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submitted 1 year ago by snownyte@kbin.social to c/games@lemmy.world

As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games.

I've just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it's in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it's because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.

But I've grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I've forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.

Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.

I'm more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.

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[-] Zarxrax@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

For me it's the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don't hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.

[-] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for "the system," but in reality they're only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It's not that the N64 has a top ten, it's that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.

I'm sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef's Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that's the thing: It's always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn't know any better because that's all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:

Majora's Mask

Star Fox 64

Jet Force Gemini

Donkey Kong 64

Diddy Kong Racing

Excite Bike 64

Paper Mario

~~Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door~~

Pokémon Stadium

Yoshi's Story

Pokémon Snap

Mario Party

Felt at the time that there was always a high quality "AAA" release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.

Obviously a lot of them don't stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven't had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Thousand Year Door was a GameCube game.

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago
[-] Protoknuckles@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

You seem to have forgotten Shadows of the Empire too!

[-] billiam0202@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Star Wars Rogue Squadron?

Star Wars Episode 1 Racer?

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yes my list was not exhaustive either and tried to focus on exclusives to make the point.

[-] moody@lemmings.world 2 points 1 year ago

Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)

How many third-party games were any good?

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We referred to Rare as a "second-party" developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.

To answer your question on third-party games, some of my favourites were...

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

Vigilante 8

Extreme-G

Snowboard Kids

Turok

Bomberman 64

Resident Evil 2

San Francisco Rush

[-] snownyte@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.

But I don't see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it's legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.

[-] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I don't get the hype for Castlevania. I've never liked any of them. I also haven't played one since the SNES.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Well, they took a pretty dramatic turn after that point. Still, Castlevania 1 and 3 are beloved for other reasons.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.

[-] snownyte@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

There's a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.

But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that's where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This doesn't track, Rare were banging out so many good games and as others have mentioned the Star Wars games were also awesome.

I feel you are also still missing the point about trailblazing. There was more gameplay innovation than anything since.

[-] billiam0202@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Speaking of innovation, the N64 was the, if not first then what I would call the first modern, console to use thumbsticks. The Dualshock was the second controller made for the PlayStation.

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yep, chuck Rumble Pak in there too.

Did platform fighters exist before Smash?

Did proper 3D platforming with free camera exist before Mario 64?

Did third person adventure games exist before OoT and has anything drastically changed the formula since?

Not to mention all these games shipped fully built with no updates and amazingly few bugs.

It seems as though OP didn't actually experience these things at the time so making a post about nostalgia for them is strange. Firing up an emulator and going "These games don't hold up now." is entirely missing the point.

[-] billiam0202@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Did platform fighters exist before Smash?

By "platform fighter" do you mean a game where your goal is to increase damage to your opponents in order to knock them out of the arena, as opposed to draining a health bar?

If so, I don't recall any before Smash, though my interest in pre-Smash fighters ended with the SNES.

I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64...and that is about it.

You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren't. Like, "Here's 25 MORE games that should have been on it." and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn't wangle the rights for.

Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora's Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that's basically it. You'd have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin' USA, and you'd never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or...whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.

I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn't, it's because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don't all have the same memories.

[-] Redacted@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years...

Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn't exist without them.

this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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