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Ode To The N64

FromEquestria2LA

Well-Known Member
I love the N64. I remember getting it as an 10 year old in Christmas 1997; and spending hours on Mario Kart and Mario 64. It's only now that I'm starting a good-sized N64 game collection; many games are cheap, but my holy grails are the Mario Party games.

Does anybody have any fond memories of the N64?
 
I only had an N64 way after they were a thing, because I liked having old consoles. My friend had one on launch, and my main memory is of the godawful 'RugRats' game she had for it. Truly, it was a terrible, terrible game. If memory serves, it was kind of like a 'Mario Party' rip off, but 'RugRats'...
 
The Wrestling games were amazing, WCW Vs NWO: World Tour and Revenge, and then WWF Wrestle Mania 2000 and No Mercy, No Mercy in particular was excellent and is still considered by most fans to be the benchmark of even modern wrestling games.

And Golden Eye was indeed cool, I never did complete more than the first few levels though.

Same with the Super Mario games, although generally I don't get on with driving games so I never bothered with Mario Kart 64.
 
I love the N64. I remember getting it as an 10 year old in Christmas 1997; and spending hours on Mario Kart and Mario 64. It's only now that I'm starting a good-sized N64 game collection; many games are cheap, but my holy grails are the Mario Party games.

Does anybody have any fond memories of the N64?

Yes - Wave Race [still play this on VC], Jet Force Gemini, Mischief Makers, Mario Golf all favourites. Love Mario Party too despite it being very unfair at times taking all my stars..
 
Golden eye was the only game that interested me. Mario Kart was good fun. But that golden eye got me hooked into gaming. I also like Abe's Odyssey oddworld on PS as well.
 
Mario kart... so many hours lost.

Also Tetrisphere... it deserved better ( I need a Swotch port)

Only Mario Party 1 was worth playing....

There was other games such as Goldeneye, Starfox, Paper Mario, Bomberman etc...
 
The N64 was an interesting console. I consider it the beginning of what I call "weird Nintendo". The company has this tendancy to move forward with wild and risky innovations while being stubbornly stuck in the past on other points. Case-in-point: The N64 had a bizarre controller, which many regard as horrible, despite the fact it revolutionized the industry by (re)introducing the analog stick. Meanwhile, they stuck with cartridges while everybody else was switching to optical media, a decision for which they would pay dearly.

I still love the N64. It had a fantastic and innovative library, and the while the controller may not have been suited to most third party titles I made perfect sense for first party games. I have many fond memories of afternoons spent in my basement playing Golden Eye or Super Smash Bros. with friends.
 
The N64 was an interesting console. I consider it the beginning of what I call "weird Nintendo". The company has this tendancy to move forward with wild and risky innovations while being stubbornly stuck in the past on other points. Case-in-point: The N64 had a bizarre controller, which many regard as horrible, despite the fact it revolutionized the industry by (re)introducing the analog stick. Meanwhile, they stuck with cartridges while everybody else was switching to optical media, a decision for which they would pay dearly.

I still love the N64. It had a fantastic and innovative library, and the while the controller may not have been suited to most third party titles I made perfect sense for first party games. I have many fond memories of afternoons spent in my basement playing Golden Eye or Super Smash Bros. with friends.
They were always weird and risky.

Hell the NES was laughed out of CES 1985, largely due to the controller. NES controller was mocked for being too dumbed down and simple. I mean it only had a newfangled input called a D-pad and four buttons, while the competition had more buttons and used joysticks ( not analog sticks).

The SNES controller was lambasted for having a weird gimmicky controller because it had 4 face buttons in a diamond shape and L and R shoulder buttons. Saga, NEC/Hudson, 3DO, Panasonic and the other hardware makers ran marketing and PR stuff against the SNES controller. He'll even third parties, especially EA decried the controller to the press.

The N64 controller was purposely designed to give you both traditional 2D controls and the new Analog controls (joysticks are different). Many third parties, Sega and Sony rejected the analog stick as another one of Nintendo's gimmicks and they claimed it would destroy traditional gaming. Third parties openly refused to adopt analog sticks for the first few years because they really thought it be another failed gimmick. The major third parties such as Square, konami, EA etc... tried to get Nintendo to drop the analog stick from the controller.

The analog stick was really that controversial in 1995 (that's when Nintendo unveiled it and was planning to launch Nintendo 64 before fall 1995).

The reason why N64 stuck to cartridges was due to following reasons:
  1. Royalties: They had 4 choices for CD-ROMs and drives at that time. They where Phillips (Dutch), RCA (U.S.), Panasonic (Japanese), Sony (Japanese). These 4 companies held the patents on technology at that time. The first three had no real interest in gaming and didn't want to invest any real resources in gaming. Sony wanted in. Sony when negotiating with Sega demanded the bulk of the profits for all software and consoles sold using CD technology. This why Sega said no. Sony when negotiating with Nintendo, slipped in a clause last minute giving Sony full profits from all software sold on CDs and they also would have gotten the hardware profits too. Sega paid a pretty penny to license the CD technology to develop their drives for Sega CD and Saturn that cost them dearly.
  2. Load time: Miyamoto did not want load times in MARIO 64 and his other games. Well he was right, load times were awful due to how slow early CD drives were at that time.
  3. Control: Sony had fully content control of any game released on PS1 due to the modifications Sony made to the CDs. They also had the power to control how many units were produced. Sony denied tons of games in each market just over them being 2D alone. Many more were denied due to "adult" content. Nintendo also controlled the cartridge supply and content.
The reality was of you wanted a CD based gaming system in the in first half of the 1990s you either had to agree to Sony's harsh terms or break the bank to license the technology and develop your own CD drive.

The systems that used CDs not named PlayStation, made little money or bled money due to the costs of licenses of patents and development/manufacturing of the drives.

Sega struggled to make profit with Saturn, Panasonic lost money with their two CD consoles (they decided to join after they saw how much PlayStation was making for Sony), 3DO went under from hardware costs, NEC/Hudson both exited the console hardware market, Amiga exited too.

By the end of the generation Sony and Nintendo were the only ones who made real profits.

----
Back on the controlled topic:
Every one of Nintendo's major controller innovations and inventions were adopte by the competition with their next systems.

This includes motion controls and gyroscopes which are now in permanently in Sony's controllers and used by all smartphones and tablets. Hell the motion controls and chips in the drone controllers named both the software and motion chip after the Wii ( I had to research this for work). The official industry publications claim Nintendo created the tech used to control drones.

Imagine a Sony or Microsoft controller without a D-pad, shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons arranged in a diamond shape... I mean the dual shock line looks just like an SNES controller with 2 analog sticks wielded on.

Seriously without Nintendo trying to find new ways of inputs into gaming, controllers would have stagnated early on.
 
On the point of analog sticks, I just want to point out that a few consoles (including the Vectrex and Atari 5200) used analog joysticks in the second generation. Unfortunately, this control method didn't catch on, likely due to the relatively poor performance of said consoles.
 
On the point of analog sticks, I just want to point out that a few consoles (including the Vectrex and Atari 5200) used analog joysticks in the second generation. Unfortunately, this control method didn't catch on, likely due to the relatively poor performance of said consoles.
Actually the difference between joystick and stick is the following:

Analog sticks can only do X and Y axis aka 2D movement. You literally cannot raise and lower the analog stick on Z axis.
You can do 360 degrees of rotation of the stick. You can push the stick down to make it click like a button. But you cannot do it at angle without damaging it.

Analog joystick (and digital) can do XYZ axis allowing for full 3D movement. It can be raised and lowered on the Z at any angle. It moves in a true 3D fashion. The hardware also recognizes the movement

This is why joysticks are widely used in industries and militaries, and not gaming for the most part.

There is no need for full 3D movement, when the software only uses X and Y axis.

Every 3D console game to date is literally built on 2D movement.

It's only 3D visually.

Analog sticks were an invention of the mid 90s to solve the problem of 2D movement in 3D games.

If true 3D games ever become possible, analog sticks will be useless. But it won't happen as long as we are 2D screen bound.

So no gaming didn't have an analog stick before the mid 90s. Nor was there a game that needed one until MARIO 64!
 
I could find only one reference to the distinction between analog sticks and joysticks and it was a discussion section for a Wikipedia article.

The inclusion of a Z axis also seems to not be a defining feature of joysticks. I can find references to industrial joysticks that are available with one, two, or three axes of movement.

I will also re-iterate that the Vectrex (which sported rudimentary 3-D vector graphics) and the Atari 5200 both had analog directional controls, even if the feature was not always utilized by game designers.

Even in the absence of 3-D environments these controls allowed for finer control directional movement. They would have been perticularly useful for top down shooters which typically addressed the need for fine-tuned aiming through the use of a paddle control or by rotating the player avatar using the X axis. Other games, like Robotron, locked players into shooting in eight directions due to the digital joysticks being used. Had Robotraon been designed using analog sticks it would likely have played more like a modern multi-directional shooter. Alas, it was not to be and we would have to wait a decade for Nintendo to resurrect the analog stick.
 
Funny story Nintendo 64 wasn't the first system in the mid 90s to feature an analog stick.
It was some minor gaming system that failed, though Nintendo 64 controller was in development since 93.
Technically Sega was able to reverse engineer the N64 demo unit to beat Nintendo out the door
Technically the N64 stick is digital, sitting on top of a converter that converts it into analog.

I honestly don't think any gaming system uses a true analog stick.

Nintendo was the only company to nail both the software and hardware with perfect execution.
It was the first fully functional stick.

There is no point in being first with hardware, if you can't get it to work right and have the software to utilize it.
 
If this were an ode to the PS1, as a Sony pony I would have some talking to do :p

No, but seriously, I don't think anyone who owned a 64 could forget Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart...loads of good times spent on those two games alone. Goldeneye was another one, 4 people going against each other and split screen cheating made for some laughs...

I never had a problem with the controller, it was a bit odd at the time compared to the competition but I had no trouble adapting at all.
 

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