If you’re a similar age as me, you likely have a lot of great memories sitting around a comically heavy tube television and a Nintendo 64 with your friends. The game in the tray may have differed – my friend group leaned towards GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, and Mario Kart 64 – but whether you were firing up Mario Party or Super Smash Bros., the allure of four-player gameplay was difficult to ignore. Add in the fact that Nintendo 64 also played home to some of the most influential single-player games of all time, like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and it was a core-memory generator.
It’s for that reason that the Nintendo 64 library on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack is an enticing proposition for me, and it’s served me well when I want to fire something up for my long-overdue playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask or when I get the itch to play the 1080° Snowboarding. However, because it’s emulating at varying degrees of quality, it’s never been the ideal way to play these games, just the most convenient. And so, I always just fired up the N64 app on my Switch or Switch 2 when I needed my N64 fix. That changed for me once Analogue shipped me its new Analogue 3D.
Pulling the unit out of its box is an exciting experience, as the trademark sleek Analogue design modernizes the original form factor of the Nintendo 64 – the original N64 doesn’t fit in my TV stand in a way that lets me easily change games, yet I had enough room to swap cartridges in and out of the top-loader slot in the Analogue – but the real thrill starts the moment you plug it in. After digging out some of my old N64 cartridges, I began leaping from game to game. I loved running and gunning in GoldenEye 007, speeding through the streets in San Francisco Rush, or reliving old glories in Star Wars Episode I: Racer. Even better, since the Analogue 3D has a built-in Expansion Pak, I can fire up Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark, or Zelda: Majora’s Mask with no compatibility worries.
The biggest difference this time is that I was running these games in 4K on a big LED TV. You can choose to add CRT and sharpness filters to reproduce that original feeling back in the ’90s, but I’ve always enjoyed getting the clearest view of my games as possible; that’s how I’ve always approached retro collections on modern consoles, and that’s no different here. Thankfully, even without the CRT filter, every game feels faithfully displayed, thanks primarily to the fact that these games are not emulated; they’re played natively on the Analogue 3D – a first for the Nintendo 64. The color doesn’t feel dimmed as it can in some emulation, leading to the most visually appealing way to play my favorite games of the past.
The Analogue 3D natively plays all your Nintendo 64 cartridges, regardless of region. I have a tradition of picking up Japanese versions of my favorite retro games each time I travel to Japan, but I’ve never had a good way to play those games. As such, my Japanese copies of Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time have just sat on a shelf as pieces of my collection. That changed the moment I plugged in my Analogue 3D. Before I knew it, I was running around in Peach’s courtyard and Kokiri Forest.
It’s a good thing I have Super Mario 64 pretty much memorized at this point
One of my chief complaints about trying to play Nintendo 64 games on other platforms is that the controller was too unique for modern gamepads to properly approximate the experience. The result is often an unnatural mapping of buttons, which is why I ended up buying the Nintendo Switch Online Nintendo 64 controller that Nintendo sells for when I want to fire up that library of classics. On the Analogue 3D front, I’m extremely thankful that all my old controllers work like a charm, and all of the different plugins (like the Rumble Pack), work just as well.
The console itself has four ports, and I didn’t have any issues plugging in my old N64 controllers and having them instantly work as though they’re plugged into an actual Nintendo 64. Even better, Analogue worked with 8BitDo to create a more modern gamepad with buttons that feel closer to the N64 gamepad of old. It’s still not perfect, but I never had a connection issue, and the button layout is close to the N64 layout while retaining the now-industry-standard form factor for controllers. But since it’s a Bluetooth system, if you’re unbothered by the different face-button layouts, you have several different options for controllers, and you can customize the experience in a ton of different ways.
It’s always going to be impossible to beat the convenience of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack library, particularly when you consider how expensive some of these cartridges have become to track down. However, if you have a few old N64 cartridges lying around and care about the faithfulness which with your experiences mirror the original intents of the developers, the Analogue 3D is a stellar device worthy of the company’s long lineage. After spending a few hours with the Analogue 3D, I’m mad at my past self for never picking up the company’s devices that pay homage to the Super NES and Game Boy.