her, expolde
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No but stars are, so yeah you basically have to do a pretty obnoxious amount of collecting. 75 stars is like 60% of the total star count. The point of it is making number go up. Quick, imagine if Celeste had Strawberry Doors in front of each chapter and you had to get a certain amount of strawbs to advance? If you needed 100 out of 180 strawbs to advance… fun?
you can’t really compare a 3d game made in 1992 with a 2010s 2d platformer though. for what it’s worth, i think things can just be not to your taste without them being bad. like i really didn’t enjoy celeste but i’m not gonna say it’s a bad game because of the things i didn’t like
Fwiw I didn’t enjoy Celeste either, mostly its last chapter is just cock n ball torture for no reason. I like the base game okay. And yeah I guess, but then every single 3D platformer was a Rareware game or a Mario 64 clone for like a decade after that. Making jumping games be about making number go up by collecting stuff reminds me of MMO design or lootgrinding, just busywork to make numbers go up, a fundamentally timewasting design. Missing the point that the joy of motion is what made platformers fun… Missing the forest for the trees…
oh sorry, 1996, but still. that game is almost enough to have been teen pregnant with a middle schooler. it’s like i was saying earlier, 3d games and 2d games are fundamentally different and comparing them like it’s apples to apples does both of them a disservice. 3d environments are much more detailed and require careful exploration sometimes and that’s why you get small hints like trails of coins leading to areas out of the way.
for what it’s worth, you can’t really blame mary-oh 64 for every game after it copying it and just adding more shit to collect. that’s kinda what i was getting at as well; there are only 3 categories of things to collect: regular coin, red coin, star. it also had some of the tighest controls a 3d platformer had in that era so i give it some grace
Curuously though, this type of collection kleptomania was grafted directly onto Sonic in Unleashed and everyone hated it to death. There’s nothing about being 3d that means focusing your game entirely around collecting garbage is a good idea. For example:
Stuff like this is totally fine and I agree, it also doesn’t explain why they had to lock you out of levels with star doors, telling you to screw off and go grab more trash?
It is the one that started it though, right? Weirdly its direct predecessor would be european micro platformers, like the Dizzy series or Flimbo’s quest which require you to collect trash the same way. Most people don’t love those, and yet when Mario 64 does it…? But the flood of mediocre 3D platformers padding their runtime comes right after SM64 came out
And it does have tight controls, that’s what’s more confusing: Mario 64 would have made a good enough normal platformer because the moveset and movement are great, and yet they made it so that collecting refuse was the only point?
that’s not the only point though. go through the objectives in every level, most of them are doing some kind of weird shit to change the environment in some way. your issue is with two stars in each level that aren’t necessary to complete the game
No that isn’t my issue, my issue is with the entire point being do thing -> get stars -> unlock doors.
what else would be the point? without objectives and ways to mark progression, you’re playing only up 64
Well, what was the point of every Mario game prior? World wasn’t about collecting dragon coins, to my memory. Platformers to that point had been effectively obstacle courses about overcoming the challenge laid out for you. They didn’t need a skinner-box rat-and-cheese number-go-up extrinsic motivator to get you to play, just traversing the levels was fun because jumping on and over stuff was fun, defeating enemies was fun. Top examples are Mega Man X, the first Castlevania, indeed Super Mario Bros 3, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Kirby’s Adventure. None of these games needed to be “GRAB ALL THE STUFF”, anything you could collect in these games was either supportive of the core gameplay (subweapons and hearts in Castlevania, armour and sub-tanks in Mega Man X) or purely for score. Gating your game’s progression based on arbitrary collectibles was an absurd idea built purely to pad a game, and you can see what a bad idea it was in Symphony of the Night as well. It’s a bad bit and I think there’s a good reason most games dropped it. The level design in SM64 and its ilk also get warped to this purpose and mean that without their silly collectables there would be literally no point. A Mario 64 that’s just “get to the end” would be an hour long game. And why*? Because they decided that platforming being fun on its own wasn’t enough somehow.
*it’s cartridge space, again. they padded the runtime because more levels wouldn’t have fit lol