As someone who sometimes buys these, the price, when on sale, is often cheaper than buying wood and hardware to build my own outer cabinet, control deck and screen.
There’s trade-offs - the materials used aren’t quite as nice as I would pick, but then the included, already applied, art is very nice. And there’s the convenience of not having to plan out all the details like control layout, monitor, side art, top bezel.
To me, it’s really a piece of furniture, rather an affordable way to play the included games.
The CPU cores also only last about 5 years, for me. Which isn’t good, considering that a cheap modern computer will easily last 8-15 years.
I, personally, don’t give a ton of consideration to the included games. I’m really just buying the outer shell and licensed artwork. That’s what I’ll be looking at when not playing.
I’ll replace the innards with a Raspberry Pi when it dies, if not sooner. So I’ll play whatever games I want that fit the control scheme.
I also replace all of the controls, about half the time. The included controls outlast the CPU core, but don’t feel as nice to play on as a set that’s reasonably easy to replace them with.
Pandora’s Box is a game machine, with games pre-loaded. It tends to have thousands of arcade games pre-loaded.
It’s a popular choice for restoring actual full size arcade machines, with dead motherboards. It’s also an option to upgrade (or just revive from motherboard death) an Arcade1Up.
With some effort, a cheap PC will do the same job, but some folks like that they’re premade and ready to use.
My internet tech came to setup a new ONT and had a bunch of time to kill so we talked about hobbies, I guess he builds arcade machines and was showing me pictures of all the wiring and woodwork he did plus programming to get it all functioning and the custom pc inside. It looked like a ton of work.
I gave him some spare 12th Gen i7 mobo combos for him to use in his builds as he said he was looking for more parts and usually puts in a 3080 video card in each
The one thing I do miss about the N64 controller is the Z trigger on the back. It’s something that no modern controller has seemed to replicate. The closest I’ve seen is the Steam Deck, and even the triggers on the back of it aren’t quite the same.
The controller was weird, but they didn’t have a template yet for what a joystick controller should look like. Also, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that you’re never supposed to the D-Pad/Joystick at the same time. Left hand goes on the D-Pad handle for 2D games, Joystick handle for 3D (some third-party developers didn’t understand this though).
I say this as someone who grew up in that time period and has fond nostalgia: it has one of the worst libraries of any console. Depending on how you count (the different regions, the 64DD, what counts as a “game”, etc) there were 200-300 N64 games. That may seem like a pretty big difference between 200 and 300, but in comparison the PS1 had, on a conservative count, 4,100 games. If you want to say only 10% of PS1 games we’re good that’s still more good games than the N64 had games.
There are a handful of titles that will be remembered as some of the greatest games of all time. The two Zelda games, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Mario Kart, Paper Mario. Personally I like the Pokemon games too. But the list falls off pretty hard after that.
I love 3D platformers and collect-a-thons, but I could never get into Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, or Donkey Kong 64. They all feel rudimentary to me, similar to Jumping Flash on the PS1. Maybe it’s because the N64’s joystick was so uncomfortable and loose. Crash Bandicoot 1 came out in the US before Mario 64 did, and in my opinion it was more fun, looks better, sounds better, and holds up better today. And then there were two more Crash games, plus the Spyro trilogy which I consider even better.
There are “cult classics” for the N64 that I think are only remembered like that because of the lack of other options. Blast Corps for example is a unique and creative little game. It’s fun to play for a bit, but was that experience really worth the price of a whole game? It almost feels like it could have been a side mode in something like Twisted Metal.
There’s so many games it didn’t have. Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, and Final Fantasy are perhaps the most famous. Even a lot of games it did have were much worse- Resident Evil 2 and the Tony Hawk series are big examples where the cheap storage of the PS1 was clearly better. I remember I had a mediocre PS1 game called Battletanx that was pretty fun. Later on in high school my friend had a modded Xbox that emulated N64 games and I recognized that title, so we played through the co-op. It was still fun, but the textures were mostly replaced with flat colors and it was hard to see what was going on. I thought there may have been an issue with the emulation, or maybe the ROM was for some beta build or a hacked version, but… No, that’s just how it looked on the N64.
I didn’t mind the 3-prong controller. Honestly just having handles was already an upgrade over the SNES and Genesis. But the controller itself feels so cheap. The buttons all rattle around loosely and feel mushy and unsatisfying to press. The joystick is hard plastic, too tall, and flaccid. The plastic itself is a downgrade compared to its predecessors and to the Dualshock and even Saturn controller.
I still have my N64 and the handful of games I got for it. It had some of the highest highs of any console, but little else.
I always liked the ergonomics of the N64 controller. The recreation of those ergonomics using the Wiimote+nunchuk was one of my favorite things about the Wii lol
The nunchuck was sublime (when it worked), but the ergonomics of the wiimote were ridiculous. Pointing at the screen required an unnatural wrist angle that wasn’t sustainable for long gaming sessions, and trying to turn it horizontal to use as a standard controller was simply ass.
I doubt you’ll get any disagreement on your take for the controller. It was definitely an odd and experimental one, though I do remember thinking it was really cool looking when it came out. I was also 6 and not the best judge of functionality.
That having been said, the cartridge decision was in line with Nintendo’s recent plays at the time that had paid out for them in a big way, and that they continue to follow today. They had made a gamble on the Game Boy a few years prior that absolutely blew up in their favor. When the Game Boy came out, the Game Gear was it’s competitor and Game Gear had a color screen and a lot more screen real estate. Nintendo made the choice to focus on power efficiency (up to almost a half a day of playtime on four double-A batteries versus the Game Gear with about three and a half hours of play time on six double-A’s) and production cost reduction. Some of those design philosophies carried forward to the N64.
Additionally, something a lot of people seem to be unaware of these days is how absolutely stark the difference in loading times was between something like the PS1 discs and the N64 cartridge. I grew up on the SNES and N64 and when I first played a PS1 game the load times made me not want to touch a Sony console for quite a while.
Anyways, that’s my two cents. No disagreements here that cartridges held the N64 back in some ways but the tradeoffs made it an amazing system and miles above the competition for me, personally. Good gameplay and quality of life will always beat more power in my book.
Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.
I believe the N64 was huge in the US, Canada, and Japan, but PlayStation dominated that generation overall. I always preferred the PS graphics, the library, and the controller personally.
It’s kinda weird that the N64 seems to have a much bigger legacy. I think it’s because of Nintendo’s ability to make timeless games that are remembered more fondly than PS ones, but I would argue that games like Spyro, Tekken 3, GT2, and SotN aged just as gracefully as the N64 classics like SM64, Smash, Mario Kart, and OoT. Plus you can play them on a normal controller.
Hard disagree. Most trailblazing console ever with one of the strongest lineups of first/second party games we’ve ever seen. Yes there were some shoddy third party ports but you didn’t buy it for those.
People moan about the controller but forget it was the first time a joystick was used and the only real issue was the redundant left prong. Loved the feel of the Z button for shooting games coupled with the Rumble Pak.
It’s a really difficult console to go back to. The peak of the N64 was one of my personal video game peaks. I was in high school and staying up all night at a buddy’s house playing GoldenEye was the BEST.
Many years later, I tried to scratch that itch and buy a used console and some games. We played it for maybe a week, but it was rough, and we didn’t really get any value out of it.
It’s hard to describe how disorienting Super Mario 3D was the first time I played it. 3D open worlds were very new and we were discovering it in the only way available, with a three handed controller.
Now that 3D games have been refined, the N64 looks like a hot mess, with very few actually good games, but at the time, it was like an experimental space craft going to new worlds, we learned how to work it, and we appreciated the ride!
The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
I’ve been getting back into Guild Wars 2 lately! Nobara Linux has made the game run the smoothest it’s even been, and ReShade has it looking even better.
Always a great game to get back into. Or get into in the first place.
The latest patch was kind of disappointing and I hope they do tweak some of the issues, but I’m still looking forward to the new expansion reveal tomorrow. The teasers were pretty neat so far.
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Aktywne