User:Nintendo101



Casual Nintendo historian. Otherwise an artist and a field ecologist. Bio degree. I've had an account here since 2012.

I wrote the character sections for Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Super Mario Odyssey. I contributed much of the article for Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Sunshine.

I have been a fan of Nintendo since a very young age. My first Mario games (and three of the first video games I ever owned) were Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario 64 DS, and Mario Kart DS. These games were good company for a young kid who moved around a lot and had difficulty keeping long-lasting friends.

During the, I sequentially played some of my favorite games in the Super Mario series to 100% completion. This includes, in order, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and Super Mario Odyssey. It's been really fun! These are great games, and I always wanted to marathon a series like this before but never had the time. It has been interesting to see where the series began and where it has ended up. The design philosophies, the characters, the art directions, world building, level design, narrative, etc. All good stuff. It might be fun to write something about it some day.

My favorite video game character is Yoshi.

Setting
Super Mario 64 takes place within the walls of Princess's Peach castle in the Mushroom Kingdom. It is the first Super Mario game to explicitly include the Mushroom Kingdom as a location since Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988). The game's levels – called courses – are not naturally-occurring places on Mario's world. They were created by Bowser using the Power Stars he stole from Peach. Most of them are accessed through paintings that hang in the castle's walls, but some are more cryptically hidden or require the player to accomplish a task in the castle before becoming accessible. Some paratextual material and subsequent games present the courses introduced in this game as real, visitable places outside of the paintings.

Generally, a course is a sprawling location with interactive environmental elements and various levels of elevation. The different elevations in a course obscure some features in the landscape that passively encourage exploration. Most courses feature a large structure in them, such as the mountain in Bob-omb Battlefield or the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land, that provides the player with a consistent point of reference. Like its more immediate predecessors, courses are themed after real-life s (i.e. deserts, mountains, coastlines) and more fantastical settings (i.e. a haunted house, clockworks, rainbow roads in the sky). The theme informs the type of objects that can be interacted with in the level, the types of enemies that can be encountered, and the non-playable characters that can be spoken to. For example, cactus enemies, a condor, and quicksand appear in the desert-themed Shifting Sand Land. Penguins, slippery ice, and snow appear in Cool, Cool Mountain and Snowman's Land.

- Though NPCs have been an element of the Super Mario series since the first game and some appear within levels in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (1992), Super Mario 64 is the first entry in the series to feature NPCs that can be spoken to and are framed as having independent lives. Several


 * Takes place in the walls of Peach's castle
 * First series game to take place in the Mushroom Kingdom since SMB3 (verify)
 * Trapped here by Bowser
 * The game states the courses of the game where created by Bowser using the stolen Power Stars, but some paratext and subsequent games imply these are real locations within Mario's world
 * Most courses are accessed through paintings that are found throughout the castle -
 * Each course is themed to a different environment and many of them include NPCs - the first scenario like this in a Super Mario game where NPCs are passively found within levels
 * Worlds were designed using principles from diorama and hakoniwa building
 * Prior games had world maps - this was the first to depart from that set up to 1.) to would be due technically challenging to develop a 3D space with conventional worlds. 2.) the hub allows a space with no objectives where the player can familiarize themselves with Mario's complex control scheme, learn to have fun with it
 * The arrangement where several levels are accessed from a hub would become the standard for the next few 3D Mario games as well as typify the genre