2.5/5 ★ – OwenTheNerd's review of Super Mario 64 DS.

I wasn’t originally gonna review this game as I don’t consider it mainline, but I decided I haven’t played it in a while, so I decided to play it in my 100% marathon. For perspective, I used to be obsessed with this game a lot. I have fully completed it a million times. I know this game better than people who like this game more than me. So before you accuse me of being nostalgically biased towards the original with how much lower the score is for this game just know that I understand every single mechanic and system of both games very well. And honest to god this game is far inferior to the original and it’s not even close. But first, let me go through some positives of this game. Firstly, as a launch title for the DS, I think it succeeds. It uses a lot of the DS functions very well. The bottom screen is utilized very well with a map screen for every level. And the minigames are a very fun and creative use of the touch screen. In fact, I love that this game adds so much more content to this game for those who had already played and mastered the original. This is something a lot of modern Nintendo rereleases and remakes miss the mark on. If you’re gonna put a hefty price tag, then at least add content. But that’s basically where my compliments stop. My first issue comes in with the very thing I just got finished complimenting, the extra content. Aside from the mini games and a couple of stars, the majority of the 30 stars and few levels added are not even remotely interesting. The extra characters are a good idea, but just kind of add unnecessary tedium to the game. I think the best way to do extra characters in the Mario series is to give you the choice of your preferred character rather than forcing you to pick the character needed to complete a level. This game does the latter unfortunately. These characters don’t add anything other than extra tedium since there’s no reason to play as any of them for any reason other than to get a required star. But by far my biggest issue with this game are the controls. Mario 64 at its core is just not built to be played on a D-Pad, not just for precision, but also because the movement is heavily dependent on the push of an analogue stick. So their work around was to add a run button. While this may seem like an alright compromise, this just makes moving around in this game very binary. Everything just takes extra effort to perform. You can especially see this in the dive which is so slow and awkward that I still haven’t found a good use for it. I understand this was the best they could do on a limited system like the DS, but this just proves that this game wasn’t built for the console it’s on. You know, this game doesn’t improve anything about the original, it just adds extra content and unnecessary features that honestly add extra tedium at times. This game wasn’t made because they wanted to make Mario 64 better, it was made to make the DS seem more impressive. That’s all I see in this game, just an impressive tech demo. In other words this game wasn’t made for art’s sake, but for advertising sake. So overall, it’s not a bad game, but it’s not that great either. It’s still an interesting way to experience Mario 64, but it is far from the quintessential 64 experience.