20 Best N64 Games Ever

As the Wii U finally seems to be picking up a little sales momentum, what better time to look back at one of Nintendo's previous successes, the Nintendo 64? Though the N64 was undeniably trounced by the PlayStation in the fifth generation console wars, it still sold over 30 million units worldwide and managed to wipe the floor with the doomed Sega Saturn. What's more, the N64 became home to some of the very best games of the late 1990s and early 2000s, be it familiar franchises such as Mario and Zelda, or bold new IPs that have become staples of Nintendo platforms ever since. Whether you're a self-confessed Nintendo fanboy or not, it's hard to argue with the brilliance and diversity of this catalogue: it's got kid-friendly games, one unexpectedly crude (yet hilarious) send-up of those types of games, outrageously entertaining sports titles, and a few re-imaginings of games we loved from previous Nintendo consoles. The N64 may have paled technically in comparison to the PS1, what with its rather outdated cartridge system which struggled to even handle FMV sequences, but there's little point arguing with the charm and fun of the games on offer, because that's what really matters at the end of the day, right? Of course, a list of 20 will never truly do justice to every great N64 game out there, so please drop your own suggestions in the comments below. Unless it's a Pokemon game, because we deliberately left those out of this list. Yuck.

20. 1080° Snowboarding

Nintendo's answer to the PS1's Cool Boarders franchise remains one of the greatest snowboarding games ever made, even as the SSX franchise blew it away in the graphics department a few years later. 1080° Snowboarding presents players with the two simple objectives of most similar games: either reach the end of the track before your opponents, or pull off the most gravity-defying tricks possible to gain the highest number of points depending on the mode you're playing. Though it might not look like much now, at the time of its release, 1080 was one of the best-looking titles on the N64, which combined with the extremely finessed controls and high trick count to make this the snowboarding game you absolutely had to play. Sure, the rubber-band AI was irritating as hell, but hey, what racing game from the 1990s didn't use this cheap tactic? Even without this, the game is sufficiently challenging and immensely satisfying once you've taken the time to master the control scheme. It's a shame that the multiplayer mode only caters for 2 players, but it's still a total blast and kept so many of us coming back for more once we'd finished all the single player content.