Also Bomberman doesn’t yell “BO!!” when he kicks a bomb anymore 
I recently modded an n64 for RGB and I was thinking about getting an everdrive for it but then I was thinking htere might not really be many games I want to go back to. Maybe paper mario and ogre battle. Such that maybe it would be cheaper to just buy those and not the everdrive.
I’ve got an Ogre Battle 64 cart sitting in a drawer, you can have it if you want.
1 Like
I do want it. Do you mean it?
Yeah, sure, assuming you live in the US? Send me your address and I’ll drop it in the mail.
ok now i have ogre battle (Thank you Victor!) looks like sin & punishment is not too expensive
2 Likes
my favourite n64 wrestling thing was making a cpu vs cpu match with both of them playing Ken Shamrock, but making the match a no time limit, no disqualification, no submission, no count out, no pin match, and then just leaving it on overnight. we really hated Ken Shamrock.
i wonder if DDT in Japan ever had a match like that
4 Likes
DDT had a Firepro match where some wrestlers just played Firepro instead of actually wrestling, but I think that’s the closest they got.
1 Like
played the first dungeon of master quest today and i liked it
whoa, i kind of want to do that
I mention this on the podcast but pretty much all of the N64’s interesting releases came out pre-FF7 in its first year, after that it’s just mascot crap. Developers backed off way quicker than people remember.
Mario is the best game on there, no question. Rare’s stuff is a lot a lot worse.
I have fond memories of playing Harvest Moon 64, I married Mary because she reminded me the most of me at the time. The Eldest of my two older sisters got the furthest in the game with the Greenhouse and she married Ellie.
Other then that I played a lot of Majora’s Mask, I picked it up because I thought it was Ocarina of time, I got really upset to find out that it wasn’t, but then I warmed up to creepy moonface in the sky and Pretty much just kept playing Kafei and Anju’s Story because I literally did not know how to do anything else, nor did I want to at the time.
I would also rent a lot of Bomberman 64 and Super Mario 64. I was terrible at both of these games, but a lot better with Mario.
Blast Corps though!
But yeah, Banjo Kazooie was such a disappointment to me, especially after reading all the raving reviews in the magazines back then.
For me the N64’s identity that differentiated it from the other consoles was basically: we can do cool shit with physics now. Because, even though you could play 3D games on Playstation and Saturn, none of them felt as good as running and jumping around as Mario, or riding waves in Wave Race, and … then they kinda focused on other things I guess. 1080° was cool and F-Zero felt amazing too, but that was way late.
The main reason I don’t like Banjo Kazooie (and basically every other 3D platformer) is really just the lack of sophisticated physics.
Though I gotta say that Goldeneye felt similar to Nintendo’s bold excursions into what’s possible in 3D, in that for me it was just this FPS physics sandbox to mess around in. I had a PC gamer friend back then who would tell me how Half Life was so much better than Goldeneye. I played it a couple years later, but I did not agree with him. It was so much more guided, so much more cinematic, so much less of a “software toy”. They’re vastly different games, structure-wise, and each has its pros and cons. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed how dominant Half Life’s standard became though. So much so, that Perfect Dark’s longer, more drawn out corridor levels veered into that direction as well. And Perfect Dark Zero as well as the Goldeneye remake have basically nothing in common with that “sandbox” mentality anymore.
So yeah, anyway, I think Rare’s early N64 output was totally up on par with Nintendo, but they gradually lost their way and turned their uniqueness into what almost seemed like a parody of Nintendo’s main IPs. Running with what I thought were the worst elements and deemphasizing the best.
5 Likes
The thing that impressed me the most about Goldeneye was being able to zoom in on the covert modem that you attach to a thing in the first level, and can see all the wire mesh stuff on the microphone bits on the sides
1 Like
I was most impressed by how good it felt to shoot people (oh boy). I just loved playing around with the enemy models, how they uniquely reacted to how and with what I shoot them. Everything felt so impactful. Goofing around with the unlockable cheat codes was the best!
1 Like
Ah, yeah I remember spending an afternoon messing around on random levels with all the cheats on, coming up with my own story to tie the levels together. Basically I was hunting down the nefarious Dr Doak and his army of clones. I finished off with the Aztec level, and when the end of level cutscene played I said out loud “Aah… now James Bond can go back to his home planet”
My brother was confused because until then he had no idea James Bond was an alien
4 Likes
yeah, Rare’s stuff in 1997 (goldeneye and blast corps) was great. all of the N64’s 1996-1997 releases were great and many of them couldn’t be done on the playstation, yet developers overwhelmingly moved to working on the playstation after that (and of course many more were there in the first place) and the N64 mostly got shovelware.
what’s the late-era would-be 64DD stuff? I honestly can’t think of anything. doshin the giant and proto-mother-3?
hmmmmmmmm idk. on the one hand that’s definitely one of the most interesting batches of post-97 N64 titles, on the other…
- shiren 2, I was not aware of this!
- majora’s mask, I spent years trying to kind of get into this and just never found it any fun at all and am so glad that we no longer consider N64-era zelda to be spectacular game design because it’s hideous, boring, and too tense despite all that
- ogre battle, yeah it’s neat that quest kept up matsuno’s designs after he went to square and did an OK job with them. big chunky sprites! these games are still kind of miserably slow RTSes though?
- animal crossing, I totally forgot this came out on the N64, and these games aren’t really for me at all but OK
- mario artist, is this like mario paint?
I always wanted to get a 64DD to play that unique 3D Sim City, because I loved the SNES version so much, and this one looked like it had at least as much Nintendo influence.
Also, there’s some more would-be DD stuff one this list:
[quote=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD#Proposed_software”]Diablo
Doubutsu Banchou (Animal Leader, released on Nintendo GameCube as Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest)
Fire Emblem 64 (canceled, with some elements of the plot later used on the first Fire Emblem for Game Boy Advance, Fire Emblem: Fūin no Tsurugi)
Hybrid Heaven (released on cartridge)
Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (released on cartridge)
Pokémon 64/Pokémon RPG
Pokémon Snap
Super Mario RPG 2 or Super Mario Adventure (released on cartridge as Mario Story in Japan and Paper Mario in the rest of the world)
Twelve Tales: Conker 64 (released on cartridge as Conker’s Bad Fur Day)
Ultra Donkey Kong (released on cartridge as Donkey Kong 64)
Unreal (canceled)[/quote]
2 Likes
My enduring fondness for the N64 comes from its library being mostly a shovelware trash heap, with glittering gems buried among the shoddy ports and licensed crap. Also because it was my first 3D game system, which at age 6 was like a revelation from God.