N64 did not age well

I preferred Mario Kart 64 over Diddy Kong Racing. While DKR had the better single-player, I found the multiplayer in MK64 more fun.

No way man. The Dino egg stealing and the banana collecting mini games put DKR >>>>>>>>>>>> MK64.

To be fair though, DKR was my families favorite 4 player split screen Rare game. Actually later came Racdym' Snowboard kids and it was up there as well back in the N64 days.. :P

Either way, those were good times. :D

Sadly...no, the graphics were really nice, but the censorship didn't make any sense and it was annoying as hell, the game felt empty in a way...and the multiplayer put too much emphasis on the Teddy war leaving some really fun games out like The Heist (i spend so, so many hours on this mode with my cousins)...so yeah, for me, here is were they start to drop the ball as a whole...

I liked Kameo and i kind of liked Perfect Dark Zero as well...but you could tell the magic was no longer there.

You have to use the heat-seeking missiles or speed boosts to catch up to someone in DKR. DKR also had more content.

I only played like a few minutes of MK64 and none of DKR. :<

They suck at tracking players who are too far.

As much as I enjoyed Nintendo during the NES, SNES, and original Gameboy era. The Nintendo Ultra 64 seemed on paper the greatest console ever. Up to that point. Sega and Sony had their 32-bit consoles. So Nintendo's promise of 64-bit 100Mhz console seemed destined to completely overtake the other two.

But it did not, Now 25 years later going back to the N64 controller is hard. This controller is not that comfortable to use. The games were far to few. In contrast the Sony PlayStation had 1500 games the Nintendo 64 only had 425. In the end Sony's PlayStation sold 104.5 million and Nintendo 64 only sold 32.4 million.

The Nintendo 64 took 3 years to reach market, While a more powerful console than Sony's 32 bit PlayStation. N64 using cartridges instead of CD ROMS doomed Nintendo. Thus began the lack of third party support that plagues Nintendo to this day.

@mark1974: goldeneye

You have to make sure there are no obstacles in the way. Get past them and then shoot.

Yeah

I still play the 64. Best system ever made. Seriously I think Mario Party 1 is better than ANY mp game Sony has ever tried releasing.

Even the Sega Saturn had a larger game library than the N64. The Saturn had about 600 games, although most of them were exclusive to Japan (the Saturn was Sega's most successful console in Japan, but their biggest flop overseas).

@brah4ever: Well he's right lol.

Come to think of it, I can't think of any Sony multiplayer games better than Mario Party.

I may be mis-remembering, but to those bashing the N64 controller, the Dualshock did not even come out until about a year after the N64 release. Meaning 3D games on the PS1 were initially played with the D-Pad.

So the N64 controller for it's time was really forward thinking (at least for a home console). Luckily, a year later, Sony standardized the dual-stick design.

It was the machine that ended Nintendo's successful run in the video game console space and dethroned them for good in that race.

It somehow sold more than the Gamecube.

I agree with those saying they had more fun in MK64 than DKR.

I must have played through every race on every character at least a dozen times each in Mario Kart. Not to mention it was perhaps second to Goldeneye in the multiplayer department, and I spent easily hundreds of hours in that game.

DKR just never sucked me in. For all its additional content and features and whatnot, I just never wanted to play it.

Contrast that to something like say Crash Team Racing on the PS1. I didn't play that one as much either, but I do recall playing through it a handful of times the same way I did Mario Kart 64. It never came close to MK64 in terms of competitive multiplayer amongst my friends though. It was a damn fine game though.

MK64 > CTR > DKR

Other damn fine N64 games were NBA Hangtime, 1080 Snowboarding, Mario Party, Star Fox, Gauntlet, Mario Golf, and Mario Tennis.

N64 was a beast for multiplayer back in the day. I feel bad for anyone who missed out on the fun that thing provided with friends.

I felt like the Gamecube continued that multiplayer tradition. So did the Xbox though. Both those were the best multiplayer consoles in gen 6.

@beardmad: 1080 Snowboarding was a lot of fun. For its time its graphics looked great.

The Mario Party games were quite addictive. Gauntlet was fun.

Ditto on Gauntlet Legends. That is one of my all time favorite N64 games. Those games are best played on consoles that allow the full multiplayer for it (PSOne version was pretty bad in that you can't play four players at all and had respawning enemies and generators).

Gaunlet was quite a long game. I didn't play the PS1 version. The enemies kept on respawning? Usually destroying the things that spawn enemies would stop the respawning. The PS1 had a multitap unless that version wouldn't let you play 4 players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOMs3BJTxA

Check out this video. As someone who never owned the PSOne version, this is how I learned about how bad that version is compared to the N64 and DC versions. At least Sony fans got made up for it with Dark Legacy on PS2.

Irrelevant. It didn't outsell the PlayStation just as the Gamecube didn't outsell the PS2. Nintendo's domination over the video game console market was broken with the N64.

That's what happened. The SNES rep helped the sales of the N64. The PS1 and PS2 took over the dominance.

Speak for yourself

Shadowman on the N64 was also a lot better than the PSone version (which many didnt even know exist)

Man Shadowman was so cool

I don't think I've heard of this game before.

I still play mines for WWF no mercy. Still fun as ever. I do have the rare replay on Xbox one and the n64 games control horrible on an Xbox controller. The games were designed to play with the n64 controller and I can't play well on Xbox.

OH GOD. You missed out.Game opens with a lovecraftean demon/being recruiting Jack the Ripper from the sewers of London. Game was AWESOME and deliciously wierd!

All early 3D games suffer from fugliness. Its what 2D holds over 3D. 3D eventually becomes fugly and it will keep happening as time passes on. Those fancy games we have right now? Give it 15 more years and see if you still think its pretty. 2D games at least are meant to look pixelated since that's the style of the genre. That's why NES and SNES games still look fantastic compared to the "superior" 3D games from PSone and N64. Even ps2, gamecube, and xbox games look like shit stains now.

It's not necessarily down to 2D or 3D, but down to art design. Bland art design will age poorly, while good art design will age well.

Also, classic games didn't really look that pixelated on a lo-res CRT TV, which blended the pixels. Classic games only look very pixelated on modern HD displays.

Twisted Metal 1 and 2..BY a LONG shot..OF course everyone has different tastes. ive never liked Mario Party or Mario Kart,Super Smash AND I sure never liked the N64 controller. I bought one at launch and hated every minuted I played of it..lol..Beat Mario 64 and Shadows of the Empire..Only 2 games I could make myself finish.

Never played that one, but I've seen videos showing why.

Some other examples of being better on N64, but worse on PS include:

-Rayman 2 (PSOne version STRIPPED from the N64 version... how... do you do that, given the storage capacity?)

-007: The World is Not Enough (PSOne version misses multiplayer, which was the appeal of Goldeneye)

@Jag85: I agree with what you're saying. 2D art design does seem to age better than 3D games though. Now that indie developers have turned pixelated games into a genre, it has made all our old games still look "brand new" and has breathed new life into them. They're kind of doing that today with 3D games but instead of making old games look new by creating old ones that look old, they're just cleaning up the others by remastering them. A lot of ps2 games look great imo but are obviously no longer up to par. Onimusha always looked impressive imo and I would love to see that art design cleaned up and remastered.

You didn't like any other game on the system?

Doesnt Rayman 2 have fairly large 3D levels? PSOne wasn't the best at rendering large 3D areas.

A few from what I played (keeping in mind I only got it recently this year, also having Rayman Classic on DSi, Origins on Wii, and Legends on Wii U), but it even neutered more content than that with less things to collect and some stripped levels. Then again, considering the PSOne version was from Ubisoft Shanghai (who would later work on the heavily altered port of the first Splinter Cell for PS2 and GameCube, which granted, I still like) and not Ancel's main team at Montpellier, I shouldn't be surprised.

A good example of early 3D games aging very well would be the Sega Model 2-3 games from the early-mid-90s. While state-of-the-art games are today associated with bland art design, the state-of-the-art games that Sega was pushing in the '90s had great art design, with very colourful graphics, along with smooth 60 FPS frame-rates. Sega later carried over that mix of state-of-the-art technology and colourful art design to the Dreamcast.

As for pixelated indie games, I'm not a fan of the pixelated look promoted by emulators and indie developers. It misleads modern gamers into thinking that's how classic games actually looked like back in the days, when, in reality, that's not what they looked like. Classic games, running at native 240p resolution on lo-res CRT TVs, looked smooth, displaying pixels as glowing dots/circles along scanlines, not as pixelated sharp squares like what you see in emulators and indie games. While many modern retro gamers like the inauthentic pixelated look, I just don't find it appealing.

man..i just couldnt get past the controller. I hate that cause the system was decent enough. I bought Turok day one and loved the game over all..BUT again..the controller killed it...

BTW, for people playing it in HDTVs, this is what the Nintendo 64 looks like in an appropriate setup

@Thunderdrone said:

BTW, for people playing it in HDTVs, this is what the Nintendo 64 looks like in an appropriate setup

That's what I was trying to say earlier. N64 games look much better on CRT TVs than they do on modern HDTVs.

No one cares what you think, Sniper.