N64 did not age well

pc gamers were truly master race back then, not like today, where consoles have a lot more advantages.

@commander:

What advantages?

The standard 1st party, Rogue Squadron, Banjo , Podracing, Extreme G etc.

Looking back, surprising how little there was... still loved the system at the time, had a different charm about it to the PS1.

I bought one in May, man I'm having the time with it. Never had a N64 before. Me and my buddy love playing on it.

It aged pretty well imo. It's all just.. different.

What games are you playing with your buds?

Definitely

aged better than the PSX imo

Yes, I played No Mercy with my friends and I still play No Mercy with my friends to this day. I've also played many other wrestling games with my friends, but we always go back to No Mercy.

No Mercy unfortunately had the flaw of getting sluggish when having 4 player matches like in that video. That was a consequence of putting so much awesomeness into this game for a system that wasn't powerful enough to handle it. If we would have got the Gamecube sequel that problem would have been solved, but sadly they changed developers so that never happened. That doesn't stop No Mercy from being the best wrestling game as long as you are not having a 4 player match and when I want to have a 4 player match, I'll play one of the previous AKI N64 wrestling games like WCW Revenge or Wrestlemania 2000, which are still better than the post-N64 wrestling games.

Why is No Mercy better than any wrestling game that came after you ask? Here are a few reasons:

-No Mercy and the other N64 games by AKI were the perfect balance between wrestling sim and arcade fun. No other wrestling game has had that perfect balance; they are either too arcadey like the Smackdown games that didn't feel like real wrestling and you couldn't have the epic long matches that you can in No Mercy or they are too much of a sim like the recent 2K games which take all of the fun out and feel more like a chore to play.

-The controls in No Mercy are simple and organic, but also have depth and reward skill. There are no complicated button combinations to remember or mini-games that you have to play during the middle of the match. The game is accessible enough that you can hand anybody the controller to play No Mercy, even if they are not wrestling fans, and within 5 minutes they will understand the controls and will be having fun. Yet beyond the simple controls there is a lot of depth to the grappling system which has a great risk and reward system where you can choose to just tap the button to do a weak grapple that does little damage but can help to wear down the opponent for later or you can choose to hold down the button to do a strong grapple that does much more damage but has a greater risk of being countered. And it has multiple different fighting styles in the game which change the strategy that you should use against your opponent depending on their fighting style.

-No Mercy has a great story mode where you can use any wrestler that you want and go after any championship that you want. You can even have a male wrestler play in the Women's championship story if you want; there are no restrictions. And there are multiple branching paths in the story to provide variety.

-No Mercy has great connected backstage areas. In No Mercy, you could start in the ring and then fight all the way to multiple backstage areas, all of which are designed great, and then fight all the way back to the ring with no noticeable load time when changing areas. Too many wrestling games lack this great feature.

-No Mercy lets you customize the match rules in all sorts of different ways to give you tons of different match possibilities. Do you want to play a 36 person Royal Rumble match with hardcore rules and the only way to win is by submission? In No Mercy, you can do that and a lot more.

-No Mercy has a great roster of wrestlers from the peak of wrestling's most popular time period, the Attitude Era. Plus, you can customize everyone in the game to keep them updated or just to do silly things for fun. If you want to change Matt Hardy's name to Broken Matt, you can do that. If you want to make Kurt Angle bald, you can do that. If you want to give Triple H different music, you can do that. If you want to make Stone Cold wear a bra and skirt for laughs, you can do that. The possibilities are endless.

-No Mercy has a great Create-a-Wrestler mode where anybody can mix and match from hundreds upon hundreds of different moves and outfits to easily and quickly create any wrestler that you want. I've always found the Create-a-Wrestler modes in other wrestling games to be too difficult and time-consuming to use. No Mercy's Create-a-Wrestler is simple and fun to use and yet can still produce great custom wrestlers. Plus, since AKI previously made games for WCW, they kept a lot of outfits and moves from WCW wrestlers in the game, so that you can easily create the WCW wrestlers to add to this WWE game and make the already great roster even better.

-No Mercy has the best modding community of any wrestling game ever. If you had a N64 gameshark, there were countless fan-made codes to add even more great things to the game.

-No Mercy gives you great rewards for playing the game. You earn in-game money by playing the game that you can use to purchase tons of great stuff in the Smackdown Mall instead of having to use your real money to purchase DLC like in current wrestling games.

There is a reason that 16 years later, many people are still playing No Mercy, there are still active communities talking about No Mercy, people are still modding No Mercy, and every credible list of greatest wrestling games of all time will always list No Mercy in either the #1 or #2 spot. There are more recent wrestling games that have better graphics and framerate, and some of them have managed to copy some of the great features from No Mercy, but none of them have been able to top the great AKI gameplay engine that fans still hold to legendary status or package all of these great features that I listed into one excellent wrestling game.

Agreed. I can name PS games that aged worse than the worse aged N64 games, like Soul Blade, the first two Tekkens (three still holds up though) and Tomb Raider in the CORE era.

I think 3D platformers on the N64 such as Mario 64 and both Banjo games still hold up for me to this day and I never get tired of playing them. Plus I enjoy the Zelda games and Starfox 64 as well and many other N64 titles. GoldenEye 007 on the other hand I think aged badly and any other FPS that was on the system.

Neither did the PS1.

But that's the thing, good game design, art style and music are ageless regardless of technical achievement.

@brah4ever: Aged horribly as opposed to what?

BTW, the N64 will look considerably worse on an HDTV. Hook it up to a nice Sony Trinitron CRT and compare.

Try out DOOM 64. Its smooth and looks sharp. Also the best classic DOOM game with the series best ost...

Damn, well said.

You failed to mention No Mercy's lack of a counter system though, that makes a huge difference in gameplay.

No Mercy is definitely top 5 (its second behind DoR), the lack of fatal four way last man standing, no countering system, and sluggish frame-rates (DoR ran at a solid 60 no matter the mode) when playing with four people take it out from the top spot.

The 2K games are definitely way to simulation ish than arcadey, no fun at all in those.

Day of Reckoning played extremely similar to No Mercy its unreal.

PSX has the controller which is similar to what we still use today.

That's not necessarily a good thing, that could possibly signal a stagnation in innovation, not to mention a lot of people have been unhappy with the DualShock style controllers for near decades.

Yeah, platformers still aren't bad to this day, but the first person shooters like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark have aged horribly.

Yeah, but it could also signal that they got it right in terms of 3D game controls.

Even with all the complaints? I don't know about that, there's a reason the Xbox 360 controller is still touted as one of the best controllers ever made and it has to do with form factor and analog positioning.

I meant in terms of the layout/buttons, ergonomically speaking the dual shocks have kind of always sucked.

The DS4 is somewhat of an improvement.

360 pad is definitely one of the best.

So? Again, how does most popular PSOne games fare up again?

Better, since a lot of them were 2D.

That entire gen has "aged" like milk, because a lot of those console games weren't that good to begin with. They get a major "this is new and fresh and different" free pass, especially because it was 3d gaming so there was a lot of unknown to how games would even work in 3d.

That said, I think there are still genuinely great games from that era that I can easily sit down and play: Mario 64, Paper Mario 64, Silent Hill, etc. I certainly agree the framerate is rough to deal with, but the games that had strong cores, are still strong today in spite of sloppy presentation. It's almost like actual good game design doesn't age; where as "hur durr my game looks pretty" does.

I think that first generation of 3D game consoles didn't age well generally; this is not a problem exclusive to N64. Have you tried playing the Sega Saturn on an HDTV? Ugh. It's tough, haha.

The one thing that hits N64 hard in this area, I think, is the way it applied anti-aliasing. Some games look very blurry as a result, and some early games look incredibly muddy from a texture perspective.

In terms of frame rate, it's a bit of a relative thing. Games like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are very respectably playable with their frame rates - the need for certain frame rates is going to depend very much on the kind of game you're playing.

As for the controller, well, the Dual Shock owes its existence to the N64 controller. The ubiquity of the analogue stick in general stems directly from the N64. So from that perspective, it was a very important design.

I actually think the N64 controller is really comfortable and nice to use - unfortunately though, the housing around the analogue stick is terrible quality, and would wear after a very short period of time. These days it's impossible to find original controllers with undamaged housings, you basically have to buy a refurbished model you want to play N64 games comfortably.

A lot of the most popular PSOne games were 2D? So, we going to ignore a lot of the 3D games like Tomb Raider (done better by the remake), Resident Evil (again, done better by the remake), Soul Blade (done better by sequels), and Tekken 1/2 (better with sequels).

And you bring up 2D games... you do realize that the PSOne actually bottlenecks even that, right? See: X-Men vs Street Fighter and Street Fighter II (the version that DSP rubs his fame in with).

I agree

Alright PSOne didn't age that much better but the controller would be less foreign to someone trying to play a game on it that something like that of the N64s.

Show me visually some games on the N64 that blow something like FFVII out of the water, in fact I'd say FFVII looks better than any N64 game overall.

I think it did have a counter system. You'd have to press block at a certain time. There's reversals that can turn into moves, pin moves, submissions and finishing moves. Here's one of them.

Yeah, but that controller didn't exist until after the N64. Nintendo popularized the analog stick (+ rumble) and Sony followed suit and refined those ideas further.

So it's worth comparing launch controller vs. launch controller for this very reason. The PS1's original controller was 100% useless for the types of 3D games that the N64 was getting. Game franchises & genres that would later come to the PS1 in one form or another. (see: Goldeneye -> The World is Not Enough)

A copy/paste refresh was 100% necessary, even with Sony's gigantic lead in sales.

I agree it did not.

Doesn't mean it doesn't have some incredible- nostalgic games. Paper Mario, Donkey Kong 64, Pokemon Snap, Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, and the Zelda's.

It was the most exciting time to be a gamer. Every year, you had groundbreaking, revolutionary games. The amount of experimental, creative games coming out during that era was unrivaled by subsequent generations.

Yeah don't know what the hell this guy is on. N64 era dark times? If anything the creative bankruptcy of today is a dark era. At the time you'd see new ideas on a weekly basis. Games with groundbreaking mechanics would pop out left and right. You had no time to play them all.

It's also worth noting that lo-res PS1/Saturn/N64 games were originally created for lo-res CRT televisions. That's why they look bad on modern HD LCDs, because that's not what they were created for. You're not playing these games at native 240p resolution, but you're upscaling them to 1080p, which distorts the image and makes everything look pixelated. Also, CRTs display images differently to LCDs, with CRTs displaying pixels as scanlines and phosphors, with glowing, blooming, and color bleeding, which smooths out the pixels and gives a cleaner image at low resolution. Playing lo-res games at native 240p on a CRT television looked a lot better than playing them on a modern 1080p LCD display, which makes lo-res games look distorted and pixelated.

It was a fun time and interesting ideas were being thrown out there but to me much of it fell flat. The Saturn had very little I wanted to play and the N64 was nowhere near as fun as the Super Nintendo before it. We were riding such highs with the SNES that it was really quite a bummer to just throw it all away and start over with this blurry 3D mess. To me Tomb Raider, as bad as it looks today, was more aesthetically pleasing than much of the N64's games. And if you didn't like the 3D platformers you where out of luck because they weren't releasing any 2D ones. What was better, Super Mario World and Super Mario Allstars or Mario 64? A link to the past or OOT? No Metroid on N64. It was far from a dark time but I was more impressed with the innovation on the Playstation than on the Nintendo. N64 was the beginning of the 3rd party drought.

Can't say I agree with that. Most were a good start and were subsequently polished.

With the AAA market and slowly but recovering AA market, yeah.

Its hard to say, gen 6 is where I felt the budgets still hadn't gotten out of hand yet so games were still pumping out left/right and the mechanics and concepts learned from gen 5 were mastered/improved on. Games were looking clean (polygons, 30-60 FPS (GC/Xbox/Dreamcast had a lot of 60 FPS titles), framerates were no longer and issue, Konami, Square, Capcom, Midway, THQ, etc were also still making games.

Plus online gaming became a thing on consoles.

Gen 5 was definitely an interesting one not necessarily in a quality perspective but moreso an experimental one.

Have you actually gone back to play some of these games?

Yes. Beat Donkey 64 last year and I enjoyed it. Solid game but way way too many collectibles.

The games that really don't hold up at all are the shooters because of their messed up control schemes and absolutely dreadful frame rates. Especially in 4-player mode.

Games like Diddy Kong Racing, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time or Banjo Kazooie still play fairly well. That's not taking into account very good Playstation games like Vagrant Story or Brave Fencer Musashi. They all definitely aged worse than the SNES/NES games but the main issues in some of them is the frame rate. Otherwise the rest is fine and many of them were a first into 3D and to me they were a very good start. It's easy to look at them 20 years later and say they weren't good but you have to remember what devs had to work with. Hell some games like Shinobi never managed to transition into 3D properly. It was quite a task at the time.

Groundbreaking and revolutionary doesn't necessarily equal quality.

Like I was saying above about how PS1/Saturn/N64 games look better on a CRT TV than on a HD LCD, the same is true for framerates. The framerates don't look anywhere near as choppy on a lo-res CRT TV as they do on a HD LCD. Not only does a lo-res CRT smooth out the pixels (with scanlines, phosphors, glowing, blooming, and color bleeding), but it also smooths out the framerates (with motion blur). That's why playing PS1/Saturn/N64 games on a HD LCD don't look or play as good as we remember them, because back in the days, we were playing them on lo-res CRT TVs, which smoothed out the pixels and framerates.

I'm talking about excitement, not quality. Excitement comes from experiencing something new. But once you've experienced the same things over and over again, the excitement eventually dies down.

Developers were still trying to figure out how to make 3D games, so they came up with all kinds of bold, creative and experimental games. And each of these new approaches to 3D felt new, fresh and exciting. This creativity and experimentalism peaked in the PS1/Saturn/N64 era, and to an extent, continued into the early Dreamcast/PS2 era. But by the late PS2 era, developers eventually had everything figured out, and they didn't need to experiment anymore. So creativity and experimentalism eventually died down.

N64 graphics have not aged well for the most part. Some games have great art that really help. I've read comments that the N64's graphics weren't "good for the time" and they were "disappointing." The N64, imo, was just... freedom. It was the freedom to explore for the first time in ways you couldn't on the Super Nintendo/Genesis - that's what was truly special about the N64.

Otherwise, the GCN/PS2/Xbox/Dreamcast was a much larger leap.

In terms of both hardware and software, Gen 5 was a significantly bigger leap than Gen 6. The leap from 2D-to-3D was an unparalleled leap in the history of gaming.

Has nay game from that gen aged well?

The cartoony stuff like Crash, Mario and Banjo could still be passable but even my beloved MGS and Tomb Raider look like shit.

The 2D games on the Saturn and PS1 have aged remarkably well.

I owned an N64 and a PS1 during that era, and I recall just how far apart really good worthwhile N64 games released compared to the consistent worthwhile PS1 games. It wasn't even close.

The N64 is the only console that made me go WOW!! The first time I saw Mario 64 I was in awe, it looked like a cartoon rather than a game and I couldn't believe it was playable.

Having grown up on 70s 'consoles' and various 8bit home computers the visuals and control was like nothing before for me, it was an unforgettable experience.

I'm sure that will never happen again now but I'll always have a special place for the blurry foggy N64.

Goldeneye aged the worst imo. I tried playing that about a year ago for the first time in years, I was trying to work out how I liked it so much in the first place.