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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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stop being dishonest.
But even if you weren't mischaracterizing my statement ...
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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.
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.
Banjo Kazooie? Developed by Rare but published by Nintendo, global sales of 3 million.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS2 = the same, but with DVD movies.
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!
IIRC it was one of best/first/well-done 4-player-on-one-screen FPS games
Goldeneye
NGE 64
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.