I spent a good chunk of September playing through Mario 64 / Sunshine / Galaxy, and finished 120 stars on Galaxy. I was reasonably excited when these re-releases were rumored early this year, especially considering the kind of hacks that had shown up in Mario 64, the leaks about the Mario 64 source materials, etc. And yet . . it was a bit of a letdown.

When you do a re-release you’ve got a spectrum of things on the table. On the conservative side you have “literally the source material, basically a rom”, on the liberal side you have “threw the whole game out and remade it from scratch”. Capcom has been doing very liberal work on Resident Evil lately, Sony is known for handing titles over to BluePoint for reasonably liberal remakes, but they still “feel” like the original game.

Nintendo tends to err on the side of conservative remakes. They’re the kings of “screw it, just ship a rom”. And there’s nothing wrong with that, roms can be really good! And that’s a good thing because that’s literally all this collection was. 3 custom emulators (to do things like “map wiimote pointing to gyro”), a rom patching system, and incredibly minor patches to do things like “change the text to be the right button”.

I had hoped to at least get a less garbo camera in Mario 64, but, nope, not even 16:9. Good news, Mario 64 still holds up here, 24 years later. Sure, the camera wants to absolutely murder you, but it still FEELS right.

Mario Galaxy I was worried about. The game was great, but it had a ton of waggle and pointing. Amazingly, it actually worked. The game is so much better with spin mapped to a button, and the pointing controls worked far better than expected. After playing through it all, there were only a couple levels that require pointing or waggle, and they sucked, but they sucked in the original too.

And then there’s Sunshine. Sunshine gets a lot of crap for being Too Weird. I . . don’t remember having a huge problem with it? I don’t remember ever replaying it, but I know I got 120 stars. And I don’t have terrifying memories of specific levels, like I do with the damned Luigi sprite level in Mario Galaxy. I just don’t have incredible positive or negative memories at all.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t play it back-to-back with a hell of a lot of Mario 64, because the game is awful. Like, legit bad, not the fault of the port, just straight up bad. Controls are bad. Cutscenes are cringe. Missions are poorly designed. Boss fights are poorly designed. No long jump. No crouch-to-backflip. Movement in general is sluggish. All the levels just sort of run together. Barely anything is stand-out or memorable. Like, I remembered levels when I played them, but it all feels like one big ass level. There’s no variety.

The re-releases obsolete the original releases – so that’s good – but it doesn’t help that stock Mario 64 and Sunshine are two of the worst 3d games.

For the record:

  1. Mario Odyssey
  2. Mario 64 (on PC with camera hacks)
  3. Mario Galaxy 2
  4. Mario Galaxy
  5. Mario 64 (original on an N64)
  6. Mario Sunshine