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I remember loads of people being properly angry when sm64 was new, because it took them ages to find *any* of the stars in some levels. arguably the best aspect of sm64 was that a pile of stars were just around all the time, and (with a handful of exceptions) you didn't have to collect them sequentially (as mentioned upthread). the smg games are of course brilliant, and they're absolutely on point wrt super mario in general being a wholly skill-based platformer, but you really do just go through the motions now. Where i'm going with this is that nintendo/ead missed a trick by moving sm64's whole sense of childlike wonder wholesale to the zelda games. it's not like a playground, it's like poking around someone's backyard. doing the same sort of exploration/gay abandon in a hyrule-based village or whatever is not even close to being the same sort of thing because (a) it's all grass and wooden carts and acorn children and so forth (b) you can't pivot or leap or somersault. Re sm64 overworld and level design: that game's jumping-castle joy was (as per miyamoto's later testimony iirc) shoved across to the zelda games by nintendo/ead, which sucks because there's so much that's uniquely wonderful about that castle. I probably wasted alot of time just clicking 'A'. The green stars at the end were a neat idea, but there really didn't have to be three of them, or maybe they could have let you collect all three at once instead of closing the level out, going back to the spaceship, reading a bunch of prompts, going back to the galaxy, selecting the next green star, and waiting for the cinematics in order to start the galaxy all over again from the beginning. That's a mark of great level design, to make you want more! I was sort of sad there weren't more levels done like that!
I think my favorite was the ghost world where you are marching down a narrow hallway in space and the carpet beneath you is repeatedly scrolling between two event horizons in a loop. That said they are AMAZING levels that are ground-breaking and really quite brilliantly playing with the conventions of the genre in a hundred unique ways. There's all these cool stunts to do, but for the most part you are stuck in once area until you unlock the next, and you never really unlock more than one at a time. Difficult listening hour described it perfectly. Yeah i've never played 64 much, maybe i should try it. Also shaking the remote to do a spin attack, instead of a button press, why? And shaking the remote to warp yourself to a new planet? It's also a little hard to jump on the enemies head in 3D, especially when you factor in the curve of the planets, so you can now shoot some of them with gems, which makes them dizzy and now you just walk into them and they explode into gems? And honestly, I'm not too keen on some of the tacked on wiimote mechanics - like pointing at gems across the screen to collect them - that's just not fun - it's nothing - and you need to do it quite a bit (a couple hundred times on each level). But what I haven't been enjoying so much is, well, so far it's a pretty laid back game - almost too relaxing - more casual exploring than action - and after playing a fair amount of 2D Marios in the last few weeks - that relaxing, easy feeling, just seems a bit wrong. I am enjoying walking around the planets and some of the ways the game has played with gravity. It is a really nice looking game - colorful, fun and well animated - and the design of the planets / galixies I've seen so far have been great. Welp, I picked it up tonight and have played a bit (maybe two hours), and I'm a bit surprised that I'm enjoying it a a fair bit less than I thought I would (so far).