Best Level from Super Mario 64

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?

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.