#19) Super Castlevania IV (SNES/Wii)

Remember when Castlevania games... Hell, any games had music like this? I don't, because I wasn't alive back then.

I do remember! Simon's Theme is one of my all time favorite video game track.

I love Simon's theme as well, Super Castlevania IV's versions of Bloody Tears and Vampire Killer are amazing as well.  The game has a great soundtrack all around IMO.

Someone from VGC actually gifted me Super Castlevania IV last week (thanks again my secret Santa)! I've never played it (only played all the Iga-vania's and Lords of Shadow)... but I can't wait to give this game a go!

I haven't played Pikmin, but I am wondering if is the kind of action-adventure Overlord is. I can understand Overlord's strategic using of minions is perhaps not as polished as it can be, but if it was I may not have enjoyed it :). If you played Overlord on console you might have done better playing it on pc.

I have fonder memories of Drake's Fortune. For one it has a lot of jungle which is awesome and Sully plays a bigger role. Also when U2's mythical phenomenon appeared I thought: not again, this story is totally ripped off from U1.

Nice choices Michael! Gold/Silver and WarCraft III are truly amazing games for sure. ^_^

I tried playing Golden Sun once upon a time, but I just couldn't get into it. It's my curse with the majority of RPGs.

Well you mentioned earlier: "no other Mario Kart has 2 player Grand Prix. How else am I suppose to unlock tracks/characters, alone?" as if you wanted to be able to unlock stuff with 2 players.

MKWii and Double Dash already have more content at the start than MK64, and both enable multiplayer GP (MKWii up to 4 players local customisable Grand Prix, and Double Dash as Rol said let you play 2 player GP in seperate karts, or 4 player if you want to team up) If local multiplayer is your thing, the only non gameplay related reason MKWii is inferior to MK64 is that it I think it forces you to unlock 16 of the tracks in single player before you can play them in local MP (or choose them online, though you can play them online without unlocking them if they are chosen by others)... then again it starts with 16 tracks, which is already equivalent to MK64 (but yes it's a bit restricting)

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I don't have a problem when people give valid reasons for not liking a game, Double Dash was to me excellent, but I can understand if people don't like the 2 character kart idea... you can't argue against it having the best setup for local multplayer though (hell it probably has the best structure for LMP of any Nintendo game) I mean it was possible to have 16 players FFS! (or if you don't like 2 to a kart, 8 players).

Similarly I can understand not liking Super Circuit (which had 2 player GP mode btw) or MK:DS... as while LMP is possible it requires extra kit for GBA and it is a different experience all sitting looking at your own screens.

Hardly any of your reasons are valid though and some don't make much sense or are untrue. Saying it has the best gameplay is subjective, your opinion, you obviously prefer it that way, but how can you say MK:DD drives the same, then say the cars are faster and more responsive in MK64? that's contradicting yourself.... Then again MK64 is generally considered the slowest MK by most people (my god rainbow road 50cc is a chore more than a game) and MK:DD probably has the quickest steering response as MKWii slowed it down a bit to cope with the Wii Wheel control setup. Best physics?... Due to the 2D karts and the 3D track the steering in MK64 didn't feel like you were connected to the ground at all.

Here are my pro's for MK64:

- Some of the tracks are pretty awesome (Sherbet Land, DK Jungle, Banshee Boardwalk, Koopa Troopa beach, Kalimari Desert, Mario Raceway and Bowsers Castle)... then again every MK has a selection of awesome tracks, MK64 is probably the poorest of the 3 games track selections I have played enough of to rate.

- The blue shell was less annoying

- Battle Mode retained what was good from the SNES version but made it 4 players... I rate MK64s battle mode equally with the Wiis, but the Wii gains massively by having online 16 player arenas... but could have been SOOOOO much better had it allowed 4 teams.

The only reason MK64 is liked anymore is ridiculously thick nostalgia goggles... probably because back then was the age of local multiplayer, when gamers would actually go over to friends houses carrying consoles in backpacks... I know I played more local MP on MK64 than the others because I would often play with my sister and her friend (generally when it was my friends Goldeneye was top choice).

I just looked at my full list... I rated MK64 in 89th out of my 114 games, it's hovering over the area of games between games I don't regret buying, and games I regret buying (luckily with MK64 I didn't actually buy it, it was my sisters and eventually became mine).
Despite being that low though, the numberof racing games I bought for the N64 means there were still 4 racing game I rated lower for the console:

#95 - Micro Machines 64: Turbo
#100 - V-Rally 99 (which is also over a turning point in my list, above are games I may regret, but are not neccessarily unenjoyable... but below are increasingly atrocious games that I would discourage people to get)
#109 - Roadsters 99
#111 - South Park Rally

Yea, but Mario Kart Wii doesn't feel like that major of an improvement over Mario Kart 64. Graphics, physics, and game mechanics are not that differen't and Mario Kart 64 felt more balanced. In Mario KArt 64, if your good, your fighting for first, but in Wii, if your just unlucky, your mid field because most items affect more then just 1 person.

Also even if quality wise MKWii and MK64 are the same, MK64 came out in the mid 90's. It offered all this 10 years before MKWii. MKWii might be a better game now, but it has a higher standard to compete with now. I expect MKWii to do a lot more then MK64, not just a little more, and for that reason I still find myself going back to MK64 to play, well a more balanced game.

MKWii starts with 16 tracks, like MK64, but 8 of those are retro remakes..So in reality MKWii has less then MK64, and when you get all 32 tracks, the amount of content doesn't feel that drastically different.

DD is good too, but I just don't like the introduction of drifting, and 2 player kart racing.

I never said the carts are faster in DD then MK64, I said they are probably as responsive, but because there are two karters, it feels slower.

The reason I feel MK64 has the best gameplay is because the formula hasn't been changed much since MK64. Mario Kart Wii and DS almost feel as if they run on the same engine as MK64.MKSNES and GBA feel different, every other Mario Kart feels like MK64, with minor touch ups. So to me MK64 had the best gameplay because at the time, what it offered was incredible, and Nintendo did such a good job with that old MK, that since then they have only been able to repeat themselves, and add some new items, and improve the AI. However I think the items in MKDD and Wii are too cheap sometimes (Bullet Bill?), and MK64 to me had the best balance.

Also battle maps on MK64 were awesome. Now they feel washed down for simplicity. I mean Skyscraper in MKWii (it's in Wii right?) has a wider track and boosts to jump over the gaps. That ruins the map, I loved it because it was hard.

I don't feel any difference in physics from MK64 to Wii, and good point about MKWii being slower then MKDD. That's one reason I don't like MKWii as much as MK64. It's too watered down. I loved the difficulty in the 64 and SNES iterations, ever since then they have made the game too easy.

I completly disagree with you about your views on MK64. I think compared to all the MK's it had the best track selection. MK Wii's tracks are pretty, but the tracks themselves don't have as many secret shortcuts (difficult ones), or just interesting sections (Bat Cave in Banshee Boardwalk). Also MK64 had the best battle, newer Mario Karts have dumbed down the map difficulty. Tracks are too wide, and most don't have holes in them, and there just aren't enough tight areas. Also MK64 has the best balance of weapons, since MK64 the only good new item introduced has been the tentacle ink bomb thing.

I have to agree with TWRoO, you really are blinded by nostalgia.

MK64 is the low point of the series which is why it was even up for debate whether it, Diddy Kong Racing or Crash Team Racing is the best funracer of the generation (note that I said funracer instead of kartracer, because this subgenre isn't restricted to karts; it's just Mario Kart's dominance that had led to misleading label of kartracing). In any other generation it's Mario Kart first and then everything else.

I also count Snowboard Kids as a "funracer", and it is also better than Mario Kart 64... unfortunately I haven't played Diddy Kong Racing, and only spent a few minutes with Crash Team so I can't rate them, but I have only heard good about DKR.

Mario Kart Wii actually only offers eight tracks at first, one new cup and one retro cup. Just like MKDS and MK7. All this means is that you have to spend about one and a half hours in singleplayer to unlock all cups. It really isn't a big deal and plenty of other unlockables sweeten the process.

Whut? Well my memory is clearly not what it once was if that's true... could have sworn that there were 2 new cups and 2 retro open from the beginning of MKWii.

The item balance in MK64 is outright bad, because the player in second place can get a golden mushroom.

True, though it was limited to 5 boosts in MK64, plus had a timer from the first boost, wheras the newer golden mushroom is unlimited use and a timer.... then again the way the boost works 5 is sufficient, in MKWii if you leave a perfect gap between boosts to enable top speed I think I can fit in around 6 or 7 during the timer.

Combined with the ridiculous intended shortcuts (like Koopa Beach, a quarter of a lap; good thing they toned that nonsense down in MK7's retro version) and the even more ridiculous unintended shortcuts Well MKWii seems to have some of them too... Grumble Mountain being the worst

I'm going to have to give up because you aren't making sense to me.... MK64 just feels horrible to me, the controls (which in a game like Mario Kart pretty much encompass all of the games "physics") are the worst part of it, and feel absolutely nothing like the proper 3D Mario Karts. It's also the slowest and the least responsive of 64/DD/Wii and DS (and probably MK7 as well)
More balanced? Well perhaps the item selection... but MK64 racing was like a yo yo, you spend time catching up to the CPU 1st place and attack them, then they use random super speed to catch you up again. Even saying that though MK64 was easier to me than DD and Wii. Which is another thing similar to nostalgia goggles, people were younger and less experienced back then, and thus seem to forget what the old games are actually like. So many people seem to think SM64 and OoT are harder than SMG and LoZ:TP. The first time I played SM64 was only months before Galaxy, and they are very similar in difficulty levels.

Feel free to argue back again, but I think we are going to start repeating things from now on, so i'm not going to try convince you any more about the big difference in physics/gameplay MK64 is compared to the more modern Karts.

I have to agree with TWRoO, you really are blinded by nostalgia.

MK64 is the low point of the series which is why it was even up for debate whether it, Diddy Kong Racing or Crash Team Racing is the best funracer of the generation (note that I said funracer instead of kartracer, because this subgenre isn't restricted to karts; it's just Mario Kart's dominance that had led to misleading label of kartracing). In any other generation it's Mario Kart first and then everything else.

Mario Kart Wii actually only offers eight tracks at first, one new cup and one retro cup. Just like MKDS and MK7. All this means is that you have to spend about one and a half hours in singleplayer to unlock all cups. It really isn't a big deal and plenty of other unlockables sweeten the process.

The item balance in MK64 is outright bad, because the player in second place can get a golden mushroom. Combined with the ridiculous intended shortcuts (like Koopa Beach, a quarter of a lap; good thing they toned that nonsense down in MK7's retro version) and the even more ridiculous unintended shortcuts (like Wario Stadium, Rainbow Road), the game was simply broken. You had people trying to take the Wario Stadium shortcut for a whole minute until they finally made it and despite wasting so much time, they were far from finishing dead last. It was basically a better option to drive back and forth to do that shortcut instead of playing the track in the intended way.

I don't know how you can insist that Mario Kart 64 is that great when, as I said above, it wasn't even good enough to be the best funracer of its generation without a shred of doubt. MK64 was a disappointment after Super Mario Kart and other N64 racing games made it pretty obvious what MK64 could have been or rather should have been.