RPGs were huge on the Super Nintendo and Nintendo themselves had multiple great ones for the system, including Super Mario RPG: Legend Of The Seven Stars. On top of that, the game has multiple multiplayer modes that add a ton of replay value, especially if you have friends who can’t resist a good barrel roll. While that was a great start, the N64 sequel improved on a lot of what the SNES original did, making it one of the finest games in the N64 library.Īside from the fun sky-bound shooting gameplay, the game also impressed with its level branching system, and its cutscenes make it perhaps the most cinematic game on the N64. The original Star Fox game for the Super Nintendo was an impressive technical marvel, as it brought 3D to a platform that wasn’t known for it. While Stadium was more or less a distillation of the Game Boy RPGs’ battle system, Snap gave fans the opportunity to explore the world of Pokémon in a 3D environment, making Snap the best way for Pokémon enthusiasts to feel like they could go on their own monster-catching journey and be the very best like no one ever was. Nintendo has historically been not as overtly violent as their peers in gaming, so when it came time to put out a first-person shooter, Pokémon Snap had the perfect kid-friendly concept: Instead of using guns to inflict harm, players can do another kind of shooting - with a camera - to capture the majesty of beloved characters through visual art.Īt the time, it was also a rare example of a 3D Pokémon game, and while it followed Pokémon Stadium by a few months, Snap offered something that Stadium didn’t. Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear To The Rescue So, let’s get into it, starting at 100 and sprinting towards the top of the ranks before slowing down and getting into more detail with the top 10 games. I won’t get mad.)Īs I stated in the SNES feature, this N64 list has nothing to do with my personal opinions, just what a quarter of a million user ratings indicate. So, if it makes you feel better, ignore Superman and nudge everything below it up a spot in your head. Thankfully, though, those shenanigans don’t seem prevalent in the data and Superman is the only notable head-scratcher that I noticed. I attribute that to users ironically giving the game many positive ratings over the years. (Before proceeding to the list, there’s a cape-wearing elephant in the room that I’ll address before we get to it: Superman - aka Superman 64 - is fairly high up on the list, despite that fact that it’s widely regarded as a historically awful game.
Then, I calculated a Final Score for each game, based on both their user ratings and how many ratings they received, in order to weigh both how beloved a game is and how many people are still playing it today.
To summarize, though, I collected user ratings - 250,849 of them this time - for North American N64 games from Emuparadise, Grouvee, IGDB, and HowLongToBeat. The methodology used to compile these rankings was essentially the same as the SNES list, so revisit that for more details. So, still in data-gathering mode, I decided to make a similar list for the N64, one that can help you plan which games to play first when N64 games are added to Nintendo Switch Online, as was recently announced. Speaking of ratings, the aforementioned SNES rankings feature was a fun project that taught me (and hopefully you) a lot about the defining console of my childhood. For reference, that’s substantially less than half the size of the SNES’ North American library (720 games). A handful of other games are scattered throughout the site’s top-100 list as well, which is impressive considering not many games were released for the N64: just 296 in North America. It’s also the only title on the review-aggregating site to achieve a 99 rating. That said, there’s plenty to love about the N64, and critics agree: The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time is the highest-rated game of all time across all consoles on Metacritic. More importantly, it lived in the shadow of its main competitor, the PlayStation, which sold about three times as many consoles. While the SNES was the clear leader of its console generation, its follow-up was not: The N64 sold about 32 million units, which is less than the SNES’ lifetime sales (49 million). The SNES and N64 enjoyed very different lives. Now, this month brings another major video game anniversary: The Nintendo 64 was released in North America 25 years ago today, on Sept.
Last month, I celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by compiling over 200,000 user ratings from multiple gaming websites, crunching the numbers, and coming up with a data-driven list of the system’s most popular games among modern players.