If you had any interest in video games in the mid-90s, then you will almost certainly remember the holiday season of 1996. For me, the Nintendo 64 was everything I could have possibly wanted after my five year love affair with the SNES. I missed out on the launch of the system, as $200 was an enormous amount of money for an eleven year old. Needless to say, I was disappointed but I managed to convince myself that Super Mario RPG was all I needed that year.
By the Summer of '97, there was no mascot RPG that could have convinced me to hang on to my SNES. So I decided to earn my own money by mowing grass over the summer. Between June and July, I had sweat enough to earn around $300 and on my families annual trip to Jacksonville to buy school clothes, I walked into Sears and came out with a console and the newly released Star Fox 64.
Between Star Fox, Mario Kart, and Super Mario 64 I had enough entertainment to last throughout the entire fall. And those were just the good games. I would play through any piece of plastic trash I could get my hands on, including trash like Chameleon Twist by myself and WCW vs. NWO with a few friends.
In retrospect, the console never really had any amazing titles. The hardware was hard to to make games for and Nintendo lost a lot of 3rd party developers. As a matter of fact, I would go as far to say that the console only had a handful of classic, timeless games. Only Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and maybe Paper Mario are really worth playing today. However, even if the console was nothing more than an Ocarina of Time player, it would have still been worth the $200. But that's an entirely different topic altogether.
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