It is odd, I never really cared about OoT even when it was current and beloved so its reputation taking a bit of a tumble in certain circles does my heart a bit of good. I think it took me until my fourth attempt playing the game a decade or so after release for me to finally see my way through to the finish, I believe every other one had previously ended in the Goron City. It’s been way too long for me to remember the specifics of what that region did that killed my desire to play (even the time I got past it I recall it being a grind), but it did something.
I dug the heck out of Majora’s when I played it a year or two afterwards FWIW.
Feel exactly the same. I don’t want to fight with folks who legit love OoT, I have no beefs. I just never saw the appeal, even when it was new and I was the target age demographic for it. Whatever charms it has, I am blind to them.
Every time I play it, I feel like I am doing homework rather than going on an adventure
Yeah it’s not like I’m “this is awful, what the heck is wrong with you people?” over it, I recognize the craft and the fact that a lot of people dug it, it just always lacked that spark.
…I am saying that about the one or two people who mentioned Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth though, that game is utter trash whose sole redeeming quality may be that it is literally the only vertically scrolling shoot 'em up on the system.
i dont remember the last time i played oot it would have been literally so long ago i dont remember but i always found it like aggressively muddy looking and the cheapy n64 audio samples do absolutely nothing to endear me to any of the music that console produced… and i think zelda dungeons have usually been so like transparently lock and key it feels like busywork for its own sake. this is obvs reductive but its like… light two torches (the only things in the room you can interact with btw) to open a door to a room where u get the hookshot so you can grapple onto the designated hookshot points and that’s supposed to constitute a puzzle ig? it feels like transparently engineered to provide some vague feeling of accomplishment or progression in a way that is not actually particularly fun (unlike various jrpgs…)
like if mgs1 and vagrant story and stuff like that are these audiovisually lush sensual experiences which is something i obvs rate pretty highly on rn… oot feels like maybe a gesture in that direction while lacking the actual swag they required to pull that off.
i dont think i hate it but it just feels soooo mid… maybe id replay it tho esp. if i had an n64 controller for pc around… im certain to have asked this but is there a good one??
also a game having a general sense of wide scope obvs does nothing for me if my feelings on it being a strike against elden ring to an extent i see it as lesser than older souls games is any indication… like majora’s mask feels like the focused experience the overbroadness of oot was prototyping
Complete opposite for me. I hate the dungeons in MM. filled with annoying Got You! enemy encounters and they are all composed of square boxes. Had a much better time with the personality of the OoT dungeons even if those are a lot of block pushing.
This thread is going to get me to play through with Master Quest.
In a seperate post letting everyone know almost every big N64 game has a randomizer with lots of QoL improvements.
I watched this whole playthrough while sick and it did cure me of wanting to play DK64 but also wow that is certainly a better game than the one I played in 2000.
For the newer members make sure to check out the last 3 times we had this thread as a podcast:
Zeldas 64 without all the dungeons and hero of time stuff, just the ambient mood zones with their clockwork characters and jingle as you enter rooms and yes nightsmearishly textured emptiness that a lot of people criticise it for, that’s a game I could love, more uncanny emptiness!
It’s very different in tone but I had the same affection for the dollhouse dioramas of Dr. Slump, playing for the first time two years ago (and Poinie’s Poin for that matter) spaces that are simplistically set-dressed Bonsai tree-like and reused over and over in different contexts, sometimes with characters and a thing to do and then sometimes abandoned and imbued with an evocative uselessness. I bet that Earthbound 64 woulda been great…
some fine hangouts
and this one’s been on my phone since…2017 which probably marks the last time I attempt to beat Majora’s Mask (a second time). I like receiving Wish You Were Here postcards from the back of my brain about it but don’t care to slog through it ever again
That Body Harvest promises so much and can deliver only such stiff, indistinct, fog-shrouded versions of it really helped stick it in my mind. It’s not good, per se, but it’s suggestive
There’s a late PSX shooter, Terracon, that kind of plays like Jeff Minter took over a failing Body Harvest project. It’s more empty than Body Harvest and unconvincingly papers over it with late '90s house. You climb up to the first hill and glowing letters spiral out to briefly say,
If you play n64 games in an emulator upscaled like I imagine most people do then it absolutely is the ugliest console to have ever existed. I don’t do that though so of course ps3 overtakes it for the crown there
it definitely wasn’t the rich kid console though. it was the “oops I talked my parents into the wrong console” console because last time you picked the genesis and it ended up just being a sonic machine and now you have mario 64 machine
Some OOT temples are a skoosh too long in places and I nearly went mad thanks to the creepy music in some. This track just makes me constantly wanna use the toilet.
I enjoyed the game back in the day and played Master Quest as well but I don’t think I’d super enjoy a playthrough now.
feels truly perverse as an angle of appreciation but i like the cutscenes in ocarina of time a lot… straining for maximum atmosphere with these little puppet people who often seemed able to hardly animate or emote, trying to make up for that by making the camera shots these ever more dramatic and distant tableaux. i feel like for later games they found a range of animation they were more comfortable with (mild cartooniness for the serious characters balanced out with more consistent exaggeration for everyone else) but it hadn’t quite settled yet so there are all these scenes of characters standing stock still and 10 ft apart, forced into reciting at each other more elliptically than usual due to the weird theatrical constraints, and then at the end of each scene link just abruptly rotates and does his frantic little jog away. one of those things where awkward execution gives the whole thing a yearning quality that partly redeems the self-seriousness it was meant to convey.
also the gossip stones were cool,
i liked goldeneye / perfect dark / jet force gemini… i guess if i was trying to pick out things that were specific to the n64 as a console one of them might be the way nintendo fussiness kind of made all the shooters take place in the same askew, serial-numbers-filed-off dimension as the snes wolfenstein port. perfect dark is the mangled snes wolfenstein version of some more coherently ““cyberpunk”” fps, jet force gemini is the snes wolfenstein port of starship troopers etc
as a lad i got a playstation way too early, the original model with rca outputs and a bad laser, then a pc later on. the pc stuff at the time was just way cooler than anything on consoles to me back then, proper sneered at the idea of playing goldeneye on a controller vs quakeworld
between that and having a snes in the uk previously, where you just sort of took it as a given that anything cool wasn’t going to come out locally n64 just never really got a look in with me at all, so i first played oot on the gamecube reissue after ~5 years of exposure to online americans saying it was the greatest thing and was like “is that it?”
3ds port went down a lot easier, only time i finished it
I had Body Harvest when I was a kid and it blew my mind. This whole big world to freely explore! Hop into any vehicle! Blow up aliens that explode in cool ways!
And the world felt full of things to discover despite being mostly barren. Cruising around on a motorbike and stumbling upon an airfield! Finding a island out in the ocean! Breaking into area 51 and getting a UFO! Getting a combine harvester and shredding zombies! Luring kids to safety with an ice cream truck! It ruled. It felt like being in an over-ambitious b-movie, especially since the game itself was over-ambitious (but still pulled a surprising amount off).
Oh man, and it felt so EPIC YO if you fucked up and let too many humans get harvested and one of those big demon dudes spawn. I remember really liking how the aliens felt like they had roles to fill, like different kinds of ants, and you had to deal with their onslaught a certain way because of that. The attacks felt ORGANISED which really did a lot to suck you in.
I mean, it was sure janky as hell, especially the on-foot controls. And it has a TERRIBLE save system. But I loved the game to bits. This was definitely a spiritual predecessor to the 3D GTA games, yeah.
