I consider the N64 a Legacy System, so I'll share my favorite game: Paper Mario.

I played through it 4 times and my most recent run through was to unlock EVERYTHING. Do all the favors for the old Koopa, find all Star Pieces, all letters, etc. PM:TTYD was an ok game, but some parts bored me a bit, unlike Paper Mario.

One complaint though is the ending to Paper Mario. After a certain point, you cannot return to Mushroom Kingdom and your game is essentially over. That's why I only went to the end on one file and kept my other one on Earth .

I have not played the VC version of Paper Mario, but I hope it's just as good so more people can play it!

To me, the Thousand Year Door lacked in creativity in ways. Some courses were like Paper Mario for N64 ports. Hooktail's Castle was very similar for example. I did like a few courses though:
Glitzville
Excess Express

Glitzville was fun during the whole game and the Excess Express was very unique.

I actually just finished up Glitzville in the game I'm playing now.
I really liked the story in that area, but, the battling got a bit tedious to me. I enjoyed finding out what was happening, but, was happy to be done with it and move on to other places.

I agree though, the N64 version is definitely the definitive one, and an absolutely spectacular game.

I normally don't like futuristic games either, but PS4 blows every 'traditional RPG' out of the water, in my opinion.

It's epic, it's sad, it's interesting....got everything I wanted.  And of course, it's the usual 'start out innocent, become a hero' sort of theme.

I've had a few runs with 1-3, but they're nothing compared to 4.  I don't feel the technology gets in the way at all...it's actually a pretty cool mix.

The idea is sort of advanced civilizations being damaged so bad that almost everyone lost their technology, putting them into a medieval like setting.  The only places where technology still exists are the planetary-environment-stations that are somewhat present, and a few satelites kept running by the androids still left behind.

The only thing I don't like is that there's some grinding involved, but otherwise, although I'm a bit biased because I dislike Final Fantasy games, I think it puts out a great effort to curtail them.  Also, the 'Hunter Guild' gives some good/interesting side quests, and almost feels like a precursor to the main guild-quest system on Phantasy Star Online.

I never played the original Paper Mario but i have played (almost) through TTYD. I restarted when I realized I sold all the good badges and couldn't beat Shadow Princess. Glitzville was by far my favorite part of the game and right now on my replaythrough I am in Boggly Woods so can't wait to get there. As for getting the original, I probably will once my mom gets us back to a WEP key and not WAP.

For me, I think SNES was one of the best Nintendo consoles out there.  By that point, it seemed like even the crappier games were solid enough that they'd at least play well, and people really seemed to know what they were doing when making both new and 'old' games.  A lot of Hard Hitting Classics as well as gaming 'firsts' were born there, and it was pretty widely accessible to most people.  I think it was also the machine and/or era that started the hardcore phase in gaming, and as far as sales successes go, was prrretty much the last time Nintendo was on top of the gaming world until the Wii came around.

N64 was great, I feel it was a much more solid system than PS1 and even Sega Saturn(which was a beast in its own right, but probably bottlenecked badly), but I guess it was mostly lack of sales that did it in.  As well, the MAJORITY of the games that I liked so well on the N64 were Nintendo made(and subsequently, all of the N64 games on the VC are Nintendo-made in some way or another(Sin & Punishment is kinda pushing it...but if we're still talking American sales and experiences during the N64 lifetime, S&P certainly wasn't around at that point in time).  It might have been the reason third party started to stray away from Nintendo, or maybe it was deeper than that...dunno.

Eh, that first generation of 3D was kinda blah though....Nintendo did a really, REALLY good job of making the best of what early 3D archetecture could do back then(just look at SM64 for that matter as a launch game, but especially Oot/MM and even a few third party games), but they just couldn't keep things going with it unfortunately.  I hear it was also difficult to program for, which you can see some problems with PS3 and developers over that reason as well...*shrug*

Anyway.  Wii is great so far, but for some of the shovelware going on, I so far have to say that SNES was one of my favorite systems.  GCN was great as well, but it was just that sort of 'me too' thing that bogged it down and didn't really make it stand out enough. (And NES was great too of course, but SNES was just about the same thing with more buttons and memory and all that, so it's hard to praise NES beyond the fact that it was AWESOME for its time(although Sega Master System technically had the graphical edge on it, and TG-16 whenever it came out).)