SNES aged better than N64?

[toastingderbyshire]

I was thinking about this the other day... so many Steam games look like 2D platformers, like I played on the SNES. the 64 was advanced for its time, but looking at the games now.. so blocky :D I'm not sure I could play any of them now, as they look pretty bad. Even Donkey Kong on SNES seems like a game from today.

 

[rmay635703]

Try playing ps2, most everything was the same gimmick

 

[Mr. Horse]

I always like the games on the n64 over the snes, but the snes did have Super Metroid.
Its kind of sad that no Metroid game made it to the n64. Kind of like how no real sonic game made it to the Saturn more or less.

 

[commodorejohn]

Part of it, I think, was that the SNES came along when developers had pretty much mastered the basic capabilities of 2D consoles and simply provided a more powerful version of something everybody was already used to working with. The N64, on the other hand, was part of the first generation of true 3D gaming systems, when everybody in the console world was still trying to figure out how 3D game design even worked. Couple that with a few truly bizarre decisions (Good idea: getting SGI to design your 3D hardware for you. Bad idea: bottlenecking it to the point where a lot of games have to make things out of shaded solid-color polygons. Good idea: introducing analog controls for 3D gaming. Bad idea: designing the rest of the controller for three-armed space aliens,) and it was a lot rougher around the edges.

 

[Unknown_K]

Early 3d games were blocky and slow both on consoles and PC.

 

[offensive_Jerk]

SNES games are much easier to stomach today than N64 games in my opinion. N64 games look like complete trash, where as SNES games have a charm to them.

The problem at the time, at least for me, was platformers and side-scrollers had saturated the market and were getting very stale.

 

[Mr. Horse]

Early 3d games were blocky and slow both on consoles and PC.

That would really depend on the PC
OK so they were still blocky for the most part, but not necessarily slow. If one had a Pentium with a voodoo it sure wasn't slow.

 

[Unknown_K]

A Voodoo card made 3d games playable, but early 3d games on the PC were software rendered or used a very early cards like the Nvidia NV1, ATI 3D Rage, Matrox Millenium 1, 3dLabs Permedia 1, S3 virge for example.

 

[Mr. Horse]

A Voodoo card made 3d games playable, but early 3d games on the PC were software rendered or used a very early cards like the Nvidia NV1, ATI 3D Rage, Matrox Millenium 1, 3dLabs Permedia 1, S3 virge for example.

Aside from the virge and Millenium those card made games more than playable. The Millenium is not a 3d card.
Also many early 3d games could use the voodoo1 too. Tomb raider could use a voodoo1c so could mech warrior2 and many others.

 

[Unknown_K]

Aside from the virge and Millenium those card made games more than playable. The Millenium is not a 3d card.
Also many early 3d games could use the voodoo1 too. Tomb raider could use a voodoo1c so could mech warrior2 and many others.

The millenium was a rudimentary 3D accelerator with support for gouraud shading and shipped with a game supporting that.
The Voodoo 1 did have a patch for Tomb Raider (among other 3d games) some months after it shipped, but the game itself didn't support it when it was released. There are many releases of Mechwarrior some of which were 3dfx editions but the game didn't launch with support.

My point is that many early 3d games shipped with just software support and needed proprietary patches for specific 3d cards that came later.

 

[GrandPoobah]

The 64 was the first generation of 3D consoles. Everything was new, even the analogue stick. It also used a mess of filters to try to smooth things out for CRTs. This makes especially crappy looking on an LCD, and the single stick for controls makes the games pretty awkward for controlling the camera let alone the player.

The SNES however was the “high-point” of pure 2d gaming. Everything was squares, and that upscales really well on an LCD. The controller was perfect for 2d gaming as well.

I just don’t think it’s even fair to compare the two.

 

[blackepyon]

The part about the N64 I didn't like (we bought one about a year after they first came out), was that once the forks in the analogue stick wore out, the controllers were junk. They used x-y light-wheel encoders, rather than the 2-axis potentiometer sticks used in modern controllers, so you couldn't kludge parts from something else, because nothing else had them.

I want to get a 3-D printer at some point. Then I'll play with trying to print new forks for the sticks, so I can get my old N64 working again. I miss StarWars Episode 1 Racer.