That first jump into an empty castle, and suddenly 3D had become a playground.

When the community picks on gut feeling, Super Mario 64 lands right in the middle, neither ahead nor behind. But the per-criterion detail tells a harsher story, on few votes, so take it with caution. Controller in hand it holds its rank, around average, and the soundtrack climbs a little higher, ahead of six games out of ten. The rest slips. Attachment, rediscovery, the urge to take it to a desert island, all of it falls to the bottom of the pack. There is the tension: a game you respect with a controller in hand, but that struggles to spark emotion today.

Next to modern platformers the gap shows. Its revolution was technical, the leap into 3D, and that kind of feat ages less gracefully than the pure emotion of a story or a strong visual identity. The criteria here, built for attachment and art direction, measure poorly what made it great.

So who is it for? You, if you love feeling the foundations of a genre, the raw joy of movement that still answers. Much less if you want the game that grips your heart and that you dream of rediscovering.