I’ve been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren’t so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that’s the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it’s made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I’ll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
I remember how many damn licensed games came out during that period. There was just almost a game for everything, it was nuts.
American Choppers had a game. Hannah Montana had several. Let's give Dukes of Hazzard a game, let's give Starsky and Hutch a game. Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
There were definitely some good licensed games!
TMNT Turtles in Time and The Simpsons are two amazing beat 'em ups.
The licensed games by Capcom on the NES are generally a safe bet for a good (if not great) game. Even into the 16-bit era, too.
The [X] of Illusion games on the Genesis are great kid-friendly platformers (Mickey Mouse games).
Plenty of great licensed games throughout the generations too. For something more “recent”, consider the success of the Lego games…which are often basically doubly-licensed.
I couldn’t care less for anything made before 2016. It’s all aged horribly. Every time I hear play shadow of the Colossus I vomit in my mouth. Ground breaking at the time, but an otherwise garbage game with okay story in a modern context.
And while not an era I’m going to stay on my soap box. Open world games without strong narrative and massive amounts of backtracking. Every open world game on the planet minus God of war(s), the first hzd (and this was pushing it), rdr2( pushing it), and cyberpunk has way to much shit spread out with little drive to finish narrative. You shouldn’t be backtracking into previous areas or sections in areas without some clever ass level design.
Multiplayer games in general don’t do it for me like they used to. These days I just want to get on and play a few missions in single player then hop off.
Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.
I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.
With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.
Same. I play games to enter a relaxation state after a long day at work. Playing a 45 minute cutthroat CS2 match with my friends where I have to be at attention constantly, while they’re all screaming at each other for being bad, isn’t exactly my idea of relaxation…
What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole "if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself" rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.
Same. It’s enough to team up with people at work so there’s no desire to do the same at home. I also don’t find grinding as much fun anymore. It used to be a fun way to spend time as a kid because we had too much time. Now, I don’t even pick a game which doesn’t have basic QoL features implemented.
For me it’s the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don’t hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.
I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for “the system,” but in reality they’re only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It’s not that the N64 has a top ten, it’s that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.
I’m sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef’s Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that’s the thing: It’s always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn’t know any better because that’s all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn’t butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn’t stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn’t make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:
Majora’s Mask
Star Fox 64
Jet Force Gemini
Donkey Kong 64
Diddy Kong Racing
Excite Bike 64
Paper Mario
Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door
Pokémon Stadium
Yoshi’s Story
Pokémon Snap
Mario Party
Felt at the time that there was always a high quality “AAA” release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.
Obviously a lot of them don’t stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven’t had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
But I don't see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it's legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.
There's a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.
But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that's where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).
Speaking of innovation, the N64 was the, if not first then what I would call the first modern, console to use thumbsticks. The Dualshock was the second controller made for the PlayStation.
Did proper 3D platforming with free camera exist before Mario 64?
Did third person adventure games exist before OoT and has anything drastically changed the formula since?
Not to mention all these games shipped fully built with no updates and amazingly few bugs.
It seems as though OP didn’t actually experience these things at the time so making a post about nostalgia for them is strange. Firing up an emulator and going “These games don’t hold up now.” is entirely missing the point.
By “platform fighter” do you mean a game where your goal is to increase damage to your opponents in order to knock them out of the arena, as opposed to draining a health bar?
If so, I don’t recall any before Smash, though my interest in pre-Smash fighters ended with the SNES.
I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.
Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.
I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.
I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.
Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.
If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.
On the Super Nintendo, I can name 20 great, all-time classic games if restricted to first and second party titles, so made by Nintendo and Rare. If you open me up to 3rd party titles I can probably come up with 100 all time classics like Lufia or Desert Strike.
On the N64, I’m going to struggle to make it to 20 all-time classics if restricted to first and second party titles, and I might make it to 25 if you let me have the whole catalog. Of the remaining 350+ games made for the system, some of them were unfinished garbage like Superman 64, some of them were badly designed crap like Quest 64, and a lot of them were competent but not memorable things like Extreme-G or The New Tetris, competently made and legitimately fun games we played, finished, put away and forgot about forever.
Us N64 owners tend to have very similar memories of the platform. There aren’t many hidden gems to rediscover.
Bringing up the topic of nostalgia, I think there are two audiences to talk to here: Those who had those old systems at the time they were relevant and those who weren’t.
I mentioned the game Extreme-G. That was a personal favorite of mine. I occasionally set up an old CRT and my old N64 and during my nostalgia trip Extreme-G and Extreme-G 2 both spend some time running. Just hearing the British cyberpunk announcer chick say “mull tee pull miss aisle” makes 25 year old neurons fire. And I also fully acknowledge that it was an above average 8.1/10 game, that it’s basically Mario Kart hosed down with Axe body spray, the Forsaken brand of 90’s drum & bass cyberpunk is a bit passe these days, and despite the very fast graphics kids these days are going to look at it and go “…okay. Pretty low resolution, isn’t it?”
And from that perspective, I don’t think the N64 aged well at all. Even Ocarina of Time, hailed for over a decade as the greatest video game ever made…is aging like a potato. It kept for a long time but it’s starting to show wrinkles and is distressingly wet on the bottom.
On c/games@sh.itjust.works or however you do that on Lemmy I answered the question “Was Wizardry a good series?” with “Was. Yes.” Because Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was phenomenal…in 1981. You just couldn’t get computer entertainment like that in the Carter administration. Not sure how well it holds up 43 years on.
I was a bit young when nes, and snes came out. I am still quiet fond of super mario world 2. But my favorite consoles, hands down are N64, PS1, and PS2. They were really just figuring out open world gaming back then, and they hadn’t yet figured our how to make every game constantly online, and/or gaming as a service.
I will say though, a lot of the old games I used to love don’t hold up as well playing them as an adult. They are either super hard, or have weird camera and controls, especially 007 GoldenEye for N64.
Another one that turned out to be tedious and hard is Zelda Ocarina of Time, which really surprised me. I thought the game was the greatest game ever as a kid.
I never played n64 (except maybe a couple rounds of Mario kart, but that may have been gamecube). I tried to play ZOoT, goldeneye, etc. and found the controls and camera awful. With no nostalgia for it, I was out in about 30 minutes (I think less on goldeneye be cause of that abomination of a controller).
You mean Nijimiss? I'm running the searches for that within Kbin Social, and not the opposite, and tinkering with the VPN, Kbin doesn't seem to have problems with EU IPs (isn't it from Poland? I have the impression I read something on that previously).
yes, i mean the Nijimiss site is actively blocking european IPs, which would include requests coming from kbin.social, and might be the root of your 500 errors. i noticed lemmy.world (finland) also cant make those requests to nijimiss.moe successfully.
my instance is not in europe, so it seems like it can make those requests without error.
Most of the content being federated to my instance from kbin appears to be mostly adverts for websites selling pharmaceuticals - usually advertising controlled substances.
After a couple from the same magazine(? kbin’s term?) I just block the community. But it’s pretty non-stop. I guess it’s not yet considered to be worth defederating, but yowsa.
Kbin got the same rexodus boost as lemmy but since then has many more atrophied communities and far fewer moderaters to do anything about it, hence spamalot.
I've only seen 1 or 2 pieces of spam in my feed and that was months back - interesting that you seem to be seeing more of it on a federated server. I only started blocking those magazines when I noticed the spam on desktop sidebars.
I just saw another one in random(@kbin.social), so I jumped in and scrolled back; there were only a couple in the past two days, but three days ago there was a series of several posts in a row (6? 8? Something like that).
I an not subscribed to any kbin magazines, so I don’t see them in my curated feed; they mostly show up in the uncurated “World.”
FWIW; you expressed curiosity, so I followed up with an example.
Unforcunately the admin\creator of kbin has personal issues and is missing. We need to leave, but that means migrating manually which is annoying. Too bad, there are some good idas here.
If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.
Looker - directed by Michael "Jurassic Park" Chricton. The first ever film to create 3D shading with a computer that produced the first ever CGI human character was the model Cindy (Susan Dey).
Westworld (1973) - also written by Michael Chricton
The Last Starfighter - another cheeseball 80s knock off of Star Wars. Also pioneered the use of CGI
Enemy Mine - Dennis Quaid bonds with an alien enemy and eventually helps him bear children. Directed by Wolfgang 'Neverending Story' Petersen. You have been warned.
The Quiet Earth - A scientist awakens to find himself alone in the world. In a desperate attempt to search for others, he finds only two who have their own agenda.
The Stuff - A delicious, mysterious goo that oozes from the earth is marketed as the newest dessert sensation, but the tasty treat rots more than teeth when zombie-like snackers who only want to consume more of the strange substance at any cost begin infesting the world. Co-stars Paul "Goodfellas" Sorvino
Miracle Mile - What would you do if you accidentally found out that the world was ending in a little over an hour? Features Anthony "ER" Edwards
All I want is a sci-fi series (any medium) that just plays in our solar system, without FTL, magical rocket drives, or aliens.
Just “what can humanity achieve in the far future, realistically?”
Cause even in 10000 years, we’re not going to have a star-system-spanning civilization (we may colonize other stars with hibernation or generation ships, but they’ll all be isolated by the distance). We’re not going to have much better rockets (cause the only way to move forward in a vacuum is to push stuff out the back).
But we could terraform and live on or around all planets in our solar system even with current tech, given enough time.
Expanse is very close, and I loved it, but it did have physics-breaking aliens which I didn’t care for much.
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