Best Level from Super Mario 64

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.