

dayo is currently playing mario 64 and drinking mountain dew

this thread makes me want to play this again!

it's been over ten years.

The way you enter the painting for Tiny-Huge Island was a stroke of genius.

could also poll favorite music but Dire, Dire Docks would probably win in a landslide

yeah, me too. just the other day i dug out my n64+SNES+NES and hooked them all up, but my N64 and SNES controllers are busted, somehow. anyone know a good place to get new/used controllers? i see some on amazon but they all appear to be crappy 3rd party, stiff controls, etc.

xposts

btw this is a great article about Mario 64
http://gameological.com/2012/08/mr-perfect/

i used to play whomp's fortress like it was splinter cell or something, letting the owl parachute me onto one of the lower levels of the fortress and then sneaking around the big dumb guards.

jim otm about the optical illusion paintings leading into tiny-huge island. another rad touch: the snowman's land painting that's only visible in the giant mirror at one end of the room.

un-rad touch: the kid in middle school who said you could get to the end of the endless staircase after about 15 minutes, he "totally did it"

lol

really the only shitty thing about this game were the random Toads that would give you stars for nothing

another point for hazy maze cave: this moment of genuine like hushed awe in the dark lake deep underground

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mb34apkf4B1ru09vqo1_500.gif

haha it was so mean that you had to butt stomp its head

while we're on this nostalgia trip BRB

― 乒乓, Friday, February 1, 2013 11:49 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

favorite place to hang out in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

gonna throw a vote for snowman's land because i love it

in all its polygonal glory

snowman's land is awesome for shellsurfing

This was def a very consistent game, I have fond memories of every single level

The Bowser levels were the most fun with their pure platforming and instant easy deaths but a vote for them would bely the scope of the game. I vote Hazy Maze Cave, what with the Steel Mario bit and the part where you ride the dinosaur, great level.

nah you buttstomped its back to make it lower its head so you could climb on it before it raised it again. it's got fat back there; it can take it. altho the noise it made was p wrenching.

xp omg yes

also that little igloo that became this weird ice palace inside??

that xp was to dayo's zelda poll

Shifting Sand Land seems like a shitshow but it had those hilarious rolling metal boxes and the disembodied hand, come on, great level!!

I like Hazy Maze Cave because of the way the music changes depending on where you are. This is something I really love about Mario games by the way, like how you get the bongos whenever you're on Yoshi. Galaxy was full of tricks like this.

you fight the pair of disembodied hands with the eyes in them that you punch in shifting sand land, right?

yeah; i think that was my favorite boss. (possible competitor: big boo, not because of the actual enemy but because of the setting, up there on the mansion balcony in the dark and the wind with no guard rail.)

yes they're in the pyramid in that tomb in the middle that you can only get to by standing on the 4 pillars outside which causes the tip of the pyramid to explode revealing a secret entrance

hand boss was weird though. i didn't feel it fit in.

that boo battle was pretty incredible; all I remember is the camera angle really screwing with you, probably on purpose

yeah, me too. just the other day i dug out my n64+SNES+NES and hooked them all up, but my N64 and SNES controllers are busted, somehow. anyone know a good place to get new/used controllers? i see some on amazon but they all appear to be crappy 3rd party, stiff controls, etc.

― Z S, Friday, February 1, 2013 11:55 AM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark

the worst was analog stick dust

think I remember coming across a controller where the octagon ring surrounding the stick had literally been ground into a circle

the owner of it prob played 1080 snowboarding to death

hand boss was weird though. i didn't feel it fit in.

I liked it, it was scarier, suggested a dark heart

i'm surprised mario doesn't have CTE from me banging his head into so many basement walls trying to catch that fucking rabbit

i still can't do the fucking rabbit.

those fuckers who do the speedruns get him in like 2 seconds. always felt the rabbit was Nintendo's way of needling the player a bit

I look forward to playing this today.

this poll is amazing, thank you for making it, also I've literally only just woken up and in all seriousness thought one of the poll options was 'Tiny-Huge Cock'

Embarrassing nicknames from Mario's past

Cool, Cool Mountain isn't the best or most fun or rewarding level but I don't think I can vote against penguins

Cool, Cool Mountain did have that atmosphere.

I think my favorite single stars were the Bowser levels, but I can't fully seperate the experiences enough to vote for one of them right now. This is hard.

If this was "best place to hang out" like the Zelda poll then my answer would 100% be Jolly Roger Bay, I honestly did turn on the N64 sometimes just to go and hang around in there, the music for that level is still my all time favourite videogame music and yeah, you could remix it yourself by wandering round: the beach was chimes only, then the lovely filtered synth strings faded in as you jumped into the water, and you'd get those light skittery drums in the hidden cave. Whether or not it's the best level is trickier. Might just vote for it anyway though.

I was 21 when this came out btw.

I posted it on this board before but there is one level on this game that is just a straight rip of a caetano veloso song

the level's music obv (I'm sick)

I heard the dude who did the music for this game bought an affordable housing unit located inside a larger division of identical housing units with access to shared facilities and resources. he called it his koji den of sick jams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhAYJZ66giw

jimd really otm about the atmosphere in jolly roger bay -- plus the eel has the same, like, majesty as the monster in hazy maze cave, where it's this huge creature that mostly ignores you (although the eel will snap if you get too close) and that you can just watch swim around its habitat.

as a level there's not much to it but it's the prettiest.

playing the water levels of SM 64 + wave race 64 in such close proximity to each other really has made water environments the Best Thing in video games

wave race 64 still the finest racing game ever. who would sponsor such a tourney?

holy shit I forgot about Wave Race 64!

what a game.

^

Great poll idea.

No love for Tall Tall Mountain? I can't remember any of the specific puzzles but I thought it had a cool 'feel'. I hated any of the ones that felt too contained in an obvious box - especially Lethal Lava Land. Wet-Dry World had a solid gimmick but suffered from this IMO. Kind of claustrophobic. The more 'landscapey' ones I think brought out that sense of majesty or peacefulness. I could say a lot more but it's late.

i approve of this bomb ass remember the 90's thread. My favorite level was the ghosthouse, and wave race was my jam. Ghosts were so cool.

http://i46.tinypic.com/nlbzgh.pnghttp://i46.tinypic.com/nlbzgh.pnghttp://i46.tinypic.com/nlbzgh.png

http://i46.tinypic.com/20f3m35.pnghttp://i46.tinypic.com/20f3m35.pnghttp://i46.tinypic.com/20f3m35.png

playing through this again and I'm leaning toward tiny-huge island atm

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Yeah, I'm going Tall Tall Mountain, seems like an underdog and I just love how spatial it is - moreso than some of the others you get the sense of "oh yeah, now i'm above that place I was before" and so on. Also just hits that sweet spot I loved about Tomb Raider and even a shitty game like Ultima 9, these early 3D worlds where it was just so much fun to explore. It's a pretty small area but it feels more about roaming and experiencing the ambitious, death-defying landscape than it does about solving little polygonal puzzles.

This game is pretty damn sweet, but all the tweaks they've done since then and Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a WAY more enjoyable experience. For instance, the camera pretty much never is a problem anymore. Also, in 64, it seems like items are much smaller, so it's more difficult to collect them. Having never played 64 til now, til after SMG2, it's pretty clear that most of the innovations were born there and I have to give mad props to Nintendo for inventing them, and perfecting them over several series of games.

I love camera problems in 64, because you can imagine the lakitu just got tangled up and couldn't track you fast enough

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

picked up an N64 a month or so ago and been collecting games, catching up on stuff i missed. i grew up w a SNES but kinda stopped gaming once things got 3D. it's been fun to go play the games i missed.

that said i beat Super Mario 64 last night (w 75 stars) and Cool Cool Mountain and Big Boo's Haunt are both highlights. Shifting Sand Land also really grew on me, it was one of those stages i absolutely hated at first but soon grew to love once i figured out how to get around and where all the fly caps were. the pyramid interior was pretty cool as well. Hazy Maze Cave was pretty great for the atmosphere and honestly i wish there were more later levels like this or in this direction, these spooky kinda abstract underground 3D caves. right now i'm going back to Tiny-Huge island to get ie. the Wiggler star and it's brilliance is becoming more and more clear.

main my criticism of the game was not enough though this was compounded by (1) reaching the upper floors and seeing all those paintings only to realize you can only jump in a few of them (and most are duplicates or earlier paintings) and (2) repeating music tracks. not gonna blame the game for these choices as it's really only valid when comparing it to games that came after, compared to the SNES/NES of course the game is a breakthrough in every way.

the Bowser stages are all really cool. Tick Tock Clock is a great late-game platformer. Rainbow Ride i still haven't beaten so my initial negative reaction will likely change once i start collecting missing stars. ditto Wet-Dry World and Snowman's Land, my least favorite stages, also the ones i've played the least. it's almost like the levels are little puzzles that have a learning curve.

anyways i would vote Peach's Castle for the best stage. it has the best music in the game, it is the best hub world in any video game. looking forward to getting 120 and finding Yoshi!

can't remember what i voted for but think that choice is prob otm. jolly roger bay is the most beautiful tho and swiping the star from the eel's tail (rather than Killing the eel in a Boss Fight) is v nice.

rainbow ride rly is annoying but it is also one of the sui generis levels, less an environment than a series of choices and branching paths and skill checks (even the red coin star iirc is "can you do a bunch of wall jumps in succession"). cool that the game mixes up its level types in this way (this and tick tick clock are two of the oddest prob-- or the most like 2d marios. so they're in a gallery together just like a museum.)

as a kid my favorites were prob hazy maze cave and the 'haunt. just gonna wildly challop that the latter is scarier than any resident evil. wish there were another boo level. bowser in the boo house. love boos.

i hadn't thought much about the 2d-3d shift, which happened when i was v young, and i'd grown up on the faux 3d of doom and wing commander before i ever saw this game, which i prob mention upthread i repeatedly dreamed about after playing once at a friend's house. but i just realized that the single precedent for how the wing cap made me feel (not just flying: flying through places you have come to know on the ground) was the fly spell in ultima underworld. so it is about 3d. the closest i've seen to this in the vr era is prob subnautica.

(the wing cap is way cooler than the fly spell in ultima underworld.)

probprobprobprobprob

I love Shifting Sand Land and Hazy Maze Cave, because of the mini-boss and Dorrie respectively

When I first played through this thing I remember thinking the Bowser levels were far better than the world-y world levels, but now I feel differently

I too am playing a lot of SNES and N64 lately. I got an SD-card loaded N64 cartridge so I could play everything and sell my old cartridges.

one of the things that's pretty unique about this game (especially if you watch the speedruns) is that you can tell they had an eye on using up too much memory, which I think caused the levels to be pretty crammed together. as a result they all feel like a well-defined space, where you can find unique ways to get from one place to another. you could be on your way to get one star and accidentally happen across another one. the more modern games (haven't played Odyssey yet mind you) don't seem like that - on Galaxy for example, nearly every little planet or challenge is walled off, there's nothing like (say) reaching the top of Rainbow Ride and seeing if you can long jump all the way to the beginning platform

yeah, that's my fave thing about the tall, tall mountain. that same Raumplan of spaces interrelated in section as well as plan, without the profound sense of the cubic outer edge constraining everything.

you can tell they had an eye on using up too much memory, which I think caused the levels to be pretty crammed together. as a result they all feel like a well-defined space, where you can find unique ways to get from one place to another. you could be on your way to get one star and accidentally happen across another one

you should play Odyssey - it does this really well! they don't kick you out of a level for finding a moon, so you are free to explore and collect. the level design is similarly tight like SM64, with lots of shortcuts and inter-connected areas. New Donk City for one has lots of areas where you can jump from building to building. once you figure out how to do the multi-jumps, you can use it to explore the more out of reach areas (and shortcut win the turtle races). i agree Galaxy feels far more linear. compared to that, SMO feels more like a direct sequel to SM64.

it's a testament to Miyamoto's genius that they spent 50% of the time just working on Mario and his controls. the reason these levels work is because traversal is not just possible but above all fun. a Shifty Sand Land without the triple jump or the god-tier flight controls would be a pain. the controls of Mario really are half the game.

I remember thinking the Bowser levels were far better than the world-y world levels, but now I feel differently

yeah i like these levels but they kind of are the most traditional in the game. they almost feel like Super Mario 3D World, the kind of standard 2D platform jumping but with an extended Z dimension. i really like how they sort of wind up and into the air (verticality is a big design feature of this game). the fact that they take place on free floating platforms in space means the camera has nothing to bump into and so these tend to have the best camera controls in the game.

hmmm guess I'll be buying a Switch then

I did play one level, my little brother's got it. you transformed into some Q-bert lookin thing and flicked the stick around. was pretty fun. and yea, the moons not booting you out is pretty nice. how great would the Mario 64 speedruns be if you didn't have to keep jumping back out of the paintings?

theres a modded rom that lets u stay in the level iirc

find DC's repeatedly expressed architect's love for tall tall mtn v heartwarming

hahaha aww

I've had a bit of spare time lately so I've been replaying this game. I'm finding it fairly creepy in ways that maybe weren't so apparent as a kid. I know it's like 95% because of hardware limitations - all the blurry textures, the levels in wide, empty space, the fact that everything is so claustrophobia-inducing, etc. But it's also a legitimately weird game. You get this grand intro and a personalized letter read from Peach and then you're just kinda thrown into this silent outdoor area, via a pipe, which don't appear anywhere in the game. The castle is basically abandoned. There's no one to talk to except a random Toad here and there (which immediately disappear). One level is literally a drowned city with no one in it. The only level that feels "alive" in any sense is the haunted one. Also even now day I get a little anxiety when it comes to falling off the cliffs here, just watching Mario disappear forever into empty space like that. I don't recall other N64 games with quite this vibe. Is it just me...?

the drowned city is really weird, i agree. it's never explained!

mostly deserted worlds were common the era where games couldn't display more than a few characters at a time. i remember it being a cliche that every myst clone would have an excuse for why no one was around.

two people voted for tick tock clock? masochists

hazy maze cave for me, would vote for dire dire docks for the music alone tho

the game is pretty creepy tho, otm about the empty castle, had a brief phase when i was a kid where is was legit scared of the boos, especially the one in the courtyard that contained the haunted house level within it

The glitchiness really adds to it too. the game could be so unpredictable sometimes. Again I realize this is all hardware limitations (was it the first N64 game that was made?) but taken altogether it’s got a real dreamlike atmosphere to it. The places don’t feel like real worlds, everything is just a little off

Also worth mentioning this is the one game where Mario actually “dies”…Xs over the eyes when he runs out of health and iirc there’s that dramatic choking animation when he runs out of air underwater.

Yeah, I have very vivid memories of the day we got an N64, playing this (my first ever 3D game) and seeing Mario disappear into the endless voids underneath the floating islands. It's not the same as falling in a pit in SMB3.

It might be hard to recapture now, but playing Ocarina after Super Mario 64 was a pretty striking change. There was a kind of warmth and ambience about that game which contrasted heavily with the creepy coldness of Mario.

Ocarina is plenty creepy too tho but this isn't a Zelda thread so I don't want to derail too much. It's got a good balance of deliberate lightness & darkness

Nothing in a video game scared me more than that half-boy half-spider thing. I had nightmares about it. I was afraid to even go in there. Even looking at it now….yeesh. All those jagged polygons and blurry textures, you can’t really capture that on a modern system

Well, you kinda could, but it would deliberately be a throwback--low-poly horror has been a trend for a little while now. It's interesting to me how the low-poly thing lends itself so well to creepiness in a way other retro styles (pixel art in particular) don't.

True but it doesn’t hit the same when it’s done purposely like that. None of it is as spooky as, say, the floating red F behind the castle walls in Mario 64

wonder how much of Mario 64's creepiness is related to the fact that it was the first N64 game and that a lot of it was essentially made as a demo? there's a good article from the developers of Crash Bandicoot talking about all the challenges in making those early 3D platformers. theres a lot about the looming shadow of Mario 64 and how they were in competition with it without necessarily knowing anything about the game or how they solved all the problems they were facing. apparently the technical limitations of the N64 and forced everything to be as simple and open-looking as it was, which I think is where a lot of the creepiness stems from. like all those weird-ass skyboxes which often looked like stock images superimposed onto clouds and what not. Wet-Dry world has this entire abandoned city in the background doesn't it? there's nothing in a modern game that looks anything like it.

all this got me watching some videos of Majora's Mask, if you wanna talk nightmare fuel. I remember getting to the final boss fight and nearly having to leave the room once the thing started singing and twirling around.

i cannot finish majora's mask it is too scary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq8HZmN0zMs

I wonder if that was inspired by House.