Comparing the speed of SNES Doom...

[elbryan42]

Duke Nukem 64 has the best multiplayer on the N64. Fast, furious, fun, and EXPLOSIVE SHOTGUN SHELLS!!! The single player rules too. Sure, it's censored, but there are great new areas in the levels using the Atomic Pack textures, it has the alien from Atomic as well as the Microwave Expander. Tons of great new weapons and items. If only it had mouse control... (and music. :( )

Bomberman 64 rules as well. Can't get enough of that game.

[deadnail]

Quake 2 for N64, contrary to popular opinion, DOES NOT suck. There, I said it.

If you have the expansion pack in your 64 the game runs in 32 bit color and the framerate bottoms out at about 45, usually hanging around 60 IIRC. It is really fucking smooth and it looks great.

What they did though, thanks to the N64's exclusivity licensing (-.- bad idea Nintendo) was recreated the game. It's a bit shorter, I think, but the levels are really Goddamn fun. They're not as good as id's work but regardless they are really good, just a single step or two down.

And it controls VERY well thanks to Quake 2 being a simplistic game... the four player DM on it had me blasting buddies for hours on end.

My favorite thing about Q264, though, is the cheat code that modifies all the ingame lighting. It uses odd colors you don't see in games all that often... as well as makes the game a hot bit darker.

Duke64 also had extremely good DM action, especially in the revised Stadium. Hell, it even had a competent botmatch. Sure, they were stupid, but they'd give you a run for your money if you cranked up the skill.

A very underrated game is Duke Nukem: Zero Hour. The visual effects and stuff they did with that game was at least a year ahead of it's time... and without doubt untouched by any other N64 game. Also, of course, it's pure Duke... and deathmatching with a semi-automatic shotgun gets interesting.

And at least they finally tried to add a BFG for Duke... The BMF Thunderbolt... which fires a Q2 style BFG ball that doesn't zap enemies on the way but disintegrates everything within 30 feet of the blast radius and fires out lightning bolts at any enemy within view of it. A hella crowd pleaser and we had an assload of fun playing DM in that too, the only unbalancing factor was the sniper rifle always being an instant kill.

I utterly loathe both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Both of them were just so inconcieveably horrible I couldn't finish the first fucking level, I just had to put it down and immidiately clean my N64. SHADOWMAN IS A SUPERIOR GAME TO BOTH GOLDENEYE AND PERFECT DARK AND SHADOWMAN IS LESS FUN THAN FLOSSING WITH RAZOR WIRE.

I didn't like Turok.

Turok 3 was an okay game, I liked the fact that there's two paths through it depending on which character you chose.

Turok 2, on the other hand, was the 2nd N64 game I bought and I don't regret it at all. Locational damage, you can blow bits off of your enemies, LOTS of fun fun fun weapons... and a par deathmatch so long as you cranked the speed all the way up.

[DaJuice]

Man, I can't believe you guys hate on GoldenEye so much. I guess console gamers and pc gamers have really different tastes.
Personally, I loved that game to death.
It had a ton of real life weapons (that silver pistol sounds soo sweet), great character animation, the levels were really well designed and varied, and the graphics were top notch, especially for n64.
I was blown away when I played the level 1 for the fist time, you could see from one side of the dam, all the way to the other side, no cheats no tricks, I had no clue the n64 could pull that off.

And Turok was the first game I ever got for my n64. I played that game for well over 6 months. The world was so immersive, it had a great atmosphere, and by the time you finished that it, it really felt like you had completed a long quest.

To each his own.

[elbryan42]

Goldeneye is one of the worst looking N64 games ever. Mipmapped mess. Boring textures. Boring levels. Superman looked better. I got a free promo tape when I bought my N64 the day it came out. The games looked awesome. Mario 64, Pilotwings 64, Shadows of the Empire. Then they showed Goldeneye. I thought it looked like shit back then, and it still looks like shit now, and plays like shit.

What makes me hate Goldeneye even more is that PC gamers and console gamers alike think it's the best game ever. PC gamers should know better. Five years before Goldeneye we had Doom and Descent on the PC. And the players of those games were ecstatic about Goldeneye. I don't understand it.

I still prefer the superior PSX version of Quake 2 (just missing 2 or 3 hubs) compared to the hacked-up and botched N64 version. I couldn't care less about frames per second or sharpness of the graphics. Smoothness, playability, gameplay and flow of the game matter. The N64 Quake 2 killed that.

The N64, like I said, KICKED ALL SORTS OF ASS during the first year. Mario 64, Wave Race, Doom 64, Duke Nukem 64, Star Fox 64, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, Turok, Bomberman 64, and more. Then Goldeneye came out. After that, good games came out few and far between. One or two good games a year. Pitiful.

[DaJuice]

I don't see how GoldenEye had anything to do with other games sucking.
And I fail to see how GE was an ugly game. Just about every review rates the game either a 9/10 or 10/10 in graphics, I think it's the best looking game on the console behind the sequel Perfect Dark.
GE probably sold more copies than any other game on the n64 except fo Mario64, and it had ZERO hype before it's release, that says something right there.

Some reviews:
http://www.epinions.com/game-Software-All-N64-Goldeneye_007/display_~reviews

[Reisal]

SNES Doom sucked because there were no angles for monsters (only straight) and the flats were dull (no textures, just flat colors)

[elbryan42]

The only real gripe I had with SNES Doom was that you couldn't circle strafe.

[Livo]

For Doom...has anyone played the PSX versions of Doom and/or Final Doom and if so, what do you think of them and their improved features e.g coloured lighting, new skies, weapon sounds etc?

I think that I can get them from a retrogaming store, should I purchase them?

I've d/led a few .mp3s of the PSX Doom music, and I must say that it seems much more atmospheric than the PC Doom versions, especially the music for E1M1.

[elbryan42]

PSX Doom rules. BTW, if you downloaded the MP3s from Kazaa/Morpheus/etc I was the one that ripped them. There's ripped music from every Doom game (except for 3D0) on my site. Enjoy.

[Livo]

Thanks elbryan...though I only d/led those .mp3s from your site :p

[deadnail]

Heh. I dug out the ol' N64 today and rented some games. Notably, Quake 2. WOW, it's really hard to look at after Halo. =)

It's probably not quite as good as I made it out to be, and now that I think about it the framerate seems no better and if anything very slightly worse than the PSX version, although it's clearly better to look at NEITHER of them are a 'joy' to play, per se.

Most annoying for me was when I rented Quake 2 for PSX after reading 'completely customizable controls' on the back of the box. Does 'completely customizable' mean choosing from a few presets that none contain what I want?

Left stick should be forward, backpedal, strafe left and right and the right stick should be freelooking and turning, to be as close to a WASD setup as possible. All the presets split the turning/moving across both sticks. Is there some hidden preset you can't cycle through or what, in the N64 version it has presets and you can funk with each button as you see fit, even finding some stuff not normally assigned, like center view or an old-school 'mouse look' type button.

Still, it's amazing to see Quake 2 flying along on a raggedy old PSX... although it might hurt just a bit if you've ever seen any other incarnation of the game. =)

BTW, Mario Tennis sucks and F-Zero X still rules.

Is Duke Nukem Advance out yet?

[AndrewB]

Goldeneye was the best N64 game ever, quite arguably. I'm not much of a graphics person (duh) but this game was optimized to the limit. The technology was quite amazing, multiplayer was great, and it's just amazing what they can do with 4MB of system memory and 12MB of cartridge space.

[Captain Red]

heh, I dug up perfect dark again today, an had a quick bash of the first few levels, witch IMO are the best in the game! Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 rock! I also like the crash site, and inner levels from area 51. other then that... the maps are a bit plain. I don't see how you could say Perfect Dark ugly exactly... I guess I'm just strange. Another thing I've been up to, I've been playing Alien Resurrection with the PSX mouse (mouse look). Wile the game has some glitches, The sounds are awesome!!! If I could find a emulator that could emulate the pc mouse as a playstation mouse in port two, I would be a very happy man! Is it just me or were all the best scary games on PSX?

[mmnpsrsoskl]

Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were among the best games on N64, and most of the sucked...the thing about Goldeney/PD I find annoying was the blurry ass graphics...it looks like someone gave the camera a cataract or something...

I loved some of the weapons, and it pretty much has the best multiplayer setup/options (except for the weapon limit)...me and 2 friends played it for 12 hours straight in multiplayer...and I didn't even raise a rank :(

[AndrewB]

I don't see how someone can complain about the blurriness of Goldeneye when nearly every other N64 game ran at the same resolution, 320x240 with anti-aliasing.

[Ralphis`]

stphrz said:

The 3do version was pretty much the same as the jag version. Same levels but with decent music. And of course that wonderful choppy framerate. Actually the only thing really missing from the jag version was the music. I think the 32x version only had something like 15 levels :/

17. E1M9 was 17 and E2M9 was 16.

[mmnpsrsoskl]

AndrewB said:

I don't see how someone can complain about the blurriness of Goldeneye when nearly every other N64 game ran at the same resolution, 320x240 with anti-aliasing.

True, true. Actually I thought the default res was 256x224...and Perfect Dark ran at a higher than normal res with the expansion pak.

[spank]

http://www.genesiscollective.com/ShowPage.php?GameLink=785

Seems you are right...

[Reisal]

Nuno Correia said:

http://www.genesiscollective.com/ShowPage.php?GameLink=785

Seems you are right...

Crap graphics X.x