i thought of the n64 as a rich kid console because of this: unlike the ps1, n64 games had to be bought in a shop, instead of going to some guy’s house, giving him £3 and waiting half an hour.
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the secondhand games market was extremely, extremely healthy in the US in the late 90s — people were rarely paying retail but also rarely bothering with piracy in those days
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I go on about this a lot since I have a very sophisticated understanding of 80s/90s computer and console hardware for various reasons, but Sony really got the “how do we do cheap, scalable, developer-friendly, consumer 3D” problem right when no one else did
imo the single best reason to be dismissive of the N64 is because of how exponentially more expressive the PS1 hardware allowed developers to be with more asset streaming and layering and so on
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i got a ps1 in like aug 96 but if i remember right the appeal and how it was sold early on by your richard leadbetter types (he was doing the exact same shit he does now) was you’ve got the best electronics company coming in, they actually give a shit about bringing stuff out here - you’re going to be able to play final fantasy this time, not just read about it in super play, and it’s pretty much the same hardware all the namco arcade stuff runs on
and then i ran it upside down for most of its life
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which games did you have a s a kid if you dont mind me asking
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in 1999 when I finally got a psx it was no longer the rich kid console, it was the ‘play an unbelievably large and good library of games for cheap’ console.
I’ll write full thoughts on the n64 library soon, once I have some free time to relax and think about it
I do think the n64 produced the ugliest 3d of any early console. Janky affine texture warping and integer-rounded polygon coordinates is still so attractive in its hackiness compared to the vaseline smooth look of the n64. The 3-point texture filtering, the VI pseudo-antialiasing, the blurring, it’s all trash and the games developed for the n64 were developed to compensate for all that ugliness so it looks even worse to emulate the n64 without the vi postprocessing. (a few notable exceptions, like Sin and Punishment, look great with all that n64 vaseline removed)
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yeah, so, my orthodontist’s office had a bunch of consoles, and it’s the only place where i’ve ever played both an Atari Lynx and a Jaguar, but they eventually got a PS1, as well. Toshinden and Jumping Flash were neat, but did not sell me on a PS1.
i still had hope, i think, in 95, that the Nintendo Ultra 64 would still get some kind of Final Fantasy and RPGs. Nintendo had been such a clearly dominant force throughout my formative years, and most of the “new” competitors like Panasonic, Philips, Atari etc. were all clearly incompetent. i had no idea cartridges were going to be such a huge dealbreaker, but also, i guess no one really anticipated the full extent of what something like Final Fantasy VII was going to be, at that point.
i played A LOT of N64, and i enjoyed most of that time, but only in the context of playing it with my friends, usually at the friend’s house. i had my own N64, but it always felt so…lonely? i know there are more single-player N64 games than i can immediately recall (edit: feel the need to include that i didn’t like Rare’s 3D platformers, and disliking Rare in the N64 years cut one’s library at least by half), but the N64 was definitely the first console i had that gave me a hint of buyer’s remorse (ok, well, my mom got it for me for my birthday when it came out, so not me buying, exactly). and when the DD was canceled…idk. i don’t personally feel like the N64 lived up to its hype, or even most of its potential.
some kinds of games felt better to play on an N64, but not most of them, i don’t think. and the cost of the games meant that i wasn’t willing to take risks on games that didn’t immediately seem to be Really Good, meaning i missed out on stuff like Winback and Hybrid Heaven, despite owning an N64.
there are very few, if any, N64 games i’d ever want to replay, i think. even after beating OoT, i could never bring myself to replay it. once the sheen of “a new Zelda AND IT’S 3D” wore off after the week it took me to beat the game, i just could not be bothered. i think everything i dislike about modern Zelda was solidified in that game?
i never owned or really played Jet Force Gemini, but my one and only experience with it was beating the game’s true last boss for my friend who couldn’t get past it. i think i’m happy to leave it at that, forever.
Turok 3, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, etc. - played those all to death, but again, in the context of being at a friend’s house. the console was really great if you had friends or siblings, i think, but in my moments alone with it, everything always just felt slightly…off?
edit: oh, well, i guess my most-signficant memory with the console has to have been importing Smash Bros. before it was announced for the US. my friends and i couldn’t wait to play it and didn’t want to wait on an announcement, so we were all getting into it right at the start.
it’s funny, because i kind of can’t stand that series, now.
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it’s honestly incredible how the N64 made like every single imaginable wrong choice in trying to ship consumer-grade SGI hardware
it has a lot of hardware features that were theoretically a generation or two ahead except exclusively cut down to the point where they were just hideous and awful
I agree that a lot of the mainstream 4-player stuff it facilitated was really cool, I think the sociological analysis of N64 owners going on in this thread is uhhhhh very borderline, but really I can’t get over how consistently they fucked up in engineering that thing. classic case of trying to design by subtraction rather than taking the right shortcuts from the ground up.
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And a classic case of Nintendo engineers trying to do cutting edge and just being completely out of their depth. Having to rely on external partners to make hardware decisions three years down the line, in a culture like Nintendo’s, is not easy. When it’s known and they can play with input devices and screens in their office they make good choices.
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I think this explains why I have such an affinity for the n64, this is my exact personality . Fun with up to but no more than 3 other people, but surreal and weirdly dismal when no one else is around
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imo one of the other most damning things about the N64 is the proportion of good games on there that were already in development before it shipped (probably 75%+)
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if I had known about Jumping Flash! at the time it mighta pushed me into getting a PS1 earlier but that happened when MGS dropped and I subsequently went through a 6 month phase of “N-sixty-for babies”. still remember the debates at school, my sketchbook went from 3D platformer cartoon characters and maps to illustrated bios of fantastical military weaponry and all original characters with names like “Apocalyptic Cyclops” (basically Revolver Ocelot with the barrel of a gun for one eye (don’t remember how he reloaded, maybe shoving bullets in his ears) good thing this thread is not titled “Which Is Better?” that would be much shorter and less interesting probably
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oh, i’m gonna be weird and say i grew to really like the N64 controller. it thought it was oddly comfortable to hold
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me too
me too
my dad agreed to buy a cd burner in a kind of labor swap where i agreed to, in return, sit there and burn 50? 100? copies of his Cajun-fusion band Bayou Roux’s album
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this is the quintessential PS1 experience imo
bonus points if your friend bought a CD labeler
edit: the word “CD Stomper” just entered my brain for the first time in 20 years
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shadows of the empire, mario kart, and mario 64
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everything is so muddy and ugly and blurry and gross looking, I think it’d look even better vaseline smeared.
there’s something about the n64 that makes every game feel like it was made with a game of telephone between five people, one of which who had never heard of games before
how could NINTENDO of all people make something so disgusting and off-putting and unpolished? I think that’s why I like it. like two opposing forces are clashing at eachother every time they make a videogame
I also appreciate unemulatable experiences. you have to experience the worst games on the worst console with the worst controller (unless you’re USING THE GOOD ONE I KEEP SCREAMING ABOUT) or else it sucks even harder. amazing.
beginning to think that I should consider myself a third party dongle for the perfect n64 experience
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yeah, I really liked it. at the time, I especially was impressed by the positioning of the Z-trigger and thought it felt great
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I guess we’re going to have to do N64 stuff in PA.
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I’m gonna out myself as the weirdo who likes the N64 aesthetic — the neon-tinged vertex lighting, the low-res textures that are so blurred and stretched out that every texel is more of a giant impressionistic blob than anything representational, the general blurriness of every edge, the hardware dithering that compensates for the low quality DAC, the heavy fog overhanging scene — give it all to me, for I will feast upon it.
(I could do without the atrocious fillrate, at least.)
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