Not-so-Super Mario.

After the shallow blast-athon of Borderlands I decided to jump back into The Witcher 2, a medieval sword and sorcery romp I’ve been playing on and off for the last few months. It was a huge change going from a game with almost no story to one with perhaps a little too much. The Witcher games are based on a series of novels, and even though they try to cram in a bit too much back-story and character history, The Witcher 2 is a fantastic, involving experience featuring a wonderfully immersive world that any Dungeons and Dragons or Game of Thrones fan would enjoy spending time in.

It’s odd that two games can be so similar in structure, and yet produce such different experiences. Both Borderlands and The Witcher 2 involve central hubs that feature various mission and quest givers, offering up fetch quests and murder jobs that can be completed by wandering out into the surrounding wilderness. But where The Witcher 2 gets it so right is that it creates a reason to do these things, an overarching story to be invested in, characters to care about, and decisions with real weight that affect the overall outcome of the story. Plus it was vulgar and violent as hell. I loved it.

I also finished off Outland, a downloadable platformer that features an interesting art style of silhouetted foregrounds against rich and colourful backdrops as you fight through the origins of Man’s good and evil, or something, I wasn’t listening. You fight bugs, gargoyles, and impressive bosses while navigating the complex levels filled with traps and damaging cosmic energy beams. It was pretty good fun, but not something I’d rush back to.

So, here comes the controversial bit. I finished Super Mario 64, one of the most critically lauded and well-loved games of all time. The problem is that I really don’t like this game very much.

Back in 1997 I was living with a group of friends in a share house in South London. We were all in our early twenties, in various stages of employ. One friend worked out of our shed making paintball accessories, and another sold weed out of his bedroom. We had a projector hooked up to a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation, and everyday one whole wall of the living room came alive with four player Goldeneye battles and WipEout 2097 tournaments. 

Due to the many weed customers there was a nonstop rotation of contenders, so there wasn’t much opportunity for single player games. As soon as you had loaded up a one-player game there’d be a knock at the door, and before you knew it a transaction had taken place, a spliff was being passed round, and it was Goldeneye time.

I’d always thought this was the reason I’d never properly played through Mario 64. But as soon as I started playing this I remembered why I’d never persevered with this game. I cannot stand the terrible controls and appalling camera issues.

Mario is very awkward to control, he turns oddly, and he slides when you want to stop, as if every surface is ice. His jumps are unpredictable, or difficult to pull off. And the camera, my god, that bloody camera. You have to constantly choose the camera angle, not through the fluid, precise movement of a second analogue stick, but in 45-degree increments using four different buttons. Unfortunately the angle you want will often not be available, leaving you to make a lot of blind leaps of faith.

If you’re lucky enough to finally line up the camera for that difficult jump you’ll take off running and then the game will just change the camera angle on you to something completely different. As a result it changes the direction that you’re heading in, leading to you simply plummeting off the ledge you were happily running along. I can’t count the number of times I died simply because the camera angle up and changed itself, sending Mario to his doom, and me into another fit of swearing.

Try navigating this as the camera chops and changes willy nilly.

It's also unlike any Mario game that I've played. There's no Luigi, no Yoshi. There's barely any jumping on enemy heads, and there's hardly any blocks that you jump into from underneath to release powerups. They feature sporadically, but there's no mushrooms that change you from normal to Super Mario. Old favourites like the fire flower and the invincibility star are replaced by an invisibility cap that lets you walk through a limited selection of objects, a metal cap that lets you sink in water, and a wing cap that lets you fly, but these are only used a handful of times, and are ultimately pretty boring. As a game it's frustrating beyond belief. As a Mario game it's barely recognisable to the ones I grew up with. 

When I started this pile of shame journey I said I’d finish each game to the credits, not worrying about completing every side quest or getting 100% completion. This has never been more relevant than with this game. There are 120 stars to find hidden within the levels of Mario 64. However, you are free to access the end boss when you have gotten only 70 stars. As soon as I hit 70 stars I was straight up those stairs to fight Bowser one last time. I’m really glad I’ve finished this game.

42 games down, 8 to go, 43 days left.