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.
It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.
Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.
Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
Any older disk based console also required a memory card.
Pretty sure the controller was the first to have an analogue joystick.
I think a lot of the quirks of the N64 were because they were essentially first drafts. A lot of first, a lot of ground breaking tech.
Nobody knew what they were doing, at that time: nothing was wrong
What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
I never had many n64 games but I only remember one actually needing the external memory pak. Most first-party games could just save to the cartridge, it’s only a few third parties that cheaped out and didn’t implement that. Meanwhile the PS1 was memory cards only.
Also I don’t think any console had internal storage until the Xbox which introduced a hard disk while the GameCube and PS2 were still using memory cards!
Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.
IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).
In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?
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 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.
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