Nintendo 64 Review

Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are the reason this machine matters, and they are reason enough: between them they established the grammar of third person movement in a three dimensional space, and every game made since owes them something. The controller's analogue stick was the industry's first good one. The decision to stay on cartridges was the machine's undoing, because it made games expensive, kept them small, and sent Final Fantasy and most of Japanese third party development to Sony, where the library dwarfed Nintendo's. Four controller ports made it the best party console of its era, with GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64 doing the work in a million living rooms. The library is short and the fog in the distance was hiding a draw distance that could not cope, but the peaks are as high as the medium has reached.