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 think you should try it. I think an hour is appropriate for a lot of the story beats if you have a decent memory, though maybe an hour and a half would be better suited to some of the more involved parts. A lot of this is affected by your reading speed. There’s a lot of reading.
For what it’s worth, I also played it in bursts, but probably something like 2 hr sessions. There’s a lot of rough, serious material in that game and I found it a lot to process at once, so I took breaks between sessions fairly often.
Glad to hear that. Although I’m not fast reader (not even in my mother tongue) I like reading when it is meaningful. I chewed through Planescape: Torment after all…
As for time, I’m not strictly limited to exactly 1 hour. It’s just I simply can’t play 5 hours straight like a teenager can… so one hour was an estimate. Sometimes it’s an hour, sometimes it’s two.
After all it looks DE should be ok and this short burst shouldn’t spoil it. Thank you.
I’m not sure if the above comment played on launch or after the Final Cut update, but there isn’t all that much reading in the game anymore. Almost all text is fully voice acted now. You still have to mentally absorb it of course, but I find it less taxing than reading, personally.
The book-like nature of it is spot on though; it’s better to treat it like an interactive novel where you choose the order in which you read its pages than as a traditional RPG.
Don’t be afraid to pick wild and weird dialogue options, and especially don’t be afraid to fail at things. The game pioneered a “fail-forward” design philosophy
Well, since I’m not native speaker I sometimes tend to miss some words/context without reading “subtitles” during voiceovers. On the other hand I’m glad there’s voiceover because it usually helps with immersion.
Fail to progress reminds me of my playthrough of Fallout 1 with very low INT character. Some conversation were priceless. It was usually things like “Mmmhm, unga bunga, huh” from my character and then sigh from the NPC like “Oh no, another village idiot…” I highly recommend to at least check some of these low int conversations on youtube - hillarious.
I think my favourite low-int detail was in Fallout 2. You come across the tribal Torr early on in Klamath and he speaks in grunts and broken sentences just like that if you talk to him with normal INT or above. However, if you talk to him with low INT the conversation completely changes into long eloquent sentences with advanced vocabulary for both him and you, matching the dialogue options unlocked at 10 INT. Amazing.
Carts lasted ages longer than discs. Sure for some actually responsible adult player discs would probably have been better but for preteens fighting with their siblings on who’s turn it is and what will be played…?
(We once ruined a PS2 game because we had it upright and it fell and the disc took such a deep scratch it never worked past that point again. I still feel guilty and feel I missed out on HP2. And that was 5 years after we got a N64, so PS1 discs would’ve been even more at risk.)
The controller is weird by modern standards , yeah, but it wasn’t too weird at the time. It’s sort of like two controllers in one, a more classic form like the snes and the basic ps1 controller and a more modern one with a joystick with the middle-handle.
There was no weirdness at all using it when it came out. The “basic” model (think xbox controller) only came out a bit later.
But nowadays? Idk, I don’t have one, but we tried playing Goldeneye 64 with my brother and man the control schemes were all over the place and I couldn’t for the life of me get “in the groove” and we used to play 4 player deatmatch a ton for years and I was ace at it.
I lived through it, and even as kids we all agreed the N64 controller was weird and illogical. But we got used to it and it was not a hurdle or a detriment to the console. You could tell if people had played before if they held the center grip or the left grip.
It was weird in a Nintendo way, yeah, but imo there was hardly anything illogical about it. The triple handle setup was reasoned in the way that if there was a more “classic” control scheme in the game, you might use the d-pad instead of the joystick (which was shit in the way it wore out though). Most games did use the joystick, but not all, and not all the time.
I think the reasoning was to have more adaptability in traditional Nintendo sort of way.
Also, the Dreamcast controller looks very weird as well, has less buttons and came out two years after.
GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.
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.
Every piece of hardware in a given budget is ultimately a product of compromise. 3D capabilities of N64 are way beyond what PS can offer - texture filtering and Z buffer just put Playstation to shame. No CD is equally embarrassing to N64. The controller… well, it was a weird time.
the ps2 came 4 years after the N64, a crucial time window of consumer audio chip evolution. but even more importantly, the N64 didnt even have a sound chip, relied on the CPU for it while competing for resources.
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.
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.
I guess what I meant a bit more specifically are things like buttons, the screen, cables, any daughter boards needed for like special lights, speakers etc. stuff beyond, as you mentioned.
It was designed so you could use left and right for a traditional 2D game, or middle and right for one of these newfangled 3D games that they didn’t know whether they’d catch on. GoldenEye also had a sort of proto-dual-stick layout where you could use left and middle!
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.
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