you gotta get the MakoPad, it’s the licensed version of that and its stick has metal in its shaft
and the shell is transparent
why don’t more controllers have transparent shells
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the one i have has a metal stick
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damn they all have metal sticks
but they all don’t have transparent shells!
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wow you can even shove a Rumble Pak in one of those
N64, Vibrator Momma to all
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Best third-party controller I’ve ever owned tbh
By sheer playtime I probably have to call Perfect Dark my favorite N64 game. After a while that cartridge basically lived in my N64 permanently.
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is Perfect Dark > Perfect Dark Zero the steepest drop in quality for any direct sequel, ever?
…yes. yes, it is
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in all seriousness, the n64 was a very huge part of my gamer education. since we have set on 9 as the magic number, here are 9 games i knew and loved as an adolescent gamer
mario 64
mario kart
starfox 64
goldeneye 007
turok 2 (did not care for 1 at all)
blast corps (i have very normal tastes in general but i do think this one was underrated)
shadows of the empire (this is the best media from the shadows of the empire “series” or w/e, everything else is trash)
smash bros (say what you will about this game, you can’t deny its presence in history)
rogue squadron (not sure if it holds up but the way this game looked was mind blowing to me at the time…the graphics…)
honorable mentions to perfect dark, chameleon twist, pilotwings 64, and, even though it wasn’t an exclusive, shout out to nfl blitz on the nintendo 64 for briefly allowing me to recapture some of the same kind of fun as nba jam on snes and that one NES soccer game where you could knock guys out and their bodies would just stay lying on the field
oh of course it’s boring to talk about now but obviously zelda was huge at the time. Huge!!!
it was a good system
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n64 is one of my least fav consoles tbh… i think mario 64 and oot are largely insipid (i love that word…) and 90% of the games look like fuuucking ass one of the most poorly aging looks… ummm i think majora’s mask is still really good and sin & punishment rocks… really it barely had any jrpgs sooo thats kind of like a dealbreaker for me personally speaking
dont get me wrong i am sure it has more than 2 really good games but not that many
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reminded me to check out how the translation of the dreamcast one is going
promising
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My N64 short list:
Mario 64
Kirby 64
Paper Mario
Mischief Makers
Majora’s Mask(toss in OoT just to build up verbs and other visual languages but I’m not counting it because it’s only good for the first play. After that it just feels solved)
Sin & Punishment
Games I haven’t played but know I should:
Winback
Harvest Moon 64
Blast Corps(I have only played singular stages. Never saw the full picture of the game)
Body Harvest
Filler Slots:
Banjo Kazooie/Tooie
DK 64
The games to play when you just need to please your brain with pegs going through slots with some charming wrapping paper
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one thing that’s sort of interesting about some older consoles is that the context is so different now
like, the saturn is an arcade monster. a solid portion of its library is somewhat obsoleted by advancements in MAME and FinalBurn
the n64 was really special at the time, but if you are looking to play the best versions of any given game, in many cases you’ll want to go elsewhere. 2 of the absolute biggest and most important games on the console have been reverse-engineered and ported with massive improvements: both Ocarina and SM64 PC are incredible, and more reverse-engineered projects like this are on the way
i don’t think these later options really take much away from the console overall, though. then again, i like to inhabit a historical mindset when i look at things. i don’t get too torn up about how things “age” because i’m more interested in how they felt at the time than how they do now. the former seems more elusive and important
still, N64 emulation is not quite there, certainly nowhere near what’s been done for SNES. it’s generally very playble with something like Simple64, but there’s no dynarec there so requirements are relatively high (Excitebike 64 stutters on my i7-7700K). There’s also RMG which is Mupen64Plus with a simple UI, closer to upstream Mupen64Plus - good choice, lower requirements, slightly lower compatibility
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glad you all are realizing the n64 rocks actually
I hate oot and majoras mask (I like thinking about majoras mask but you’ll never make me play that shit) and feel like the system gets judged based on whether you like those games or not but it’s like A WHOLE ASS CONSOLE
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This is a photo of me cleaning my N64 and its games after they were immersed in flood water a few years ago. (It still seems to work just fine, though I haven’t tested every game after cleaning them all.)
I don’t have nostalgia for the N64 the way I do for some other old consoles. When one of my friends got one at launch, I went to his house to see it and he showed me Mario 64. I remembered how exciting it was to try Super Mario World for the first time and I was looking forward to seeing the next generation. I was disappointed, to say the least. (I didn’t say anything negative about it to my friend, though, since he seemed to like it. And I know it has its fans so I’ll leave it at that.)
A year or two later, my brother’s manager at work bought a N64 and didn’t like it so he gave it to my brother. My brother didn’t play it much and eventually gave it to me. At one point, I came across a video rental store that was going out of business and was selling all video games for next to nothing. So I was able to try out a bunch more N64 games that looked promising.
Most I didn’t care for. (For example, I’d try Castlevania again every so often, telling myself that it can’t be as bad as I remembered from the last time I tried it. I mean, it’s Castlevania. But each time I rediscovered that yes, it was that bad.)
Ocarina of Time, after it had a chance to grow on me, became a favorite. And, of course, as a Tetris Attack fan I loved Pokemon Puzzle League. (I was a little too old to have had any other exposure to Pokemon games, cards, TV shows, etc., so that game is the only reason I know anything at all about the franchise.)
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is rakugakids any good? i love the art.
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majora’s mask to me always seemed like it was posing the question “ok so what if you tried to make a more experimental game in this engine, would it be… terrible?”
very similar to why I was so lukewarm on obsidian’s bioware-and-bethesda-era work tbh
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In no order:
Super Mario 64
Paper Mario
Majora’s Mask
Star Fox 64
Turok 2
Perfect Dark
F-Zero X
Harvest Moon 64
Castlevania 64
And frankly there’s a lot of other games I adore but I’m limited to 9 by the OP I guess
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the best n64 game is wetrix
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WOW wee woo wee woo next time on sucks or it doesn’t
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I’ll always take the N64 bait even if I’m loathe to be lumped in with the “muh childhood” gamerisms that seem to dominate the wider cultural consensus regarding the console just cuz there’s too much well-crafted, innovative and genuinely weird stuff in addition to the party pleasers
the Custom Robo games are neat, stripped down Pokémon overworld chibi charm stuff but instead of kidnapping monsters you’re collecting parts for your customisable combat mech for snappy shootouts where you start cubed up, cannon shot and dice rolled to determine a starting stance and hey this arena has fish and bloopy footsteps what’s not to love
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