Which is a shame because, visually speaking, Sunshine looks terrific. That precision, that Nintendo magic, is missing from Super Mario Sunshine. But there’s a magic to the precision that Nintendo brings to its biggest franchises, whether it’s a mainline Zelda or Mario or Metroid game. And, to be fair, it’s not a truly terrible game. I have no doubt that there are Super Mario Sunshine defenders out there. What we got was one of the worst Mario games ever made: Super Mario Sunshine. Nintendo took six years after the massive success of Super Mario 64 to release another 3D Mario game. Far from just a museum piece, it’s a challenging thrill to play, even alongside modern platformers directly inspired by it. If you can overcome some of the dated visuals and a lack of new features, Mario 64 remains one of the greatest platforming games ever made. This is as close to what people played back in 1996 as you can get these days. Other enhancements that have been added over the years to Mario 64, like the different playable characters in the Nintendo DS version, are also absent. Purists should be thrilled, as updating a classic game with new textures is fraught with its own problems, but if you’re looking for a more modern twist on Mario 64, you won’t find it here. Bring that resolution up to modern standards, and those textures look like a blurry mess. The grassy hillside outside of Peach’s castle and the surface of the water in Dire Dire Docks both look like they use textures that were created two and a half decades ago, for a system running at 320x240. Any single-color objects in the world - like Mario’s overalls, or a koopa’s green skin - still look great, as single-color textures scale up perfectly to higher resolutions.īut much of Mario 64’s world consists of textures that aren’t just single colors. Mario may look a bit boxy, given that he’s made up of just a handful of polygons, but he never looks blurry or washed out. This means that clean lines and solid blocks are sharp as diamonds. Mario 64 on Switch has been upscaled for modern devices, while still maintaining the original game’s 4:3 aspect ratio. Mario may not have every single one of his newer tricks at his disposal, but some of his core staples - the long jump, the triple jump, and the backflip - were all first introduced in this game, giving the player a wide array of options to tackle the many platforming challenges ahead.īut while the core gameplay has held up against the ravages of time, the visuals aren’t always so ageless. Mario 64 is a blast to just mess around in, in the same way that rolling over sand dunes in Super Mario Odyssey is endlessly satisfying. No game before Mario 64, including the 2D Mario games, had made bouncing around the world while doing nothing this much fun.Īnd remarkably, even 24 years later, that’s still true. I just ran around, climbing trees, sliding in the grass, and swimming through the moat, simply for the fun of it. The first time I dropped into the courtyard of Princess Peach’s castle, it melted my brain. There had been 3D games before, but none of them felt as fluid and alive as Mario 64. If you weren’t playing games when Super Mario 64 came out (maybe because you didn’t exist yet), it’s hard to describe what a revelation it was. Whether the collection is right for you really depends on how you feel about each individual game, and the Switch-specific enhancements that have been brought to them. Despite every entry being a 3D Mario game, the titles are vastly different from one another. Nintendo has now collected three of the most memorable 3D Mario entries into a single package for Nintendo Switch: Super Mario 3D All-Stars includes Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy. Sometimes it’s for better, and sometimes for worse. The 3D Marios have introduced new mechanics, while veering off in unexpected directions. While the 2D Mario games have been progressive, often building from the one that came before, the 3D entries tend to diverge pretty wildly from one another. It’s easy to divide the Super Mario franchise into two buckets: 2D games and 3D games.
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