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SUPER MARIO 64: Midway to Yoshi with touchscreen controls – Part II

While the rest of the gaming world is all stoked about the new PlayStation and Xbox, I am stuck in Laos and in 1996 via the N64 emulator, Mupen64, on my Android phone. My last post made it to about 14 stars. I made it to 66 stars this time. Even though 66 is more than half way to 120, it doesn’t feel that way due to the difficulty of the final stars.

The Controls +

I know there are good bluetooth controllers that would make this a whole lot easier, but I don’t have one. I’m in Laos. It’s not like I can drop by Wal-Mart or order it on Amazon and the local shops all say I need to ride down to the capital city, a twelve hour drive, to find one. It took over a year for my son’s 2019 Christmas gift to arrive from Florida. I would still like to read any suggestions on controllers in the comments though.

The only thing that is difficult to do with the Z button at the top left is long-jumping. It’s still possible, but you’ll mess up if the pressure’s on or you haven’t gotten used to it. My last phone couldn’t process more than one touch on the left side at the same time, so I had to learn how to play without long-jumping at all. The D-pad is missing which isn’t a big deal unless you’re playing Starfox 64 which needs it for certain moves. For most N64 games, it isn’t used at all or does the same thing as the analog stick.

Slow Motion –

One of the ways I dealt with the frustration of touchscreen controls not being as responsive to the real thing was by cheating. I would try to beat the penguin without cheating, but he’s a really sticky AI. If you thrash down at full speed, he’ll catch up and if you let him have a head-start, he’ll slow way down for you to catch up. I found 40% game speed was best for beating slides.

Slide for 100 ⭐️

I wasn’t looking to beat Mr. Penguin this time. I was on the quest to find 100 coins in the level. The star appeared near the end of the race. I couldn’t long-jump to it so I went down again. When I came back down, the star wasn’t there. I should’ve collected coins from the slide first then scavenged the left overs to 100 around the mountain. Now I have to do it all over again. The save game cheat can’t help in this situation.

Random Path

I’m sure world record speed runners have determined the most efficient path for clearing Super Mario 64, but I just went around and collected whichever star I felt like at the time. I was surprised that I had forgotten a few stars and that there were warp points that I’d never known about until now.

Thanks for reading about my painful journey to find all the stars. Do you think I’ll make it all the way to 120 stars and see Yoshi or will there be a spot which is impossible to pass using touchscreen? I’m afraid any spots requiring multiple wall jumps will be my final roadblock, but it should still be possible to do with the touchscreen if time is slowed down. Has anyone else attempted this frustrating way of clearing Super Mario 64?

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: Majora’s Mask 🎭 20 Years Too Late…

I loved The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but sadly had never heard of Majora’s Mask because it came out in the year 2000. At that time I was on active duty in the U.S. Army and spent all my free time in college or in the Pacific Ocean trying to make it as a surfer. I got back into gaming in 2001, but I was in Thailand where they preferred PlayStation. Back then all the consoles were easily hacked and could play burnt discs that shops everywhere were selling from fifty cents to over a dollar. As a gamer it felt like Christmas walking home with a bag full of cheap games. N64 cartridges were expensive and weren’t easily pirated like the CDs used in the original PlayStation so most people in Asia (outside of Japan and Korea) never saw an N64 or any of its great games. Even now, people see me playing Super Mario 64 on my phone and ask about it.

I have good internet at home and most restaurants have WiFi so I don’t waste money on a data plan for my phone which means I will use it offline often. Getting a phone ready for offline mode has many benefits. If you’re at a party for example and the power goes out and then there’s no internet, you’ll be able to jam on because you have the song files ready or can still play games that don’t need the internet like N64 games. I can imagine going back in time and telling myself that every single Nintendo 64 game can be played on a phone that fits in my front shirt pocket and I would think that we made it to Star Trek. When I think about the limitations of file size, RAM, and speed they were working with back in the 1990s, these games really shine as true digital masterpieces of artistic creation and ingenuity.

After downloading every N64 game ever made on my phone, I had to delete 99% of them because most looked horrible, some wouldn’t load at all, and most were boring. I was sad to see that GoldenEye 007 couldn’t be controlled with the touchscreen and had to go in the bin too. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Star Fox 64, Perfect Dark, and Super Smash Bros. were the only games that could be controlled with touch screen well and also survived my love of putting files in the trash bin.

The graphics looked good on my phone’s screen and the controls were smooth. It felt like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but a bit different at the same time too. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask was one of only three N64 games which REQUIRED the Expansion Pack which added 4MB of RAM. It really did make a difference and improved the quality of the gameplay, but was it worth buying it if it only worked on three games late in the life cycle of the N64? I remember having it and didn’t regret it at all. It was only $30 and came with the games that needed it so it was kind of a fair deal. I think many of us bought it individually and then bought games that came with it, so we’d just give the spare ones to friends who didn’t have it. I don’t know if it made any difference, in fact I remember many people complaining it made older games freeze up sometimes.

This starts off fun, getting to be Link again in glorious 64 bit plus expansion graphics, then this guy in a mask comes along and jacks our horse and ocarina.

He also turned us into this tree kid.

Flying around with flowers is fun. Nintendo always had a magical way of making games feel alive and full of fun compared to the competition. I bet that some new form of AI will be able to read these old games and reproduce them exactly like they were designed only in 8K resolution. There are many fan boys doing this now, but I think it will be done perfectly when an advanced AI does it.

With only three days left until time runs out I felt myself running around like a chicken with its head cut off not knowing what to do.

I rode my bike to this food court located at the start of the night market. I didn’t have WiFi, so I couldn’t rely on Youtube for a solution. Back in the day we’d get stuck for days or weeks on a game until someone’s older sibling told us what to do or we found a clue in an old Nintendo Power magazine.

Boom. Game over. The world has come to an end because I wasn’t fast enough. Oh wait. It’s like a 72 hour version of Groundhog Day. You get to start over, just without anything gained along the way. I would love if real life were like this without the getting stuck in the loop part. Playing old N64 games on my phone is kind of like that with the save option. It really makes the game a lot more fun not having to start all over again. I want to play these old games for nostalgia and relaxation, not to get stressed out, so I cheat using the save option all the time.

I found myself frustrated by this game, turned it off and went back the Super Mario 64, but it kept bugging me and I came back the next day to try again. I wish I had played this when it came out. I would’ve really loved it then. It’s honestly hard for me to get that into it after playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it’s only 32MB in size and I’m glad it’s on my phone incase I ever want to play what is considered by many to be one of the greatest video games of all time.

GENSHIN IMPACT: First Impressions Review

This was the first game recommended by the App Store and looked like an interesting RPG, so I gave it a go. I’ve always like Japanese animation and video games, so it was exciting to play this merging of the two. It is very interesting how they’ve finally made a game look like a living animation. The characters and world are 3D characters, but look and feel like they were hand drawn from any angle.

The characters are voiced with good actors which helped me get into the game more. I hate RPGs that make me read. If I wanted to read, I’d check out the latest HIVE posts or read Google News, but when I play games, I want to feel emerged in the environment and forget about the actual world and reading ruins the experience for me. They still display the texts so you can read what the characters are about to say so you can read faster than the characters speak if you want to jump to the next line or scene too.

I also like that the characters can interact with the environment properly. If there is a mountain or tree, you can climb up it.

I’m using an old iPad to play this. Even though it is 5 years old, it’s still an iPad Pro and has never had any problems until today. I think this game was meant for something more powerful like a PS4 because it would stutter during big animation scenes and would have a lot of black fog in the distance. Maybe when I get a new phone I’ll try this again because the stuttering scenes ruined the experience for me. It could be that I’m just running the demo and if the whole thing gets downloaded it works better.

Unfortunately for me, my iPad only has 32GB of storage which is almost full. Maybe I’ll go on a mad picture deleting spree and install the whole 4GB of game data and see if that helps to improve the experience.

It kind of feels like playing a Zelda game. You have a sword, some magic ability, and have wings for gliding. I really believe that artists will be able to animate whole worlds like this simply by thinking or talking about it with an advanced AI in the near future. If they can do this now, imagine what it will be like when computers can read our thoughts in five or ten years.

I was only able to make it to the first town before I started having problems again when a dragon shows up, but the whole screen has gone black so I can’t see ANYTHING. I’ve tried reseting and loading only the game to see if it works, but I got nothing but black again. Such a shame because I was really enjoying this game. Oh well, I’ll try again on the PS4 or PS5 where it will look great. This is a great game and I wish I could play it more. I don’t know if it’s my iPad or bad game design, but I can’t continue from this point. Have you played this game too? What was your experience like?

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit

Nintendo just released a real-world kart with a camera to play in your home. It costs $99 and comes with a USB chargeable Mario or Luigi and four gates to create your own courses. If you have a huge house and are willing to drop $400 on four karts and already have the Nintendo Switch then you can have some seriously fun game parties because the game supports up to four physical karts.

Creativity

Creating a Mario level has always been a fun experience, but now that it will be a mix of reality and game obstacles, it will be fun on a new level. I created Conversation Gaming to bring quality education to the gaming world and will surely use this game for events with my students in the future.

Xbox, Playstation, or a Mario Kart?

Many people are going to choose this $99 kart over a $500 system. Nintendo has always gone up againts more powerful hardware coming out on top and it looks like they’ve found a very creative way to do it this year.

Cats and Dogs

I’m looking forward to all the YouTube videos creative players are going to produce with this game. There will surely be funny moments where dogs and cats freak out seeing Mario and Luigi navigate the courses in THEIR living rooms.

Developer Interview

The guys who made this compare it to the jump from when Mario went from 2D to 3D. I honestly don’t think it’s that big of a deal, but mixed reality gaming is pretty cool.

The Orginal Xbox

I despise ~~Microsoft~~. I think Bill Gates is creepy and I decided to boycott all ~~Microsoft~~ products for life back in 2008. I remember what a big deal it was erasing Windows and running only Linux. I asked my wife if she understood what it meant, but her only reply was that if she could keep watching YouTube, then it doesn’t matter.

The original Xbox came out before I felt that way and I still think it was one of the greatest gaming machines ever.

Hard Drive

Having a hard drive was something only for computers until the Xbox. ~~Microsoft~~ never really used it for anything other than letting you copy your CDs to it, but it made all the difference once you hacked it.

The Best Emulator

I remember showing my friends how the modded Xbox could play their favorite Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis games. When asked which games it had, the answer was very Sarah Palin, all of them.

Orginal Nintendo and Sega games were punny as well as any Atari games. Every single Super Nintendo game including the Japanese games added up to a few gigabytes. It wasn’t until you got to the N64 where you needed to delete any games to save space.

Speaking of the Nintendo 64, I have not seen a better emulator than the Xbox. It could play any N64 game smoothly, something a PC still can’t do today. It was really fun to still play Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Golden Eye (The no Oddjob rule still was in effect.)

Movies and TV

A modded Xbox was way ahead of its time. The experience you had using XBMC (Xbox Media Center now called Kodi) was better than some paid services today. You could steam videos and podcasts as well as play any files downloaded from torrents. HD files at 720 hadn’t really come along yet, so you could store hundreds of TV shows and movies on the hard drive, making it a must whenever you visited a place without internet.

Xbox Games

You could download and burn games to a blank DVD, but it had to be a certain type and burned a certain way, so it was way easier just to download the ISO file then copy it to the hard drive.

What about you?

Do you agree with me that the orginal Xbox was the last great thing ~~Microsoft~~ did? Has anyone else removed ~~Microsoft~~ from their lives completely and forever? I think Sony is going to crush ~~Microsoft~~ in the next generation. I haven’t seen one person excited about the new Xbox, but everyone is talking about the new PlayStation.