N64 deserves more credit than it gets...
- Thread starter msbae
- Start date
I thought the N64 was all around terrible.
Really that whole generation of consoles was bad. They sent me off to being largely a PC gamer until Xbox 360 (despite owning Xbox and PS2). I view that generation as being the 3D equivalent of what Atari 2600 was to 2D. Ass. Something people played because they didn't have anything better.
I would take SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx over N64/PS/Saturn in a heartbeat. The respective good games from the 16-bit era have aged much better than the 32+ bit era. Seriously, I would take Super Mario Kart over Mario Kart 64, Super Mario World over Mario 64, and A Link to the Past over Ocarnia of Time in a heartbeat.
As others said, beyond the first party stuff, there was nothing going on for the N64. Doom 64? Goldeneye and Perfect Dark honestly were complete jokes to people playing Quake 2 and Half-Life on the PC. It's pathetic.
I liked the Saturn... I really liked the Japanese style second controller I picked up for it. But that console went absolutely nowhere.
Playstation was the best of the generation by default. A lot of the supposed classics do nothing for me (Metal Gear Solid especially), but there were a ton of games for the system, and more than a handful of entertaining ones. By far the best game IMO for the system was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. A 2D game unconcerned with trying to go 3D just for the sake of being 3D. I got good mileage out of mixed 2D/3D stuff too, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII. The first two Twisted Metal games were wildly entertaining... The early Tony Hawk games were awesome.
I did have a lot of fun with All-Star Baseball on N64 with my friends... Rogue Squadron was a great game, but I played that on PC with a proper joystick and 3D Acceleration, so it's hard to give much credit to the N64 there.
Really that whole generation of consoles was bad. They sent me off to being largely a PC gamer until Xbox 360 (despite owning Xbox and PS2). I view that generation as being the 3D equivalent of what Atari 2600 was to 2D. Ass. Something people played because they didn't have anything better.
I would take SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx over N64/PS/Saturn in a heartbeat. The respective good games from the 16-bit era have aged much better than the 32+ bit era. Seriously, I would take Super Mario Kart over Mario Kart 64, Super Mario World over Mario 64, and A Link to the Past over Ocarnia of Time in a heartbeat.
As others said, beyond the first party stuff, there was nothing going on for the N64. Doom 64? Goldeneye and Perfect Dark honestly were complete jokes to people playing Quake 2 and Half-Life on the PC. It's pathetic.
I liked the Saturn... I really liked the Japanese style second controller I picked up for it. But that console went absolutely nowhere.
Playstation was the best of the generation by default. A lot of the supposed classics do nothing for me (Metal Gear Solid especially), but there were a ton of games for the system, and more than a handful of entertaining ones. By far the best game IMO for the system was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. A 2D game unconcerned with trying to go 3D just for the sake of being 3D. I got good mileage out of mixed 2D/3D stuff too, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII. The first two Twisted Metal games were wildly entertaining... The early Tony Hawk games were awesome.
I did have a lot of fun with All-Star Baseball on N64 with my friends... Rogue Squadron was a great game, but I played that on PC with a proper joystick and 3D Acceleration, so it's hard to give much credit to the N64 there.
There were much better shortcuts than that in Wario's Stadium. If you did two wall jumps properly you could finish each lap in under 7 seconds.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9u8z0bJCfM[/yt]
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Oddly The GC/PS2/Xbox age to the present have turn me off of all gaming unless the games are more than 10 years old.
During that generation, I was mostly gaming on PC, but I did play my brother's PS1 and N64 occasionally. Outside of a few titles like Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, I spent most of my console time playing the N64, mostly for the games previously mentioned and also the ports of Quake, Duke Nukem, Hexen, and some others.
I never could quite get the hang of the controls, though. That thumbstick always felt awkward to me. I thought the controller for the Gamecube was a big improvement, aside from the Z-button on mine being a little clunky.
I never could quite get the hang of the controls, though. That thumbstick always felt awkward to me. I thought the controller for the Gamecube was a big improvement, aside from the Z-button on mine being a little clunky.
BLASPHEMY! (except the part about the awesomeness of the 16-Bit era.)
The N64's downfall came in that it, and the GameCube, were the culmination of Hiroshi Yamauchi's "we will do it our way, and your way can go fuck off" philosophy. In the Nintendo 64's case, it was the cartridge thing (they were prohibitively expensive to produce), plus certain aforementioned technical limitations (the texture memory being the big one). In the GameCube's case, it was the use of a proprietary, lower-capacity disc format instead of DVDs, which were quickly becoming the industry norm. While Yamauchi retired because he was getting up there in years, but after the financial disaster that was the GameCube, he had a significant amount of pressure from the board to step down from his role. (While he had little control over Satoru Iwata's ascension, he insisted that Tatsumi Kimishima, a lifelong banker who was at the time in charge of the Pokemon brand, take over Nintendo of America, since that had been the unit largely responsible for the losses.)
Contrast that to a company like Microsoft, which, during the development of the original Xbox, formed a technology advisory board comprising some of the best and brightest of game and technology developers, and gave those people a tremendous amount of input towards the design of the system. Microsoft was originally going to go with a low-priced ATI GPU (it was going to be an enhanced R100) until the tech advisors, plus the strong lobbying of Seamus Blackley, convinced Microsoft execs to go with Nvidia.
All that said, I had a lot of fun with the Nintendo 64, and Super Mario 64 is still incredibly fun. I respect it for its legacy, but most of its games don't hold up well at all today.
Contrast that to a company like Microsoft, which, during the development of the original Xbox, formed a technology advisory board comprising some of the best and brightest of game and technology developers, and gave those people a tremendous amount of input towards the design of the system. Microsoft was originally going to go with a low-priced ATI GPU (it was going to be an enhanced R100) until the tech advisors, plus the strong lobbying of Seamus Blackley, convinced Microsoft execs to go with Nvidia.
All that said, I had a lot of fun with the Nintendo 64, and Super Mario 64 is still incredibly fun. I respect it for its legacy, but most of its games don't hold up well at all today.
Despite it's perceived faults, I love the GameCube. I have 35 different titles for it, which is more than any other system I own, except (maybe) the PC.
I have 54 but as a whole the system is still garbage.
Also 35 different titles? I have 18 copies of NHL 2002!
I never bought a GC. I was mostly in PC gaming mode then and it never caught my interest. I've never owned an XBox or Playstation either.
Rii
Rear Admiral
The GCN is my top platform in terms of number of games purchased also, but I think that has less to do with its games themselves than with its era representing the high point of my interest in gaming once I had financial wherewithal to satisfy that interest. As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, 1996-2001 probably wasn't the golden age of gaming as a list of my favourite games would seem to suggest.
I'm still not budging on my assertion that the FPS genre has produced a grand total of perhaps two interesting games post-2001, though.
The GCN is my top platform in terms of number of games purchased also, but I think that has less to do with its games themselves than with its era representing the high point of my interest in gaming once I had financial wherewithal to satisfy that interest. As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, 1996-2001 probably wasn't the golden age of gaming as a list of my favourite games would seem to suggest.
I'm still not budging on my assertion that the FPS genre has produced a grand total of perhaps two interesting games post-2001, though.
The first Golden era was the 1970's-1983. The second one was 1985-1996, when Nintendo could do no wrong and saved the industry. The third is now with the Wii & DS providing so many unique/cool games we'd otherwise never see.
Word. Castlevania and Einhander both, though Einhander had a bit of 3D rotation and scaling thrown in, but it didn't matter much to gameplay.
Now that's just crazy. Everyone knows the purpose of the Voodoo1 was GLQuake and accelerated Mechwarrior 2.
Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are SUPERB games some of the best of that entire generation (PC included)
Unfortunately, I think the official N64 controllers might be some of the worst ever made in the entire history of video games. They are flimsy, they feel cheap, and they are ergonomic nightmares. I mean come on, if you're using the analog stick you actually have to remove your hand from the controller and replace it in order to use the d-pad or L-trigger. And whoever designed that analog stick should be shot, even the Saturn's analog controller was superior (basically the same as the Dreamcast's).
I bought a PS1 back in the day and never regretted it. Mario 64 might have sold me on the N64 had it not been for Tomb Raider. Without it being the first game where you could freely explore 3D space, Mario 64 just didn't enthrall me all that much.
I remember that there were two things that really bothered me about the N64 back in the day. One was that I always felt the graphics looked terrible - everything seemed washed out and blurry whereas both PS1 and Saturn had titles that just looked very crisp (back then, anyway). I also felt that CDs were the way to go and that Nintendo was too pride to realise that and move forward, resulting in higher game prices (which also put me off). I see more of the disadvantages of CDs now. But it certainly held me off back then.
None of the (few) top titles ever made me feel like I was missing something on the N64 while I had my PS1, neither Mario 64 nor Zelda 64 or Goldeneye. In terms of Mario, as I said, it was in no small part because Tomb Raider had taken my breath in terms of exploring 3D space in a game, so Mario lost A LOT of its punch for me. I never much cared for the Zelda games so this didn't much appeal for me. And having played shooters on the PC, a console shooter did not do anything to attract me.
So, for me, personally, the N64 doesn't deserve much credit. I'm not surprised it wasn't as successful on the market. And I don't feel it has aged very well either, to be honest.
I remember that there were two things that really bothered me about the N64 back in the day. One was that I always felt the graphics looked terrible - everything seemed washed out and blurry whereas both PS1 and Saturn had titles that just looked very crisp (back then, anyway). I also felt that CDs were the way to go and that Nintendo was too pride to realise that and move forward, resulting in higher game prices (which also put me off). I see more of the disadvantages of CDs now. But it certainly held me off back then.
None of the (few) top titles ever made me feel like I was missing something on the N64 while I had my PS1, neither Mario 64 nor Zelda 64 or Goldeneye. In terms of Mario, as I said, it was in no small part because Tomb Raider had taken my breath in terms of exploring 3D space in a game, so Mario lost A LOT of its punch for me. I never much cared for the Zelda games so this didn't much appeal for me. And having played shooters on the PC, a console shooter did not do anything to attract me.
So, for me, personally, the N64 doesn't deserve much credit. I'm not surprised it wasn't as successful on the market. And I don't feel it has aged very well either, to be honest.
I think the Atari 5200 controllers may be the wrose, I mean atleast the N64 controller analog stick would go back to the center after being released. Didn't care much for the 7800 controllers either for that matter.
But I never had much of a problem with the N64 controllers, I did think they were way too bulky though - but at that time I was a PC gamer to the core, so I had issues with a lot of controllers from that era, especially with FPSers because I preferred (and still do) the keyboard and mouse.
Very few games required you to use the D-pad and the analog stick. The point was for you to choose one or the other (the d-pad left things flexible for any 2-D games that might come onto the scene).