Retronauts Blog 16: N64 Redux
A few months ago I relived the good ol' days a bit by posting a somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog about how much the N64 sucked. This made many people angry and was widely regarded as a bad idea. Whatever. It's just, like, my opinion, man.
Why "the good ol' days"? Ah, therein lies a story.
See, today's frothing Sony nuts are quick to write me off as a useless Nintendo fantard, but back when the N64 was darkening our nation's retail shelves it was the frothing Nintendo nuts who dismissed me as a useless Sony nazi. I guess it's difficult for some people to come to terms with the notion of not seeing the world in black-and-white. I criticize because I <I>love</I>. Or something like that.
The good news, I guess, is that today's Retronauts podcast (iTunes link/XML link) will give both Nintendo- and Sony-obsessed underclassmen the unusual experience of sharing common ground, as I've somewhat inadvertently played host to 38 minutes of both N64 and PS3 bashing. I regret to admit that this podcast didn't turn out at all as I had hoped; my intention was to find people who would be willing to represent both sides of the issue, to stick up for either (or both) systems. But no; turns out everyone involved pretty much agreed: N64 had problems, and Sony doesn't appear to be in any hurry to learn from Nintendo's mistakes.
Those with sensitive constitutions (or who are suffering from easily-provoked corporate loyalties) should be aware that this podcast could possibly have the same effect on them as a microwave oven heating a bag of popcorn next to someone wearing a pacemaker. That is to say, their hearts may explode. Likely in fury. I sincerely tried to provoke some counter-arguments, but the consensus was consistent.
So, I really am sorry about that. Look, next week we'll be talking about Doom, OK? It'll be all positive. For the most part. Except maybe about the XBLA deathmatch play, which has proven to be execrable for me and everyone else on the Internet. Except, apparently, the half-dozen folks in that article's peanut gallery. Lucky bastards.
Anyway, I did promise to say nice things about N64 when its 10th anniversary arrived, and I am a man of my word.
Five Things I Don't Hate About N64
[ 1. Super Mario 64 | Nintendo | 1996 ]
If Super Mario 64 isn't one of the three most important games of the past decade, it's pretty damn close. In one stroke, this game didn't simply give Mario a facelift for a new generation of hardware, it reinvented the platformer and laid the basic ground rules for just about every single 3D action game that followed. It even encapsulated all the flaws and shortcomings of the move to 3D. It was every bit the landmark that the first Super Mario Bros. had been eleven years prior.
It's silly to pretend Mario 64 was perfect or anything, but there's no question that it was unbelievably polished for a first attempt at something so new, so big, so ambitious. I guess that's what happens when you have one of the world's top designers on the case, backed up by the full resources of the most profitable game developer in history. So important was this game that producer Shigeru Miyamoto was essentially given carte blanc to shape the N64 hardware itself to suit Mario's needs. No optical media, to ensure rapid load times; a weird-ass controller, to enable full analog input. If Mario 64 had been anything less than exquisite it would have been a disaster.
But luckily for Nintendo, it was a raging success. Critics and gamers alike got all gooey in the knees at the sight of it, and its game-to-console sales ratio was probably higher for the first year of N64's life than any non-pack-in title in history. Yes, Halo, that means you. Lucky break!
Unfortunately, nothing else on N64 really came close to matching the sheer impact that Mario 64 delivered. The system had its share of solid platformers, but Mario 64 was effectively the definitive 3D platformer, and no one managed to improve on its template for quite a while. (I'll leave determining which game did the deed as an intellectual exercise to occupy your next rainy Saturday.) But it was a damn fine ride while those 120 stars lasted.
[ 2. Germs of greatness ]
The 64DD add-on went down for the count without even swinging. If it were a boxer, it did the equivalent of falling flat on its face from a slight cold before making into the ring. If 64DD were a supermodel it would have fainted from hunger before even making it onto the runway. (Admittedly, it's tough to imagine a supermodel with measurements like 64DD.)
What a chump.
But the 64DD sowed the seeds of good things to come form Nintendo. Bad things, too, admittedly, but you can't blame 64DD for the eReader. Nintendo's always loved poorly-supported add-ons.
No, the 64DD was where Animal Crossing made its debut. You may have heard of this game in its more recent incarnations, which are pretty much exactly the same as the 64DD title but on actual, viable platforms. And it was home to customization-heavy software like the F-Zero X track editor and the abortive Mother 3. This is a pretty big deal since customization will finally be possible on a system level with Wii; for Nintendo not to capitalize on that fact with things like Wii Connect 24 would be tantamount to surrender.
The 64DD went nowhere, but Nintendo netted some valuable practice with that particular dud of a peripheral that might come in handy now that they're back in the game.
[ 3. Paper Mario | Intelligent Systems | 2001 ]
Though ostensibly a sequel to Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario was so much better than Square's callow late-gen SNES adventure. Why? Because Square tried to squeeze Mario and the gang into a fairly standard RPG; Intelligent Systems went the other direction and extrapolated an RPG from a Mario game.
All the hallmarks of a Mario platformer are here: Mario runs and jumps in something like a side-on perspective, and he can even squoosh enemies with the proper accessorization; sidequests and NPCs are intrinsically Mario-esque, with none of that "Frogfucius" crap; the plot is a doughty Bowser-snags-the-(not-entirely-helpless)-princess affair rather than mucking things up with some ill-fitting cosmic entity nonsense; and you don't have to fight alongside a stupid marshmallow or puppet. And where most N64 games tended to look blurry and grainy and ugly, IS discovered the best way to work with the system's limitations was to exploit them. Paper Mario sported a distinct visual style that was actually an intrinsic element of its gameplay.
Best of all, Paper Mario was where Nintendo's Treehouse localization department truly came into its own with one of the smartest, funniest and self-referential translations ever bestowed upon a game. In short: it's an amazing game, and I will buy it in an instant if it shows up on Wii's Virtual Console.
[ 4. Ocarina of Time | Nintendo | 1998 ]
OK, so I never finished Ocarina. In fact, I got bored and gave up about ten hours in. The headache-inducing graphics certainly didn't help; the ambition of this game was beyond the capacity of the N64 to realize. And eventually, the dungeons started to feel repetitive, moving about the game world looking for secrets and triggers to activate the next plot twist became a chore, and the whole thing began to drag.
That doesn't mean I don't like the game, and it certainly doesn't change the fact that for the first few hours it was an absolutely incredible experience. The title screen alone, with Link riding into the sunset to a haunting (if a bit artificial) melody, was worth the price of admission. But it didn't stop there; at every turn, a familiar little bit of Zelda ephemera was gamely translated into polygons in the most awesome way imaginable. That stupid crappy Gohma crab from level six of the original Zelda that took a couple of arrows to the eye before going down was now a scuttling, vulgar hybrid of "crab" and "filthy evil." And Z-targeting was the best idea, like, ever.
So yeah, I can definitely see why some people burble giddily about this being the greatest game ever, even if I don't agree. I just hope Twilight Princess manages to fix all the things I disliked about Ocarina without sacrificing the bits that worked.
[ 5. Nintendo learned its lesson ]
And that's maybe the most important thing of all. Nintendo learned its lesson with the N64, because coming in a distant runner-up to Sony after two generations of domination was a tough wake-up call. Yes, Nintendo never stopped turning a profit -- but with the N64 they suffered a greater failure than merely losing money. They lost relevence.
The new Nintendo, the one behind DS and Wii... well, it's still the old Nintendo in a lot of ways. It's still doggedly iconoclastic and sometimes follows what seems to be a counter-intuitive path to the money. But it's definitely a different company. The company's arrogance, inflexibility and greed all seem to have receded; now it's Sony that seems to be kind of delusional and, by all accounts, seems to be alienating its developers by the bucketful.
These days Nintendo is more open to publishers, more about reaching new audiences, and less about trying to compete with budget and production values alone. Ultimately, what made N64 so hard to enjoy was the paucity of quality software; my PS1 "keeper" library spans two shelves, while I own a meagre half-dozen N64 games. Wii probably won't do much to appeal to the cutting-edge types like Hideo Kojima, but for the majority of the world's developers, who don't have a Halo-sized development budget to work with, it's a perfect opportunity to create something modest in scale and high in innovation. Who knows if it'll work out for them -- but at least they're not blundering along with the same doomed tactics of the N64 era.
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