There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn’t butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn’t stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn’t make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
Comment on What are some eras of gaming that you've stopped feeling nostalgic for?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 6 months agoI agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for “the system,” but in reality they’re only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It’s not that the N64 has a top ten, it’s that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.
I’m sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef’s Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that’s the thing: It’s always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn’t know any better because that’s all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 months ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Can you list 20 great first party games on any platform?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.
Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.
I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.
I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.
Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.
If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I agree, not common, which is why I don’t understand the “only 20 or so great games” take.
snownyte@kbin.social 6 months ago
There's a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.
But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that's where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This doesn’t track, Rare were banging out so many good games and as others have mentioned the Star Wars games were also awesome.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Speaking of innovation, the N64 was the, if not first then what I would call the first modern, console to use thumbsticks. The Dualshock was the second controller made for the PlayStation.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yep, chuck Rumble Pak in there too.
Did platform fighters exist before Smash?
Did proper 3D platforming with free camera exist before Mario 64?
Did third person adventure games exist before OoT and has anything drastically changed the formula since?
Not to mention all these games shipped fully built with no updates and amazingly few bugs.
It seems as though OP didn’t actually experience these things at the time so making a post about nostalgia for them is strange. Firing up an emulator and going “These games don’t hold up now.” is entirely missing the point.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have conveniently forgotten:
Majora’s Mask Super Smash Bros. Star Fox 64 Jet Force Gemini Donkey Kong 64 Diddy Kong Racing Excite Bike 64 Paper Mario Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door Pokémon Stadium Yoshi’s Story Pokémon Snap Mario Party
Felt at the time that there was always a high quality “AAA” release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made.
Obviously a lot of them don’t stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven’t had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time IMO.
Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You seem to have forgotten Shadows of the Empire too!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Thousand Year Door was a GameCube game.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Good point.
moody@lemmings.world 6 months ago
Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)
How many third-party games were any good?
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
We referred to Rare as a “second-party” developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.
snownyte@kbin.social 6 months ago
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Star Wars Rogue Squadron?
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer?
Redacted@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yes my list was not exhaustive either and tried to focus on exclusives to make the point.