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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.
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.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
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....
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.