Nerd Mentality

End Boss Month: Day 15 (Super Mario 64, Bowser)

Posted June 15th 2005 by J Edison Thomas.

Super Mario 64 threw a curveball at gamers the world over when the end boss turned out to be... Bowser! In tie dye! It was around this time that Nintendo developed their smug, "Man, we just innovate the hell out of everything," attitude. Indeed, all rational thought was now taking place so far outside the box that the commonly accepted laws of reality temporarily unraveled.

Putting an old-timey spin on the leap to 3D, Bowser squares off against Mario multiple times in Super Mario 64, something that hasn't happened since the original Super Mario Bros. And speaking of spin, what a great way to break in (or just break) that new analog stick than to grab a giant Koopa by the tail and swing him to a nauseating speed before launching him into the stratosphere? Before I get so far off the similarities between this Bowser and the first that it's impossible to smoothly segue back, Super Mario 64's final encounter with Bowser is probably the most difficult Koopa King Klash since his first appearance. Bottom line objective: grab Bowser by the tail and throw him. The long story: he can elude you with teleportation, roast you with fire breath, roast you with fire breath aimed into the air, stomp the ground to send out electrifying shockwaves, and just stampede all over you for the hell of it. And if you manage to actually get a hold of his tail, it's still a whole other mess trying to get the right speed and aim to make him actually hit the spike bomb. And you have to do that three times. And after the second hit Bowser stomps the ground to make half the level fall apart, leaving you with much less wiggle room between yourself and the beast, and also a much farther distance to fling him to hit a bomb. Easy? No, not really.

In retrospect it was already fairly impossible to segue back smoothly by the time I tried it. That was terrible. I shouldn't have even written that entire last paragraph.

So since I don't really have much else to say on Bowser in the Sky, I'm going to shamelessly plug that I'm very good at Super Mario 64. That's still my favorite article on this website. But this one was good too, right?

Posted in: Features

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