It's impossible to dig up 'those funny tweets I saw sometime recently,' so I'll paraphrase them:
- Being an adult is being able to buy a cake without needing a reason.
- The family needed something to lift our spirits, so I brought home a sheet cake from Costco. My child DEMANDED to know whose birthday it was.
This "adulthood + bad times = cake" idea got incepted for sure. It wasn't long until a nostalgia-fueled viewing of Nintendo 64 games lit up a light bulb:
Hey, I'm an adult, I can finally go back and add Wave Race 64 and Pilotwings 64 to my collection! I always wanted those as a kid!
They were each about $25 on Amazon and hilariously easy to buy.
Extending the "I'm an adult" justification, and because my brain could use a vacation, here I am, writing up notes on 25-year-old games.
- Wave Race 64 is by far the better of the two. This game holds up wonderfully! Like many of the N64 heavy hitters, this was a launch title intended to show off the system's supposed graphical prowess. It's small in scope, with only about 10 tracks, but this was really an achievement.
- In classic Nintendo fashion, it controls fantastically, with a satisfying feel and depth that still engage me now. In trying to make tight turns I find myself jamming that thumbstick. My goodness - gameplay involving water physics must have been a ridiculous problem to solve in the 90s.
- They spent polygon budgets really wisely - characters' chests look blocky, but you rarely see characters from the front, and hey, they have life vests on so their chests should look square. That detail aside, the fast action and focus on the water means you don't notice other hardware limitations.
- I adore the Pilotwings series. Even if each game is disappointingly short. The SNES original is really just 10 "levels" - and that's actually 5 levels and a hard mode for each. The 64 version is a nice bump up from that, but you're looking mostly at about 12 levels (albeit with a few more things to do per level) and a few bonus ones. You could crush this one in a day if you wanted.. but you probably won't want to. The core Pilotwings gameplay is there, and one has to admire the devs' technical performance to get a N64 launch game to show terrain at a wide distance... but you can tell this was a game rushed for launch. The 'bells and whistles' that can be added late to game - sound effects, music, UI - are all so rough I'm amazed they got released under Nintendo's publishing. The text on screen in particular looks like debug text, which gives me a laugh now. That one detail can paint a whole picture of the kind of situation these devs were in to get this thing out on time.
- Nintendo has a history of getting the best out of its own hardware and seemingly not sharing that wisdom with third-party developers. Pilotwings 64 had fantastic draw distance - the kind you would need to see where your airplane is going to land. Crazy to think that other game developers couldn't draw out more than about 10 feet. So if you were a 90s fanboy about to buy a console, you were super jazzed by the amazing landscapes you saw as part of the Pilotwings promo, and the amazing lifelike quality of Wave Race's water... and then the rest of the library didn't live up to the promise.
Objectively, the 64 didn't do amazingly well. 33 million units sold is a solid performance for a 90s game console, but Nintendo was the incumbent winner coming out of the fourth generation and lost the mantle to the first PlayStation, which sold over 100 million.
It's clear in retrospect that the transition to 3D was anyone's game to win. It was the wild west. Now that 3D games are very firmly established as we close out the 8th generation, it's fascinating to go back and see the decisions made by game developers before conventions were established. Who did what with the technology they had on hand?
- PlayStation devs seemed to have it better. They got a few more polygons and way more storage, thanks to CD-ROM.
- Square tried to have its cake, and eat it too, with Final Fantasy VII. On the one hand, they decided to use the cheap storage of CD-ROM to produce a JRPG of epic scale. On the other, it showed a vision for games that looked like movies - and that game was a very rough execution on that ideal. It would take 25 more years to make good on that vision, with Remake.
- Nintendo contracted a flight sim developer, which had never made games before, to produce Pilotwings 64. That may explain the success with only the draw distance...
- Some PlayStation game devs used the excess storage to store CD audio soundtracks, deciding that audio needed priority or that video games benefited from the 'authenticity' of major-label soundtracks.
- PlayStation games also brought about - and this one was big - voice acting! For Metal Gear Solid, hours and hours of dialog were performed, not unlike a radio drama.
- Not everyone who wanted games and movies to meld reached for recorded video. Metal Gear Solid also relied on cutscenes, which ultimately became the standard.
- Nintendo (and noticeably only Nintendo, never third-party devs) did its best when it played to its strengths, to cover up the lack of horsepower. Super Mario 64's art direction was blocky, solid colors, and occasionally texture-mapped. But it always felt natural. Four controller ports and instant load times meant that bigger groups of people cherish countless hours spent engrossed in rounds of Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 007, and Super Smash Bros.
- It's in that context that Wave Race 64 truly shines. With great racing gameplay and visuals that focus on what matters most (seeing the waves in front of you), it shows that Nintendo occasionally had 3D gaming figured out at its very dawn. Best $25 I've spent this year.