A classic in pretty much every way.
-Now no one can go without seeing this character and not automatically knowing who it is, a classic character and a gaming legend.
-Super Mario 64. One of the first games released with the Nintendo 64, even packed in with it back in 1996.
First, you start off with Mario arriving at Princess Peach's castle, being invited for cake, but when Mario gets there he finds out that King Bowser(Koopa) has taken all the power stars from the castle and trapped Princess Peach and her servants into the castle walls. Now Mario as he always does, decides to save Peach by recollecting the stars, and how does he do that? By jumping into the paintings of course!
When starting out you'll of course have no stars and have access to only one room, but later on as you collect more stars you can use them to open more doors and find new worlds in Princess Peach's castle, which acts like a hub to get to each world.
Now it wouldn't be Mario without the tremendous gameplay and mass amount of secrets. Mario has his basic moves such as a small combo of punching and kicking, also of course jumping. But this time around since it's now in full 3D Mario can start running and doing a triple jump which gains hight with each jump, also included with the jumping is when running he can do a dive move that will hurt enemies or have him grab onto things, such as certain little characters or items that can help him in some way with his quest.
Next is level design, each level you enter instead of it being the classic side-scrolling like Super Mario World of the Super Mario Bros. games, it's more a giant square with landscape and props on it. Although it's not side-scrolling anymore it still feels right at home with how they're each designed, with each cliff or possible pitfall, depending on the level. It also includes a new camera system labeled "Lakitu Bros." which is a camera you can move around behind Mario with the C-buttons to get a better view of the 3D world, but this does have it's flaws as it can easily get stuck behind walls you get stuck into a position that makes it hard to see what you're doing or where you're going.
Then the graphics, now compared to most games now this game looks downright ancient, but when it was released it looked easily like one of the best since it was one of the first games released after the Super Nintendo was dying down. The colors are vibrant and fit really well together while there may have been many glitches it doesn't retract from the game being fun, nor are any of the major ones really noticeable.
Regardless of the glitches and sometimes possibly frustrating camera system this game was and still is one of the most fun games to date, even after you've beaten it a few times, you could just go back and play it again.