![]() Someone else was queued up, my dad had finished waiting in line, and paying money to play a game that you couldn't take home was, understandably, something my mom scoffed at. I don't remember how much it cost-I want to say it was $10-but it didn't matter. There it was, running in front of my eyes, and DieHard Game Club was charging money for you to play the game in 10-minute increments. I figured it was a promotional tape meant to hype up the release of the Nintendo 64, but it quickly became apparent that, no, this was, my god, a copy of the Japanese release of Super Mario 64. It looked like, and turned out to be, Mario running around a castle. My eyes caught movement from a TV in the corner. It was, in essence, a sneak peak at the future. That shop was DieHard Game Club, the same one that started the magazine Game Fan, and it specialized in importing games from Japan. While my dad waited in line to buy tickets, my mom would let me roam around the store and gawk at things we couldn't afford. My family went to the movies pretty often, and next door to one of the theaters we frequented was this quaint video game shop. I obsessed over every screen shot and every tiny detail. Everything I knew about the first 3D Mario, the game that was supposed to change everything, was from my monthly bible, the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was the summer of 1996, the summer of Will "welcome to Earth" Smith, and a few months before the Nintendo 64 launched outside Japan. It's hard to imagine someone without nostalgia glasses being able to appreciate Mario 64 in this form, which is a shame, because man, I still remember the first time I laid eyes on it. It's a game that, at this stage in its life and part of a $60 re-release, would benefit from some real attention. ![]() Mario 64 is one of the most important video games ever made, but it was also released 24 years ago, and 3D All-Stars somehow makes the game feel even older. ![]() Having the games side-by-side shows how much Nintendo has quietly refined and polished Mario's presence in 3D since his debut, while revealing how tough it can be to revisit the past. Can you imagine if 3D All-Stars featured an alternative version of Mario 64 where Luigi was playable? Instead, it doesn't even include 3D camera movement, forcing players into the frustrating restrictions of 1996's yellow "C" buttons in 2020's analog era. It's possible the barebones nature of 3D All-Stars is another consequence of COVID-19's ongoing disruption of the video game industry, but nonetheless, 3D All-Stars arrives after the infamous "gigaleak," where parts of Nintendo's secretive internal history were exposed through leaks. ![]()
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