The courses feeling alive was another cool thing about Wave Race. The tide lowering on one track, paths opening on others, the fog lifting on the lake, and the animals that show up sometimes depending on how well you’re doing, like they’re there to cheer you on. and getting dolphins to follow you. and every track felt so different and felt like it was part of a bigger world.
oh and the code to ride a dolphin! also i liked how doing tricks gave you zero benefit (except diving which felt SICK), in fact they would slow you down, so they were just there for showing off. really great way to rub it in when playing two player.
another great way to do that is to beat the other player but controller the game with your feet which i did until someone got too pissed off
also it just felt great to smash through and over waves, man what a great game. i have a copy of blue storm but never played it for more than a few minutes because of everything i hear about it. sounds like they went for more of a simulation and lost all the arcade whymsicalness of the 64 one
re: dynamic racing elements, aside from Diddy Kong Racing’s collectibles challenges and hidden keys and boss battles and explorable hub world (the promise of which was maybe incidentally hinted at in Royal Raceway where you can go off-road up to the castle and felt like a more general promise teased by many N64 games) a video game thing I think about a lot is that bell you can ring in Boulder Canyon, a kind of tricky sprite target to hit that raises the drawbridge so that you can screw over anyone a certain distance behind you and they have to make a split-second course correction round the moat (and then the secret key for that world requires you turning around and going the wrong way up the drawbridge before it lowers again!) I’ve dreamed of a game that makes that kind of course shuffling on the fly a thing, a rubik’s cube race track where you’re thinking ahead about how to alter paths, prime traps, enhance power-ups etc. seems like a winning idea
you know whats fucked up, I love n64 racing games and racing games in general, and i love racing games with progression and shit, but I have never played diddy kong racing. baw gawd. I think I need to correct this asap
Leaving aside its library for a moment I feel like it’s the platonic ideal of game console. It’s a console shaped like a friend. What a great little machine. I’d buy a Gamecube Mini just to see that shape again.
also probably the fewest glaring mistakes of any Nintendo hardware other than the original NES and game boy
and the game library was great too! it was all just weirdly also-ran at the wrong time – it was second or third place in the market for its whole lifespan and almost all of its best games were supposed to be the second and third tier ones
DKR is interesting because it also has an undocumented (?) feature that turns the later challenges from very difficult to manageable – boost items are much, much stronger if you release the accelerator (basically just like momentum throttling in F-Zero GX).
That little bit of knowledge ended up being the difference between never getting remotely to the end of the game in the 90s, and clearing nearly everything when revisiting it in the mid-00s.
(a lot of my knowledge of the periphery of the N64’s library comes from the mid-aughts when one of my older siblings decided to just by dozens of games on eBay — probably was the best time to do that tbqh)
the SNES was very successful for what it was, but:
the CPU and the main bus were very idiosyncratically designed in such a way that strongly suggested it was supposed to be backward compatible with the NES, functionality that never shipped, and made it notoriously annoying to emulate or to port games to from other platforms. it was also just fairly slow on paper (it’s a clock-doubled NES with a bigger instruction set and wider bus), made up for by…
astronomically high costs of producing individual games due to the heavy use of expansion chips. nintendo got way too used to this due to the SNES’ market position and it bit them badly with the N64 because it honestly should never have been replicable in the first place. imo they got very lucky that the graphics and sound hardware were overengineered to the point that devs were able to produce results that were still competitive with early 3D hardware in the mid-90s (through a lot of prerendering, which ofc carried forward to the PS1).
just comparing the amount of modern-day homebrew releases for the SNES vs Genesis says a lot about the relative ease-of-development for the two pieces of hardware
Nowadays the biggest disadvantage with working with the platform is probably the sound hardware — it uses an uncommon 8-bit processor and Sony DSP, both hermetically sealed away from the rest of the system in a tiny 64 KB cage. In contrast, the Genesis has a common Z80 and Yamaha chips pulling sound duty, and they have direct access to system ROM and RAM if necessary.
There’s also the fact that the 68000 is a much better target for C than the 65816, though that’s a bit of a lesser concern.
Hmm, I think this might not be quite fair. Unlike the NES which had a constantly evolving proliferation of memory mappers and sound chips, the SNES library looks roughly bifurcated between 95% of games using pretty standard cartridges and 5% using fancy 3D chips. The latter seem like loss leaders intended primarily to increase the prestige of the system (the fact that most of them were first-party titles, and that Star Fox 2 was not released is evidence for that).
The unit economics were still poorer than PC and PS1 games, but largely because of ROM chips.
Snowboard Kids is the top kart racer because of just how violently you can fuck people over (parachute before a jump, stealing everyone’s money, pans over a pit, the lift)
My friends and I used to raise that Diddy Kong bridge, collect items, then go up to the little lip at the top and try to push each other off. It was even better than the racing.
Along these same lines I’ve always wanted a racing game that captures the feeling of exploring a track in the time trial mode and attaches goals and gameplay to that somehow
I like the vagueness and interpretation, I also like the pure physicality of these spaces. I think I just connect better with simple shapes. I’d compare it to like practical effects in film, even if it looks shitty I still feel like I can touch it. A huge polygon is something I can get hold of in my head better even if the texture looks like smeared mud.
Like Starfox 64 I think works so well because the fun is in shooting giant rotating geometry chunks. Give me the big shapes dancing through space.
like I know the joke is that Rare just made the most absolutely deranged collectathons, shaming every other European dev in the process who would never dare make you collect that much shit, but holy shit they made a goddamn kart racer collectathon
and I remember being an idiot child and going “hey that’s cool”
I’m an adult now
I just want to pick a goddamn cup and race 4 races
After a few minutes with DKR I can conclude it’s kind of hot garbage. It’s hard to tell where the kart is going because it steers further than it’s going, so I overshoot because I’m aiming for where the kart is pointing and not the actual direction, which is the camera’s forward vector.
they should’ve made it a sequel to the batman zx spectrum game, taking place after you successfully fixed his car by collecting all his car parts and now have to collect more shit