Right, so picture this: I'm sat in the dentist's waiting room in 2005, and there's this kid next to me absolutely absorbed in what looks like a Game Boy that someone's fed too many vitamins. Turns out it's the new Nintendo DSi, and this little tyke is playing Super Mario 64 on it. My first thought? "That's not right." I mean, proper Mario 64 belonged on the N64, with that chunky three-pronged controller and a…
There's something almost mythical about what Angel Studios pulled off when they squeezed Resident Evil 2 onto an N64 cartridge. I remember the first time I heard about it—probably through a mate who worked at Electronics Boutique, whispering about how Capcom was attempting the impossible. You had to understand the context here: RE2 was this sprawling, cinematic beast on PlayStation, crammed onto two discs with FMV sequences, uncompressed audio, and all the digital headroom that…
Standing in front of that burgundy CRT television in 1996, watching Mario's pixelated face stretch and scrunch in the file select screen, I had no idea I was witnessing the birth of something that would fundamentally rewire how we think about moving through digital space. My mum was somewhere behind me complaining about the "telly being upside down again" because we'd switched from the regular aerial to the N64's RF adapter, but I couldn't hear…
You know how sometimes you stumble across an old box in your mum's loft and suddenly you're twelve again, arguing with your brother about who gets to be Yoshi? That happened to me last weekend when I found my N64 controller collection—four original grey pads, one with a wonky stick that drifts left like it's permanently steering into a skid. The muscle memory kicked in immediately. That three-pronged alien spaceship design that everyone mocked until…
My mate Dave was round the other day, watching me mess about with an N64 controller—the actual one, not some modern approximation. His kid picked it up and just stared at it like I'd handed him a relic from Mars. Three prongs? What's the middle bit for? Why's there only one joystick? Fair questions, really. But when I fired up Mario 64 and that plumber's face filled the screen, stretching and squishing as I waggled…
The smell of a friend's basement in winter 1999 is burned into my memory—that musty carpet odor mixed with the electric warmth of a CRT that had been on for three hours straight. We'd gathered for what felt like a historic moment: someone had actually managed to get Resident Evil 2 running on Nintendo 64. Not just running, mind you, but looking… well, shockingly decent.I mean, we all knew the story by then. PlayStation had…
My mate Tony called me an idiot last Tuesday. Not for anything particularly stupid—well, more stupid than usual—but because I'd just spent twenty-five quid on a pristine copy of Mortal Kombat II for the Mega Drive. "You know you can download it for free, right?" Yeah, Tony. I know. But you can't download the weight of that chunky cartridge, can you? You can't download the satisfying click when it slots into the console, or the…
You know what still gets me? The way that little paper Mario would flutter when he jumped. There was something so perfectly Nintendo about taking their most famous character and flattening him like he'd been run over by a steamroller, then somehow making that limitation feel like pure magic.I remember the exact moment I first saw Paper Mario running in that Mushroom Kingdom intro. My mate Dave had picked up a copy from Electronics Boutique—remember…
The thing about speed is that you don't really understand it until it's taken away from you. I learned this the hard way when my mate Dave brought his SNES round for a sleepover, and we spent half the night arguing about whether Mario moved too slowly compared to Sonic. Dave was wrong, obviously, but watching Mario's careful, considered jumps after months of Sonic's breakneck sprinting felt like watching paint dry in slow motion.See, I'd…
I'd been tinkering with my N64 controller collection last night—cleaning the analog sticks, replacing that infamous bowl-shaped plastic bit that always wore out—when my daughter wandered over and asked why the controller looked "so weird." Three prongs? Who designs a three-pronged controller? Fair question, really. But as I held up that grey plastic boomerang, muscle memory kicked in like an old friend.See, before Super Mario 64, we'd all been living in a flat world. Sure,…