Topic: Super Mario 3D All-Stars

@Snatcher PhantaManta is what i assume you’re talking about. I beat it on my first try as well, pretty cool fight. Probably my favorite in the game. You just need to find a strategy to beat it and it’ll be fine. And making sure you have plenty of water and refilling in coins every so often. When all the little manta rays start targeting you is actually the easy part tbh

@BruceCM it may not be much of a secret, but the secret stars are spread out among the castle. You get a few from talking to specific toads, about a third are red coin challenges in the side levels (cap & bowser stages), and a few more are just hidden. I don't blame you for not going back though - I've enjoyed my time with 64 but it wore out it's welcome with me on Tall, Tall, Mountain.

@Apportal ya its Phantamanta.

Some of these stars are insanely hard to find. Like that Watch for Rolling Rocks one. Who would ever think to wall jump in that one particular spot to find a secret area? And even then, the game frequently didn't register me grabbing the ledge, so if I didn't already know the star was there, I could have easily spent a ton of time hunting round for it.

Oh, and Shifting Sand Land can bite me. How am I even supposed to grab the red coin near the start that's basically right on top of quicksand?

@Ralizah I have seen people ride koopa troopa shells over quicksand and other dangerous terrains. So I’d bet that’s the intended way.

Got 3D All Stars this afternoon and jumped right into Sunshine. I powered through the the game and just beat the final boss, but there's still a lot of extra shines to get. I pretty much just got the 8 base shines from each world. I think Sunshine still remains my favourite Mario game. I'll likely go back in and 100% it soon but I also downloaded Hades today and heard it's pretty good, so I want to try that out first.

So far I’ve got 50 shines. Getting the red coins while riding the bloopers is so annoying.

@Ralizah With Mario's camera. Trust me.

@Northwind You're not bad, you're literally going the wrong way after grabbing the bird like you are looking to hit the invisible walls outside the level.

@Mariolover92 Same here. I've got all stars so many times that I know how to get them all. I didn't have many games when I was a kid.

@Losermagnet Please, complete Super Mario 64, you can 100% it, you're almost there and I know you can do it. Then take your sweet time with Sunshine which is a game to enjoy and not to rush. Going back to SM64 is difficult, it's better to beat it before playing Sunshine.

@BlueOcean Oh, it'll happen. I've got to see it through to the end. I took my time with it in spurts today. Tall, Tall, Mountain is done and Rainbow Ride is almost done (2 stars, one of which is the 100 coin star). That leaves Tick Tock Clock and Tiny-Huge Island. But I appreciate the encouragement

Gotta say, I really like the difficulty curve in 64. The first 5 are a bit easy, next 5 offer a good challenge, and last 5 put you to the test. Really well done.

@Apportal Yeah...that mission is absolutely ruthless. Here I am, having collected all the red coins and I'm still surfing. It's very easy to screw up and have to start the entire thing over.

@BlueOcean Yeah - I've done that 100% thing with SMB3 and SMW as well. Those games are burned into my noggin lol

52 stars now. I've unlocked the boss door for the upstairs area where I haven't even tried out a single stage yet, lol.

@Ralizah I’m assuming you’re going for all the stars in every painting, almost chronologically, which is something I wouldn’t recommend anyone doing when playing for the first time. I understand it but it’s not natural at all. I think most of us back in the day just played what we could get and if something was even close to becoming frustrating you would have already moved on. There is a reason you only need 70 stars or something to finish the game, the abundance of stars is deliberately designed so that even if you just stroll around you would be able to find a star, similar to Odyssey but less extreme I guess.

Anyway good luck lol.

@Ralizah @Spanjard

I agree with Spanjard though however that is absolutely how you are determined to tackle it than have at it. Its how I mostly play it now but I have played it repeatedly countless times.

One thing that's clear - and I'd largely forgotten before playing this collection - is that the rhythm of games in 1996 was different. You're supposed to fail (over and over) the first time you play. Getting the red coins in (any) stage is always a challenge because there's always one you might mess up on and fall off the world or into lava etc. There's far less safety net/checkpointing.

I think that aspect of their game design (alongside a frustrating camera) is what has dated Mario 64 and Sunshine more than their graphics. It's a hold over from the 2d era... but in levels that are much, much bigger than any NES or SNES game would contemplate and controls & camera direction that's much more likely to take responsibility for success out of your hands on occasion. I can't see myself getting 100 coins on Tick Tock Clock in 2020!

Galaxy fixes some of those things in its design - it still feels like a thoroughly modern game. But for the vestigial Wii era "point and click on yes" interface in places and the pointer it could have been a brand new game.

Sunshine really needed a big nip and tuck though. Even aside from not enjoying the structure as much as Mario 64 which let you skip stars if you found another in the stage I think the game itself is actively unfriendly in places. Just thinking about an early shine I got yesterday surfing on the bloopers around a course where if you hit any obstacle you lose a life... other later 3d Mario games do have similar bits but these days they'll always give you lots of coins/star bits to collect en-route so you build up extra lives and feel like you've at least got something for your failure (the NES and SNES 2d games did the same).

The way i always did the stages in Mario 64 was to find as many stars in a given world as i could until you reach a point where the rest aren't possible yet. For example if the next star in the list was only obtainable after finding the switch to activate the invisible blocks in another world. I would generally try to collect as many as i could before trying a different world. Then once the certain star was reachable i would go back and get it then continue on with whatever world i was doing next.

Oh and i just flat refused to miss any stars. To me the game isn't complete until all stars, Shines or whatever were found. I go for 100% with every playthrough.

@status-204 Of course - everyone is free to disagree. That's part of the point of a forum!

I grew up with very difficult games on the NES. I played and got all 120 stars in Mario 64 back in the day. I'm not expecting developers to give me everything on a plate.

However I am noting that there are stars in Mario 64 where you play carefully for 5 minutes making use of your skills playing the game and - whether you get the star or not effectively still comes down to a leap of faith at the end because the camera makes judging the distance near impossible.

I was tolerant of that in 1996 because I had near unlimited time as a teenager and I couldn't instantly switch to any one of a hundred other games.

Today's resurgence of really difficult games have also learnt lessons from this. If I play Celeste (which is a great game) I die and I restart on the same screen ready to challenge the part I failed at in literally seconds. I can practice the difficult part over and over and over again until I succeed. It doesn't send me back to the very start of the level and force me to sleep walk through 3 rote, easy, minutes before I get to practice the hard part again.

@status-204 I understand that. It's just that what you see as "an easy part that gets your blood pumping" is - for me - a complete waste of time and the game not respecting my time. It was part of the rhythm of games in the 90's and playing Mario 64 without save states reminds me of that. I can personally appreciate that there are some upsides to that style of design which are now forgotten.

It's just that it's one thing when you die due to poor skill or player implementation and lose progress - it's another when you die and lose progress due to poorly designed challenges, controls, camera or collision detection. Mario 64 has plenty of the latter (and Sunshine has tonnes of the latter).

It's also a different thing in my mind if there's a very challenging section with a 1 minute lead up versus a 5 minute lead up.

@WoomyNNYes You spray his mouth when it's open, just like you did with the very first one on the airstrip.

@Dezzy Yeah, Sunshine is definitely longer. If only because of the exploration (100-coin shines, blue coins, etc.). Galaxy is pretty straight forward.

Got all blue coins in Sirena Beach. I think it's the most difficult one, since some are hidden in weird places, like by stomping a slot machine, or by spraying a random bookcase. Tight spaces make it also difficult to spot some of the red M's.