Is Super Mario 64's movement STILL the best in gaming?

Hang on, is Super Mario 64’s movement the best in gaming?

Load up the game and you’re dropped back at Peach’s Castle entrance, with the of that distant waterfall. The flitter of birds between trees. green hillock and blue sky and a specific, familiar sense of calm. Then you wind up your first triple jump – – and release it – And now it’s all 😮 and mouth agape The best thing in gaming? Certainly the best thing you can do with a bipedal avatar and a pad in hand, as Mario shoots so high and so fast the camera cranes to keep up. Then he spins and tucks – arms out, arms in, too quick to count – cleaving the air with the sound of two swooshes before landing with a gymnast finish. With triumph and joy. Super Mario 64. Still perfectly animated and weighted and timed You’ve not even heard the Dire Dire Docks theme yet! What are other games even

I think many players have worked through the 3D All-Stars Collection one game at a time. But I’ve been enjoying a four-course – I include Odyssey – game of Uber-Mario: Like Triple Jump Tapas! Flicking between games, their differences clearer in relief. And played like this they alter each other a little, like album tracks in sequence. And pound for pound and jump for jump, to me 64 feels like the G.O.A.T.

The balance feels just right. In 64 Mario’s jumps are thrillingly quick and excitingly high (I was watching Eurogamer’s Let’s Play and Aoife actually let’s out an at the first triple), with enough travel and suspension at the zenith to feel convincingly, momentarily free. But there’s enough gravity in the pull-down to feel the weight and the platforming stakes. On a flat, too, the game has real lean, like that beautiful (I mean it!) sense of compression as Mario pivots – torso first then head spin – and leans a superbike, released with a Side Flip. In 64 there is just so much fun in heft and speed, the simple joys of momentum. And that’s the , surely? Momentum management?

Super Mario 3D All-Stars is coming September 18th! (Nintendo Switch) Watch on YouTube

This defines the obstacles in 64, which feel similarly pure. There are those platforms that see-saw, and the ones spin like plates so you have to sort of pull yourself free. Or those mini-pyramids with their tips lopped off, that you have to run up just-so then stop on the top like a dime. Everything is geared towards in-hand pleasures of weight and movement more than canned spectacle or fancy contextual animations, which makes the platforming feel consistent and honest, in its pleasures.