The Game that Changed Gaming Forever.
You are going to Peach's castle for a Cake, but Bowser arives and seal's all of the castles inyhabitants inside the Walls and Painting of the Castle, you need to get them out by recovering the power stars.
Gameplay
Right after turning the game on you knew it was special. After looking at the little booklet you would probaly say "no friggin way it will do that much" after being used too pixel games for so long but then you turn the game on and you could spend hours just jumping around in the foreyard. Hell even twirling Bowser around on "Bowser in The Sky" is still fun and mario saying what sounds like "So longa gay bowser" is funny as well. There are so many things you can do and the N64 was DESIGNED for Mario 64 so it had too be good.
Controls
Like I said above the N64 was designed for this game, and so was the Controler. Never before this game have I played with such percision. The movements of Mario, the jumping moves, the Wing Cap, the Koopa Shell you can do so much it makes what Super Mario Bros for the NES look like crap to the current gamer. Graphics
The Games Simplistic graphics looked good and hid the N64 hardware limitations [of the Cartriges... the N64 DID have more power than a PS1 and later games prove it even though Mario looked great some of the backgrounds looked kinda bland. But that is a good thing because the Enemies looked quite good too [though a lot of em were pixelated], but camera issues at times and some polygon tearign messed it up.
Sound
The game sounds good but some files are kind of Fuzzy, it is like Mario Kart 64 sometimes you could not understand what the people were saying. Luckily MArio 64 uses text so that dosent matter, but soem of the voices are hard to understand. And the sound can mess up at times messing up the otherwise great music.
Replayability
120 Stars, Thousands of Coins, so much too do why would you not keep playing the game, hell you might want to keep improvign your score.
Rent or Buy
Buy it it is a N64 Classic!
Overall
A few flaws are all that hurt one of the best games ever made!