RPG Engine for the Nintendo 64
github.com
github.com
Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one.
On the other hand, I’d happily play SM64 and OoT through again, along with dozens of NES and SNES titles.
Not a ton of stand outs, admittedly. In the first two years of N64's existence, there were only a few dozen titles even released on the console.
PS2 = the same, but with DVD movies.
They may have been outsold in the fifth generation of consoles, but first party software gave them longevity that their competitors wish they could replicate. Where is Master Chief and who, Crash Bandicoot, now?
ROM - VERY fast but small Optical disks - slower but much larger Flash carts - best of both worlds by the time we started using flash for game consoles
Nintendo f'd up by staying on ROM carts for the N64 because it limited your storage space so much. And the benefit - faster load times - was probably lost on many people. (Notice how no N64 game has loading screens of any notable length). OOT just uses brief fades to black.
Not Master Chief, try 'Steve' from the best selling game of all time.
exclusives are generally a lock-in scam for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system.
The question is, did the N64 have a lot of amazing games on it, and the answer is unequivocally yes.
At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.
starcraft made it onto that console, that in and of itself negates most of what is being talked about here
> starcraft made it onto that console, that in and of itself negates most of what is being talked about here
Your statement does not in any way negate the statement you're responding to. Or much of anything in the thread for that matter.
The core of what people are responding to is that you state "console exclusives are a scam," which, at the point in time in history we're talking about, is verifiably not the case. You can point to agreements between companies (Final Fantasy VII being the most famous example) but these are not console exclusives in the modern sense. They were agreements, which had a mixture of commercial and technical factors, to make a game on that console. Once that decision was made, it wasn't really necessary to contractually enforce exclusivity because, until the PS4/XB1 era, porting to a different console was really, really hard.
Did companies do it? Yes. Was it planned in as part of the regular flow of developing a video game? At this point in time? No. It was a decision taken later.
It was pretty awful as a console game (as most RTSes would be). It also lacked significant features like online gameplay, voice over cinematics, and significant changes were introduced to make it easier to play with a controller, although none of it worked well enough to make up for the clunkiness of the port itself.
The exception does not disprove the rule. The PS1 had almost 4x more games than N64. If it was trivial to port games then, it would have happened. But of all the generations of consoles past the 16 bit era, that generation in particular probably has the smallest venn diagram overlap of ports available on multiple systems.
Nowadays even indie devs creating experimental games can cheaply port their games to all consoles using a cross-platform engine like Unity or Unreal. Those tools weren't around for that console generation
The conversation then derailed into whether or not multi-platform was a thing back then. The answer is that it was, SC64 is a counter-example to the claim that it wasn't a thing.
There are lots of other games that can be brought up as well, such as Tony Hawks pro skater, as another counter-example.
That generation was the first generation where multi-platform started becoming common. It happened in the earlier generation as well (Street Fighter and Kirby are two easy examples), but that generation is where it started becoming common. It only got more common as time went on.
The mistake people are making is confusing "not as common as it is today" with "not common at all". You can literally find listicles of cross platform games for that generation.
There were some games like that, but not nearly all.
Even between a C64 and a NES you can' make cloneish ports without sacrifing performance because the NES' PPU it's far better than the C64 counterpart.
There's plenty of stuff on YouTube showing the differences for different games. Avalanche Reviews did a good video of Resident Evil 2 ports across different consoles and generations.
The only real difference between something like Unreal Engine and what they used back then is that UE won and is the de factor standard whereas back then most were rolling their own still.
All you've posted in response is a small number of games that were obviously ported AFTER released (in one case 10 years after).
Unreal Engine has nothing to do with this. It was first released in 1998 as a PC engine, not appearing on consoles until the Playstation 2 era in the 2000s. The 2000s happened after the 1990s.
It's also not relevant when discussing studio's adding support for multiple consoles to their in-house game engines.
> exclusives are generally a _lock-in scam_ for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system.
stop being dishonest.
But even if you weren't mischaracterizing my statement, console exclusivity means only that console has the game. Whether it was planned ahead of time or done after the fact is irrelevant, the game is not exclusive when it becomes available for multiple platforms. It's a distinction that does not matter.
The only one arguing with bad faith here is you.
> Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
This is what was actually said
--------
stop being dishonest.
But even if you weren't mischaracterizing my statement ...
--------
Look closer at the definition of ad hominem, I'll emphasize it for you.
__rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself__
It is not an ad hominem to point out that someone is cherry-picking, and it is, in fact, a form of dishonesty.
This is a far cry from your response, emphasis mine
> __You’re__ obsessed with deceit and dishonesty.
Let look back at the definition of ad hominem
> where the speaker attacks the __character, motive,__ ...
stop it.
>> where the speaker attacks the __character, motive,__ ...
I rest my case.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/28/21538173/control-cloud-v...
As for the Sony-Microsoft duopoly though there really is no major difference between XBOX and PS today or between those platforms and the PC platform. I have mixed feelings about that because a lot of games on the XBOX (say Numantia) come across more like a PC game than a console game these days with font sizes that make them not at all cozy from my couch.
The method is measuring good games. Which, now, often are exclusives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie
> The franchise debuted on the Nintendo 64 and subsequent entries in the series also appeared on Game Boy Advance and Xbox 360.
This is but one example.
What is being said was true of previous generations, but not that one. N64 even had starcraft ported to it.
N64 had very few ports and vice versa with the PS1. PS1 had a catalog of over 1000 games but N64 had somewhere around 300, with Nintendo franchises probably forming about 20-25% of the total catalog.
This was also partly because games engineered and designed for the N64's strengths were not suitable for PS1 and vice versa. Porting Resident Evil 2 to the N64 took heroic efforts by Capcom to compress the game into a size suitable for cartridge, for example, and even then they had to create a custom cartridge design for it. StarCraft 64 was clearly quite different gameplay-wise from its PC counterpart as a result of a lack of mouse and keyboard, which are especially important for RTS. It also required a 4MB (RAM) expansion pack to be installed onto the N64 in order to play the full game. Other differences included a lack of voice acting in campaigns as a result of cartridge size limitations.
Ports existed in the SNES and Genesis era (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Earthworm Jim, etc come to mind). I would argue they were far more common then as the two consoles were not far off in specs and 2D game engines were already mature by then.
No it didn't, please stop saying untrue things.
You can say it and I'll defend your right to say whatever nonsense you want. But it doesn't refute jack.
But if you're really fussed about it, pick one of the other myriad examples. Tony Hawk, SC64, etc.
But the games were often developed by completely different teams, sometimes the gameplay was extremely different between platforms.
It would not be difficult to build a library of several hundred great games for the SNES. Compared to that, the N64 was a huge step back! After picking up the first party games, can you even make a decent top 20 third party games? It’s brutal!
This is why despite having lower polygon counts, Playstation games often look better than N64 games. The former having a variety of detailed textures, while the latter have one low res texture smeared over everywhere.
Interestingly the same holds true for the Nintendo Switch: Sakurai mentions how closely he had to work with the development team to compress Smash Bros Ultimate's massive soundtrack. IIRC Smash is on a 16GB game cart despite the console supporting 64GB. Presumably this was done for cost reasons.
Other than that, pretty much all of the games you'd actually want to play on N64 are Nintendo or Rare games.
Again though, you aren’t wrong! Rare covers many of the non-Nintendo greats on N64 (GoldenEye! Banjo Kazooie! Donkey Kong 64! Conker, if you were in a fairly narrow range of maturity!), but they did some Sega before N64 and a lot of Xbox afterward, so I just expect there’s probably some interesting details left to expand here :)
If there’s not much to it other than that they were a shining star with a ton of Nintendo investment, all good.
Nintendo has always been fond of favoring second party relationships and working tightly with them to create either new IPs themselves, or expand on their existing IPs. HAL Laboratories is famous for Kirby, Super Smash Bros, working closely with Creatures, Inc. and Game Freak on Pokémon titles, and the Mother / Earthbound series, and was so close that their darling programmer and later manager Satoru Iwata became the first president of Nintendo outside of the Yamauchi family. Other strong second party development studios that Nintendo has hitched their horse include but aren't limited to Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem), Retro Studios (Metroid Prime, though now a first party studio), and Argonaut Software (Star Fox).
Rare was just trying to make games before their eventual partnership with Nintendo grew. I believe I read somewhere though that the relationship started to wane, so when Microsoft started wining and dining studios to build their own second party studio, when they came to Rare, the company saw the dollar signs and promises of more creative agency and decided to hitch to another cart. Since then, the company has released some successful titles since then, but arguably none are as notable as during the heyday of their partnership with Nintendo.
And Nintendo hasn't recovered since. The Gamecube had a great library, but very little of it was third party, especially compared to the PS2. The Wii was used as a dumping ground by third parties and just got garbage while the 360 and PS3 got major releases. Wii U was completely ignored, and now the Switch's third party content is either last gen ports or heavily downgraded versions of PC games.
Handhelds, of course, were different. The GBA, DS, and 3DS all had pretty large third party support and high quality support at that.
But that one mistake has hurt them for 30 years. They've had huge waves in hardware sales, but software sales by third parties will probably never reach what the SNES and NES had. People sometimes complain about there being yet another Zelda and yet another Mario, but Nintendo's core series are the only thing carrying their platforms.
Of all the console makers I would argue it's Microsoft that is currently struggling the most. The Xbox X has sold less than 20 million units and sales have been dwindling. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft has no strong differentiator from the Playstation.
Personally, I don't know anyone who has an Xbox. It's either PlayStation for high-end or Switch for more casual gamers (or a 2nd console for PS owners).
It seems that most of the games you can't play on those two systems are available on PC (e.g. Starfield), which anecdotally in my experience is where people tend to play it.
If you want to play Call of Duty 27 or GTA V, buy one of those instead.
The Sega Genesis and SNES had completely different libraries, but both had massive third party support. The N64 and onward has had basically limited third party support in comparison to other platforms. This isn't limited to the genres you mock because you can't play them--it's all genres.
The DS was far weaker than the PSP but had absolutely colossal third party support. The point is, when it comes to consoles you plop down in front of a TV, Nintendo basically burned their bridges 30 years ago. GTA and Call of Duty weren't even around then.
As an addendum, here are the Switch's top selling games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...
All top 10 are first/second party. And top 20. Only in the top 30 do third parties start to appear.
Compare it to the SNES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Super_Nin...
Third parties everywhere.
Mistake has more than 1 meaning. Saying the Wii, Wii U, and Switch were consciously different argues against 1. And Wii and Switch sales argue against another.
Goldeneye
NGE 64
IIRC it was one of best/first/well-done 4-player-on-one-screen FPS games
Banjo Kazooie? Developed by Rare but published by Nintendo, global sales of 3 million.
There was this short time in the 1990s when everybody and his brother were inventing some kind of 'disc', for instance there were the magneto-optical discs like the audio Minidisc (love 'em but my Net MD recorder just died) and the MO disc used by the NeXT cube and then there were the "floptical" discs like the ZIP disks and the N64 DD disc.
Writable and rewritable optical discs dropped in price more quickly than anyone thought possible and not long after that, USB flash drives and SD cards where everywhere.
Most portable game consoles since 2010 have been flash-based, often with some kind of modified SD card (e.g. Vita, Nintendo Switch.) I just bought a 256 GB SD card for $20 which is bigger than any commercialized disc even if it is a little pricey for software distribution.
And of course stationary consoles are going towards digital distribution, you can buy a digital PS5 now and a digital XBOX is coming soon and ultimately the storage is... Flash.
It’s not to say that things might not have been better if they’d gone with a CD-ROM format for the 64. But the brand differentiation with Sony that emerged in that generation has been the cornerstone of their (extremely successful) strategy going forward.
The GameCube was easily capable of playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto—it was significantly more powerful than the PS2—but those games came on 9GB dual-layer DVDs, so it was just never gonna happen.
The reputation Nintendo had picked up for being the “kiddy console” probably didn’t help either.
I was sooooo onboard with the N64 when first announced (or project reality at it was named at the time) and early screens.
Dont get me wrong - I understand why they stayed with cartridges. Load times really were faster than CD and one argument Mayamoto used was music changing on-the-fly (like mario creeping up on a sleeping enemy, which changed up-beat music to a lulaby) but is it really all that important?
My friend had a playstation. It was a great system but the load times for some games were absolutely terrible! For me it killed the mood. The 'experience' for some games made me prefer the inferior snes version at times, especially when looking at beat-em-ups.
How different would Mario 64 be if the N64 was CD-based from the beginning? Honestly, I think it would have changed the quality of the game -but not for the better. Of course, in N64 was CD system, then we wouldn't have anything to compare it to... therefore this comment wouldn't exist. lol.
The CD version might have included some full motion video and crisper quality music, but I think all other areas would have been the same as the cartridge version, except for load times. I think Ocarina of Time would have been painful to play on CD but then the design of the game would have gone a different route if N64 was CD.
From memory, the two biggest problems the N64 had (from my perspective, at time of writing) were using Cartridges, and being released much later than the Playstation and Saturn.
CD's were 'the thing' at that time. To have a games console which allowed for much more space for games.. and be a music player, was a big deal for your 90's kids in their bedroom!
Going by memory, in Europe/UK, the Saturn came out mid-95. Playstation came out not long after. I think the playstation was £100 cheaper on release compared to the saturn. I think the Saturn was about £400. The N64 did not come out until March '97.
-- over 1 year later! --
N64 was cheaper than Playstation and Saturn on launch (compared to their launch price) but I wouldn't be surprised if playstaion had already dropped it's price so was comparable. I think Nintendo slashed the price of the N64 from £250 to £150 within 4 weeks!
Dont get me started on the 64DD. I thought it was great at the time but, in reality, the idea of adding components to games consoles was already getting annoying (Sega proved that with their Genesis/MegaDrive.. CD, 32X, etc)
Maybe N64 could have done better if being a DD right at the start, having 'decent' space and maintaining load times speeds.
Nintendo considered the load-times of a 2X or 4X CD drive to be far too slow, and 8X drives to be too expensive. PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them. For an existing RPG it was still worth it, and with the prerendered cut-scenes that were planned for FFVII it was a no-brainer.
“It was starting to become clear to us what the memory capacity for the different next-gen consoles would be. Our games were going to need a huge amount of memory. The Final Fantasy VI CG demo we made for the Siggraph exhibition took 20 megs all by itself. We thought that demo had a lot of visual impact, so there really wasn’t much question about which hardware we would use; if we were going to realize the promise of the demo we had shown at Siggraph, nothing but the CD-ROM format would suffice.
Another reason for choosing the CD-ROM was related to price. I think one of the big reasons the first Final Fantasy was favorably received by players, and the later games in the series gained so many fans, was that you could buy those games for around 5000 to 6000 yen. We tried to have the same pricing for Bahamut Lagoon, Gun Hazard, and our other later Super Famicom games, but using cartridge ROM meant those games had to be sold for over 10000 yen. New players did not flock to those games like they had before. If we used CD-ROM for Final Fantasy VII, we’d be able to have a 2-disc game at a price of 5800 yen. I was hoping it would be possible to make a game that could sell several hundred thousand copies.“
I also had some turn based Dracula adventure game where you chose how to spend your time that was terrifying to me so I once hit the “rest” button in my Victorian era London apartment until it was 1994, which I thought was pretty hilarious ( Dracula would just immediately kill you when you ventured outside but 10 year old me didn’t quite realize how video games worked).
The PS1 didn’t really have those weird experimental FMV games but wow demo disks were my bread and butter for a poor kid.
Sega 32X worked at least, sadly it wasn't very popular either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM
Part of the issue with these sorts of console add ons is that they just split the addressable market further. ISV's either have to address only console owners with the add on, or they can address everybody with the console if they can manage without the extra hardware. Commercially, this can be a hard sell, which makes it difficult to sell the add on, making it even more difficult to write software requiring the add on.
No add-on has been able to survive more than one year outside Japan. Not even PS VR, whose sales are too low.
https://www.engadget.com/2011-03-09-microsoft-sells-10-milli...
From 2011. At any rate, it obviously satisfies the grandparent’s comment on success. (Also, you may be thinking of the Xbox One, which they received flak for bundling with a Kinect)
Certainly 10m standalone units warrants the ‘success’ tag, I’d imagine — thanks for the link.
Nowadays it takes regular websites like a full minute to load all the javascript so I've always made it partially into the article when ads start moving content around or I get inexplicably jumped back to the top. A pretty stark contrast.
It's not JS taking a minute to load, it's just that ads are typically loaded async and from many different origins than the server hosting the site itself. Def worth using an ad blocker or something like Brave which does it by default.
It's really highlighted with some of the NES/SNES RPGs that were ported to PS1 - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 1-6 come to mind. As one particularly egregious example, there's a significantly long pause when entering combat in Chrono Trigger.
The CD-ROM is slow though; in an alternative world where there was sufficient RAM to load the entire original Chrono Trigger into RAM, it would take about 12 seconds to read all 4MB of it.
However, nobody wanted to do that. The only RPGs we got on the N64 were Quest 64 and Paper Mario. The reason why requires diving into the development history of what would have been a third RPG for the system: MOTHER 3. To put it bluntly, they ran out of storage space, and pivoted to the N64 DD to get more. The custom floppy disks the N64 DD took could hold 64MB[0]. Even then, this wasn't enough, so the game was then broken up into two parts: an N64 cartridge plus a DD expansion pack, which would give them 96MB in total to play with. MOTHER 3 would then continue in development hell before being canned and reborn as a Game Boy Advance title[1].
Fire Emblem was also supposed to release on the N64. However, unlike Itoi biting off more than he could chew with the N64, FE64 failed because the head designer, Shouzou Kaga, didn't even want to touch the hardware. He'd stalled for time by working on Satellaview FE games[2] on the SNES, and then left Nintendo entirely right before Thracia 776 came out. He'd then release a totally-not-Fire-Emblem clone on PlayStation and get sued into oblivion for... basically telling all the games press that he was making Fire Emblem on PlayStation.
So that's a 50% success rate for RPGs on the N64 - not a good look. Could homebrewers do better?
On prior Nintendo systems, cartridges executed in-place - that is, the CPU bus and game cartridges were wired up such that the game was effectively the system's boot ROM. This also meant that the CPU address bus width would limit the size of the game without further bankswitching. On the N64, however, cartridges load into memory through the PI bus, which has a separate address space from the main MIPS CPU. PI bus uses 32-bit addressing, and the address range allocated to the cartridge would allow up to 3.75GB ROMs. Data storage devices that large would never exist during the lifespan of the N64, but building an N64 cartridge that large would be practical today. I suspect loading the ROM image into emulators or flashcarts wouldn't be too difficult either.
And, of course, if you did manage to hook your N64 up to ridiculous amounts of storage, you could do crazy dynamic loading tricks like this[3]. If the N64 wasn't limited by storage space, RPGs would have actually looked better than on PlayStation, and render in real time to boot.
[0] Cartridges were later produced at this size, notably for the N64 port of Resident Evil 2
[1] This did not actually fix the problems with MOTHER 3. If anything, it made them worse, because GBA cartridges are limited to 16MB without bankswitching. The game used significant amounts of compression to deal with this, which complicated efforts to make an English translation. MOTHER 3 would also not release until a month after the DS Lite, which meant that an official English release of the game was very much out of the question.
[2] The Satellaview was a SNES hardware addon that allowed downloading games off of satellite radio services operated by St.GIGA. Think of it like Nintendo's equivalent to the SEGA Channel, except Japan-only because satellite radio didn't even exist in the US yet.
However, I think RPGs could have done just fine on ordinary cartridges. Ocarina of Time was an epic 3D game with all the size and scope and themes of an RPG, it just plays like an action adventure game. It relied on text and real-time cutscenes for storytelling, though (more efficient space-wise than audio and pre-rendered cut scenes).
I think it was mainly the capital requirements of developing on the 64. If I recall, the tooling was rough and 3rd parties were largely developing in the dark prior to the release of the 64. I think a lot of hardware details were still being sorted out in the year leading up to the 64's release. There wasn't much lead time for 3rd parties to start on games. Nevermind that most game developers at the time had very little 3D gaming experience and the engines had to be basically built from scratch (you couldn't just boot up Unreal or Unity).
But neither of those things were in any way required to make an RPG. In fact, heavily relying in pre-rendered stuff has mostly been abandoned since.
You can still play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night now and it looks pretty fantastic, whereas something like Tomb Raider has some compromises you'll need to accept...
Some further examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Nk2lTRD5Y
The fourth Monkey Island game used extremely ugly 3D graphics. There was no good reason. The 5th, much later, was licensed to Telltale and they used ugly 3D graphics. There was an improvement from 4 to 5, but neither game can be compared favorably to 3.
The point of 3D graphics is to make things nicer for the developers, not the players.
That being said, I think modern 3D games look fantastic when done correctly. It's just not the best format for some genres.
The N64 was an expensive platform to launch on though. It was a lot more capital intensive to do a game on the N64, because the cartridges had wholesale costs of $15-20 to produce, plus licensing fees to Nintendo. Sony on the other hand had a cheaper licensing model and CDs could be mass produced at pennies per copy.
The problem is simply that the RPG genre was dominated by Square and Enix. And Square famously abandoned Nintendo after they abandoned the CD format that was originally planned for the N64. In fact, Nintendo had licensed the CD tech from Sony for early prototypes of the N64, and may have inadvertently created their most formidable competitor by doing so. The CD format was superior for doing large pre-rendered graphics and for higher quality sound tracks and audio files. Since these components were more useful for complex storytelling and cutscenes, Square decided to stick with Sony after the split with Nintendo.
However, lack of perspective correct texture filtering on PS1 was already ugly at the time.
There were exceptions, of course; big-name publishers could publish sprite games for tentpole franchises, so we still got Street Fighter, SotN, Mega Man 8, etc. Rules only apply when the rulemaker can afford to enforce them. That's still true today, as we found out when it came out that Google waived the app store fees for Spotify.
No other projects are based on my project at this time. I didn't even get the battle mechanics implemented before people started sharing it!
You don't need to use that tool to build it, I just did when I made it.