Started playing this again. Real joy in hearing Mario's yammering as I long jump my way to the castle.

The camera for the most part works fine. It's just that you can't expect to rotate it fully in one direction (a 360 degrees spin) around Mario. It rotates to a limit off to the side and won't advance anymore (like a camera after the last shot of film has been taken).

When I beat the game long ago (and acquired all 120 stars) I did not bother with the zoomed-in camera. I guess after playing Resident Evil 4 this viewpoint really appeals to me and there is heavy interest in doing an entire playthrough with it. It looks really cool having Mario do his long jump with it. Turning, however, is problematic. If you run to the side it whips around in a jarring fashion to follow Mario. Somersaulting backwards is best done unzoomed. Have yet to try wall jumping with it on.

Reading a sign is surprisingly unfriendly as you have to line up Mario perfectly in front of it.

Great level design that is not horribly segmented into little worlds like Wario World or Super Mario Galaxy. I like how the early levels are like mountain tops. There is an immensity to them whether it is slowly making your way up higher and higher making Mario into a very small man one step from a nightmarish freefall or descending downwards clutching a small penguin whose very survival depends on your careful downstepping of ground laid with snow and ice.

More to come.

Or like, you know, THE ENTIRE MARIO FRANCHISE.

Eh. I am not comparing 2D Mario games to 3D Mario games. The point of comparison for 3-dimensional worlds are for the 3D Mario platformers (and other 3D platformers), not the entire franchise.

I don't like the Mario games feeling like Super Monkey Ball levels.

Gonna scan the player's guide for Super Mario 64 to use in the level design youtube video of 64 vs Sunshine vs Galaxy.

Mario 3 was the best.

I have real trouble choosing between 3 and World, they're both amazing.
I'd love to see the NSMB series go more in the World direction, though.

Out of the NES games, yes. Then again, I think it was just one of those games I played just because I wanted to beat it.

It's the only one I've ever actually beaten out of the 3.

Last April (last year?) I actually played every single level in SMB3 in one playthrough. It was a good 2, 2-and-a-half hours. Some of the levels, I never actually played before then, either because I was afraid of them, or tried them out and couldn't finish them. So many years later, as a platforming guru, I surprised myself with how well and quickly I breezed through the game. There were maybe 3 non-linear levels (that loop eternally) unless you go through the right sequence of doors - I'll admit I had to look up a walkthrough for those, because those absolutely stumped me back in the day - but, hey, that's the equivalent of using Nintendo Power anyway, so I don't count it as cheating. That was the first time I actually beat that game, too.

The first Mario, I still try to this day to beat it, but at the absolute best, I get up to the final castle, and something keeps killing me.

The second Mario, the sixth world, how it's just a desert world all over again, that looks like the second world, kind of ruins it for me. I'm hardly able to last a second in the final castle of that game, either. I love the ice world in this game for some reason, though, and I always have. Dude, you pick turnips out of whales' heads...

Super Mario 64, back when it first came out, it took me half a year before I collected all 120 Stars. Actually replayed it for the first time since during the past Winter; got about 74 Stars in 3 sittings.

Super Mario World's easy.

Super Mario World 2 deserves to be released on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console. Just sayin' Between SMB3, SMW, and SMW2, I think my fondest memories are of SMW2.

I am trying to figure out how to measure Mario's speed in this game compared to Sunshine (forget Galaxy). I think the only way to do it would be to measure the distance by amount of steps Mario takes. Mario seems a small bit faster with basic movements (not including water sliding) in 64, but I'm not 100%. I think I am getting obsessed with these little details of comparison too much. If I measure speed I might as well measure how much distance is covered with individual moves (i.e. long jumping versus turbo nozzle jumps).

One thing I can declare is that Mario moves faster out of standstill in Sunshine than 64. He can dive and somersault without having to build up a momentum.

One little detail I really enjoy in 64 is watching Mario dive towards you with the camera swiveling around to be behind him out of backwards somersault dive. It just looks really cool to me. In Sunshine Mario will dive at you and you don't really see his face and white gloves that close up AND the camera does not turn around. However, if you zoom the camera out in 64 it does not turn around when you backwards somersault dive.

Do people here watch Pannen's videos for Super Mario 64? They are extremely helpful to me in having a complete understanding of the underlying mechanics, and they're always entertaining seeing as they are pretty much insane.  I don't think any other game would be able to warrant such obsessive behavior from a gamer. Sometimes that seems like a good reflection of the intense programming that went into making a game like Super Mario 64.

His HP video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeGNpeFOOCY

I never thought the HP system went beyond the simple 8 parts into .5's. Pretty hilarious that he cancelled a death jump landing by exiting out of the world immediately on landing. I don't think you can do that in Sunshine.

I wonder if this guy will ever move onto doing these types of obsessive videos for another game.