Essentially creating another genre that continues to grace consoles to this day (or plague them, depending on your viewpoint), the Mario Party games are the pinnacle of ‘everyone can join in’ multiplayer. Why it’s Essential: If you needed more literal evidence of N64’s reputation as a party console, here’s the Mario Party series. What they are: A trio of interactive board games in which players move their Mario character of choice around a board in an attempt to collect more stars than anyone else. To this day, 25 years later, there’s still nothing like it. Not only does this add a massive level of strategy to proceedings, it also keeps things fresh as one minute you’re driving a bulldozer and the next you’re a giant mech that destroys buildings by somersaulting into them. This is where Blast Corps’ most genius mechanic comes into play: the ability to get out of one vehicle, leg it across the game world and climb into another.
Each level is essentially a time-based puzzle, as you try to figure out not only which buildings to destroy before the oncoming nuke hits them, but also what you’ll use to destroy them in the most efficient manner. Why it’s Essential: Blast Corps isn’t as immediately accessible as Banjo or many of Rare’s other games, but that’s sort of the point.
What it is: A top-down action game in which you’re in charge of destroying a series of buildings to clear a path for an out of control, unstoppable truck carrying a nuke. There’s something oddly satisfying about whipping your jetski around corners, getting flung about by the unpredictable waves.Ĭontinuing the theme of Nintendo nailing it the first time around, Wave Race 64 was its first attempt at doing realistic water physics and even today it’s still convincing. Why it’s Essential: Nintendo fans keep asking the Japanese giant for a new F-Zero game, but many would rather see a new Wave Race instead. What it is: The sequel to Wave Race on the Game Boy. But the N64’s arsenal consisted of so many gems that, on the contrary, there are many great games that didn’t make the cut. With a game library so small then, you’d think coming up with a list of the 25 best N64 games list would be tricky. Even though the N64’s cartridges meant near-instant load times, the fact was these cartridges cost a fortune to make. Ultimately, most developers sided with Sony and its use of CD-ROMs. Overall, the Nintendo 64 didn’t have a lot of games: The company’s infamous split from Sony led to not only a new console war between companies, but a format war too: CDs versus cartridges. Notice: To display this embed please allow the use of Functional Cookies in Cookie Preferences.