My mate Dave convinced me to start cataloguing every N64 game I could get my hands on about three years ago. "You've got loads of them anyway," he said, gesturing at my slightly concerning pile of grey cartridges. "Might as well write down what's worth playing." What started as a weekend project has turned into this bizarre archaeological dig through Nintendo's 64-bit library, and honestly? I'm still finding gems I'd completely forgotten existed.The thing about…
My mate Dave popped round last Tuesday with his laptop, looking like he'd discovered fire. "You've got to see this," he said, firing up what looked suspiciously like Mario 64 running in a window on his desktop. The catch? No N64 in sight, just some software called Project64 doing things that would've blown my teenage mind.Here's the thing about N64 emulation—it's brilliant when it works, absolutely maddening when it doesn't, and somehow both at the…
There's this moment burned into my brain from Christmas 1996. I'm sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet—you know, that rough brown stuff that left marks on your shins—holding an N64 controller for the first time. The thing looked like it was designed by aliens who'd heard about human hands but never actually seen them. Three prongs? What were they thinking?But then I pressed start on Super Mario 64, and everything changed.That plumber's face filled…
Picture this: you're twelve years old, clutching a dog-eared copy of GamePro, staring at that glossy two-page spread showing Mario in glorious 64-bit 3D. The magazine's promising something called "Ultra 64" – yeah, that's what they called it back then – and your brain's doing cartwheels trying to imagine what comes next. We'd conquered the Death Star trench run in Super Star Wars, we'd collected every last coin in Super Mario World, and now Nintendo…
Cleaning out the spare room last weekend, I found it tucked behind a box of PlayStation memory cards—my Pikachu Nintendo 64, still in its original box, looking as gloriously ridiculous as the day I impulse-bought it from Electronics Boutique. The yellow shell catches light like a toy car, and honestly? After all these years, it still makes me grin like an idiot.See, this wasn't just another console variant. This was Pokemon fever made manifest in…
My N64 sits on the shelf next to a stack of cartridges that probably cost more than my first car. Well, that's not saying much—my first car was a rusty Escort that made more noise than a Rumble Pak having an existential crisis. But these grey plastic rectangles? They're worth their weight in nostalgia, and some of them are genuinely worth their weight in actual money these days.The thing about the N64 is that it…
There's this moment, right? You're standing in Woolworths on launch day, sweaty tenner crumpled in your palm, staring at this weird three-pronged controller that looks like alien technology escaped from Area 51. The N64 cartridge slots are bigger than your head, the console itself is this matte black monument to what-if. But it's that demo unit running Super Mario 64 that stops you dead.Mario's just…standing there. Waiting. And then some kid grabs the controller and…
There's this fighting game that everyone seems to have forgotten about, buried somewhere between the Street Fighter II fever and the Tekken 3 hysteria. I'm talking about Mace: The Dark Age on Nintendo 64, and honestly? It deserves way better than the dusty shelf it's been relegated to in gaming history.I stumbled across my copy last weekend while hunting through a box of old cartridges—you know how it is, looking for one thing and finding…
There's something almost criminal about how good Banjo-Kazooie still feels in your hands. I was rifling through my cart collection last weekend—proper cartridges, not ROMs, the ones with that satisfying plastic heft—when I spotted that familiar yellow spine wedged between Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Pulled it out, blew on it (I know, I know, it's supposedly bad for the pins), and within minutes I was twelve again, watching that opening cutscene where Banjo's…
The sound still gets me. You know that metallic *click* when you slot a cartridge into the N64? Four of us hunched around a 21-inch CRT, controllers tangled like headphone cables in a pocket, and someone—always someone—arguing about who gets the good controller with the tight stick. "This one drifts left!" "Well, mine doesn't rumble!" The negotiations could take longer than the actual matches.I was probably sixteen when GoldenEye landed in our local Blockbuster. The…