Why Is “Snowman’s Lost His Head” So Hard?

Super Mario 64 has 120 Stars to collect, 90 of them from individual named missions in the game’s 15 courses. Many players find that a fairly early one, Snowman’s Lost His Head in Course 4, Cool Cool Mountain, is among the most vexing. When I played it, I found it a illustrative example of what happens when the game gives you imprecise directions, and just asks you to try. I did try, time after time, until it just seemed to work, for some reason I couldn’t figure figure out, and by that point I was just happy to be done with it.

Cool Cool Mountain is a big area with sloped paths leading from the top leading to the bottom. For this Star, some ways up there’s a snowball that talks to you, asking if you could lead it to its body, a larger snowball, some ways down. As it rolls it grows in size. Ideally you stay ahead of it the whole way, and managed to get it to crash into its body. If this happens, it spawns a Star; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t appear, leaving you to exit the course from the pause button or collect a different star before trying again.

The problem is, you can do exactly what I explained and the snowhead still won’t collide with the snowbody. Sometimes the head seems to aim at your position near the end of its route, but sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does, you have to be standing in a narrow region in order for it to produce the necessary impact.

As it turns out there’s three requirements. Kaze Emanuar broke them down in a two-minute Youtube video last year. It’s pretty short as far as these videos go!

The requirements are:

• You must enter a single invisible sphere partway down, on the bridge along the route, before the snowball does on its trip. If you don’t, the snowball will continue, but it won’t even try to hit the body. You’ve already failed it.
• At a specific spot towards the end of its route, it’ll check if you’re within a cone in front of its movement. If you aren’t, then it’ll just continue on and out off the course as if you hadn’t hit he sphere.
• If you are within that cone, it will then direct its movement towards your location. If you aren’t standing so it’ll collide with the body, it can still miss it and you’ll fail the star.

The thing is, to a player, it looks like you’re only really needed at the end of the route. Why do you have to hit the sphere first? Even if you manage to stay ahead off the snowball the whole way, if you don’t touch the completely invisible sphere, the whole thing will break. And since it’s on a bridge, it looks like it should be fine to take a shortcut off onto the lower path.

Further, you have to be both within the cone and in a place where the snowball will collide with the body. There are many places you can stand that would direct the snowball to hit the body, but aren’t in the cone! The cone is also invisible, and the range off places you can stand to complete it is quite narrow.

Watch the video for the full details, it’s really short! Kaze does a good job of explaining it.