It’s very neat and very boring
They’ve got all the verve and showmanship of hotshot young programmers showing off, they’re happy to undercut whatever they’re trying to build with a cheeky comment directly to the player, they paper over all the technical impossibilities of what they’re doing by making the game faster, louder, and faster, but it’s ultimately quite repetitive and drawn out and doesn’t have any truly deep weirdnesses.
i guess we have to agree to disagree because my reflexive answer is a flat “what no theyre not” but im guessing we’re both going off memory
i found the room shapes/sizes pretty diverse even if there are less big set piece rooms than Ocarina, and the vertical design is pretty noticeable
and i simply dont remember any bullshit ambushes. maybe dark souls 3 colonized that part of my game memory lol
edit the big thing Ocarinas dungeons have going for them is those big set piece rooms and moments. Like the giant dodongo skull in the second dungeon, the ship that travels down the ghost river in the shadow temple, etc. The dungeons tend to be more linear (shadow temple is practically a straight line) and held together with standard box pushing and torch lighting, but visually/thematically theyre VERY memorable no question. (and the music is better)
Majora dungeons have a bit more anonymity but imo make up for it by being a little more nonlinear, kind of asking you to work out the space more actively. I remember especially liking the ocean temple for that reason. They also demand you to use the mask powers frequently. and the mask swapping is its own inventory problem, but i really like that all 3 enhance link’s freedom of movement in some way that the dungeons try to play with, since that engine is otherwise so stiff and plodding
again this is all half remembered, half based on watching some lets plays for a couple minutes lol but i can respect having a preference, is my gist
If some mid af PS1 game like Gungage came out on N64 some Scott the Woz looking youtuber would be telling me it was sorely overlooked and it’d fetch $100 at a pawn shop
Okay I’ll play nice. N64 games have the best beta content. People threw away a lot of stuff in those scrappy early 3D eras and maybe part of it is unique to the development process of Nintendo and their partners. Every couple years I go on The Cutting Room Floor and they’ve somehow found more Ura Zelda and Goldeneye stuff. Magical.
is pretty sick playing it again last year. just about gesturing towards an All Range Mode Space Harrier at its best but it needs like 100x the ant-lining into the air drones and on the ground grunt hordes to gun down and the framerate is already soiling itself as is
Good big empty spaces splashed with not-quite-big-enough textures and coloured lighting with the trademark Rareware faked-in bump mapping (maybe some real ones too, remember that shiny one on the dump truck (Backlash) in Blast Corps? what a treat in 1997)
It was in the back half, through a homework-sized hole that my soul left my body. I made sure to take care of the hundreds of Tribals along the way ASAP (love that you can kill them “by mistake” and also that some enemies will execute them if you take too long once the shit hits the fan, like, Ewok Hostage Crisis + run and gun = all the game you need really) but forgot about the 12 spaceship parts, 3 of which I had and I’d already revisited each level at least twice as different characters. I beat Mizar back in the day ok, I have nothing to prove 20 years later, see you sometime closer to never JFG o7
and the man himself…
speaking of N64 emulation, is there a decent USB controller in N64 shape for PC?
JFG is good but you should love yourself and play it on Rare Replay where it has a framerate and the controls it was seemingly going for originally
yes even the part where the game goes “hey fuck you find everything”. that part is especially good.
this is the most in-depth i’ve seen on the current options from a big majora’s mask modder
iirc his takeaway is:
only the nintendo reissue is the three-handle shape but you might be able to find older options used? not sure
alternatively, you can use an original controller with a raphnet or mayflash adapter
Rare Replay is like the only eighth generation console game I own lol and yet I still opted for the original like a sicko (I like the controls) will give it a spin one of these days
edit: oh and Bloodborne those are the two
imagine how I feel, I bought RR for JFG
still lovin’ that they didn’t edit out the N64 banners on Mizar’s racetrack
yeah the rich kids console thing is super weird to me. I was by far the poorest kid in my friends group and definitely in the bottom 1 percent of money at school and my mom got me an n64 because it was a hundred dollars cheaper than the playstation and always had some kind of bundle. all my friends never let me live down that I had the ‘ghetto’ shitty console but they shut their fucking mouths when we had four player kart racing and quick load times. I still was really bitter and angry about being on the wrong side of the console wars so I quit home games ‘forever’ after playing my three games to death and didn’t touch a console for about 5 years (I’d still go to the arcade)
I didn’t fall in love with the n64 til I lived in oakland and was able to afford /acquire all the n64 stuff I missed out on
i know this is the n64 thread but i’ve meant to ask this before: was ps1 piracy as ubiquitous in the states as it was here? none of the kids at my school bought retail games
I got a modchip in like 1997 to play a dragon ball z game and then I just burned everything to CD-Rs once I got a cd burner in 1998 but it was actually not very common for the PS1 in the US
an adapter! that seems like perhaps my best choice. i know the price on the Nintendo-issued one isn’t actually obscene, but it somehow feels like it is
mayflash/raphnet stuff has always been weirdly underappreciated imo — 8bitdo/repro stuff has finally gotten very good in the past several years but there was like a solid decade when the only sensible PC gamepad solutions were mayflash dongles or OEM xbox hardware
I think that when it comes to the N64 Zelda games, everything about them is incredible, EXCEPT for the dungeons. The dungeons are the chore you do so you can get back into the world exploration and side quests.
I am surprisingly sympathetic to this view
the rich kid console was having a ps1 in 1995 before anyone with any sense knew they were even worth getting yet. the sony name was not yet proven!
Imagine being a kid and you have a rich friend and you go over to his house one day because he wants to show you a new thing called PlayStation and you go into his living room and it’s a video game console set up upside down.
Yeah it’s kind of mind blowing that it ended up being a real video game console and not like, another CD i