The Decade of the N64

1up is running a piece looking back at the ten years since the N64's launch. The start of Nintendo's slump, the N64 still managed to come out of the console wars with some great and lasting memories, like GoldenEye, Smash Bros., and Ocarina of Time. From the article: "Nintendo certainly gave players plenty of time to get all 120 stars. By the end of 1996, the N64 still had fewer than a dozen games, and even that anemic library was glutted with mediocrity like Mortal Kombat Trilogy and Cruis'n USA. Sure, there were gems like Mario Kart 64 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and there was the stubborn optimism of Nintendo of America President Howard Lincoln (who insisted N64 games sold more than 250,000 per title), but industry commentators were starting to see through the emperor's clothes. Meanwhile, Sony was turning up the heat with massive blockbusters like Final Fantasy VII." The Press the Buttons blog has some additional commentary on Nintendo's first 'meh' console.

Comments

Uh Perfect Dark?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those other games mentioned in the summary are great, but Perfect Dark was the best action game for the N64, more so then Goldeneye. 5 page article and only one mention of it.

Re:Uh Perfect Dark?

[Captain Spam]

Nothing could truly perpare you for unlocking darksims, eagerly loading them into the next slo-motion multiplayer game and watching them spin their torso around and shooting at you while continuing to climb a ladder.

If I recall something Rare said before on their letters page, they specifically made the Dark Sims to be unfair. Like, they could shoot from ladders like that, they could run faster than you could, they could fire without reloading, they could get infinite ammo at their whims, they could see through walls, etc. And I could swear I once saw a Dark Sim that I killed simply fade away and immediately respawn elsewhere, instead of flailing backward and taking a few seconds to respawn like any other player/sim.

I kinda liked that. If you're so l33t at PD that you can take on anything, it'll give you something blatantly unfair to deal with. Except on that same letters page, they still admitted that none of the sims of any skill knew how to deal with explosions (either firing or reacting to an explosion in progress).

That's another thing about the N64. They had an interesting amount of quirks to their games. Or maybe that was just Rare's N64 days. Ah, fun.

As Someone Who Still Owns One

[aarmenaa]

I really thought the N64 was a fun system. For many years I got a game for my birthday and a game for christmas, and built up a pretty decent library. Honestly, I can't say that the single player was worth repeating in many of those games. But, the multiplayer almost always shined, at least with the games I bought. Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Smash Brothers, Starfox, Perfect Dark, and more were just really, really fun when you could get lots people to play with you, which was easy for me since I had 3 siblings.

The system did have it's problems, but every system does. The controller was "weird" at best, and it was pretty expensive. It was also hard to separate the crap from the games you'd want to buy. I managed about 20 games before the system went out of date, but man it took some looking. You also saw a lot of experimental games on the N64, which were later refined for next gen systems. Harvest Moon wasn't a great game, but it was intresting. I've heard there's a Gamecube version of the game. I'd like to see how that shaped up sometime.

Then again, the N64 was the last console I bought. I didn't buy a gamecube, any portable systems, nothing. So, I may be little biased towards the 64, especially since I still play it. I have a computer. It's not the fastest, but the video card cost me less than a console and graphics look at least as good. I don't count the entire cost of the computer, because the rest of the hardware I'd have anyways.

Ahh, nostalgia.

[Anonymous Freak]

Has it really been 10 years since I was in college? Wow.

I remember the day the N64 came out, my roommates and I rented one (and Mario,) and played Mario non-stop until we finished it. Different roommates would take over as others had to go to classes. But we finally finished it. Four days later. We played through the night, a few of us even skipping a class or two. That game was played for about 96 hours straight. It was cool.

Hopefully Wii can bring back that feeling.

My First and Last Console

[LeglessMoof]

N64 was my first console ever, and also my last (although I am considering buying a Wii). I played my fair share of games for SNES, GameCube, and PlayStation 2 at friends' houses but I never owned any of those systems. I bought the N64 a couple weeks after launch. As I was only 12 at the time, my friend and I pooled our money together to buy one and he had to trade in his SNES. (Eventually we pooled our money to buy a 2nd one so we each had one.)

So perhaps I am a bit biased in my opinion, but I always thought N64 was an underrated system. Who could forget such great games as:

Super Mario 64
Starfox 64
Goldeneye 007
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Super Smash Bros.
Donkey Kong 64
Mario Kart 64
Perfect Dark
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

I also got many hours of enjoyment out of the following games, even though most people considered them to be mediocre:

Mario Party 3
Mario Tennis
Waverace 64
Blast Corps
Gauntlet Legends
Diddy Kong Racing
Misson: Impossible
NFL Blitz
Quest 64

With the exception of NFL Blitz and Gauntlet Legends, all of those titles were exclusive to N64. In the past 10 years, I have only seen 4 non-PC games that would make me want to give up my N64 for a different console:

Guitar Hero (PS2)
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PS2)
Super Smash Bros Melee (GameCube)
Mario Party 7 (GameCube)

I am not going to deny that there weren't other good console games out there, but I certainly wasn't exposed to them....

Re:Fitting that it's been 10 years.

[grapeape]

I dont think it was so much that Nintendo's quality went down as much as what gamers wanted went from gameplay to pretty graphics. Paper Mario was a great game but compare it to the pretty cinematics of Final Fantasy 7 and which one would you pick? I would even be willing to say that the majority were willing to lower their standards a bit for prettier games. Sony was able to build enough hype of the playstation and a general belief that if a game is bigger in size its better in quality and continued to build on that with the PS2.

This generation is IMHO the first one in a long time where they are all starting out even, 3rd party support is bigger than its been in a long time for Nintendo but they still have the half true-half false tarnished legacy of the past, Sony has brough itself back to the pack with its pricing scheme, delays and lackluster launch titles and the 360 is still plodding along with all the baggage that the Microsoft name lends to the console. I really think this is going to be the first true "console war" since the SNES vs Genesis vs Turbografx days.

Innovation

[marshallh]

This article seems to miss the point that the N64 introduced a number of new things that Sony shamelessly copied - take the Rumble Pak and analog stick for example.

The games are different from the PSX - Mostly "meh" titles, and maybe a dozen games that were to die for.

I'm currently developing homebrew for the N64, and from a hardware standpoint, the design is very forward-looking. The RCP 3d coproccessor was fully upgradable - the game transferred microcode to the RCP to tell it how to draw polygons, for example. This was a very sensible design choice - as Nintendo optimized their Fast3D microcode, you got better speed in the game you were developing.
Unfortunately, Nintendo neutralized that advantage by not making microcode tools available until it was too late - some developers did some amazing things by writing their own microcode (Boss Games, and Rare for example)
It was a pretty solid design, the only glaring limitation I can think of is the small (4KB) texture cache and high memory latency (making the N64 fill rate limited, instead of polygon limited.)

It's a shame Nintendo didn't make it easier to develop for - it seems they kinda pulled a Sega with it, and lost some 3rd party support. In any case, it's quite an adventure to learn about.

I still disagree.

[justchris]

I had both a PS1 and an n64. The n64 clearly had more rally good games than the PS1 did. The PS1 just had more games, and, specifically, it hard RPGs and Racing games, something the n64 significantly lacked. I don't actually like racing sim type games (I prefer arcade style racers), so half of that issue never bothered me.

To this date, I think the n64 is probably the console I had the most fun with. The quality of the games was superb. PS1 was great fora single player experience, but I was still in university at the time, in a house full of roommates, so the n64 got at least 20x the play time of the PS1.

There were genres that were invented on the n64, as well as techniques that redefined existing genre's. There still has not be an FPS on any console that compares to Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, either one. This is not nostalgia speaking, I still play these games occasionally. For all the framerate issues and decreased graphics, they are just that good.

In some ways, I think GC was more disappointing. It hasn't produced nearly as much that has invigorated console gaming. All the innovation and newness has been on the PS2, with GC and Xbox presenting a lot of the same old, same old. Of course, I suppose that's to be expected, the PS philosophy is to keep throwing rice at the wall, and eventually something will stick.

And now, in handhelds, the DS is doing what the n64 and PS2 did before it, it remains to be seen which of the 3 upcoming (or 2 upcoming +1 existing) consoles will actually move videogaming forward.