N64 did not age well

Yeah shooters like Goldeneye suffered the most. Even the control scheme is all kinds of bad.

@Jag85: Not really, as they often move in a jittery fashion and the animation is stunted. 3D games look worse, definitely but the 2D games are too...slowed in their movement is the best way to put it.

I feel latter day PS2 games have aged the best, i.e. RE4, GOW2 and so on.

N64 has (maybe) a handful of really great games but for the most part it was horrible even in it's day.

The N64 was never one of my favorite systems and I certainly don't miss the controller.

That being said there was still some great games on the system. Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Paper Mario 64, Kirby 64, Smash Bros 64 and I'll even include Perfect Dark in this. While it has the same issues as Goldeneye in terms of controls, I still really like all the weapons the game had as well as the cool secondary uses they all had.

Most 2D games of the 32-bit era moved at a crisp 60 FPS, with more detailed graphics and animations than 16-bit games. This is especially true for most 2D games on the Saturn (the pinnacle of 2D sprite/tile technology), and to a lesser extent, many 2D games on the PS1.

I'm trying to decide what my favorite game from that generation was and I'm pretty sure it was Castlevania Symphony of the Night which to me is telling because it was a throwback to the previous generation. To be fair though Mario 64 would be one of the runners up. Also Tony Hawk 2, Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy 7, Tomb raider 2, Metal Gear Solid. All Playstation games. The Playstation dominated the N64 and for me personally there is no question about it.

edit: I guess Tony Hawk 2 and Resident Evil 2 were also on N64? I can't imagine playing them with that controller though.

A lot of games that gen aged horribly (including some PC games).

What do you guys think is better, Goldeneye or Perfect Dark?

No early 3d aged well

@storm_of_swords: wow that was a long post but a good one. I haven't played any of the old wrestling games, so don't know if they hold up well today, they were definitely fun to play many years ago.

I can definitely agree with you regarding the recent 2K wrestling games. They are garbage.

You should look at PS1 games because those also aged horrible, even worse.

Yeah consoles were a tough sell in those days. While N64 owners were suffering through the nightmarish performance in Goldeneye, I was getting fantastic performance in 20 player servers on Half-life or Unreal Tournament.

That was the golden age of PC gaming. We had incredibly good games coming out on the daily such as Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Half-life, Unreal Tournament, StarCraft, etc. while console gamers were suffering through obnoxious controls and incredibly bad performance and visuals.

Consoles were hardly a tough sell, since console gaming was a much bigger market than PC gaming back in those days. It was only last gen that PC gaming caught up to console gaming's market share (due to Steam, MMO, MOBA, China, and Russia).

In terms of visuals, top-tier N64 games like Indiana Jones and World Driver Championship outclassed PC games released up until 1998. And then during 1998-1999, Dreamcast games outclassed PC games, in terms of visuals and performance.

PC gaming was where the innovation happened and was absolutely huge in those days. Also, there has never been a period in gaming history where consoles even began to match PCs. The Dreamcast was radically weaker than PC games in terms of visuals and performance.

That entire gen is dependent on the game. I'd say most of it didn't age well.

Innovation was also huge in console gaming back in those days. As for hardware power, throughout the '90s, PCs were outclassed by high-end consoles in visuals and performance, from the Neo Geo during 1990-1992, to the 3DO in 1993, to the PS1 and Saturn during 1994-1995, to the N64 during 1996-1997, to the Dreamcast during 1998-1999; Dreamcast games pushed far more polygons than any PC games did during 1998-1999. PCs have only been dominant since the 2000s, not before that.

That is also the way I remember it and I had a pretty serious PC at the time with the new MMX chip and whatnot. Consoles were a better experience for the most part. The PC had online games though.

No, PCs have never been outclassed by consoles at any point in gaming history. The PS1 was not capable of playing games like Unreal and Quake. The PS1 could barely handle Doom. The Dreamcast days were no different, the Dreamcast was not capable of games like Unreal Tournament.

PCs have always been dominate in terms of graphics and performance. Not sure where you got your ideas from. Very bizarre, to be honest. The Neo Geo could not run Wolfenstein 3D. The PC innovated basically everything related to 3D gaming before consoles were even capable of having adequate 3D graphics. Games like Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder were dramatically beyond what a console could put out in '91 and '92.

I'm sorry man but you're just making this stuff up. PC has always been on the forefront of graphics technology and gaming innovation.

Only games i can't really play anymore are shooters...yes, even Golden Eye is a chore to play now...the rest are fine, i can put Conker any time and i will still have a blast with it.

The original Xbox and 360 (Gears of War) actually outclassed the PC with certain games, I can't remember them.

Crimson Skies

Splinter Chaos Theory

Halo 2

Were some games that were rivaling PC on the OG Xbox.

Hell, RE4, F-Zero GX, ReMake, and Prime 2 did as well on the GC

Mind blown at how Conker 2 hasn't happened.

The original Xbox was a midrange PC, it was in no way whatsoever comparable to a high end PC when it released.

By the middle of the generation, the Xbox was ridiculously outclassed by PCs with games like Far Cry putting out visuals that were light years beyond contemporary games like Halo 2. Even low range PCs of that day dominated the Xbox.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was on PC as well and ran better on PC with way better visuals.

The Xbox (and the Xbox 360) both used PC architecture and had midrange PC components in them. Neither could compare to high end PCs, but they were not intended to compare to high end PCs.

Quake released at the same time as the N64, which had games like GoldenEye, Indiana Jones and World Driver Championship that blew away Quake. Unreal released the same year as the Dreamcast, which had many games that blew away Unreal. As for Unreal Tournament, that was only pushing 5000-7000 polygons per scene, whereas Dead or Alive 2 on the Dreamcast was pushing 50,000-60,000 polygons per scene, far exceeding the polygon counts of 1999 PC games.

Wolfenstein 3D has a homebrew port for the Sega Mega Drive. It was the arcades that innovated 3D graphics technology, with the arcades being light-years ahead of PC and consoles in the '90s. Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder were pseudo-3D sprite games, whereas the Sega Mega Drive had true 3D polygon games since 1990, with Hard Drivin' and Star Cruiser.

Wait, what? Quake came out a year earlier than Goldeneye and was worlds beyond Goldeneye. Remember that Goldeneye ran at 15 or so fps in multiplayer. It had some of the worst performance in gaming history. Furthermore, Quake had much higher resolution textures, a higher poly count, much better performance all around. It's ridiculous to claim that Goldeneye blew away Quake. Quake blew away EVERY N64 game that ever released. Every N64 game had terrible frame rate, ridiculously low resolution, and practically no textures at all. I've never even heard of Indiana Jones for the N64,I looked it up and it looks even worse than Tomb Raider for the PS1. Definitely not even remotely on the level of Quake.

I'm not sure where you are getting your information from. Unreal Tournament supported at least 16 players per game, Dead or Alive 2 was only 1v1 in a tiny arena compared to the huge and sprawling maps in UT99. Trying to say that UT99 had a certain poly count per scene is hilariously misleading and just straight up ludicrous. That's a meaningless statement. Map size, player counts, environmental effects, texture resolution and density, these things are what matters. Dead or Alive 2 did not even remotely compare to Unreal Tournament 99 in terms of technology. Absurd.

Unreal was a gamechanger, we had never seen graphics or immersion like that before. It put Epic on the map and made it so Unreal is still, to this day, one of the most widely used game engines.

Wolfenstein 3D having a port on the Genesis does not mean anything. Doom was ported to the SNES, but the SNES was not capable of running it. Bringing up early 3D console games won't work. PC had Driller in 1987. Hard Drivin was released on PC (MS Dos at the time) before the Genesis. The Genesis port of Star Cruiser came out 2 years after the PC version. Interesting that you'd bring up those games when they prove my point and disprove yours. Early 3D games on the Genesis and SNES were almost unplayable awful in terms of performance and visual fidelity. Starfox in particular has to be one of the ugliest games ever made.

Sorry man but because of the fluid nature of PC technology, PC has always been ahead of the game. The Dreamcast was not different.

The character models in GoldenEye look more detailed, with significantly more detailed facial textures in particular, than the character models in Quake. Indiana Jones was released for both PC and N64, with the N64 version being superior to the PC version. World Driver Championship ran in hi-res with detailed textures and high polygon counts at a steady framerate, looking more technically impressive than any PC games released during 1996-1997.

Unreal Tournament only had 300-400 polygons per character, while the UT arenas only displayed 200-800 polygons in a scene. Even with 16 characters on screen, UT only renders 5000-7100 polygons in a scene. In comparison, a Dead or Alive 2 arena can display up to 52,000 polygons in a scene, while even a single DOA2 character alone can have up to 9300 polygons (more than an entire UT scene with 16 characters). And all this while maintaining 60 FPS. DOA2 on the Dreamcast was far ahead of UT in terms of visuals and performance.

Maybe you may never have seen graphics like Unreal before 1998, but for those of us who went to arcades, we'd seen far better graphics than that years earlier. Unreal's graphics and performance were barely even Sega Model 2 quality, let alone Sega Model 3 quality. And later that year, it was followed by the Dreamcast's Japanese release, launching with Sonic Adventure, which pushed far more polygons (up to 50,000 polygons per scene) than even Unreal Tournament, let alone Unreal.

The Sega Mega Drive homebrew demo of Wolfenstein 3D is almost identical to the PC version's first level. Driller and Star Cruiser released for 68000-based home computers like the Amiga, Atari ST, and X68000, not what we today call PC, i.e. IBM-compatible PCs with x86 architecture. In comparison, the Amiga, ST and X68000 all used the same 68000 architecture as the Sega Mega Drive and Neo Geo consoles, essentially making them console-computer hybrids. As for Hard Drivin, that was released on PC (IBM-compatible) the same year as the Sega Mega Drive version. And finally, the year Star Fox came out was the year that saw the release of the 3DO, which was far superior to PC in terms of visuals and performance in 1993.

@Jag85 I wasn't a tech nut back then so I don't exactly remember but what about the original Half-Life released in 1998? Released a little a year and a half after Goldeneye but also a year and a half before Perfect Dark. I remember it looking better than pretty much any console shooter.

@Juub1990: When the Voodoo 2 released in early 1998, that was the point when PC graphics cards surpassed the N64. So PC shooters that followed it, i.e. Half-Life and Unreal, were clearly better looking than N64 shooters like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. The only console with better graphics than PC in 1998 was the Dreamcast.

Yeah I do remember the Dreamcast blowing away everything when it first came out.

I don't know what some people are on. PC's complete supremacy is a fairly recent phenomenon. Aside from a very handful of titles, consoles were far superior to the PC in terms of graphics in the early to late 90's. Porting Mario Bros 3 was considered a technical achievement at the time.

That's more or less what John Carmack said, arguably the best PC programmer of that era. PC hardware in 1990 was not capable of full 60 FPS side-scrolling like the NES, so Carmack began his programming career trying to replicate the smooth NES side-scrolling with a Mario Bros 3 port. That led to him creating the adaptive tile refresh technique, which allowed smooth side-scrolling on PC for the first time. And that was a major breakthrough for PC, paving the way for the fast-scrolling ray casting engines he programmed for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

Hardly.

the N64 was uncontested in terms of splitscreen/co-op MP gaming.

That was an infinitely better experience than playing a stack of 2D PS1 games all by yourself.

Sony consoles have always been more solo experience based though.

Consoles outpacing PC visually at launch was nothing new until this generation of consoles where they were mid-ranged PCs (literally) from the get go.

Play on an emulator bro, gfx much better with texture smoothing.

the thing about n64 is that the best games never get the real praise Banjo imo is the best game for the console people only talk about goldeneye which was over hyped BS
diddy king racing > mario kart

I like the fuzzy visuals, the framerate I can forgive because it's a legacy system, It's a nice console with some absolute gems in its library.

I can play N64 just fine.

Yeah, i blame the terrible remake they made for the original Xbox...i have the feeling that after that, Rare was not seeing as a top tier developer anymore and from there...they just went down and down, hopefully Sea of Thives can make something about this so Rare has a little bit more freedom on their projects and who knows.

You thought Conker Live and Reloaded was bad?

I thought the visual upgrades and online multiplayer made it stand on its own tbh.

Rare's true decline started with Perfect Dark Zero on the 360, Kameo was good though.

Would kill for another Banjo Kazooie game that is like the originals. Or... pay like 19 bucks for a game that is hopefully like them (Yooka Laylee).

Both BK and BT are both near the top of my list of favorite games on the system. Hell... BT makes my top 10 of all time. Still can go back to that game and replay the whole thing from start to finish without any issues.

Diddy Kong racing was one of the three games I owned for the platform.

While I agree it is superior to Mario Kart in many departments, mainly graphics, sound and controls, there is one huge area that puts it below Mario Kart from me: Competitiveness

What's so fun about Mario Kart is the element of randomness. Even if you're first something insignificant can set you back to last place. The game is highly unpredictable which makes it really fun in multiplayer. Diddy Kong Racing on the other hand was far more predictable. Once one had taken the lead by a sizable amount, they were pretty much gone with no way to catch them. It made multiplayer races infinitely more boring than in Mario Kart 64.

Diddy Kong Racing had way more varied gameplay than Mario Kart.

Mario Kart has the randomness.

I also think Mario Kart has the better designed tracks. In Diddy Kong racing the tracks sure are pretty but they don't possess the interactivity they do in Mario Kart. Toad's Turnpike is pretty awesome. So are tracks like Yoshi Valley or Choco Mountains. Diddy Kong Racing's tracks were pretty to look at but other than just going forward not a lot happened in them whereas they were all action-packed in Mario Kart 64.

Don't forget that Mario Kart 64 still has a huge community of fans that still set or break records

N64 always was ugly. Even The turok series with the ram pack had serious issues

It is pretty ugly but amazing what they did with such measly power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specifications

You could fly in Diddy Kong Racing tho

Those specs outclassed the PS1 and PC graphics cards during 1996-1997.

For its time the N64 was quite powerful.

@Juub1990:

Diddy Kong Racing>>>>>Mario Kart 64

No contest.

If you're playing what was best on N64 on the N64 than you're doing it wrong.

Rare Replay holds up very well on X1. :P