Here, I get the first eight Power Stars and fight Bowser in the first of three fights against him in the game. This is a casual play and is in no means a speed-run of any kind. It really adds a much crisper, cleaner, and vibrant look to the game and fits perfectly with the overall aesthetics intended by the game’s original developers. There is no shortage of packs available for Super Mario 64, and in the video here I’m making use of what I think is one of the best ones: “Retro Mario Sixty-Four” by Risio. Only a handful of games have texture packs available for them, but for those that do they really do beef up the experience quite a bit. Despite the fact that the Nintendo 64 used cartridges with flash memory in an age when disc-based media was pretty much the standard on home consoles, games like Mario 64 were technical marvels that were able to do an awful lot with the limitations of onboard memory (the game is only 64 Megabits, which is only 8MB of total memory!!).įor many, many years, modern emulation through programs such as Project64 have made it possible to load new textures into these nearly 20-year-old games like this. Super Mario 64 is one of those games that even if you aren’t a big fan of Nintendo, you know it was ground-breaking and genre-defining when it was released back in 1996.
