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Honestly, it's amazing that the N64 was able to do the things that it did from a technical standpoint. Reading about the hacks that the Rogue Squadron and Conker's Bad Fur Day devs did to get around the system's piddling textures is mind-blowing; look at Mario 64 compared to the systems last games and it's like night and day. It's still blurry as poo poo but considering the tiny cartridge sizes and weird hardware bottlenecks it's still incredible. The fact that Star Fox 64 managed to have full voice acting on a 10 MB rom  That said, the N64 was by and large the system that broke my life-long Nintendo fanboyism. In retrospect there were a lot of important and influencial games, but at the time (especially during the latter days of the console) it was a drip-feed of one or two decent Nintendo and Rare titles a year and almost nothing else; Nintendo Power during the summer of the early 00s was only a few dozen pages and they were stuck covering lovely GBC kart racing games because there was literally nothing else for them to talk about. It was even worse if you were an RPG fan, where you went from the SNES being a golden age to having Paper Mario and...Quest 64? loving Aidyn Chronicles, a game with a draw distance of about 3 feet and which was so broken and unfinished that you couldn't even revive characters who died in combat? Meanwhile your buddies were rocking a Final Fantasy every other year and tons of cool weird JRPGs and you could only hope that Earthbound 64 would actually get released one day (it didn't). Really, if you wanted anything other than platformers, racing games, and janky console shooters you were SOL with the N64.
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Aug 30, 2013 04:04
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:32 |
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Blast of Confetti posted:It gets in to This has been debunked time and time again but the talking point stays alive because nostalgic hardcores love to hate on cheevos. The truth is that it's a combination of games being more complex thanks to things like physics, console quality assurance standards being stricter, Hot Coffee making devs paranoid about unused content, game design philosophy shifting towards unlockables and rewards, and the simple fact that cheat codes were a marketing gimmick ("leak" cheat codes to Nintendo Power a month or two after your game comes out, watch sales spike again) that is no longer effective in the internet age.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:06
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territory, but I swear loving achievements are what killed cheat codes. We went from bobble head mode and Get All Guns to +10 points for finishing a cutscene. 
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WendigoJohnson posted:Then why the hell did they neuter the new reborn game genie? They tried to block it because it would allow people to be granted instant cheeves. With how big a focus there is on network integrity (including millions of dollars of digital purchases) I can kinda see why they wouldn't be keen on letting people directly loving with their consoles. There are countless reasons why the modern-day, always-online entertainment center slash game console would want to maintain integrity beyond imaginary game points.
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Sep 6, 2013 03:14
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C-Euro posted:I had one of these too and it worked like a dream. Plus mine had a turbo button so I was able to finally get through those bullshit mash-A sections in some games (Banjo-Tooie) I seriously have no idea how Rare expected people to beat the Canary Mary segments without autofire.
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Sep 6, 2013 05:13
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Vargs posted:Everybody seems to love Banjo-Tooie, but I can't say I was all that thrilled with it. The hub area didn't have half the charm of Grunty's Lair in BK1, and a lot of the levels felt like a convoluted mess (Grunty Industries, oh man). I still adore BK1 though. Still stands up today. Tooie suffered a lot from feature creep. Like, Kazooie had its fair share of minigames but Tooie had a ridiculous amount of then, many of which required skills completely separate from the main game (like the many FPS segments, racing games, turret segments, rail shooters, button-mashing contests, etc.) and were horribly balanced and frustrating either due to poor controls or just general incompetence. And the levels were definitely way too big and sprawling for their own good. Having to trek across a huge level each and every time you wanted to get to the one jiggy you hadn't earned was a total slog.
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Sep 7, 2013 05:01
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Well, it wasn't just the tribals, there was poo poo like having to get a gold on a really hard Floyd railshooting level, so you can get earplugs, that you can give to a bear, so you can get one of the twelve spaceship parts you need. The only hint towards this in the game was a bear that can't sleep. Good luck figuring that poo poo out without a guide! Basically, everything leading up to the second Mizar fight was almost like a NG+ type thing. Considering that Goldeneye 007 has a fully functional ZX Spectrum emulator hidden in its code I figure it was one guy's pet emulation project that wound up being worked into the full game for whatever reason.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:02
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What made it even worse was that most of the Nintendo 64's doldrums also occurred in that time between Pokemon and the GBA where almost nothing happened on handhelds as well. It's not like now with the WiiU where you're getting one or two console titles a year but the handheld offerings are good, the Gameboy Color was just an awkward 3-year stopgap to keep the aging Gameboy going until they could release a proper successor.
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Dec 18, 2013 09:43
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Synthetic Hermit posted:I couldn't afford full-priced games back in the day, and even used games cost a fair bit. So I would go and rent a few games every couple of weeks (initially, I rented the system too). I got acquainted with a large chunk of the catalogue this way, and by discovering hidden gems and savouring the best games, I never felt starved. And to fill time between rental sessions, I'd be reading about the Nintendo 64 in magazines. A lot of the third-party N64 games that were ports of PSX games that came out significantly later and/or were pared down to work on the N64, though. Just like the Gamecube. And now the WiiU  In retrospect it's pretty cool that they managed to cram THPS2 or Resident Evil 2 onto a tiny little cartridge. But at the time it sucked running into situations like, say, playing through a blurry port of Megaman Legends while my richer friends with both consoles had already played through and beaten Legends 2 the year before.
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Dec 18, 2013 11:51
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:32 |
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Much like the N64s cartridges, the GCN's dinky little discs held less than the standard format everyone else was using. Power has nothing to do with it.
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Dec 19, 2013 00:46
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