{"id":2611,"date":"2013-03-20T17:56:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T17:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=2611"},"modified":"2013-03-20T17:56:23","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T17:56:23","slug":"my-top-100-7-super-mario-64","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.controlpadblues.com\/?p=2611","title":{"rendered":"My Top 100: #7 – Super Mario 64"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1996<\/a>

1996 – Nintendo (Nintendo 64, DS, Virtual Console)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Imagine looking at a rubix cube head-on.<\/p>\n

You know there’s a possibility of there being more sides to\u00a0it.\u00a0\u00a0You’re pretty satisfied with looking at the green square,\u00a0but the green\u00a0one\u00a0is nevertheless\u00a0the only one you’ve ever seen.\u00a0 You have an incredible amount of fun looking at this one\u00a0square, but you can’t help but wonder what the rest of the sides actually look like…\u00a0 if only you could pick up the square, turn it around in your hands, and look at what is actually a three-dimensional cube.<\/p>\n

To me, that’s kinda what Super Mario 64<\/em> was.<\/p>\n

Ever since I first played Super Mario Bros<\/em>., I would try to imagine what was beyond the land that I could see on the screen.\u00a0 I’d play with friends, and we pretended to be Mario<\/em> characters, imagining our back yards as being just like the Mushroom Kingdom.\u00a0 My imagination was vivid enough, but I used to think “if only I could jump into the television, and walk around Mario’s world just once, that would be amazing”.<\/p>\n

The Super Mario Bros. 3<\/em> cartoon satisfied that curiosity, but only to a certain extent.<\/p>\n

The Super NES era came with more detailed\u00a0graphics and parallax scrolling, which gave Super Mario World<\/em>‘s Dinosaur Land quite a bit of depth.\u00a0 You could see what was in the background, and it definitely helped make the world feel more alive.<\/p>\n

Before\u00a0the Nintendo 64 came around,\u00a0I had no\u00a0idea\u00a0what a 3D Mario<\/em> game\u00a0might play like.\u00a0 I had seen screenshots of worlds in other 3D games, and I had played Doom<\/em> quite extensively\u00a0at that point, but 3D didn’t seem like that great an idea for the platformer genre.\u00a0 The idea of controlling a character in a 3D space with a control pad didn’t particularly sound all that easy to do.\u00a0 Mario 64<\/em> sure looked nice, but\u00a0the introduction of the N64’s controller did nothing to alleviate my apprehension.<\/p>\n

Then I played it.\u00a0 Ohhhhhhhh man, what a feeling that was.<\/p>\n

The analog stick felt so natural under my thumb.\u00a0 It had just the right amount of resistance to it, and Mario was under complete control at all times.\u00a0 I was triple-jumping with ease in no time, using the Z-trigger to crawl and long-jump,\u00a0while the A and B buttons did exactly what they always did.\u00a0 The camera controls\u00a0took a bit of getting used to, but even that felt natural after a while.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0had everything\u00a0I loved about Mario – the jumping, the enemies, the music, the variety in the levels, the power-ups, the coins…\u00a0 it was all there, and it felt like almost nothing had changed.\u00a0\u00a0Mario moved\u00a0exactly like he did\u00a0when he was only moving left or right, except now, he was doing it all over the place.<\/p>\n

The amount of content was quite staggering, as well.\u00a0 Even when I defeated Bowser that first time, I thought “wow, that was an incredible game, surely there can’t be more left to play and explore”…\u00a0 and then the game just kept going, and it was all so friggin’ fantastic.<\/p>\n

It truly blew my mind,\u00a0and I feel like I’m 13 all over again whenever I play it.<\/p>\n

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