First Blog, First Game

 Hi, hello! Welcome to RoxBox Reviews. I'm Rox, this blog will more or less be my soapbox, hence the name. Anyway, thanks for checking out my first ever blog, where I will be talking about....more or less whatever I feel like. And since this year is an anniversary year for at least three of my favorite gaming IPs, I figured I'd commemorate the occasion by talking about one of the first games I ever played, which happens to be from one of said IPs. The IP in question is Super Mario, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and the game is Super Mario 64.

This game is easily one of the most influential games ever created, as it full-on created an entire sub-genre of platformers. without this game we wouldn't have other big hitters like Banjo Kazooie, Ratchet and Clank, or even Kingdom Hearts. Yes, I know that last one isn't a collectathon, and is instead an action RPG, but it has been stated that the creation of Kingdom Hearts was inspired by Mario 64. I mean, the whole idea of calling the player's field of view the "camera" comes from this game. Since 3D games were fairly new at the time, Nintendo decided to explain how the player's field of view works by having it be represented by an in-universe character following the player throughout the game, acting as the camera man, and the entire game is being seen from his viewpoint.

For as important and influential as it is though, Mario 64 isn't a perfect game. There are aspects of this game that didn't exactly age well, like the camera for example. Yes I just finished gassing up how big of a deal it is, and how smart it was to explain its function by having it be an actual character, but despite how influential it is, I wouldn't exactly call it good. The camera has a bad habit of getting stuck on walls and other structures, as well as the fact that its pretty limited in terms of how much you can move it and where you can move it. The graphics also didn't age well, which can lead to some things looking more unsettling than they probably were supposed to, Though despite this, I think the unrefined graphics does have a certain charm to it that I can't exactly explain outside of just saying that its very...nostalgic. And lastly the power ups are easily the weakest they've ever been up to that point in the series, with the wing cap having terrible controls, the invisible cap being extremely situational, and the metal cap for as iconic as it is, is kind of useless if you know what you're doing.

Just to wrap things up, Super Mario 64 is one of the most influential games ever made, not just in the Mario franchise, but in the gaming industry as a whole. Yes, there are certain aspects of 64 that didn't exactly age well, but I still give it a lot of slack considering 3D games were still a new thing at the time, and the entire industry was kind of just winging it. Either way, I'm glad this was the first video game I ever played, as this definitely helped shape me into the gamer I am today.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and stay tuned for more posts from me. Happy 40th anniversary, Super Mario!