I am probably going to get hate for this, but I don’t think too highly of this console.
Sure, some of the games at the time were astonishing and well regarded classics, but man oh man do I dislike the controller, it just feels so… alien to hold you know?
Another thing too, the cartridge format whilst snappy, suffered from making too many cutbacks compared to the disc format of PS1 and Saturn which gave you pretty much the full scoop.
I am sure Nintnedo had their reasons at the time, but to me it was almost like it was a death by a thousand cuts scenario, a really powerful machine let down by not using what is literally the next gen medium at the time.
Let me know your thoughts, it is fine to disagree as the console is well respected with both nostalgia and entertainment, I’m just an outlier here.
The one thing I do miss about the N64 controller is the Z trigger on the back. It’s something that no modern controller has seemed to replicate. The closest I’ve seen is the Steam Deck, and even the triggers on the back of it aren’t quite the same.
Cartridges actually have much faster load times than discs. Notice how the Switch has reverted back to cartridges? They’re faster.
As for the controller… It is pretty odd. Though, at the time, we didn’t have the same standard for controller design we have now. So it makes sense that Nintendo would try something bold. Then after they had committed to the design, the world decided the PS1 controller made much more sense, and that became the benchmark for future controller designs.
I’m willing to bet the revert to carts had something more to do with the switch being handheld and it’s small form than load times. Still a beneficial side effect though.
Every piece of hardware in a given budget is ultimately a product of compromise. 3D capabilities of N64 are way beyond what PS can offer - texture filtering and Z buffer just put Playstation to shame. No CD is equally embarrassing to N64. The controller… well, it was a weird time.
the ps2 came 4 years after the N64, a crucial time window of consumer audio chip evolution. but even more importantly, the N64 didnt even have a sound chip, relied on the CPU for it while competing for resources.
It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.
Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.
Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
I never had many n64 games but I only remember one actually needing the external memory pak. Most first-party games could just save to the cartridge, it’s only a few third parties that cheaped out and didn’t implement that. Meanwhile the PS1 was memory cards only.
Also I don’t think any console had internal storage until the Xbox which introduced a hard disk while the GameCube and PS2 were still using memory cards!
Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.
IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).
In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?
Any older disk based console also required a memory card.
Pretty sure the controller was the first to have an analogue joystick.
I think a lot of the quirks of the N64 were because they were essentially first drafts. A lot of first, a lot of ground breaking tech.
Nobody knew what they were doing, at that time: nothing was wrong
The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
It’s a really difficult console to go back to. The peak of the N64 was one of my personal video game peaks. I was in high school and staying up all night at a buddy’s house playing GoldenEye was the BEST.
Many years later, I tried to scratch that itch and buy a used console and some games. We played it for maybe a week, but it was rough, and we didn’t really get any value out of it.
It’s hard to describe how disorienting Super Mario 3D was the first time I played it. 3D open worlds were very new and we were discovering it in the only way available, with a three handed controller.
Now that 3D games have been refined, the N64 looks like a hot mess, with very few actually good games, but at the time, it was like an experimental space craft going to new worlds, we learned how to work it, and we appreciated the ride!
It was designed so you could use left and right for a traditional 2D game, or middle and right for one of these newfangled 3D games that they didn’t know whether they’d catch on. GoldenEye also had a sort of proto-dual-stick layout where you could use left and middle!
Carts lasted ages longer than discs. Sure for some actually responsible adult player discs would probably have been better but for preteens fighting with their siblings on who’s turn it is and what will be played…?
(We once ruined a PS2 game because we had it upright and it fell and the disc took such a deep scratch it never worked past that point again. I still feel guilty and feel I missed out on HP2. And that was 5 years after we got a N64, so PS1 discs would’ve been even more at risk.)
The controller is weird by modern standards , yeah, but it wasn’t too weird at the time. It’s sort of like two controllers in one, a more classic form like the snes and the basic ps1 controller and a more modern one with a joystick with the middle-handle.
There was no weirdness at all using it when it came out. The “basic” model (think xbox controller) only came out a bit later.
But nowadays? Idk, I don’t have one, but we tried playing Goldeneye 64 with my brother and man the control schemes were all over the place and I couldn’t for the life of me get “in the groove” and we used to play 4 player deatmatch a ton for years and I was ace at it.
I lived through it, and even as kids we all agreed the N64 controller was weird and illogical. But we got used to it and it was not a hurdle or a detriment to the console. You could tell if people had played before if they held the center grip or the left grip.
It was weird in a Nintendo way, yeah, but imo there was hardly anything illogical about it. The triple handle setup was reasoned in the way that if there was a more “classic” control scheme in the game, you might use the d-pad instead of the joystick (which was shit in the way it wore out though). Most games did use the joystick, but not all, and not all the time.
I think the reasoning was to have more adaptability in traditional Nintendo sort of way.
Also, the Dreamcast controller looks very weird as well, has less buttons and came out two years after.
GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.
The controller was weird, but they didn’t have a template yet for what a joystick controller should look like. Also, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that you’re never supposed to the D-Pad/Joystick at the same time. Left hand goes on the D-Pad handle for 2D games, Joystick handle for 3D (some third-party developers didn’t understand this though).
It was definitely a product of its time, but it paved the way to what we have now. It’s important to note the N64 was the first console to have an analog stick, so nobody really knew where to place it. They put it in the middle since it was something extra not all games would use.
That said, the hardware limitations didn’t matter that much as long as the games were stellar. Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are maybe the most influential games of all time, up there with Doom and Quake.
I always liked the ergonomics of the N64 controller. The recreation of those ergonomics using the Wiimote+nunchuk was one of my favorite things about the Wii lol
The nunchuck was sublime (when it worked), but the ergonomics of the wiimote were ridiculous. Pointing at the screen required an unnatural wrist angle that wasn’t sustainable for long gaming sessions, and trying to turn it horizontal to use as a standard controller was simply ass.
The controller had a weird and unfortunate shape. It’s still miles better than any PS controller due to Sony’s refusal to put the stick on a natural position for the the thumb.
Sega and then Microsoft (after the first huge iteration) got both general shape and analog positions right.
Cartridge is an indefensible choice, it was perhaps borne of Nintendo’s falling out with Sony that prejudiced them against CD. Nintendo probably liked that they were more difficult to pirate as well, gamers not as much evidently. The Gamecube going optical but with a bizarre reversed mini-dvd is even worse.
There’s also a complete absence of software from your post, whatever it’s shortcomings Nintendo and Rare pushed some amazing games on it which people remember fondly.
I believe the N64 was huge in the US, Canada, and Japan, but PlayStation dominated that generation overall. I always preferred the PS graphics, the library, and the controller personally.
It’s kinda weird that the N64 seems to have a much bigger legacy. I think it’s because of Nintendo’s ability to make timeless games that are remembered more fondly than PS ones, but I would argue that games like Spyro, Tekken 3, GT2, and SotN aged just as gracefully as the N64 classics like SM64, Smash, Mario Kart, and OoT. Plus you can play them on a normal controller.
I doubt you’ll get any disagreement on your take for the controller. It was definitely an odd and experimental one, though I do remember thinking it was really cool looking when it came out. I was also 6 and not the best judge of functionality.
That having been said, the cartridge decision was in line with Nintendo’s recent plays at the time that had paid out for them in a big way, and that they continue to follow today. They had made a gamble on the Game Boy a few years prior that absolutely blew up in their favor. When the Game Boy came out, the Game Gear was it’s competitor and Game Gear had a color screen and a lot more screen real estate. Nintendo made the choice to focus on power efficiency (up to almost a half a day of playtime on four double-A batteries versus the Game Gear with about three and a half hours of play time on six double-A’s) and production cost reduction. Some of those design philosophies carried forward to the N64.
Additionally, something a lot of people seem to be unaware of these days is how absolutely stark the difference in loading times was between something like the PS1 discs and the N64 cartridge. I grew up on the SNES and N64 and when I first played a PS1 game the load times made me not want to touch a Sony console for quite a while.
Anyways, that’s my two cents. No disagreements here that cartridges held the N64 back in some ways but the tradeoffs made it an amazing system and miles above the competition for me, personally. Good gameplay and quality of life will always beat more power in my book.
Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.
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The one thing I do miss about the N64 controller is the Z trigger on the back. It’s something that no modern controller has seemed to replicate. The closest I’ve seen is the Steam Deck, and even the triggers on the back of it aren’t quite the same.
Cartridges actually have much faster load times than discs. Notice how the Switch has reverted back to cartridges? They’re faster.
As for the controller… It is pretty odd. Though, at the time, we didn’t have the same standard for controller design we have now. So it makes sense that Nintendo would try something bold. Then after they had committed to the design, the world decided the PS1 controller made much more sense, and that became the benchmark for future controller designs.
I’m willing to bet the revert to carts had something more to do with the switch being handheld and it’s small form than load times. Still a beneficial side effect though.
The controller was so you could use it as a d-pad or as a joystick controller
Our current format has the assumption you will use both at the same time
Cartridges were faster but held less data, currently there is no reason to use cds/dvds/blurays over sd cards
Handhelds all use cartridges (the only exception being the PSP) because they are smaller and do not require mechanical parts.
Every piece of hardware in a given budget is ultimately a product of compromise. 3D capabilities of N64 are way beyond what PS can offer - texture filtering and Z buffer just put Playstation to shame. No CD is equally embarrassing to N64. The controller… well, it was a weird time.
I played a lot of THSP2 on my
PS2PS1 and was horrified by the N64 version’s audio quality when I played it at a friend’s housethe ps2 came 4 years after the N64, a crucial time window of consumer audio chip evolution. but even more importantly, the N64 didnt even have a sound chip, relied on the CPU for it while competing for resources.
Sorry I meant PS1! It played CD quality audio as well
It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.
Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.
Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.
I never had many n64 games but I only remember one actually needing the external memory pak. Most first-party games could just save to the cartridge, it’s only a few third parties that cheaped out and didn’t implement that. Meanwhile the PS1 was memory cards only.
Also I don’t think any console had internal storage until the Xbox which introduced a hard disk while the GameCube and PS2 were still using memory cards!
Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.
IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).
In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?
Any older disk based console also required a memory card.
Pretty sure the controller was the first to have an analogue joystick.
I think a lot of the quirks of the N64 were because they were essentially first drafts. A lot of first, a lot of ground breaking tech.
Nobody knew what they were doing, at that time: nothing was wrong
The controller sucked. It sucked then; it sucks now. But it had ports for four of them, so that console had tons of four-player multiplayer games, and they were great. PS1 could technically support it, but no one had a multitap, and because no one had a multitap, practically no games supported more than two players.
Cartridges were expensive and couldn’t hold much data on them, but you basically never saw any loading times. Long load times were a thing I associated with the PlayStation brand up until the PS5. Loading times were definitely an expensive trade-off for that console, and it didn’t help them in the market, but it certainly made the N64 stick out for it.
You’re not wrong at all. On any of your points.
It’s a really difficult console to go back to. The peak of the N64 was one of my personal video game peaks. I was in high school and staying up all night at a buddy’s house playing GoldenEye was the BEST.
Many years later, I tried to scratch that itch and buy a used console and some games. We played it for maybe a week, but it was rough, and we didn’t really get any value out of it.
It’s hard to describe how disorienting Super Mario 3D was the first time I played it. 3D open worlds were very new and we were discovering it in the only way available, with a three handed controller.
Now that 3D games have been refined, the N64 looks like a hot mess, with very few actually good games, but at the time, it was like an experimental space craft going to new worlds, we learned how to work it, and we appreciated the ride!
The controller was not ergonomic and designed for cool alien looks rather than actual accessibility or usability. That’s my beef with the controller.
That said as a kid I thought it was the absolute coolest thing.
It was designed so you could use left and right for a traditional 2D game, or middle and right for one of these newfangled 3D games that they didn’t know whether they’d catch on. GoldenEye also had a sort of proto-dual-stick layout where you could use left and middle!
Carts a cutback?
Were you a kid when N64 came out?
Carts lasted ages longer than discs. Sure for some actually responsible adult player discs would probably have been better but for preteens fighting with their siblings on who’s turn it is and what will be played…?
(We once ruined a PS2 game because we had it upright and it fell and the disc took such a deep scratch it never worked past that point again. I still feel guilty and feel I missed out on HP2. And that was 5 years after we got a N64, so PS1 discs would’ve been even more at risk.)
The controller is weird by modern standards , yeah, but it wasn’t too weird at the time. It’s sort of like two controllers in one, a more classic form like the snes and the basic ps1 controller and a more modern one with a joystick with the middle-handle.
There was no weirdness at all using it when it came out. The “basic” model (think xbox controller) only came out a bit later.
But nowadays? Idk, I don’t have one, but we tried playing Goldeneye 64 with my brother and man the control schemes were all over the place and I couldn’t for the life of me get “in the groove” and we used to play 4 player deatmatch a ton for years and I was ace at it.
I lived through it, and even as kids we all agreed the N64 controller was weird and illogical. But we got used to it and it was not a hurdle or a detriment to the console. You could tell if people had played before if they held the center grip or the left grip.
It was weird in a Nintendo way, yeah, but imo there was hardly anything illogical about it. The triple handle setup was reasoned in the way that if there was a more “classic” control scheme in the game, you might use the d-pad instead of the joystick (which was shit in the way it wore out though). Most games did use the joystick, but not all, and not all the time.
I think the reasoning was to have more adaptability in traditional Nintendo sort of way.
Also, the Dreamcast controller looks very weird as well, has less buttons and came out two years after.
GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.
The controller was weird, but they didn’t have a template yet for what a joystick controller should look like. Also, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that you’re never supposed to the D-Pad/Joystick at the same time. Left hand goes on the D-Pad handle for 2D games, Joystick handle for 3D (some third-party developers didn’t understand this though).
I have a lot of nostalgia for it, but the controller was definitely weird
It was definitely a product of its time, but it paved the way to what we have now. It’s important to note the N64 was the first console to have an analog stick, so nobody really knew where to place it. They put it in the middle since it was something extra not all games would use.
That said, the hardware limitations didn’t matter that much as long as the games were stellar. Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are maybe the most influential games of all time, up there with Doom and Quake.
Technically the Sega Saturn had an analog stick controller available before the N64.
https://segaretro.org/3D_Control_Pad#History
No. The N64 was released in Japan before this weird abomination was released on either Japan or North America.
Looks like you’re right. The N64 released a month before the Saturn’s controller was available. TIL.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_stick
I always liked the ergonomics of the N64 controller. The recreation of those ergonomics using the Wiimote+nunchuk was one of my favorite things about the Wii lol
The nunchuck was sublime (when it worked), but the ergonomics of the wiimote were ridiculous. Pointing at the screen required an unnatural wrist angle that wasn’t sustainable for long gaming sessions, and trying to turn it horizontal to use as a standard controller was simply ass.
The controller had a weird and unfortunate shape. It’s still miles better than any PS controller due to Sony’s refusal to put the stick on a natural position for the the thumb.
Sega and then Microsoft (after the first huge iteration) got both general shape and analog positions right.
Cartridge is an indefensible choice, it was perhaps borne of Nintendo’s falling out with Sony that prejudiced them against CD. Nintendo probably liked that they were more difficult to pirate as well, gamers not as much evidently. The Gamecube going optical but with a bizarre reversed mini-dvd is even worse.
There’s also a complete absence of software from your post, whatever it’s shortcomings Nintendo and Rare pushed some amazing games on it which people remember fondly.
I believe the N64 was huge in the US, Canada, and Japan, but PlayStation dominated that generation overall. I always preferred the PS graphics, the library, and the controller personally.
It’s kinda weird that the N64 seems to have a much bigger legacy. I think it’s because of Nintendo’s ability to make timeless games that are remembered more fondly than PS ones, but I would argue that games like Spyro, Tekken 3, GT2, and SotN aged just as gracefully as the N64 classics like SM64, Smash, Mario Kart, and OoT. Plus you can play them on a normal controller.
I doubt you’ll get any disagreement on your take for the controller. It was definitely an odd and experimental one, though I do remember thinking it was really cool looking when it came out. I was also 6 and not the best judge of functionality.
That having been said, the cartridge decision was in line with Nintendo’s recent plays at the time that had paid out for them in a big way, and that they continue to follow today. They had made a gamble on the Game Boy a few years prior that absolutely blew up in their favor. When the Game Boy came out, the Game Gear was it’s competitor and Game Gear had a color screen and a lot more screen real estate. Nintendo made the choice to focus on power efficiency (up to almost a half a day of playtime on four double-A batteries versus the Game Gear with about three and a half hours of play time on six double-A’s) and production cost reduction. Some of those design philosophies carried forward to the N64.
Additionally, something a lot of people seem to be unaware of these days is how absolutely stark the difference in loading times was between something like the PS1 discs and the N64 cartridge. I grew up on the SNES and N64 and when I first played a PS1 game the load times made me not want to touch a Sony console for quite a while.
Anyways, that’s my two cents. No disagreements here that cartridges held the N64 back in some ways but the tradeoffs made it an amazing system and miles above the competition for me, personally. Good gameplay and quality of life will always beat more power in my book.
Totally agree on load times. That was a major factor in me sticking with Nintendo over PS during that time.
Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.