OMG Nintendo

There's a lot of talk about story and plot in video games these days, which frankly baffles me. I mean, I like RPGs, but I still can't conceive of playing a video game just for the story. Video games, to me, are primarily about character and setting. Your characters in games are primarily vectors for letting you do things and making you care about the game's action. Setting is always going to be intimately tied to gameplay, as it represents the sum total of what a game makes possible for you to do.

Nintendo, as a developer, has a good grasp on the importance of setting. I can't think of too many Nintendo games that are primarily memorable for their narratives, but there are a lot of levels and areas in Nintendo games that left huge impressions on me. Sometimes an area has a cool gimmick, flashy art design, or manages to pose an exceptional challenge. Here's a list of the ten greatest Nintendo levels (or areas) that I've ever had the pleasure of playing through. Go play them yourself if you haven't, and hopefully you'll find something truly memorable in them, too.

10. Track 2, Excitebike

Ah, Excitebike. A simpler game for a simpler time, but man, what a great game the home version of it was. Yeah, it wasn't really a two player game and the stage editor didn't really work well because you couldn't save your creations, but something about that game kept me playing and replaying it over and over again... usually Track 1, that damned brown track, where you'd struggle to get a qualifying time and either ram yourself into a wall or another racer (if you played the B game).

If you could qualify in the simplified first track, then you moved on to the blue second track. Now you were playing an "Excitebike" track, basically something at a much higher level of difficulty than whatever your qualifying track was. You could opt to use any track as your qualifier, but most people picked Track 1, which meant dealing with Track 2 as their first course in "Excitebike" mode. It wasn't too incredibly hard, but like a lot of truly great level designs, it completely messed with your head. You might have thought you'd mastered everything Excitebike could throw at you after the first race, since getting a good time could be so hard, but no, the second track immediately threw something mind-blowing at you: giant f'ing pyramids.

Seriously, I don't know what else the things could be. It's like all of a sudden you were being expected to dirt bike your way over ziggurats. Actually handling the pyramid jumps wasn't too tricky once you mastered tilting your bike, but it tended to throw you badly off your game and leave you vulnerable to hitting one of the numerous muddy patches on the course, or one of the areas where the course just kind of stopped for awhile. The actually deadly jump was a nasty area that put a tiny bump ahead of a massive pylon, and woe to you if you didn't have your speed up high enough to get over it. Using a big ostentatious obstacle to soften you up for the subtle but more deadly obstacle is a great classic game design trick, and is probably why I don't know a whole lot of people who ever completed a full game of Excitebike.

9. World 8-4, Bowser's Final Castle, Super Mario Bros.

So there was one jump in world 8 of Super Mario Bros. I could never pull of myself, but occasionally someone would visit, make the jump for me, and then I'd get to take on World 8-4, Bowser's final castle. In retrospect it probably seems merely quaint, just another iteration of the SMB "castle" levels that appeared at the end of every world. Bowser's final castle had one major thing setting it apart from the others, though: it was completely terrifying.

This castle was a maze, with difficulty implemented in a devious fashion. The castle was littered with warp pipes that would only take you back to the beginning of the level, while you had to take others in order to advance. In the meantime, there weren't many vicious jumps to contend with but there were some deviously placed enemies crammed into tight quarters. The safest way to get through was to run really fast, but most players would make the mistake of trying to approach the enemies slowly and cautiously. If this didn't kill you on the way to Bowser, it would certainly kill you when you got to Bowser and he started raining axes down on you.

Even once you knew the correct sequence of pipes, the castle was full of design elements that would rattle your confidence and make you doubt yourself. A water sequence full of Bloopers and spinning fire wheels about halfway through could be murderous if you let it upset your rhythm, as were areas where much-needed invisible blocks were placed alongside bouncing Paratroopas. Really good level design isn't so much about hard-as-nails placement of jumps and enemies, but really, about messing with the player's head and tricking you into making mistakes. World 8-4 is always the level I think of when it comes to a game playing with your mind, because it was such an early attempt and also such a good one.

It's a little hard to appreciate now what a radical idea that Dark World (seen above around 3:15) was when Link to the Past was originally released. That's because the Dark World is such a good idea that tons of other games have ripped it off, with varying levels of subtlety and success, and now even people who've never played a 2D game should basically know the mechanic.

Stop me if you've heard this one: in the game there's a world parallel to the world you usually explore. You use particular items or locations to switch between the two worlds. You can do this for travel purposes, to use the parallel world to bypass obstacles, or to find particular things that are hidden in the parallel world. Link to the Past is fond of both these gimmicks, and as a mechanic it was brilliantly fresh at the time.

The Dark World was more than just a pure gameplay mechanic, though. It was literally an entire other parallel world. Although the plot didn't call for it, you could explore a complete evil twin of the Hyrule overworld map, and also had the game's final battle there. In terms of story the Dark World was pretty rad, too. It was a higher plane once called the Sacred Realm that went all to hell when Ganon got the Triforce, and turned people into monsters when they went there. Link, hilariously, became a bunny. If only he'd transformed the same way in Twilight Princess....

7. Hyrule, Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

I'm kind of hard on Ocarina of Time, what with its Navi and its Water Temple, but there's one thing I'll always give it credit for: the absolute best version of Hyrule ever to appear in a video game. The original Zelda was a wasteland with the odd old man cowering in a cave, and Zelda II was only slightly more populated. Zelda III's main sign of civilization was a village that about a half-dozen people lived in. But in Ocarina of Time... suddenly Hyrule felt like a place where people lived, worked, and died. Time passed, actions had consequences, and you had the sense of Link actually existing as part of a community much larger than himself. The video above really only shows a glimpse of this, but generally this isn't the sort of thing you can easily find visual aids for.

Pulling this off in a video game is no mean feat. In fact, none of Ocarina's many successors managed to make Hyrule feel alive and vibrant in quite the same way. Majora's Mask is concerned with another world entirely, Wind Waker's Hyrule once again felt like a place where maybe twelve people live, and in Twilight Princess the Hyrule-focused segments are rote and dull. Ocarina got Hyrule just right, from the sprawling castle town to the details of the Castle itself.

Perhaps this is part of Ocarina's enduring appeal itself. It was the first Zelda game where the world really felt populated; there were clearly individuals with their own problems and businesses to run. When you were running around as adult Link and found out Lon Lon Ranch had been given to Ingo, you felt crappy about it, like somehow you personally were responsible for Link being sealed away in the whatever dimension for seven years. For the first time in Zelda, you got to talk to a significant number of the people you were tasked with saving, and you got to see the horrible results of Ganon being allowed to take over the world. All it takes is a little emotional investment to make an otherwise good game feel like a great one, and Ocarina of Time took perfect advantage of that with its treatment of Hyrule.

6. Brinstar, Metroid

To some extent, Brinstar is Metroid to me. It has the iconic theme, a lot of the iconic weapons pick-ups, and is usually the part of the game you end up screwing around in the longest. It's the part of the game where you'll master your basic jumping and running techniques, and most of the techniques you'll use to take on basic enemies. Most of the game's bosses are tucked away in deeper areas of Zebes, but to be honest, boss battles aren't really what I think of first when it comes to Metroid.

No, what I think of first is always the lonely, desolate feeling you experience upon that first descent into Brinstar in NES Metroid. While the game's sparseness is quaint by modern standards, it was legitimately eerie if you played it back when it originally game out. Metroid really wasn't like anything else on the NES at the time. It was as close to a horror game as most people ever got, especially when you got into areas where the soundtrack stopped playing, or when the eerie main title theme cued up. The all-black backgrounds and cavern borders to the screen communicated a suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere.

Metroid, by NES standards, was a dark and terrifying labyrinth full of inexplicable alien creatures that didn't seem threatening at first, but could rapidly sap away your energy if you let your jumping get sloppy, or if they just spawned somewhere you weren't expecting. Getting the Ice Beam and Long Shot made things significantly easier, but the early moments of the game still convey a paralyzing sense of an entire hateful alien planet against you. Perhaps because Brinstar is first and so expansive, that's the area of the game I associate that feeling with the most. That feeling of muted terror is what Metroid is about to me, and Brinstar is where it was communicated most clearly.

5. Katina, StarFox 64

When you played StarFox 64 early on, it initially felt like... well, like the first StarFox game, but just with nicer graphics and proper voice acting. Now, even that is a recipe for a good game, since SNES Star Fox's polygons you could stab yourself on didn't really age gracefully. The point where you realized StarFox 64 was unquestionably a massive expansion on the original was when you hit one of the third mission choices, Katina. Now, there are no really bad missions in StarFox 64, though I'm not a big fan of the Landmaster, but Katina really was something special.

Where before StarFox had been about pretty straightforward dogfights, suddenly you were tasked with shooting down waht appeared to be an endless horde of enemy fighters. After shooting around for awhile (after ten kills, I think?), then you were suddenly confronted with a truly massive flying saucer that squatted over the landscape. Now the mission objectives were to try and shoot the monster down by firing into hatches on its underside. Yeah, it was pretty much a scene stolen from Independence Day, and it might not impress anyone now. At the time, it was mind-blowing stuff to see something that was, actually, exactly like a great big exciting Hollywood movie happening in a game. It didn't hurt that the StarFox 64 version of the scenario was much better than anything any of the officially licensed ID4 games cooked up, either.

There were two possible outcomes for the level: either you screwed up and the ship fired its big super-weapon, which resulted in a pretty awesome giant laser light show, or you were a giant badass and shot out the weapon's main power core within the allotted time. Yeah, Venom seriously built a weapon that had to expose its main power core for about a minute before it could fire-- given some of their other creations, though, I can buy someone in R&D being stupid enough to think this would be a good idea. Anyway, Katina really stuck out as an example of what made StarFox 64 such a good game: a lot of really surprising and enjoyable innovations on the basic StarFox formula everyone had damn near memorized by then.

4. Mario Kart Series, Rainbow Road

There are only a few things in gaming that make me immediately degenerate into a frenzy of bilious cursing. One of them is Rainbow Road, the brightly-colored vicious hell course that's made appearances in every single Mario Kart game to date. It keeps coming back because it's such a clever, brilliant idea for a course, and also because most gamers are sado-masochists who enjoy suffering endless horrible falls into the abyss.

You see, Rainbow Road is always the final track in each game's Special Cup, which is essentially the For Badasses Only segment of Mario Kart. I'm not a natural badass and my driving game skillz tend to erode rapidly between Mario Karts, since I otherwise don't play them much. So, inevitably, I cleave through the early parts of a Mario Kart game pretty easily, and then crash head-on into Rainbow Road's brightly colored brick wall. Rainbow Road does not forgive. You will learn how to drive like a master here, or fail to ever place in first.

What follows from there is cursing, frustration, failure... but oh, the euphoria you feel when you finally take first place in Rainbow Road, finally complete it without taking a single dive into the yawning darkness it floats over. Rainbow Road is an awesome final level design because it succeeds so well at being terrifying, and then making you feel like a supreme ninja when you finally figure out how to beat it. And, to be honest, Rainbow Road is never as bad as it looks; like Bowser's Castle, the open sides mostly are just there to mess with you and frighten you into making stupid mistakes. Still, Rainbow Road comes back again and again in Mario Kart because it does the job so very well, and is just so much fun to beat.

3. Super Mario Bros. 3, Giant Land

World 4 of Super Mario Bros. 3 is very close to being my favorite area in anything ever. The gimmick was fresh at the time and I can't recall any major games that tried it beforehand. It was also one of the first Super Mario level gimmicks that played around with the physics of the setting in a fun away, as opposed to the tooth-grating irritation of sliding around in ice levels. Anyway, World 4 of Super Mario Bros. 3 is called Giant Land, and that's because everything there is tremendously huge. The scale seems to be everything being four times bigger than usual, but it doesn't really matter. Suffice to say your world is huge, you are ridiculously tiny, and suddenly enemies and level design tricks that were commonplace seem bizarre and new.

I initially tried to think of a single level in this world to feature, but I honestly couldn't. Every single level in World 4 is completely rad, and a joy to play through. Yes, evenn the two Fortresses and the odd non-giant enemy levels. Even when I got to where I'd try and skip through the game to get to world 8 faster, sometimes I'd just stop in World 4 and beat everything because it was so absurdly fun. Tiny Mario hauling around gargantuan shells and chucking them at enormous blocks is pure entertainment, and some of the levels pose some interesting gameplay challenges. That water level where Lakitu is hurling Spinies at you while you try to swim to the goal? Surprisingly devious. So is the level's airship, which pairs up the horror of slow scrolling with tons of fire jets.

The real draw of World 4, though, is in the giant levels. They're really well-done, down to the smiling clouds in the sky being enormous and huge flowers dancing on the map. There's levels where you have to jump from one giant Paratroopa's back to the next to clear gaps, plenty of jumps made far trickier by the present of Giant Pirahna Plans, and really hilarious giant question mark blocks that still dispense normal-sized power ups. There are also both giant brick blocks and regular-sized ones, which share the same properties but look tremendously different. Breaking giant brick blocks makes you feel far studlier, somehow, as does dodging the giant shells you have a chance to toss around. The whole thing is just pure fun of the sort that made Mario 3 the classic game it is.

2. Bob-Omb Battlefield, Super Mario 64

Mario 64 was a huge moment in gaming. PC titles had gone 3D a few years before, but for a generation of console-bound kids, Mario 64 was the first time we'd ever explored a video game world that explored the marvelous possibilities of the z-axis. Mario 3 had been more of an exploration-based game than either of its predecessors, which were more about surviving gauntlets of dangers, but Mario 64 took that emphasis in a whole new direction. Now players were given levels that they could return to multiple times in search of different stars. You didn't need all of the stars to beat the game, but challenging yourself to try and snag them all massively extended the game's playtime. What Mario 64 allowed, for the first time, was basically a Mario level with the possibility of multiple outcomes, and multiple goals to pursue.

This design style coupled with the then-slick 3D graphics to basically create a Mario game that was like a treasure chest of tiny little worlds to explore. You could go into a level to fight the boss or get a star, but some levels were fun to just run around in for the sake of looking at how pretty and amazing everything was. Mario 64 has tons and tons of really great level designs - I particularly like the snow and lava-themed ones - but the one I picked to showcase here is the humble first course, Bob-Omb Battlefield. This was the first level you'd see in Mario 64, and it was the moment when you absolutely knew that gaming would never be the same again. The sense of scale was incredible, in some ways developing the clever ideas Mario 3's Giant Land established. Mario's enemies were, by and large, incredibly huge when compared to him. Goombas could no longer be stomped in desultory fashion; a Koopa Troopa could be a serious threat.

The sense of tremendous scale only got more pronounced from there. Chain Chomps were suitably terrifying in Super Mario World, but in Mario 64 they were outright monstrosities. You didn't want to be anywhere near it, but in fact, would have to dive behind this monster's chain to get one of the course's stars. Later you'd fire yourself out of the cannons that dotted the stage. The course was also dominated by a giant mountain, with massive balls rolling down it to menace Mario. When you made it to the top, after lots of jumping practice, you could confront the first of a new generation of Mario bosses: a very large version of an ordinary Bob-Omb, that Mario was somehow mighty enough to pick up and throw around. The humble King Bob-Omb isn't so impressive now, but if you played it at the time of release it was heady stuff. Later Mario games like Galaxy built on the sense of wonder Mario's smallness could inspire, but Mario 64 was the first time anyone even attempted it. As a result there's a freshness to its 3D worlds that, to some extent, sequels haven't quite managed to duplicate.

1. Special Zone, Super Mario World

Super Mario World was a fine game in its own right, but what made it really memorable was its dedication to secrets. I'm pretty sure finding every "exit" in Super Mario World is probably a greater challenge than finding all 120 stars in Mario 64. Anyway, certain levels in Super Mario World had hidden exits you could access by finding a key and then taking it to a keyhole. These secret exits took you to the Star Road, a pretty unusual and difficult series of worlds that function as Mario World's Warp Zone equivalent. There were special levels to play there, and by finding their secret exits you could open up a series of Star Roads that basically let you warp around the game map if you wanted.

If you found the secret exits in Star Road 5, then your game went crazy. You gained access to the Special Zone, a series of eight levels that are generally considered super-hard, but are really just pretty rigid tests of different aspects of the game. Some test memorization, some are puzzles, a few demand full-on master reflexes... and all can be cheated through with a Blue Yoshi, but that is sort of a problem with Super Mario World in general. Basically, where the rest of Super Mario World is a pretty laid-back and easygoing game, the Special Zone suddenly applies thumbscrews and uses absolutely devious level and jump placements to make the levels feel more like running a gauntlet.

There really aren't words to sufficiently express the brilliant insanity at work in the Special Zone to someone who's never seen it. There are levels where you're stuck riding a platform on rails, and have to navigate on/off switches just so or you'll be hurled into an abyss. There's a level where you have to deal with something like ten Pokeys appearing in rapid succession, leaving you out of luck if you can't snag Yoshi or a Starman to deal with them quickly. There are multiple levels that involve completely vicious placements of Chargin' Chucks, either tossing footballs, throwing baseballs, or just plain being inconvenient. Special Zone is the ultimate test a Super Mario World player can face, and one of the finest tests of difficulty ever in a Nintendo game.