I did it! For the first time in my life I've collected all 120 stars in Super Mario 64! This is a bucket list kind of achievement to me. When I played it as a kid I was simply not good enough to collect them all. When the Super Mario™ 3D All-Stars was announced for the Nintendo Switch I knew I had to buy it so I could get my revenge. And that's exactly what I did.
It's a timeless game
Super Mario 64 is simply timeless. I haven't played this game since pre-2005 and I was amazed at how great it still holds up. Aside from the boxy graphics, which is a huge charm, it doesn't show signs of aging at all. The controls are fluent and reactive. It's not clunky like so many older games feels these days. It's a game of pure quality.
Many people were disappointed when the All Stars collection came out because it was pretty much just a re-release of the old games with some slight upgrades. Not a remake but more of a slight remaster. For Super Mario 64 this meant some upgraded textures, a slight up scaling to fit newer screens and some small rearranging of the HUD. I have no issue with this. Playing the game as close to it's original version as it can be was exactly what I wanted.
I do however wish they would have done a few more changes. Most of all I wish they had done something with the rendering distance. I was having issues finding a couple of things because you literally have to stand a couple of yards away from them for them to spawn. It's quite annoying for coins, and especially for platforms. I was running around like a dork so many times because I couldn't find the platform to take me where I wanted to go. Simply because it was invisible until I was right next to it. Annoying.
It's a hard game
Nonetheless I managed to power through it and collect all the stars. It wasn't without it's difficulties though as this game is hard. If you're not careful it's really easy to fall of a cliff or die in some other way. There's not a short list over ways to die in this game either. As was the case with older games you have to start over from the last save point when you die. There's no handholding. This meant that many stars had to be made several attempts at.
The especially rough ones are often the red coin stars. There were times where I was so impatient I would do something stupid and die having collected 7 out of 8 red coins. That meant there was nothing to do but start over. This really isn't a game to rush. Take your time or you will regret it. I learned that the hard way several times over.
The world that took me the longest to complete was probably the Tiny-Huge Island. Most of the worlds on the upper floor of the castle were worlds I was struggling with as a kid. That meant there's a lot of stars here that I've never found. I eventually managed to find all the secret locations so it worked out. Collecting 100 coins was a pain on this level though until I figured out I got a blue coin from ground pounding the giant Goombas while being tiny Mario.
Elusive stars
There were several stars that eluded me along the way. I had for instance completely forgotten that some of the Toads were handing out stars. I was getting confused seeing as I had collected almost all the stars from all the levels and were still missing like 20 stars. I then randomly talked to a Toad and he gave me a star and it dawned on me. Time to run around the castle looking for Toads.
Out of all the stars the ones that's the hardest to get would definitely be some of the 100 coin stars. I had pretty much forgotten all about these and when I had collected 105 stars I had no idea where the last 15 was. Then one of the Toads around the castle gave me a hint that I should collect 100 coins in all the levels and, once again, it dawned on me. There was a lot of dawning done in this playthrough.
I started systematically going through them all. The difficulty of these 15 stars definitely went up as I worked my way through the levels. In some levels it's almost impossible NOT to collect 100 coins while in others it's a real task. Some levels pretty much only has 100 coins so you need to be thorough. The Tick-Tock World was definitely the hardest one for me.
Meeting Yoshi
Having finally collected all 120 stars it meant I finally got to go see Yoshi on the roof! This was a thing of legend when I was a kid. We had all heard that Yoshi appeared when we collected all the stars but none of us ever managed to do it. First thing I did after having collected the last star in the Tick-Tock World was to rush outside to see if the cannon had opened. And it had!
I jumped in and blasted off for the roof of the castle. Lo and behold, there he was. Good ol' Yoshi stomping around on the roof. Seeing him up there was such an awesome feeling that I would only dream of as a kid. I talked to him for a bit, he gave med 100 lives and them he jumped off the roof. I hope that wasn't a suicide and that he's doing ok.
So that's that. Another thing crossed off the gaming bucket list. I'm gonna move on to Super Mario Sunshine eventually and do the same. I never collected all of the stars in that either. I'll eventually get around to playing Super Mario Galaxy as well, which is the only Super Mario game I haven't played. I'm quite excited for it.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.