The original Mario 64 would suffer lower framerates in certain areas (e.g. Dire Dire Docks). We can also imagine that if the artists had had more headroom to work with, then they would have spent it on making levels larger and more detailed.
Mario 64 was already pioneering basically everything in the 3D platformers, and maybe even 3D games as a whole.
Given it was a launching title, they had to stop somewhere and ship the thing. So, like any software with ever, they had to make tradeoffs.
And, well, here we are talking passionately about this game 26 years after. For me it’s an amazing proof that they made amazing tradeoffs.
Because, yes, we now have plenty of time to analyse the thing and find issues with the game. But, the 6yo me, the player me, they have nothing to criticize about this game.
For me it is still a perfect masterpiece given its era and technical context. I don’t think the game could have been really better than it is without breaking something and I’m pretty sure that the engineers at Nintendo considered the game as « finished » and liked the result themselves. It shows in the game. The better would have been the enemy of the good.
But in the meantime you are also right because Mario 64 DS was a really good extension. I miss this game, it really deserve to have its remake. But this version hugely benefited from the evolution of the Mario universe and the technical superiority of the DS so I’m not even sure it could have been done in the 90’s.
I hope we’ll today be able to play a newer version of this game. Be it official or not, I crave for SM64DS with the original controls.
Quake is a nice game as it is but it’s much simpler when the player is the camera.
[0]: https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/E1M8:_Ziggurat_Vertigo [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a72k_XBi2ls
I'm not sure. A sophisticated camera is quite nice, but quake introduced a visibility determination solution that was used in dozens, perhaps hundreds of games afterwards. It also helped pioneer modding (it has a compiled scripting language), and later on had online deathmatch with predictive netcode (so it actually worked over the internet!) and was one of the first games to support hardware accelerated 3d graphics on pc.
It also has lightmaps, all surfaces are textured, and runs in software with no hardware acceleration, z-buffering, built-in perspective correct texture mapping, etc.
Obviously, that doesn't make it more fun to play, but Quake was an incredible technical achievement for the time, I don't think anybody would put Mario 64 in the same basket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKlbE2eROC0
To summarize what he says: since the game was a launch title, it was likely being compiled with an early, less-stable compiler/SDKs, with known bugs that wouldn't be fixed until later (he even cited some official developer documentation that mentions this). So setting that flag could have caused known issues/instability at the time so they just left the optimization out.
And the other thing is the game is using a lot of libraries that were indeed compiled with the O2 flag, and the performance drop by removing those is far more significant than the tiny gain by adding it to the top-level of the makefile where the rumor suggested it should have been added.