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Hello all!! As per some good advice, I will be separating my reviews by console/company, Most of these titles will be DS/DSI game reviews, but eventually when I get my wii I might have some of those as well. So while not all of these games will be Nintendo games, they all will have been released on Nintendo consoles, which I hope is good enough! I am pretty amateurish, but I do my best to make my reviews entertaining.
To all those who come here, thank you sincerely for reading my reviews, it means the world!
To kick things off: Super Mario 64 DS
I just finished Mario 64 DS as of like 3 days ago and I felt super inspired to write about it right away :)
Seems doubtful that people DON'T know this game, but I'll do a little synopsis anyway.
Super Mario 64 DS is a port of the N64 game Super Mario 64, in which the evil Bowser has trapped the princess and citizens of the mushroom kingdom inside of living painting worlds using power stars! Collect these powerstars throughout the levels to unlock new rooms in the castle, get even more stars, and eventually overcome Bowser to win the game!
This is the first "collectathon" game I've played, which was a pretty popular genre at the time of Mario 64s release (thinking banjo kazooie, Spiro, Croc, and more recently: a hat in time and Yooka). The core concept, if you've never played, is to enter levels and amass a collection of stars, puzzle pieces, or whatever else the maguffin of the game is. The loop was fun and pretty short! on average stars took about 2 - 10 minutes to collect, and were usually straight forward, though there was the occasional level I ended up having to look up a walkthrough for. I enjoyed it! I played the whole game over the course of about a week, though there is no in game timer I suspect I beat it in about 10-12 hours.
One notable difference I did not know about this game till I started was the fact that you don't just play as Mario in this game as in the original M64. Instead you you start as Yoshi and must unlock the other characters over time. While this concept is interesting, it is often more of an annoyance in my opinion. Because stars wont tell you if you need a specific character to get, you will occasionally wander throughout a level before realizing you likely need to be Wario or Luigi to progress, though to be fair the game typically (but not always) gives in level hats to transform into Luigi or Wario on the fly. When they don't though, you leave the level and walk to the character select. The other problem is that Mario has the best moveset by far. So you often just play as Mario 99% of the time while switching very occasionally to the other two, its more a gimmick than a good game aspect is I guess what I'm saying. I think while I had problems with the multiply characters, the stars that did use the characters felt pretty good, so I think it was on the cusp of doing something really interesting.
Speaking to the moveset, wow.. this game is hard to get used too. Part of this is the limitations of the DS. The DS only has 8 directions of movement as opposed to the 16 that an N64 would have which makes accidentally walking off cliffs very very easy. The camera controls are also pretty tough, the ground is solid, even to your camera, so you are bound by the perspectives you can look at by the walls of the level. This can lead to the need to take blind jumps or frustrating damage. THAT BEING SAID, once you start getting used to Mario's moveset, you start feeling it, and you really start feeling it. You can traverse levels very very fast if you can master the longjump and backwards backflip jump.
There are 13 primary levels and I think 6-8 secret levels over the course of the game, the 13 primary levels each have 7 stars with 1 100 coin star, while the secret levels only have 2 (typically red coin and a switch/normal star). I really enjoyed this setup, and because you unlock more levels the more stars you have, you aren't ever dwelling on levels for too long which I thought was great! My personal favorite level was hazy cave maze since it, in my opinion, made the best use of the new DS game only mechanics. Figuring out stars was very rewarding with each being its own short puzzle.
Between big unlocks (20 then 60 and finally 80 stars) you fight Bowser, and I cannot lie, these fights suck. The grab hitbox is janky and you'll often hit yourself trying,. Then to damage him you have to throw him into bombs that ALSO have janky hitboxes, so while I didn't love that part, seeing Bowser was fun and it did make use of the DS touchscreen, which I always appreciate. (it also did have the best music in the game)
After beating the final level you get a cute cutscene and a THE END screen, which was great :)! This was a fun game that I am unlikely to revisit, but none-the less I had fun and would recommend this game if you're at all interested in trying one of the foundational collectathon games.
If you've ever played, lmk what you all thought!
To all those who come here, thank you sincerely for reading my reviews, it means the world!
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To kick things off: Super Mario 64 DS
I just finished Mario 64 DS as of like 3 days ago and I felt super inspired to write about it right away :)
Seems doubtful that people DON'T know this game, but I'll do a little synopsis anyway.
Super Mario 64 DS is a port of the N64 game Super Mario 64, in which the evil Bowser has trapped the princess and citizens of the mushroom kingdom inside of living painting worlds using power stars! Collect these powerstars throughout the levels to unlock new rooms in the castle, get even more stars, and eventually overcome Bowser to win the game!
This is the first "collectathon" game I've played, which was a pretty popular genre at the time of Mario 64s release (thinking banjo kazooie, Spiro, Croc, and more recently: a hat in time and Yooka). The core concept, if you've never played, is to enter levels and amass a collection of stars, puzzle pieces, or whatever else the maguffin of the game is. The loop was fun and pretty short! on average stars took about 2 - 10 minutes to collect, and were usually straight forward, though there was the occasional level I ended up having to look up a walkthrough for. I enjoyed it! I played the whole game over the course of about a week, though there is no in game timer I suspect I beat it in about 10-12 hours.
One notable difference I did not know about this game till I started was the fact that you don't just play as Mario in this game as in the original M64. Instead you you start as Yoshi and must unlock the other characters over time. While this concept is interesting, it is often more of an annoyance in my opinion. Because stars wont tell you if you need a specific character to get, you will occasionally wander throughout a level before realizing you likely need to be Wario or Luigi to progress, though to be fair the game typically (but not always) gives in level hats to transform into Luigi or Wario on the fly. When they don't though, you leave the level and walk to the character select. The other problem is that Mario has the best moveset by far. So you often just play as Mario 99% of the time while switching very occasionally to the other two, its more a gimmick than a good game aspect is I guess what I'm saying. I think while I had problems with the multiply characters, the stars that did use the characters felt pretty good, so I think it was on the cusp of doing something really interesting.
Speaking to the moveset, wow.. this game is hard to get used too. Part of this is the limitations of the DS. The DS only has 8 directions of movement as opposed to the 16 that an N64 would have which makes accidentally walking off cliffs very very easy. The camera controls are also pretty tough, the ground is solid, even to your camera, so you are bound by the perspectives you can look at by the walls of the level. This can lead to the need to take blind jumps or frustrating damage. THAT BEING SAID, once you start getting used to Mario's moveset, you start feeling it, and you really start feeling it. You can traverse levels very very fast if you can master the longjump and backwards backflip jump.
There are 13 primary levels and I think 6-8 secret levels over the course of the game, the 13 primary levels each have 7 stars with 1 100 coin star, while the secret levels only have 2 (typically red coin and a switch/normal star). I really enjoyed this setup, and because you unlock more levels the more stars you have, you aren't ever dwelling on levels for too long which I thought was great! My personal favorite level was hazy cave maze since it, in my opinion, made the best use of the new DS game only mechanics. Figuring out stars was very rewarding with each being its own short puzzle.
Between big unlocks (20 then 60 and finally 80 stars) you fight Bowser, and I cannot lie, these fights suck. The grab hitbox is janky and you'll often hit yourself trying,. Then to damage him you have to throw him into bombs that ALSO have janky hitboxes, so while I didn't love that part, seeing Bowser was fun and it did make use of the DS touchscreen, which I always appreciate. (it also did have the best music in the game)
After beating the final level you get a cute cutscene and a THE END screen, which was great :)! This was a fun game that I am unlikely to revisit, but none-the less I had fun and would recommend this game if you're at all interested in trying one of the foundational collectathon games.
If you've ever played, lmk what you all thought!
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