8 Best N64 Puzzle Games

Magical Tetris Challenge is a version of Tetris featuring Disney characters, and you play as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck or Goofy. It was Capcom's first game for the console, and it is one of the few N64 games that is entirely in 2D. The twist is in the attacks. When you clear lines, the other player receives a set of "magical" pieces, which range from pentomino pieces to very large ones up to 5x5 blocks in size.

Each character gets a different storyline in Story Mode, and plain Classic Tetris is there for when you just want to stack. Players agree the music is the best thing about it, and the controls are tight too. It is a Disney game that a lot of people skipped for that reason, which is their loss.

Bust-a-Move '99 is the second sequel to Puzzle Bobble. It hit arcades in September 1996 and was later ported to just about everything, the Nintendo 64 included. Names got messy along the way: it was Bust-A-Move 3 DX in Europe and Bust-A-Move 99 in the United States. In Japan, the Nintendo 64 port was released as Puzzle Bobble 64.

As in Bubble Bobble, the first player controls Bub and the second player controls Bob, and you aim bubbles up at the cluster so matching colours pop. This one added the ability to choose a character, though only in the VS Computer mode. Players still recommend it as a fun pick when you only have a few minutes to play. It is the same great game as the one below it, with more of everything.

Bust-A-Move 2 is the first sequel to Puzzle Bobble. It was released into the arcades in 1995, and home conversions followed for the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Windows. On consoles it carried the Arcade Edition name, while arcades knew it as Bust-A-Move Again. Some of the contestants in the new tournament mode are based on characters from Bubble Bobble, including variations on a Monsta and a Mighta.

The North American boxes for the PlayStation and Saturn versions were considered wildly inappropriate for a cheerful game that young children could play. The game inside is pure sugar, and it was the one families kept going back to. Players remember long head-to-head matches with their brothers and sisters, and that is exactly what it was built for.

Dr. Mario 64 is a tile-matching action puzzle game developed and published by Nintendo, and it came out in North America on April 9, 2001. That was very late in the N64's life, and Europe did not get it at all until it was re-released on the Nintendo Classics service in October 2021. The story borrows characters from the 2000 Game Boy Color game Wario Land 3, and Wario is a playable rival.

A multiplayer mode allows up to four players to compete at once, and Seiichi Tokunaga arranged the classic Dr. Mario music. It got average reviews at the time. Players disagree with that now. They say it holds up, and some still play it with friends and partners today. Fever is still the best song in any puzzle game.

The New Tetris is a 1999 puzzle game developed by H2O Entertainment and Blue Planet Software and published by Nintendo. It keeps the line clears and adds one big idea: you can also form 4x4 large squares of four pieces to create blocks. A block built from all the same kind of piece turns gold, any other mix turns silver, and those blocks pay out far more when you clear them.

It has a multiplayer mode for up to four players, plus an electronic dance music soundtrack by Neil Voss, who also scored Tetrisphere. It received favorable reviews. For a lot of players it is still the version of Tetris they like best, for the music as much as the play. One player put it simply: "It's a multiplayer masterpiece."

Wetrix is an isometric puzzle game where the player, on a square landscape, produces mounds to hold water bubbles falling from the sky. Uppers raise the land to create walls for the lakes, while Downers do the opposite. Fireballs can evaporate water for points. If there is no wall in its way, water seeps off the edges into a drain, and the game ends once that meter is full. Falling blocks were the only thing it was meant to share with Tetris.

The N64 version sold over 105,000 units in the West and just above 12,000 in Japan. Reviewers found the falling pieces excessively tricky to place, mostly because the camera barely moves. Players forgive that. They call it one of the best and most original puzzle games on the console, and nothing else here plays like it.

Tetrisphere was originally titled Phear and meant for the Atari Jaguar in early 1995. It was reworked into a Tetris game for the N64 after Nintendo obtained the publishing rights, and it came out in North America on August 11, 1997. The well is gone. Instead, pieces sit on a sphere, and in Rescue Mode you destroy layers of bricks to reach the core and free a trapped robot. To spare the hardware, the engine only shows a portion of the sphere at any given time.

Despite limited advertising, it sold moderately well, and reviewers praised its originality and the score by Neil Voss. Players describe it as a cosy game, one for a chilled-out session rather than a tense one. Strange, yes, but it is also very soothing.

Pokémon Puzzle League came out in North America on September 25, 2000, and in Europe on March 2, 2001. It began development as Panel de Pon 64, a sequel to the Super Nintendo game Panel de Pon, before being reskinned with characters from the Pokémon franchise. You play as Ash Ketchum, beat seven of the eight Kanto gym leaders and finally face a legendary undefeated competitor known as the Puzzle Master. The original Panel de Pon 64 version was finished later and released in Nintendo Puzzle Collection for GameCube.

It received mostly positive reviews, but players go further than the critics did. They call it a gem of a puzzle game, and some say it is the best puzzler on the system. Players recommend it more than any other N64 puzzle game.