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.
But the games were often developed by completely different teams, sometimes the gameplay was extremely different between platforms.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The method is measuring good games. Which, now, often are exclusives.