• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 8th, 2023
  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•The N64English
    1·
    6 months ago

    My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

    1. It’s stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today’s standards.
    2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
    3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don’t ‘bleed’ into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

    The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.

  • takeheart@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•The N64English
    7·
    6 months ago

    It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

    Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

    Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.