Is DOOM 64 the best looking N64 game?

[JM_andtheArgonauts]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Then again, Nintendo 64 games were meant to be played on a television screen. Blurry textures are not as noticeable from afar.

And also remember the resolution of old TV screens was a lot lower. N64 looked amazing on the old box TVs from the 90s 

[Rudolph]

5 minutes ago, JM_andtheArgonauts said:

And also remember the resolution of old TV screens was a lot lower. N64 looked amazing on the old box TVs from the 90s 

Right, and it works both ways. When I moved into a new apartment, the previous tenant left behind a fairly big CRT television and I figured I might as well take advantage of it by renting a Playstation 3 from a local video rental store (before the business totally went extinct). The game looked actually pretty bad and the text was hard to read. Suffice to say, I returned the console the next day and I gave the TV away soon after.

Edited September 28, 2023 by Rudolph

[JM_andtheArgonauts]

4 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Right, and it works both ways. When I moved into a new apartment, the previous tenant left behind a fairly big CRT television and I figured I might as well take advantage of it by renting a Playstation 3 from a local video rental store (before the business totally went extinct). The game looked actually pretty bad and the text was hard to read. Suffice to say, I returned the console the next day and I gave the TV away soon after.

😂 that’s a great story. What next-gen high resolution game did you try playing? Haha

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, JM_andtheArgonauts said:

😂 that’s a great story. What next-gen high resolution game did you try playing? Haha

Well, I do not want to go into too much of a tangent here, but I believe it was Binary Domain.

[Dragonsbrethren]

I remember playing GTA Vice City on the last CRT I owned, and even by that time it was clear they weren't designing for them anymore. The menu was unreadably small and blurry. It was what finally motivated me to go out and get a (terrible mid 2000's quality) LCD TV, because at least the text was sharp.

 

That said there's so much bias against N64 games nowadays. GoldenEye as an example might look blurry and low resolution in those screenshots, but the environment quality was phenomenal at the time, to say nothing of using actual motion-captured character animations. That was the game you wanted on the N64, not stripped-down ports of PC games like Duke 64 or Quake 64. The game definitely has places where it suffers typical N64 problems, but the designers were also very good about maximizing texture quality by using large grayscale textures colored by vertex shading, and also splitting geometry to accommodate lots of small textures instead of wallpapering large ones. Lots of neat tricks like alpha blending the railing texture to create shadows in that Dam shot (and the baked lighting, in general, is done very well). Coincidentally, Doom 64 also takes advantage of high-res textures and vertex-based lighting, it just suffers from the limitations of the Doom map format and is way more constricted in the quality of environments that can be created.

Edited October 1, 2023 by Dragonsbrethren

[TasAcri]

Goldeneye also had something most other FPS at the time didn't really have: Environmental shadows. Not real time but shadows nonetheless.

 

Look at this picture for instance:

 

 

You can see the shadows i'm talking about all over the place. Like those anchors or however they are called, look at their shadows being cast on the walls or the floor. Or the shadow under the stairs. Or the shadow of the balconies on the walls.

 

You would almost never see that kind of detail in other FPS at the time. Quake had something similar but not nearly as sharp or well defined. I'm pretty sure these are some sort of transparencies and not baked textures. That's because if you zoom in on the edges, they don't get pixelated, they are still just as pin sharp as before.

Edited October 1, 2023 by TasAcri

[famicommander]

Some contenders:
Star Wars Rogue Squadron

Star Wars: Battle for Naboo

Perfect Dark

Paper Mario

Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards

Conker's Bad Fur Day

1080 Snowboarding

F-Zero X (basic textures but super fast gameplay and consistent 60fps)

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Sin and Punishment

 

I do love how Doom 64 looks and feels, though.

[Individualised]

On 10/1/2023 at 6:29 PM, TasAcri said:

Goldeneye also had something most other FPS at the time didn't really have: Environmental shadows. Not real time but shadows nonetheless.

 

Look at this picture for instance:

 

 

You can see the shadows i'm talking about all over the place. Like those anchors or however they are called, look at their shadows being cast on the walls or the floor. Or the shadow under the stairs. Or the shadow of the balconies on the walls.

 

You would almost never see that kind of detail in other FPS at the time. Quake had something similar but not nearly as sharp or well defined. I'm pretty sure these are some sort of transparencies and not baked textures. That's because if you zoom in on the edges, they don't get pixelated, they are still just as pin sharp as before.

That screenshot actually looks really cool, almost looks like a render. I think the scanline filter might be doing a lot of the hard work there though.

 

As for the shadows, calling them "environmental shadows" is a bit of a stretch, they are probably baked into the level geometry without the game engine doing anything special to render these, and they may even have been manually done by the level designer themselves rather than being generated programmatically using light sources and stuff during map compilation - I'm not familiar with Goldeneye 007 enough to know but if the game only uses this effect selectively then that's a good sign that these were done manually. In the latter case, it's nothing really special and in fact Doom did this.

[TasAcri]

59 minutes ago, Individualised said:

That screenshot actually looks really cool, almost looks like a render. I think the scanline filter might be doing a lot of the hard work there though.

 

As for the shadows, calling them "environmental shadows" is a bit of a stretch, they are probably baked into the level geometry without the game engine doing anything special to render these, and they may even have been manually done by the level designer themselves rather than being generated programmatically using light sources and stuff during map compilation - I'm not familiar with Goldeneye 007 enough to know but if the game only uses this effect selectively then that's a good sign that these were done manually. In the latter case, it's nothing really special and in fact Doom did this.

 

The screenshot is an older one i took from an emulator, using Parallel RDP, which is accurate. But in this instance i'm using a 2x upscale and then the CRT shader downscales it to a lower resolution. The end result is close to the original but also cleaner so it's not a faithful representation, it's just the way i prefer N64 games to look.

 

That's how the actual N64 would look at the same scene:

 

 

It does look a bit cleaner on a real, good CRT mind you (which i have thankfully). Think of something between the first and the second screenshot.

 

Anyway, these shadows are used in the whole game and very consistently. And yeah, like i said, they are not real time but baked in. The difference is, i don't think they are baked in the textures like in other games. I think they are transparencies or even different transparent polygons or something. Their edges look pin-sharp even when you zoom in on them with the sniper rifle.

 

Here's a screen demonstrating this:

 

 

I always liked the way Goldeneye looks and i think these shadows are what makes the difference for me. I don't know of any other FPS games at the time that use this technique. It's not that they are "realistic", shadows are not supposed to be this sharp. But in a low poly, stylized game like this, they look much better than soft shadows would. Especially on a N64 game that already has to deal with a lot of softness and blur.

Edited October 5, 2023 by TasAcri

[Kyle07]

On 10/5/2023 at 5:42 AM, Individualised said:

That screenshot actually looks really cool, almost looks like a render. I think the scanline filter might be doing a lot of the hard work there though.

 

As for the shadows, calling them "environmental shadows" is a bit of a stretch, they are probably baked into the level geometry without the game engine doing anything special to render these, and they may even have been manually done by the level designer themselves rather than being generated programmatically using light sources and stuff during map compilation - I'm not familiar with Goldeneye 007 enough to know but if the game only uses this effect selectively then that's a good sign that these were done manually. In the latter case, it's nothing really special and in fact Doom did this.

I am assuming the shadows are manually placed. Real shadows would be to demanding for that time, wouldn't they for the N64?

But even when DOOM did it, I like it what you can achieve with smartly placed shadows. DOOM looks often so awesome when this is executed well done. As such, I appreciate that it was also well implemented in GoldenEye 007.

 

I think even in the Quake I remaster I liked how lighting was handled. Not sure if quoting the remaster is a good thing in this "90s" discussion.

Often I felt, that in Half-Life 1 the resolution of the pre-calculated shadows was so low-res, that this felt the worst to me. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe community maps influenced my feeling on that.

[Dragonsbrethren]

GoldenEye's shadows are just a combination of the background mesh and vertex colors. If the designers wanted a hard shadow, they'd split the mesh there, and darken the coloration of the vertices for the shadowed area. For softer shadows, the same thing but with a smooth surface mesh. A third type of shadow and lighting effect is created like I described for the railings in the Dam screenshot: The railing texture, which has transparent areas, is alpha-blended over the ground texture, and again darkened by coloring the polygons' vertices. That allows for very detailed shadows using only a handful of polygons. The coloration of characters and Bond's gun is a property of the collision mesh, which can differ from the underlying map geometry, but rarely does. (There are a few examples of oddities like guards turning yellow on Surface's helipad that could have actually been avoided with edits to the collision mesh's coloration, meaning the colors were likely automatically generated from the background geometry.)

 

I don't have an emulator up and running right now, but one of the best examples of how GoldenEye's devs were able to make detailed lighting is probably in Archives, the hallway near where you meet with Mishkin. A grayscale gradient texture is used to create beams of light coming from open windows. Hard edges are used on the floors and walls to create the shape of the windows, and then a metal lattice texture is alpha blended over that to create a shadow of the window frames. It's way more detailed than anything you would have seen in Quake, for example. There was no lighting pass on GoldenEye's environments, it was all modeled by hand, similar to sector-based lighting in Doom but obviously way more robust being true 3D meshes.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Dragonsbrethren

[Amaruψ]

On 6/20/2023 at 9:18 AM, TasAcri said:

Now let's see how the real N64 game looks like:

 

 

 

And how DOOM 64 looks like:

 

 

Doom has sharper textures and output and a more solid frame rate. Though Goldeneye is a far more advanced game overall.

 

Also here's how another great looking N64 game (Banjo-Kazooie) looks with the VI filters ON and OFF

 

 

 

I'm not sure why people bring out that ugly mess Goldeneye 64.

 

World is Not Enough: 007 on N64 plays a lot better and looks a lot better in general than GE64. 

[Hellektronic]

Yep, because Doom 64 (a sprite-based shooter) really took technology to a whole new level. That's why you see it referenced in every single article imaginable about the 3D abilities of the Nintendo 64.

The 3D imagery is MINDBLOWING.

That's sarcasm up there, if you can't tell.

[Individualised]

2 hours ago, Hellektronic said:

Yep, because Doom 64 (a sprite-based shooter) really took technology to a whole new level. That's why you see it referenced in every single article imaginable about the 3D abilities of the Nintendo 64.

The 3D imagery is MINDBLOWING.

That's sarcasm up there, if you can't tell.

This is such a tone-deaf reply. Something looking good has nothing to do with how technically impressive it is. A lot of games that are technically impressive look like shit and that applies to a lot of N64 games. Doom 64 looks really good despite not pushing the hardware to its limits. It has sprite-based entities, and the polygon count may not be as high as some N64 games, but it has a very well crafted artistic vision with really nice sprites and textures. Compare to something like Goldeneye which just doesn't look as "intentional"... textures look like stock photos poorly applied to the game world, human characters have realistic textures that don't fit their low-poly models at all etc.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Individualised

[Hellektronic]

1 hour ago, Individualised said:

This is such a tone-deaf reply.

I never said it was tone... uh... heard?

It's a 2.5D game, hardly pushing the limits of the system. A lot of games *did* use the system to create good looking visuals, not something like Goldeneye, which obviously looked pretty rough. Other Rare games for example, like Jet Force Gemini and Conker's Bad Fur Day, look pretty impressive for that era. Whereas Doom64 has colored lighting, but otherwise looks exactly like Doom with new sprites. Arguably not as good looking sprites, and filtered as well, creating a blurry appearance.

It's an improvement over PS1's Doom port, but eh. That's not really saying a whole lot, the PS1 port looked awful. Other than the lighting effects.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Hellektronic

[invalidlain]

Personally, I don't think there are many n64 games that look good, saying that as someone who grew up with the system. I think Doom 64 looks...

 

Good. But I personally would never say it is the best looking or playing game on the console. The frame rate may be solid, but something to consider is that the game ultimately runs on what was, at the time, an aging engine. That alone made sure the game was going to run great, but look a little dated at the time. I think games like Quake or Conker or even Ocarina of Time were always going to take the contender for "best looking n64 game," solely because of the engine Doom 64 runs on. These games were more efficient at actually challenging the system's hardware limitations. So yes, while Doom 64 may look and even run good on the Nintendo 64, I firmly believe it didn't really test the N64's power, so I don't think it's a true contender for "best looking Nintendo 64 game."

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, Hellektronic said:

I never said it was tone... uh... heard?

It's a 2.5D game, hardly pushing the limits of the system. A lot of games *did* use the system to create good looking visuals, not something like Goldeneye, which obviously looked pretty rough. Other Rare games for example, like Jet Force Gemini and Conker's Bad Fur Day, look pretty impressive for that era. Whereas Doom64 has colored lighting, but otherwise looks exactly like Doom with new sprites. Arguably not as good looking sprites, and filtered as well, creating a blurry appearance.

It's an improvement over PS1's Doom port, but eh. That's not really saying a whole lot, the PS1 port looked awful. Other than the lighting effects.

I think it comes down to personal taste to be honest. While Doom 64 doesn't utilise the hardware to it's full extent, to me it's one of the best looking games on the system due to the art itself. Everything seems to fit together perfectly, every little detail seems intentional. A game doesn't have to be "full 3D" or utilise advanced graphics techniques to look good, and many games that did do those things haven't aged well at all, both visually and graphically. Compare Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a 2D game, to Castlevania 64. The former is considered one of the greatest games of all time, with very pleasing visuals and great gameplay, while the latter is mostly forgotten and suffers due to its usage of 3D. I'll agree with you that Conker's Bad Fur Day looks really good for the system. Keep in mind though that Doom 64 was one of the first games to start development for the system, though it ended up being released in 1997. It might be better to compare it to other N64 titles that started development while the system itself was being developed i.e. Mario 64.

 

To be honest I consider even PC Doom 1 and 2 to look better than a lot of N64 games simply due to the higher texture resolution (something Doom 64 did not compromise on), so that should explain my opinion.

24 minutes ago, invalidlain said:

Personally, I don't think there are many n64 games that look good, saying that as someone who grew up with the system. I think Doom 64 looks...

 

Good. But I personally would never say it is the best looking or playing game on the console. The frame rate may be solid, but something to consider is that the game ultimately runs on what was, at the time, an aging engine. That alone made sure the game was going to run great, but look a little dated at the time. I think games like Quake or Conker or even Ocarina of Time were always going to take the contender for "best looking n64 game," solely because of the engine Doom 64 runs on. These games were more efficient at actually challenging the system's hardware limitations. So yes, while Doom 64 may look and even run good on the Nintendo 64, I firmly believe it didn't really test the N64's power, so I don't think it's a true contender for "best looking Nintendo 64 game."

Quake on N64 looks awful. A game being the best looking on a system is not necessarily about how far it pushes the system's capabilities.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Individualised

[Hellektronic]

1 minute ago, Individualised said:

A game being the best looking on a system is not necessarily about how far it pushes the system's capabilities.

Ah, but if we're talking "best looking", I'd say it would have to be 3D rendered to compete with the era. Granted a lot of 3D games of that time were pretty hairy looking, especially on Playstation, but the N64 was galaxies ahead of the Playstation in 3D rendering. I'd honestly say that was it's greatest strength. It was like the first gaming console to ever fully render 3D scenes without it looking completely awful like polygon shapes.

It definitely did better at cartoonish visuals over realistic, but ya know, that was the tech limits of the time. Ultimately, I think the title of "best looking" should go to a game that is 3D and effectively uses the expansion pack, most likely. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were pretty impressive for that, somewhat convincingly rendering realistic locations that have stuff like chairs and tables in them, which Doom never did, and 64 is no exception. Sure it looks a bit cartoonish, maybe a bit low-res, but it's still better looking compared to reality. Sprites aren't realistic, they're flat and pretty non-dynamic, and that's why people wanted to get away from them. In fact Perfect Dark was one of the first games to ever have 3D blood spatter. Games like Turok 2 were pretty cool for their advanced violence, compared to a generic death animation sprite, violent though it may be, it wasn't dynamic. You shoot an imp to death, it dies the same way regardless of the gun. But then you kill an entrail in Turok 2 with a plasma rifle with a chest-shot, it makes a bloody hole with rib-cage bones sticking out, gushing blood everywhere, then pooling around the corpse. THAT was impressive. You can't tell me that shooting a 2D pinkie sprite compares.

As for me? Obviously since I still play classic Doom, I don't see full 3D rendering as a necessity, or even impressive visuals for that matter, even though Doom is very impressive for '93. But if we're debating best looking, the fully rendered 3D games of the N64 were far more jaw dropping during that time.
 

[TasAcri]

9 hours ago, Hellektronic said:

Other Rare games for example, like Jet Force Gemini and Conker's Bad Fur Day, look pretty impressive for that era.

 

Yeah and the average frame rate is what, 20? 15?

 

Sure, Jet Force Gemini looks great but they could probably make it even better looking if it run at 3 fps.

 

What matters for me is the right balance between visuals and performance. Frame rate should be counted as a visual feature just like animations do. Most RARE games don't have that. They push the machine without a care in the world it seems. The only RARE game that has an acceptable balance is Banjo-Kazooie. It's the other game that i personally think is the best looking on the N64, besides DOOM 64.

 

World Driver Championship is also a very good non-RARE contender for the title.

 

Anyway, DOOM 64 has the perfect balance IMO. It runs perfectly and it looks as good as it could on the N64. It looks far better and more complex than any of the DOOM console ports. It also has very good textures compared to most N64 games.

 

So yeah. Banjo-Kazooie, WDC and DOOM 64. These are the games i would use to show of the N64, without having to deal with people pointing out how badly N64 games run.

 

Edited October 17, 2023 by TasAcri

[Cutman 999]

 

On 6/19/2023 at 6:58 PM, Biz! said:

 

> Shitty fog

> Blocky as fuck enviroments

> Ugly, oversimplistic, blurry hud

> Log res as fuck textures (Like seriously what the fuck are the things above the snow in the first screenshot, holy shit)

> Not even actual N64 screenshots lmao

 

Yep, goldeneye is not a good-looking game, even for n64 standards...

[tzen]

2 minutes ago, Cutman 999 said:

Yep, goldeneye is not a good-looking game, even for n64 standards...

 

Lmao this is sheer fucking crazy talk

[Cutman 999]

On 9/28/2023 at 10:42 AM, Rudolph said:

Then again, Nintendo 64 games were meant to be played on a television screen. Blurry textures are not as noticeable from afar.

In crt's not as much, after all the n64 had a lot of weird filters for a reason, but texture quality is still noticeable in fifth gen games.

[Cutman 999]

On 10/1/2023 at 10:59 AM, Dragonsbrethren said:

 

That said there's so much bias against N64 games nowadays. GoldenEye as an example might look blurry and low resolution in those screenshots, but the environment quality was phenomenal at the time, to say nothing of using actual motion-captured character animations. That was the game you wanted on the N64, not stripped-down ports of PC games like Duke 64 or Quake 64. The game definitely has places where it suffers typical N64 problems, but the designers were also very good about maximizing texture quality by using large grayscale textures colored by vertex shading, and also splitting geometry to accommodate lots of small textures instead of wallpapering large ones. Lots of neat tricks like alpha blending the railing texture to create shadows in that Dam shot (and the baked lighting, in general, is done very well).

Well, every n64 is blurry and low res. The difference is that in goldeneye is noticeable as fuck, while in other games is not as much (Depending of the game, not every single game is Banjo Kazooie good after all). Talking about doom 64 again, it surprises me how well the textures of that game hold on compared to even first party games for the system.

[Cutman 999]

On 10/17/2023 at 3:03 AM, TasAcri said:

 

Yeah and the average frame rate is what, 20? 15?

 

To be fair, 20 and 15 fps where standard in n64, and many games had to compromise visual quality vs perfomance. This is why i prefer the way ps1 games look.

[Cutman 999]

On 10/16/2023 at 6:25 PM, invalidlain said:

I think games like Quake or Conker or even Ocarina of Time were always going to take the contender for "best looking n64 game," solely because of the engine Doom 64 runs on. 

Mentioning ocarina ruined some of the post a bit, ocarina runs like shit and has very bad textures, REALLY bad ones. Only the models on that game are good.

[Amaruψ]

 

This is the only good screenshot I can find of World is Not Enough on Nintendo 64 that isn't taken with a polaroid. Easily triumphs DOOM 64 is terms of looks, doesn't it?

[Individualised]

Just now, Amaruψ said:

 

This is the only good screenshot I can find of World is Not Enough on Nintendo 64 that isn't taken with a polaroid. Easily triumphs DOOM 64 is terms of looks, doesn't it?

Not a real N64 screenshot (and Project64 is infamous for all of the wrong reasons)

[Amaruψ]

Just now, Individualised said:

Not a real N64 screenshot (and Project64 is infamous for all of the wrong reasons)

 

Eh, I'd still consider it to be better in comparison to DOOM 64. Still being able to run this at a decent framerate on Nintendo 64 is quite surprising in the end. 

[Individualised]

Found real hardware footage of the game. I think it might be one of the best looking N64 games I've seen so far, but performance is an issue unfortunately. The level geometry and texture quality is great though and looks much better than GoldenEye 64, and certainly outclasses the Quake 1 port with its heavily simplified geometry and low texture quality compared to the PC version. This game's level geometry almost reaches the same level as Quake 2 on PC. Very impressed.

 

[TasAcri]

Here's a more complete video:

 

 

I disagree about this game. I don't think it looks that good. Only the first level loos great, the others look worse than the good looking levels in Goldeneye. The later has some very ugly maps (like the graveyard, the jungle, the last map, etc) but it also has Control, Bunker, Facility, Silo, Frigate, etc and all these look better. And the frame rate in most of them (except Frigate) is fine too.

 

 

2 hours ago, Cutman 999 said:

To be fair, 20 and 15 fps where standard in n64, and many games had to compromise visual quality vs perfomance. This is why i prefer the way ps1 games look.

 

They didn't "have" to do this sacrifice, it was a choice. There are great looking N64 games that run at stable 30fps and look better than the majority of poor running games on the console at the same time.

Edited October 21, 2023 by TasAcri