/vr/ - Retro Games

>Before Crash characters had no emotion (Pacman, and even Mario), or one dimensional emotions (Sonic was “fast”). Crash had facial emotions that let him speak to you and gave him personal range. Crash wasn’t any one emotion. Crash was Crash. For example, you could see Crash acting like a mime. Sonic and Mario weren’t capable expressing even a mimes range of emotion until after Crash came out. “Itsa me, Mario” just doesn’t cut it, especially when Mario’s face didn’t even animate as he said it!!

>Personally when I first got my hands on Mario I was like WTF? How is anyone going to know what to do here? And although there was a pretty real sense of marvel in this funny new world, I never found it very fun. The early camera AI was brutally frustrating. And the Mario voiceover. I still cringe, “It’sa me, Mario!” Still the game was brilliantly innovative, although I remain convinced that if anyone but Miyamoto had made the game it would have flopped.

>On the subject of Mario 64, I agree more with Andy than with Jason, and think that Jason’s view highlights something very interesting and powerful about his personality. At the time I thought — and in retrospect, I still think — that Mario 64 was clumsy and ugly. It was the work of a great genius very much making a transition into a new medium — like a painter’s first work in clay. Going from 2D to 3D made all the technical challenges of games harder — for both conceptual and algorithmic reasons — and Miyamoto had just as hard a time as us adapting traditional gameplay to this new framework. The difference was that Miyamoto was an artist, and refused to compromise. He was willing and able to make a game that was less “fun” but more aggressively novel. As a result, he gave gamers their first taste of glorious 3D open vistas — and that was intoxicating. But the truth is that Mario 64 just wasn’t that fun