The Videogame Solipsist: Nintendo 64

I couldn't find a decent image of the original box, so just bear with me

Somewhere in the basement I have an old issue of some third party Nintendo 64 magazine. It came out during the first half of 1998, and reading it back then, it felt perfectly normal not to see many games I wanted coming out. Reading it after the N64 era had closed, the issue now seems like a historical document proving that things weren't going as well as I thought.

The Nintendo 64 still has a great reputation among gamers, particularly those my age or below, and I suppose it's for any number of reasons. When you're young, as I was when the Nintendo 64 came out, you only get a new game every once in awhile, so it didn't feel like the system was failing when I played all of 3 or 4 games a year. At the same time, we were all still under the spell of Nintendo. During that weird time between the end of the 16 bit generation and the domination of Sony's Playstation, Nintendo were the most obvious and safest bet. As discussed in my last entry, Sega had more or less hung themselves and by the end of 1997 they had all but given up on the Saturn in the U.S. So, we wanted to believe that the Nintendo 64 would be awesome--and really, it wasn't that bad of a system. Looking over the list of games for it, I noticed a few I had forgotten about, like Blast Corps. and Dr. Mario 64 (yeah, I had no idea they even released this).

My two main memories of the Nintendo 64 are getting it and getting fed up with it. I had a friend who got the system at launch, and shortly after, I was at his house watching him play Mario 64 for most of a day and never getting a chance to play. Another friend got it around the time of Mario Kart 64, and to be sure the 3 or 4 player matches we had were every bit as amazing as the two player experiences I had with friends or my sister on the earlier systems. Meanwhile, I finally got my N64 during the summer of 1997. I think I made a deal with my parents that if I painted the shed and our back deck, they would get me the system and Starfox 64. The hard work was worth it, because Starfox 64 and its rumble pak were revolutionary things. Not only was the N64 the first system to truly feature analog controls (meaning your character could run or walk depending on how far you pushed the stick instead of you having to hold down a button to toggle running off or on) but it was the first one to truly feature force feedback. Unfortunately, only having one game to play--and Starfox 64 of all games--gets really old after awhile, so I borrowed things like Cruis'n USA and Turok from friends. That Fall, Goldeneye came out, and with the combination of it, Mario Kart 64, Starfox 64, and Mario Party, it just kind of clicked that it would be a system for hanging out with friends and having fun.

However, the greatest flaw of the Nintendo 64 was its lack of great single player experiences. Oh, sure, there were Mario and Zelda titles for it, but by and large the system had no RPGs to speak of. Zelda games don't count as RPGs, so I could probably name the N64 RPGs on one hand, though the list would include the caustic Quest 64, who's generic title is actually the best thing about it. Hilariously enough, I very nearly bought Quest 64 to hold me over until Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out, though in the end I never got either game. In fact, I owned the Nintendo 64 for about a year and a half before Zelda, and I can't imagine waiting that long for a good single player game, let alone something that wasn't a RPG, to come out nowadays. But I did, and in my idiocy, I didn't reserve the game. This was before reserving games even entered the lingo of gamers--it just seemed inconceivable that Nintendo wouldn't release enough copies of a game. But they did, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had been eyeing the library of the Playstation for some time--all the RPGs and the great single player experiences--and I finally turned my back on Nintendo.

I don't want to make this sound like I totally dropped the N64, though. I kept buying games for it, but they usually amounted to a quarter--if that--of my Playstation purchases. 1999 and 2000 weren't great years for the system, but they did see key releases, like the first Smash Brothers, Paper Mario, Perfect Dark, and Zelda: Majora's Mask. Assuming you were a two-or-three games a year kind of gamer, I'm sure the N64 was very good. But for everyone else, they were lean, sad times. It felt like a right of passage to get a Playstation and open up your eyes after being brainwashed by Nintendo propaganda for so long--the issues of Nintendo Power, the bizarre videos they created to promote the launch of the system and Starfox 64, all the shit talking about how carts were superior to CDs, etc. I feel sorry for people who stuck to Nintendo as their sole source of gaming, partially because they were missing out on so much greatness on the Playstation (and, later, the Dreamcast), but mostly because Nintendo wasn't rewarding their loyalty with much of anything. In fact, I kind of hate Majora's Mask, but that's a whole different post.

I say all of the above as a huge Nintendo fan, but it'd be hard for anyone to argue that the latter half of the 90s was anything other than the cracking of the Nintendo egg. Sega nearly did it before falling on their own sword, and Sony actually did it. At the same time, Nintendo made a series of bad business decisions, from the ill-conceived and quickly killed Virtual Boy to keeping with the expensive cart format to being arrogant with third party developers to designing a system that was difficult to program for to requiring people to buy a RAM expansion pak to play Zelda: Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark (you could play PD without one, but not to its full capacity). It's really amazing it was successful as much as it was.

The Videogame Solipsist: NES

Oh my my, oh hell yes (image taken from VGmuseum.com)

I must have gotten the NES in '88. It was for my 4th birthday, and I'll always remember this because while my parents had gotten me the NES my grandparents on my Mom's side had gotten me an electric racecar track. While I played with the latter for 15 minutes or so while my Dad set up the NES, it would--obviously--never become a fixture for me. It was as if my entire future were set up then and there as a choice of toys: become the cool kid racing cars or become the Nintendo nerd.

My first memory of the NES was simply trying to get past the first enemy in Mario. Certainly we messed around with Duck Hunt but Mario held us transfixed. The coordination it took to somehow defeat the relentless Goomba seemed like a mountain I could never hope to climb; this also marked the last time my Dad would ever play a videogame, let alone be better at it than me. Only he could get to the end of the level at first, and my sister and I were jealous.

Still, it was an amazing new toy. A game you played on the TV--yet it wasn't just a game. You could put other game cartridges into it, too, not unlike tapes in a VCR. I honestly don't remember when I began to get other games, or what those were, but it seemed like everyone you knew had a Nintendo back then and different games to try. Eventually you rented scores of them from videostores--in the end I probably only owned a dozen or so games, but must have played a hundred or so more.

Actually, that was the big thing about the NES: its ubiquity. There were so many games for the damn thing that I eventually played something from every genre even before I began to use genre distinctions. Dragon Warrior was baffling until years later when I played Shining Force on the Genesis and learned about "levels" in terms of character power and not what stage you were on. Anyway, all my friends and neighbors had it and we would help each other on games. I'll always remember how my older neighbor Adam got really far into the first Zelda and during one summer used to come over every day and help me through it. Funnily enough, when his sister had a birthday party once, I spent most of it playing a gift for her: Rad Racer. Even then, I liked doing things alone--please, resist the urge to make the obvious joke here.

As for the games I played...well, this would be a really long post if I went through them all. Suffice it to say that the obvious ones--Zeldas, Marios, whatnot--were all amazing and mindblowing. Oddly, even back then I found Metroid obtuse and frustrating, though one of my friends insisted it was the best game ever. I remember playing games competitively and co-operatively for the first time on the NES, too, which was just as fun as playing them alone--if not more so. This was also during the era when you didn't scour websites every few hours to see if the Smash Brothers date had slipped; you pretty much heard about games from Nintendo Power or clerks at the store or video rental place and that was it. I recall the first Turtles game being a total bitch to find, both because of its popularity and the fact you couldn't find it to buy anywhere because nobody knew if it was out or not. Of course this was before everyone realized that the game was harder than a pair of diamond testicles and controlled like utter shit.

The end of the NES was particularly interesting to me because people weren't really sure what to do. The assumption amongst adults seemed to be "hey, this thing was supposed to be like a VHS tape player!! You're just supposed to get new games, not new systems!!" Sometime in 1992 or 1993 I got a Sega Genesis because most of my friends had it and the games looked so much better than the NES. For some reason, the SNES didn't interest us. About this time the NES began to start into the era of "blow into the end of it, blow into the machine itself, cut yourself and swear a blood oath to Yamauchi" in order to get the damn thing to work. But with time, the NES became a very fondly remembered piece of hardware which we would all dig out from time to time for nostalgia's sake. The majority of the games don't hold up as well anymore, partially because as kids we had no critical faculties, but enough of them do to make the system still worth playing.

Except that my grandma sold my NES and 5 games for like $15 at a garage sale in the mid 90s. I think it was revenge for ignoring the electric racecars.

Super Mario Galaxy

I can't swim. I took lessons as a kid, but I never stuck with it beyond the beginner session because going to the deep end scared me. Yet, paradoxically, I love water--maybe it's because I'm an Aquarius, maybe not--and when my family went on vacations and I was a kid, I couldn't get enough of hotel pools or the ocean. There is something beautiful and uncanny about swimming in a pool and turning upside down, feeling weightless and confused because now what used to be below you feels like the roof--and when you look "down" it now looks like up. You see the water surface above you, and above that, the "true" roof, and your sense of disorientation is both delicious and mind blowing.

Stay with me.

My Mom taught me a neat trick during a bored summer afternoon when I was younger. What you do is you take a small hand mirror, hold it just under your nose, and go outside. Let's say you have a deck or a set of stairs outside you can use. So, with the mirror under your nose, look down into it and you see the sky. Jump or step off the deck/stairs. For some reason your brain thinks that you are going to fall into the sky and you feel frightened and free of gravity at the same time. This also works indoors, where you keep stepping over doorways and ceiling fans when you don't need to.

I bring both of these childhood memories up because they're exactly the kind of things that Super Mario Galaxy gets right. You're never sure exactly which way is up or down, or even if there is one. It is often completely subjective depending on which "ground" you are standing on. While Mario 64 may have brought the series into 3D, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy is the first "true" 3D platformer because there is a real sense of depth instead of simply moving up/down or left/right.



The first time you end up on a planetoid and you can run around the full sphere of it, wrapping around it over and over, doing Mario's jumps, spinning the Wii remote to attack enemies, using the remote to collect star bits to shoot at enemies, too...well, this feeling of "wow, this is so much fun!!" never goes away. Even the levels that force you to use the Wii remote's motion sensing to control Mario completely, such as the manta ray surfing level or the Super Monkey Ball-esque one, though frustrating at first, quickly become second nature. It is an immersive game, by which I mean you never have to look down at the controller and figure out what you're supposed to press to do what, it comes completely intuitively.

The other big thing that Mario Galaxy gets right is variety. I am tempted to call it a mini-game collection fused with Mario 64's core gameplay, but that's misleading. Simply put, every stage you play on is completely unique and you will always be doing new, interesting things you never thought you would be doing. Galaxy constantly surprises and pleases you, even with the stages which are difficult and frustrating--and there are some. However, this ties back into the genius of the game's variety: you don't have to play every level or collect every star to complete the game. If you get stuck on something, you can either skip it completely or come back to it later with a fresh mind.



Let me close this review with why precisely I bought the game. I wasn't completely sold on yet another Mario game until I was in Best Buy two weeks ago. I had heard so many great things about Galaxy, but it was only once I played it at Best Buy that I knew I had to have it. I ran around the main hub world part of the game, watching little star people gurgle and coo at me, soothed by the delightful music, and played half of one level, dying by falling off the stage and getting sucked into a black hole. I put the controllers down, walked over to the Wii games, and immediately went up to the checkout. If you have a Wii and you don't have this game, there's something wrong with you.