A return visit to Peach’s Castle, the hub at the centre of Edge’s first 10

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...chsCastle1.jpgWe could probably fill the wordcount without even getting past the moat. After all, we filled whole afternoons without getting past it. The outside of Peach’s Castle was 3D gaming’s gentle introductory playground. It seems oddly sparse today: just a cluster of trees and a lake devoid of traditional game-like challenge. But that’s the point. Nintendo built Mario 64 on a foundation of technological breakthrough with its sprawling 3D worlds, but nothing but pure design and animation brilliance can be thanked for Mario’s supple, elastic controls. There was a joyous, bouncy pleasure in the sheer act of movement, and the open, undulating grounds of Peach’s Castle were built for frolicking in.What a contrast with all those locked doors inside. Super Mario 64 didn’t feature the first platform game hub level but certainly codified the form, since other aspects of its design meant the between-levels part of the game had to shoulder much more responsibility than before. A map screen is great when you’ve got the best part of 100 levels to lay out, but Super Mario 64 only had 15. They were bigger than anything players had ever seen, designed for repeat visits and full of diversions, but the game needed a different means of tying the courses together.From a functional perspective, then, Princess Peach’s royal abode is pure padding – it takes Super Mario 64’s 15 stages and sprinkles them over four subdivided floors. Despite the gating it does so nonlinearly, a subtle clue that things had changed from the days when Mario’s adventures were nothing but an epic journey towards the right of the screen. This was a space to be explored, with multiple entrances, exits and rooms you were meant to return to. Still, it’s a relatively compact, tidy and efficient environment compared with the bloated hubs it would inspire: you could fit Peach’s Castle many times over into Donkey Kong 64’s DK Island or Banjo-Tooie’s sprawling Isle O’ Hags.

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