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.
Okay, from the picture it looked like the plate was missing or it had a landlord special paint job or something.
I’m designing a dining room cupboard/hutch and looking around the internet for pictures to draw from I started noticing details about them, like how I can give you a checklist of things that will be on them in pictures on the internet, and if there is an outlet visible in the shot it will somehow be negligently built/maintained.
Stardew Valley was released in 2016. My understanding is it took 10 years to make (Eric Barone worked at a movie theater, and when he wasn’t at work he was working on the game) and he’s been supporting and releasing new content for the game for 8 years now. The Wiki pages for the characters contain the artwork for the characters he’s drawn, and redrawn, and redrawn over the years.
He basically won the cozy farming genre, it’s time to move on, for his own health if nothing else.
I’m aware of good old fashioned multiplayer where an average Pentium 2 rig has enough grunt to host a multiplayer session and be one of the client machines, obviously games of that scale should be able to be run by enthusiasts. I’m talking about, what if something like WoW shuts down?
I would also wonder how this would work with MMOs where the server side, both in processing power and in bandwidth, is not insignificant. I mean I suppose “are required to publish the code, no requirement that it’s feasible for others to run” but…yeah.
I think you can get there in TF2 when considering subclasses via weapons loadouts. Demoknight for instance is a completely different play style than normal pipe/sticky demoman.
The water temple has the problem of being too self-similar, the main body of which being a three story tall donut shaped room with doors in the four cardinal directions, so it’s difficult to keep track of which series of unremarkable rooms are in which direction. The interface was kind of fucky because you had to change boots a lot in the menu, and can only use the hookshot for combat while walking underwater for some reason against those clam creatures that you have to be quite close to to get them to open, but farther away than that to hit.
There are a couple keys hidden in “why would there be a room there?” kind of places so it’s a pain without the compass.
The Dark Link miniboss setpiece is very cool, but the fight itself feels too bullshit. It doesn’t feel like meeting an equal in swordfighting skill and having to best him, it feels like “most normal attacks just straight up don’t work, cheese it with magic and/or the hammer.” Boss fight is kind of meh as well.
The core of the dungeon’s puzzle aka learn how to use the water to traverse this place started off as a cool idea but…Let’s face it Ocarina of Time is actually starting to age poorly and the Water Temple was the first blemish.
On a completely different subject which I think is related: My parents want a cabinet and hutch for their dining room. I’m designing and building it. Looking on the internet for ideas, I like how that cornice is done. Can’t do those legs the way I’m going to build the side rails" type thing, I notice a trend: There is basically no documentation on the internet that anyone actually uses dining room hutches to store things they frequently use. Those that aren’t just blank to market the cabinet itself are crammed with random knickknacks or worse the White Woman’s Instagram tableau. A scroll sawn cursive word, some brand new ceramic containers with words printed on them in that thin tall font, especially a teapot with TEA written on it in which tea will NEVER be made, a statue of a pig, an old sifter, a fake plant…
I hate the idea of such a large, complicated and expensive piece of furniture used as a trophy case or a diorama of basic bitchery. In the words of George Carlin, “spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need.”
So…I’ve lost count of how many Mission Impossible movies they made. At some point between 2014 and 2016 I think they made one, because for hundreds of youtube videos in a row I was shown an ad that had this irritating song that went “Ready or not, here I come” in a really nasally voice? Apparently advertising a Mission Impossible movie.
I have refused to watch any Mission Impossible movie, or any movie starring Tom Cruise made before or since, and to a degree the spy/action thriller/guy intensely running genre ever since. Because of how much they chose to irritate me about it.
If part of your strategy is to beat me into submission, I’m going to avoid your entire market segment forever.
Meanwhile a lot of my favorite games I never saw actual advertisements for, even if those ads existed. I learned about them from word of mouth, watching streamers/youtubers, or searching for “games like [game I enjoy]”
I categorically rule out a lot of big business practices because the era when “Hey you could make a fun game about flying an X-Wing” is over and the era of “Our business strategy leverages marketable properties in a variety of monetization verticals” is coming to a middle. So I tend to buy from smaller studios or solo developers.
Didn’t the NES produce non-square pixels? Like pure data wise the screen was square but at some point in making it NTSC it gets stretched horizontally to 4:3?
A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.
Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.
Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.
My bottom three:
Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.
Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.
I was starting to get nostalgic for an old game called Riddle of the Sphinx, found out there’s a remaster of it on Steam…that is apparently put out by one of those shady fucking churches, so nope.
I’ve been playing the hell out of Satisfactory lately, I’ve had the game beat for awhile but I’m buying all the trophies. I want to FULL CLEAR the game in early access before the 1.0 release and I’m building up coupons for the Golden Nut.
When I think back on my time with AntiChamber, I don’t really think about the ending. I really think of the beginning up through getting the green gun. It starts leaning farther into the direction of Talos Principle or Portal at that point.
To me the game was about the experience of coming to terms with this strange new world you’ve found yourself in, and the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY wall tiles. It’s impressive how long the developer managed to keep that schtick up.