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Let's take the Way-Back machine to eight years ago. I was in college, getting my roommate and friends all addicted to video games on the Super Nintendo. We were pretty happy with the likes of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 3, Yoshi's Island, and even some pretty heated battles of Super Mario Kart and Wario's Woods. Not even the new-at-the-time Sony PlayStation could tear us away from the SNES. That is until a game store demo was showing off this new Nintendo 64 system with Mario 64. We were all floored. Here was Mario walking around a colorful 3-D world, we had never seen anything like it. Mario 64 was truly ground breaking and even major magazines like TIME and Newsweek were claiming that Mario 64 looked as amazing as Toy Story. That claim may be laughable now, but Mario 64 was truly an influential game. It wasn't the first 3-D game, but it was the first 3-D platformer to get it RIGHT, and countless other games owe their existence to it.
The reason why I say all this is because back then, I would have never imagined that eight years from then, you'd be able to play Mario 64 on a portable game system. Yet here we are and Mario 64 is a launch title for Nintendo's newest handheld, the Nintendo DS. While aspects of 3-D platformers brought about by Mario 64 have been improved upon tenfold, Mario's first 3-D adventure still holds up pretty well today. Even better, the DS version makes good use of the capabilities of the handheld and adds lots of new characters, levels, and challenges for those who have played the original to death. The game starts out pretty much like the first Mario 64 game did. Princess Peach has invited Mario to her castle because she baked a cake for him. What a nice gal. But in the DS version, Luigi and Wario kind of crash in on the invitation, too. Can't blame them, though, I've heard Peach's cakes are really good! A long time passes and not a peep comes from the castle. Yoshi, who had been asleep on the roof of the castle this whole time (kind of pays homage to when you see Yoshi on the roof after getting all the stars in the first game), anyway, the green dino goes in the castle to investigate. He learns that the Princess has been trapped in a painting by Bowser (sound familiar), and Yoshi will have to find his friends, collect enough Power Stars to undo the spell, and teach Bowser a lesson. Yes, you start the game out as Yoshi, not Mario. But pretty soon you unlock Mario. Luigi, and Wario and be able to play as all of them. Each character has his own skills. Yoshi can eat enemies and throw eggs. He also has that run in the air jump move and a special power up lets Yoshi breathe fire. Mario is the only one who can do the famous wall kick, and his power ups let him fly with the wing cap or bloat up like a balloon. Luigi can jump higher than anyone else and his power up lets him turn invisible. Finally, Wario is slow but strong, and can turn into metal. Peach's castle serves as your main hub, and you hop into paintings to explore varied stages. In each stage are stars that are hidden, and you'll have to fight baddies, collect red coins, and search high and low to find them. Luckily, the extra screen on the DS has an overhead map that tells you where stars, red coins, and other points of interest lie. The more stars you collect, the more doors and levels you can open up. And that's really all there is to Mario 64. They've added a few things like extra stars in the levels to get, extra stages (but they're really small), and some extra power ups like the Super Mushroom that lets you tromp around giant sized for a while. They've also added things to make some of the more annoying areas less annoying. Now you don't have to make that awkward long jump to the roof of the ghost house, for instance.  But that's not all. There are also several dozen mini games you can unlock that utilize the touch screen and the stylus. Remember that rabbit in the original Mario 64 that you had to catch? Well MIPS has multiplied since then, as rabbits are wont to do, and each time you catch one around the castle with one of the characters, you'll get a key that unlocks another mini game. You'll use the stylus pen to pull back a slingshot to shoot Bob-Ombs, draw lines to make trampolines for Mario to jump on, and even play poker in Luigi's casino! Each game saves your best five scores and most are so much fun, it's worth the price of the game itself. Now I can't wait for Wario Ware! I think the DS is best designed for these kind of mini-games. With wireless DS play you can also partake in 3-D run and chase battles for stars. While the graphics in Mario 64 DS look dated by today's standards, it's still pretty amazing to me that they got it to work on a handheld system. They even improved some of the graphics here and there. Characters are less blockyﾗBowser now looks especially cool. It's also impressive that they got the music and sound EXACTLY right. You know how in some GBA games that were SNES ports how the music doesn't sound as good? But not in Mario 64 DS, everything sounds just as it did on the N64ﾗin some cases, even better. Really the two main problems with this game are problems that have plagued this and other 3-D platformers since: camera angles and play control. Being one of the first 3-D games that let you control the camera angles, Mario 64 ran into some problems here and there. You can use the touch screen to rotate the camera and the L button to keep it behind Mario, but many times the camera will get stuck in an awkward position and cause problems. Mario 64 was a game that showcased the new analog control for the N64, but the DS doesn't have an analog stick, just a D-pad. There are three ways to get around this. One, you can control Mario with the D-pad, which provides rather less than precise control. You can also try to control Mario a bit more precisely using the stylus pen or the thumbstrap, but I haven't gotten the hang of either of those. I actually made it all the way through the DS game using only the D-pad, which either means that the control isn't too bad or I've played the original Mario 64 so much that I've gotten used to the game's awkward idiosyncrasies (I did get all the stars in Mario 64 back in college, which means I'm either really good at that game or I had too much free time in college). Even with the flaws, Mario 64 DS is a great launch title for the new handheld, and shouldn't be missed by Mario fans. 
It's Mario. You jump on turtles and mushrooms. Mario games are the perfect example of good games for kids. Some of the control and camera problems may annoy newcomer gamers and some of the star challenges are tricky and frustrating, but it's still a great game that even a very young player can have fun ﾑmessing around' with. Highly recommended.
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