The Games of my Life

Bought it last night. Still haven’t had much time to play it. Got 4 stars so far (all of them in the “Bob-omb Battlefield”), out of 150, and I played the 8 mini-games which don’t need to be unlocked.

I’ve never played Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64, only in emulators, but the DS port is technically excellent - the characters, in particular, noticeable have more polygons than on the N64, and the game is perfectly smooth and fast. Even though graphically it’s not a game on the same league as modern ones on “big” consoles (after all, the original is 9 years old), it’s still considered by many people (just google for it) as one of the best platform games of all time, if not the best. The game’s design is brilliantly original, and the game takes us to another world in a way almost nothing else can.

Is it perfect? No. I haven’t tried the multi-player modes yet, but reviews say they’re nothing special - basically, it’s the various players in an arena, competing to catch stars. It certainly won’t replace Mario Kart.

Somewhat more troubling are the game’s controls. The original Mario 64 was created for an analog controller - in fact, the N64 introduced the analog controller to the world (though they announced it too soon and Sony and Sega copied it before the N64 was actually released) because of that game - and suffers a bit because the DS doesn’t have one. Instead, the game gives you two options: use the D-Pad, which isn’t as precise and makes it so that you have to press a button to run; or use the touch screen, which I chose to do.

The control scheme is interesting - it reminds me of laptops’ touchpads, where you drag the finger to move the mouse cursor. Here, however, you don’t have to keep moving your finger to keep moving - when you touch the pad, a circle appears around your finger, and as you move your finger towards the outer end, the character moves - the more, the quicker.

The problem - which is solvable through habit, but it doesn’t happen immediately - is that you tend to keep moving the finger to move “faster”, even though you’re already at the end of the circle’s area, and thus running at maximum speed. That causes the circle to move (otherwise, you’d stop), to keep up with your finger. But then you move it more, and soon you’re reaching the end of the touch screen. You have to get used to staying in the circle, which isn’t immediate for touchpad users.

On the other hand, you get great precision, and are able to move exactly at the speed you want, in the direction you want. It just takes some getting used