The N64 Mythology

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Originally Posted by Soulis

I still don't see anything here that disproves Nintendo making/working on their analog stick just as early or even earlier than that. I also don't find anything here for me to stop giving credit to Nintendo for making the analog stick a standard during that generation. Because that's what i was giving credit for, not who worked on it first. Making something an industry standard is just as important, if not more, than inventing something new. If Nintendo didn't exist Sega would probably done it a bit later. Or Sony. But Nintendo did it first. It doesn't make them gods. Just something to give some credit for. Neither does it make Sega look any worse. I actually love both Sega and Nintendo about just as much, for different reasons each. (since you seem to think i'm a Nintendo fanboy).

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I didn't say Nintendo didn't work on it just as early. I'm simply saying both companies were working on similar solutions to the same perceived problem around the same time.

I wouldn't say Nintendo made it a standard either. All three determined it was going to be needed for 3D games. So 3D games made it a standard. Giving Nintendo sole credit for making it standard is just plain silly. The only reason Sega didn't bundle it with their system first is simply because their system came out earlier and wasn't selling well. But go ahead, keep moving the goal posts.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

But go ahead, keep moving the goal posts.

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I don't think i do, i still say the same thing i was saying from the beginning. That's that they made the stick an industry standard.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

I wouldn't say Nintendo made it a standard either. All three determined it was going to be needed for 3D games. So 3D games made it a standard.

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You know i actually agree with this. It's just that of all those 3D games you are thinking, Mario 64 was the one on the top as far as pushing the analog stick is concerned. And i would even argue that no other game worked as well or made the analog seem so necessary or helped the analog stick make such an impact. Also, games are made by the companies. There is no difference in giving Mario 64 credit for standardizing the analog stick than giving it to Nintendo.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

The only reason Sega didn't bundle it with their system first is simply because their system came out earlier and wasn't selling well.

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This is mostly an assumption though. But still, you only just explain one reason why Sega missed the opportunity being them the ones who made the analog stick the industry standard. I'm not saying the opposite.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

I don't think i do, i still say the same thing i was saying from the beginning. That's that they made the stick an industry standard.



You know i actually agree with this. It's just that of all those 3D games you think, Mario 64 was the one on the top as far as pushing the analog stick is concerned. There was no other game that pushed it as much as Nintendo did with this particular game. And i would even argue that no other game worked as well or made the analog seem so necessary. Also, games are made by the companies. There is no difference in giving Mario 64 credit for standardizing the analog stick than giving it to Nintendo.


This is mostly an assumption though. But still, you only just explain one reason why Sega missed the opportunity being them the ones who made the analog stick the industry standard. I'm not saying the opposite.

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See I'd say given the position they were in at the time, Sega did the best they realistically could to push the analog controller. They bundled it with NiGHTS and really pushed that game as a killer app. And that game really does work well with the analog controls. I'd put it up just as high as Mario 64 when I think of games that need analog controls. If Sega was in the position Sony was in at the time, I'm sure we would have seen them pumping out Analog Saturn bundles just as Sony did with the Dualshock PS1 bundles.

And then the Analog Saturn controller would be deprecated within a year.

Sega was known for a lot of good stuff, but not controller design.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

I don't think i do, i still say the same thing i was saying from the beginning. That's that they made the stick an industry standard.



You know i actually agree with this. It's just that of all those 3D games you are thinking, Mario 64 was the one on the top as far as pushing the analog stick is concerned. And i would even argue that no other game worked as well or made the analog seem so necessary or helped the analog stick make such an impact. Also, games are made by the companies. There is no difference in giving Mario 64 credit for standardizing the analog stick than giving it to Nintendo.


This is mostly an assumption though. But still, you only just explain one reason why Sega missed the opportunity being them the ones who made the analog stick the industry standard. I'm not saying the opposite.

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I'd argue that the PS1 starting to include the dual shock, and then especially the PS2 did far more to push analog as a standard than the N64. Not only did it make analog standard, but dual analog controllers which the N64 didn't really have (and arguably the GC barely had as well).

Compared to the PS1 + PS2 the n64 sales numbers were positively niche.


Really I don't see this thread as N64 hate... just that too many seem to over value the N64's impact. It wasn't a bad console, but it wasn't great, and it's design hampered it's own potential (sort of a familiar Nintendo trend).

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

I'd argue that the PS1 starting to include the dual shock, and then especially the PS2 did far more to push analog as a standard than the N64.

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The single analog stick as a standard for movement in a 3D environment and the dual analog sticks as a standard for both movement and analog camera control are two things that didn't happen in the same time frame. I argue that the N64 made the single stick standard during 5th gen. Also i don't think that the second analog stick became a complete necessity in gamers minds (thus, a standard) before Halo anyway. It existed way before that of course but it was just a niche thing.

Like Trekkies said (and i agreed) its the games that set the standards, not the hardware. Without the right game you can't convince anyone that a hardware innovation is a necessity. Nintendo had both the right hardware and the right game at the right time, plus they hyped the hell out of it. They basically said to us "gamers, this is the future of 3D games either you like it or not, so get used to it" and they based the whole console and marketing campaign on that one thing. That didn't really happen with the dual analog setup. The gaming community by itself decided after a while that the dual analog setup is indeed necessary and the game that started the fire was Halo, which was released a lot later than the first dual analog controllers.

Also, i don't get what sales have to do with anything. Even without an analog stick controller the PS1 would still sell a lot more than the N64.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

The single analog stick as a standard for movement in a 3D environment and the dual analog sticks as a standard for both movement and analog camera control are two things that didn't happen in the same time frame. I argue that the N64 made the single stick standard during 5th gen. Also i don't think that the second analog stick became a complete necessity in gamers minds (thus, a standard) before Halo anyway. It existed way before that of course but it was just a niche thing.

Like Trekkies said (and i agreed) its the games that set the standards, not the hardware. Without the right game you can't convince anyone that a hardware innovation is a necessity. Nintendo had both the right hardware and the right game at the right time, plus they hyped the hell out of it. They basically said to us "gamers, this is the future of 3D games either you like it or not" and they based the whole console and marketing campaign on that one thing. That didn't really happen with the dual analog setup. The gaming community decided after a while that the dual analog setup is indeed necessary and the game that started the fire was Halo, which was released a lot later than the first dual analog controllers.

Also, i don't get what sales have to do with anything. Even without an analog stick controller the PS1 would still sell a lot more than the N64.

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Both came out in the same gen. Saturn/N64 with single analog. PS1 with dual analog. Second gen had the every console but the DC with dual analog.

Games didn't always make full use of dual analog, but I would argue that single analog never became a real standard, it was only adopted by the n64 and the short lived DC. Every other home console since those two has had dual analog support (wii notwithstanding).

And sales show adoption. Far more people bought consoles with 2 controller ports than with 4, just as more people bought consoles with dual analog than single. Combined with the fact that basically nothing the n64 "pioneered" (which it really didn't) has really gone on to major adoption... what other criteria would you measure it by?

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

... what other criteria would you measure it by?

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Maybe by the impact of a certain game which was the best demonstration of the analog stick? Mario 64 was the game that made the most impact.

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

Combined with the fact that basically nothing the n64 "pioneered" (which it really didn't) has really gone on to major adoption

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What about the rumble pack? Wasn't Nintendo with Starfox 64 pushing the idea in our throats with this? Sure the technology existed before but who started making it a big deal for consoles? (honest question)

First post updated.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

Maybe by the impact of a certain game which was the best demonstration of the analog stick? Mario 64 was the game that made the most impact.

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It certainly helps. But does the single analog if Mario 64 translate to the adoption of dual analog on the PS1 and almost every console in the generations after? The ps1 certainly had it's share of analog controlled games.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

What about the rumble pack? Wasn't Nintendo with Starfox 64 pushing the idea in our throats with this? Sure the technology existed before but who started making it a big deal for consoles? (honest question)

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But would Nintendo be able to claim that, or would it be more accurate to state it was a logical progression from existing technology that's been around in the arcades since the 70's?

Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all released feedback controllers/add on's in the same year (dualshock, rumble pak, and a sidewinder variant).

Nintendo didn't have any clear lead in that where they showed it to be insanely popular where everyone else then picked up on a me-too device a while later.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

I didn't say Nintendo didn't work on it just as early. I'm simply saying both companies were working on similar solutions to the same perceived problem around the same time.

I wouldn't say Nintendo made it a standard either. All three determined it was going to be needed for 3D games. So 3D games made it a standard. Giving Nintendo sole credit for making it standard is just plain silly. The only reason Sega didn't bundle it with their system first is simply because their system came out earlier and wasn't selling well. But go ahead, keep moving the goal posts.

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This is wrong, or else the Playstation and Saturn, and perhaps also the 3DO and Jaguar, would have had analog controllers packed in with the systems when they shipped. They did not. The XE-1AP controller (for various computers, Genesis, and Turbografx with an adapter) is very cool and an obvious ahead-of-its-time item, but it did not create a new standard for game controls. It was only after Nintendo showed the N64 controller that suddenly everyone else started working on analog.

And again, that Sony didn't have an analog gamepad until a full nine months after Nintendo and Sega really shows that Sony particularly were not thinking about analog until long after their competitors. (And no, the neGcon is not the same thing, that game has only one analog axis, not tow. Big difference.)

While it is likely that eventually everyone would have adapted analog, the fact is that it is Nintendo who pushed the industry towards it faster than it otherwise would have gone.

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

Both came out in the same gen. Saturn/N64 with single analog. PS1 with dual analog. Second gen had the every console but the DC with dual analog.

Games didn't always make full use of dual analog, but I would argue that single analog never became a real standard, it was only adopted by the n64 and the short lived DC. Every other home console since those two has had dual analog support (wii notwithstanding).

And sales show adoption. Far more people bought consoles with 2 controller ports than with 4,

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But as the game sales figures show, people who wanted to play 3+ player local multiplayer games bought N64s. People who mostly wanted to play one and two player games got Playstations.

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just as more people bought consoles with dual analog than single.

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People owned the controllers, but very few PS1 games use the right stick, for instance because almost all games supported the regular controller so using it as a camera stick couldn't really work if you also had to have buttons for the camera.

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Combined with the fact that basically nothing the n64 "pioneered" (which it really didn't) has really gone on to major adoption... what other criteria would you measure it by?

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This is completely false. The Nintendo 64 pioneered home console use of Z-buffering, perspective correct 3d, bilinear and trilinear mip-mapping, triple buffering, edge anti-aliasing, and gouraud shading. All of these features are implemented in hardware and Nintendo required them to always be used. These are all standard microcode features of all 3d-capable home consoles released since that no console before the N64 can do. I have before agreed with the criticism that Nintendo should have issued some microcode more specific for 2d games, and been more willing to let better developers use custom microcode (only Boss Games and Factor 5 are known to have convinced Nintendo to let them do so, outside of first and second party teams), but for 3d forcing everyone to use these features was an overall good thing.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

Maybe Sega didn't bundle it with their console because they were still developing it when they released the Saturn?

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I don't know about that, remember that Sony started bundling their analog controller with the system fairly soon after its release in 1997. Sega had a long head start over Sony, releasing theirs in mid '96, but never bundled it with the system, and it remained a niche controller for relatively few games. The result of this is that many, many Saturn games from '96, '97, and '98 that should have analog don't have it, unless they are racing games of course in which case they almost all do (because of the wheel).

I think that had Sega bundled the controller in with the system starting from mid or late 1996, you would have seen MANY more Saturn games supporting the 3D Controller, instead of leaving it for only a limited number of titles. Sega just didn't quite recognize the use of analog in most games, it seems, while Nintendo did a better job of that either through accident (wanting everyone to play Mario 64 the way it should be played) or design. That is, either Nintendo knew that an analog stick on the controller would be good for all games and put it in the box because they wanted 3d games to play better, or they just wanted people to play Mario 64 right and the rest of it was a happy coincidence.

Sega, meanwhile, never got to either of those points -- they never packed it in, and never seem to have realized the advantage of doing that, something Sony did realize by later '97. I know the 3-in-1 bundle was quite successful in the US in '96, but I still think an alternate Nights+3D controller bundle, either then or new for '97, would have been a very good idea. Earlier would be better though, the sooner you push developers to support analog the better! Of course you need it in Japan too; games like Bulk Slash and Willy Wombat really should have had analog support... ah well.

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Maybe PD1 doesn't advertise that it works with it because it wasn't released yet?

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I've explained this before, but I guess you forgot. Panzer Dragoon 1 supports the Mission Stick, not the 3D Controller. However, when Sega designed the 3D Controller, they decided to make it mostly compatible with games designed for the Mission Stick and also the Arcade Racer. There are a few games designed for those controllers that do not work with the 3D Controller -- Hang-On GP and Virtua Racing for the Arcade Racer, and Midway's Greatest: Atari Collection 1, Black Fire, and some more for the Mission Stick -- but most games are compatible with the 3D Controller because all three of Sega's analog control types were designed to be inter-compatible. Only the light gun doesn't work with anything else, for obvious reasons.

Panzer Dragoon 1 does have some issues with the 3D Controller -- because of the circular joystick well, you cannot get the stick into the corners of the screen, and because PD1 uses a system where the cursor matches where the stick is in the well, you can't shoot into the corners of the screen without a Mission Stick. This is of course because the game thinks you have a Mission Stick even if it's actually a 3D Controller.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

I didn't say Sega thought of it first. I said they were all working on it around the same time. But go ahead, keep putting words in people's mouths and moving goal posts to keep your glass N64 house from shattering.

I think Sonic Team said they had the final design of the 3D control pad finalized around late 1995 early 1996 too btw. Sega probably didn't release it earlier or bundle it with the console because they wanted to release it with the flagship game it was being designed for, NiGHTS into Dreams.



Actually we can know for sure due to interviews and magazine articles. Here's the article about the Saturn 3D Controller. I've posted this for you and ABF once before. Please try to remember it before you guys try to have this same stupid argument a year or so from now:

http://puu.sh/7kN54.jpg
http://www.outofprintarchive.com/art...-OSSM11-4.html

Key points:
-NiGHTS research and Development began immediately following Sonic and Knuckles completion.
-About 6 months in (around early summer of 1995), they realized they needed analog controls for the game to play well, so they started developing the 3D Controller.
-They went through about 100 designs
-There's absolutely no mention of the N64's controller.

So the basic fact is the Nintendo 64 had no influence on Sega's decision to create an Analog controller. They were working on it before Nintendo even revealed their analog controller.

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Thanks for finding this again. By mid '95 when they said they came up with the idea Nintendo surely already had their analog stick designed, the N64 was originally supposed to release in 1995 after all. I don't think it had been publicly shown then, yet, so both do seem to have come up with it independently, Nintendo almost certainly first and then Sega second. Sony then presumably decided to copy the others once the controllers released and showed their advantage, and put two sticks on the thing because the Playstation Analog Joystick had had two joysticks.

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Sega simply didn't package it with the system because they already had stock without it that wasn't selling. Sony later did package there analog controller with the PS1, but their system was actually selling so they had no stock to actually produce. If the Saturn was selling well, you can bet your ass they would have bundled it with the system. Sega did however bundle it with the flagship game they wanted to show it off with. So really that's showing just about as much faith in it as Nintendo showed with the N64.

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This is speculation of course, but I give my opinion on this above.

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And here's the source for why Nintendo delayed the N64:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/06/bu...me-player.html

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Yeah, I mentioned this earlier in the thread, though not with the source.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

I still don't see anything here that disproves Nintendo making/working on their analog stick just as early or even earlier than that. I also don't find anything here for me to stop giving credit to Nintendo for making the analog stick a standard during that generation. Because that's what i was giving credit for, not who worked on it first. Making something an industry standard is just as important, if not more, than inventing something new. If Nintendo didn't exist Sega would probably done it a bit later. Or Sony. But Nintendo did it first. It doesn't make them gods. Just something to give some credit for. Neither does it make Sega look any worse. I actually love both Sega and Nintendo about just as much, for different reasons each. (since you seem to think i'm a Nintendo fanboy).

Sony did make the better analog stick though (mechanically) and it was chosen as the standard later on, i'll give them that. The long N64 stick isn't nearly as durable. But in some games it works better because the further you push it, the bigger the resistance is (although subtle). The Sony analog doesn't have that "problem" but i can't play something like F-Zero X without the longer stick informing me how much exactly do i need to push the stick. I'm having difficulties playing the game on the emulator using the 360 analog while i can storm through it, beating most staff ghosts with the N64 controller.

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Sony's analog sticks (before the PS4) are awful, they're so much less precise than Nintendo's (or Sega's) analog sticks!

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Originally Posted by Gogogadget

Wait, Turok is the 'first' FPS to feature a fully formed world with jumping, swimming, outdoor areas and polygonal weapons?

Quake 1, 1996.

Also a much superior game with no fog.

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Console game, not any game, for Turok. And Quake and Turok don't play at all alike, beyond their genre...

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Originally Posted by Folco

Was the Wii controller the first to implement gyroscope controls for gaming?
Of course not, the reason Wii is regarded as a "pioneer" for motion gaming is that it was the first console to use it as the default standard and which popularized it to the mass market.

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Improving and popularizing a thing is important, though. People here denigrate that far, FAR too much. When you make something better and popular, of course that is an important accomplishment!

You may not be the original inventor, but you ARE pioneering something when you take an idea to a mass audience that has never heard of it and convince them to buy in.

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Originally Posted by Barone

Hmm, not trying to hurt your fanboy trip but: how many years it took for a N64 FPS game have light-sourced projectiles like Powerslave?

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No clue, but I'd think the larger environments and polygonal enemies of Turok would require more hardware power. Sure though, of course Powerslave is a good accomplishment.

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No double-standard, no bias here.

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The question to the second quote was "do any Saturn or PS1 games have textures as bad as Turok", so I don't see how this has anything to do with it.

Unless you are trying to say that the awful pixelated textures on PS1 and Saturn games are something you "just have to get used to"? Sure, that's true. And over time I somewhat have, I'm sure I dislike them less than I did before I owned either console. But they ARE an issue.

Also, while which style you like more is subjective, the objective element to it would be that N64 texture filtering, anti-aliasing, etc. (I give the list above) are features that require a lot of hardware power to do. The PS1 and Saturn do not have the horsepower to handle them.

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From the same creator of "Virtua Fighter is not a 3D Fighting game" and "Fighting Vipers doesn't have sidestepping".

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Go to PC gamers in the mid 1990s and just TRY to tell them that MechWarrior 2 is a first-person shooter. You would rightfully be laughed out of the room.

Just because the console version is simplified versus the PC original doesn't make it a FPS, it plays very differently.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

Such awful pixelated textures:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video1_zpsgxbwin0d.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video2_zpslsjavrrc.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video3_zpsmjfeqh2q.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video4_zpsgkbbuxjq.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video5_zps0dzfhkom.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video6_zpskmiqftvp.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video7_zpsxaouhi8p.png[/IMG]

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m98/TrekkiesUnite118/VFRS-Video8_zps38pclzbs.png[/IMG]

And that game came out in July of 1995. So roughly 8 months after the Japanese launch, or 3 months after the US launch.

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A lot of that is shaded, more so than done with more complex textures. The parts that are more complex textures, such as the text and graphics on the backs of some clothing, show the pixelization I was talking about off quite clearly.

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Originally Posted by Barone

Let alone the fact that those games weren't supposed to be played on huge ass 70 inch LCD/LED/Plasma TV and that you should have some scanlines there.

People going full retard about PS1's full screen dithering and "jaggies", "pixelation" on both PS1 and Saturn using awfully stretched emulated captures with no scanlines is something that I find mind-boggling, to say the least.

Too bad there's no attenuation for the awful textures in the N64 games.

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Games should always be played at their intented aspect ration, I absolutely agree on that point. And yeah, games made for a CRT will look better on a CRT. I also don't really like those filters on SNES, Genesis, etc. emulators, they mostly look kind of ugly. However, I've rarely used emulated scanlines in emulators either; on a real (normal) CRT you do not see lines like that through the picture, after all. Those things are adding lines that you wouldn't see on a CRT unless you have some professional BVM or something. I know the point, to only display what the hardware is actually rendering, but in emulators I rarely have scanlines on.

Of course though, I'm not obsessed over image quality, unlike some people. For instance, I don't have any console from before the 6th generation hooked up to component, or S-video for anything; the 4th and 5th gen systems are mostly composite, and 2nd and 3rd gen mostly RF (though for the NES I have a toaster NES on composite, as well as a NES 2 on RF). I'm also fine with watching VHS movies, I don't mind the lower picture quality. Etc.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

Even for a launch window game Turok's draw distance is pathetic. But here, how are these for early generation Saturn games:

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Sega Rally does look pretty good, yes... until you play it in two-player mode. That cuts the draw distance down so much that it's actually hard to play the game, you can't quite see the turns coming at you!

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Virtua Cop is entirely railed; I'm sure knowing exactly what the player can see at any moment is a great help for making the graphics in view the best they can be, you don't need to render ANYTHING other than what the player can see at that moment.

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Originally Posted by The Coop

"First Person" is the viewpoint/perspective the player sees the game from. As in, from the "eyes" of the character (human/alien/robot//vehicle/whatever) you control. And I say "eyes" because even if you control a vehicle that's on its own with no pilot, it has to have a camera somewhere on it so it can see where it's going, right? You'd be seeing through that camera, and thus, still in First Person. You don't need a "person" to play in First Person perspective.

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"First person" isn't a genre. We separate genres because different genres need to do different kinds of things. What you say here is something overly general. It is sort of like saying that all videogames are RPGs because you "play a role" in every videogame ever, so everything is an RPG!

Even if that statement is literally correct, obviously that's far too broad to work as an actual genre, so instead conventions tell us what puts a game in one genre or another. A game is not a FPS just because it's got a first-person viewpoint; the game needs to be about shooting, and should also be you controlling a character on foot, not some kind of vehicle; vehicular combat games are usually considered a separate thing. And of course first-person simulators like MechWarrior aren't FPSes, and nor, really, is Shadowgate 64, for instance -- the game is first person, but there is no shooting, it's a first-person graphic adventure game. RealMyst is another example of that, if we don't count the original Myst because you can't move around freely.

So, Myst is a first-person game, but it clearly should not be judged the same way as Turok. They are different kinds of games doing very different things. The same goes for the difference between Turok and MechWarrior; the difference may be smaller, but it's there. But sure, if you were making some super-general, cross-genre "list of early first-person games with polygonal characters", then yeah MechWarrior 2: Arcade Combat Edition for PS1 and Saturn should be on the list, along with Turok for N64.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

You chose those two because they fit your narrative. Powerslave and Doom have significantly better draw distances and disproves your argument.

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I don't have a narrative. I chose those two because they are two of the more technically accomplished games for their platforms. Doom doesn't disprove anything, that games' polygon count is clearly much lower, and PowerSlave is more like Doom than Turok in terms of graphical design.

As I said, polygon count is the issue.

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Turok doesn't have very high polygon counts either you know...

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Polygonal enemies adds a lot to the polys-on-screen count.

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Doom, Powerslave, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Hexen, Jumping Flash, etc. all have substantially better draw dsitances than Turok. Turok's fog is pretty bad.

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We know, you really, really hate Turok, and exaggerate how big of a problem the fog is. But again, polygon count. Most of those games have sprite-based enemies, that cuts down on polys of course. Turok's environments are also larger and more complex than any of those games. Quake (the PC version) is of course by far the best game on that list, and probably the best looking, but that's a PC-first game, so the comparison isn't really fair. Comparing the console versions of Quake to Turoks 1 or 2 show advantages and disadvantages for each game, visually.

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As for Disruptor, why don't we actually look at a better level and not one cherrypicked by you:

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I didn't cherrypick anything, I just chose a video of one of the first levels. I'm not going to spend hours looking through videos, and anyway I'd expect games to have about the same view distance in all levels, excepting visibility differences which back then were rare.

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I'd be fine with 2D enemies if it meant I could see more than a few feet in front of my face. The jumping puzzles would probably be far less frustrating if the draw distance was better too.

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I don't think the draw distance has any impact on the jumping puzzles, and I do like the polygonal enemies. So yeah, difference of opinion here.

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Here you go:


Skip to around the 4:30 mark.

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Interesting, most games wouldn't have such a huge draw distance difference between indoor and outdoor areas... I never got far into Ghen War, don't think I've seen that before. The environment indoors is fairly simple, which is probably what allows the better draw distance, though, so this supports what I say above. But it's interesting that they'd have any difference at all.

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

It certainly helps. But does the single analog if Mario 64 translate to the adoption of dual analog on the PS1 and almost every console in the generations after? The ps1 certainly had it's share of analog controlled games.

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Single analog, yeah, but dual? Other than those racing games Barone loves that let you use the right stick for gas/brake, almost nothing else on the system makes any useful use of the right stick apart from the one game that requires the dual analog controller, Ape Escape. I think that the second stick was a legacy from the Playstation Analog Joystick, as I say above, that Sony copied over but made little use of that generation. Most analog PS1 games use only one analog stick, just like N64 games do.

That the Dreamcast and Nuon both only had one analog stick shows that people did not initially think 'second analog sticks are needed!'. It was only later that that happened, and perhaps was done as much to copy Sony to try to appeal to that huge Playstation fanbase as anything else...

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But would Nintendo be able to claim that, or would it be more accurate to state it was a logical progression from existing technology that's been around in the arcades since the 70's?

Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all released feedback controllers/add on's in the same year (dualshock, rumble pak, and a sidewinder variant).

Nintendo didn't have any clear lead in that where they showed it to be insanely popular where everyone else then picked up on a me-too device a while later.

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Rumble was on PC first, consoles second. Between the consoles though, Sony at first only had rumble in Japan and adoption as initially slower, while Nintendo pushed it worldwide from the beginning. Sony of course also pushed rumble everywhere once the Dual Shock controller released.

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Sega Rally does look pretty good, yes... until you play it in two-player mode. That cuts the draw distance down so much that it's actually hard to play the game, you can't quite see the turns coming at you!

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That's what revolutionary netplay is for. Plus the netlink edition has updated visuals.

N64 didn't pioneer those. They had the hardware for it. But standard 3d methodologies were used as the hardware/software matured.

That's like stating the 360 pioneered having more RAM in the system because it included more in the system than the consoles before it... well, duh.

3D was nothing unique to the N64. It wasn't even unique to that console generation. Even the genesis and snes had polygonal 3d in games. That's not even getting into the home PC and arcades.

More powerful and specialized hardware came as time went on, and the N64 was released almost 2 years after both the PS1 and Saturn.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

"First person" isn't a genre. We separate genres because different genres need to do different kinds of things. What you say here is something overly general. It is sort of like saying that all videogames are RPGs because you "play a role" in every videogame ever, so everything is an RPG!

Even if that statement is literally correct, obviously that's far too broad to work as an actual genre, so instead conventions tell us what puts a game in one genre or another. A game is not a FPS just because it's got a first-person viewpoint; the game needs to be about shooting, and should also be you controlling a character on foot, not some kind of vehicle; vehicular combat games are usually considered a separate thing. And of course first-person simulators like MechWarrior aren't FPSes, and nor, really, is Shadowgate 64, for instance -- the game is first person, but there is no shooting, it's a first-person graphic adventure game. RealMyst is another example of that, if we don't count the original Myst because you can't move around freely.

So, Myst is a first-person game, but it clearly should not be judged the same way as Turok. They are different kinds of games doing very different things. The same goes for the difference between Turok and MechWarrior; the difference may be smaller, but it's there. But sure, if you were making some super-general, cross-genre "list of early first-person games with polygonal characters", then yeah MechWarrior 2: Arcade Combat Edition for PS1 and Saturn should be on the list, along with Turok for N64.

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You think it should be about controlling a character on foot and shooting. The actual genre says otherwise, given all the vehicles you can now drive/fly, the puzzles you have to solve, the QTEs that crop up, the traps that can be laid out, and so forth. The acronym FPS has grown broader in scope since the 1990s, and isn't wall-to-wall gunfire anymore.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Sega Rally does look pretty good, yes... until you play it in two-player mode. That cuts the draw distance down so much that it's actually hard to play the game, you can't quite see the turns coming at you!

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It's a lot better than the split screen play of Extreme-G on the N64. Even the single player game has areas that are fogged so bad, that it's hard to see the corner coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPVO8cqm9_0

I have Sega Rally for my Saturn. And I love racing games but I could never get into it. You're all alone in the track. Somewhere on the track is 5 other guys if I remember right.

Gimme 20 cpu opponents with awesome AI I can wrestle with around corners. I want I want I want!

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Originally Posted by A31Chris

I have Sega Rally for my Saturn. And I love racing games but I could never get into it. You're all alone in the track. Somewhere on the track is 5 other guys if I remember right.

Gimme 20 cpu opponents with awesome AI I can wrestle with around corners. I want I want I want!

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It's a rally racing game; that's how rally racing events work. It's all about mastering the track to get the best lap times. I consider it to be one of the best single player racing games of its generation.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

It's a lot better than the split screen play of Extreme-G on the N64. Even the single player game has areas that are fogged so bad, that it's hard to see the corner coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPVO8cqm9_0

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Yeah, the first XG game I played is the PC version of XG2, which looks great and doesn't have nearly as close a draw distance as the first game. XG2 for the N64 looks similar to the PC version, but at a lower resolution and framerate of course. When I first played XG1 for the N64 sometime in the '00s, I was somewhat disappointed by the only okay graphics and how close the fog is. It's playable -- I beat the game -- but it is a bit closer than in most N64 racing games. I love XG2 a lot, but XG1 definitely isn't quite as great.

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Originally Posted by The Coop

You think it should be about controlling a character on foot and shooting. The actual genre says otherwise, given all the vehicles you can now drive/fly, the puzzles you have to solve, the QTEs that crop up, the traps that can be laid out, and so forth. The acronym FPS has grown broader in scope since the 1990s, and isn't wall-to-wall gunfire anymore.

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It is true that today there is a lot of genre mixing going on; RPG elements (levels, experience, etc.) are now in a lot of games, for example. You have to look at what a game mostly is to decide its genre. For something like Myst or Turok, of course that is quite easy; Turok has platformer elements, but it's mostly a FPS, and Myst is first person, but it's obviously not a shooter. There are some it's harder for, but people do decide these things -- all games have their genre listed somewhere, either officially by the developer or on Wikipedia and GameFAQs or what have you.

GameFAQs, for example, lists Ghen War (SAT) as a FPS but MechWarrior 2: Arcade Combat Edition (PS1/SAT) as a Simulation (Vehicle > Combat) game. I guess I can see that, Ghen War is more of a straightforward game while MechWarrior 2 even on consoles still is definitely a sim. Still, it is interesting that Ghen War is called a FPS -- other somewhat similar, very simple vehicle combat games like Battlezone, Spectre VR don't have the "FPS" genre label. Tunnel B1, another vehicular first-person shooting game, is called an FPS though. (I find this stuff, the specifics of categorizing game genres, interesting even if few others here do.)

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

N64 didn't pioneer those. They had the hardware for it. But standard 3d methodologies were used as the hardware/software matured.

That's like stating the 360 pioneered having more RAM in the system because it included more in the system than the consoles before it... well, duh.

3D was nothing unique to the N64. It wasn't even unique to that console generation. Even the genesis and snes had polygonal 3d in games. That's not even getting into the home PC and arcades.

More powerful and specialized hardware came as time went on, and the N64 was released almost 2 years after both the PS1 and Saturn.

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The N64 pioneered all of those things on consoles. 3d in general is a very different thing from having hardware anti-aliasing, buffering, perspective correction, etc. Just adding more RAM isn't the same as being the first to put new 3d hardware features into a system.

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Originally Posted by A31Chris

I have Sega Rally for my Saturn. And I love racing games but I could never get into it. You're all alone in the track. Somewhere on the track is 5 other guys if I remember right.

Gimme 20 cpu opponents with awesome AI I can wrestle with around corners. I want I want I want!

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Yeah, that is a downside to it. I don't find that timetrial-based rally racing style all that interesting either. In Sega Rally you are trying to catch up to other cars, though, and overtake all of them, so you are racing against others, they just don't start next to you. Sega Rally plays a lot like Ridge Racer really, you start miles behind and have to catch up to everyone by the end. The best I've done before (in the Saturn version) is third place, it's a crazy-hard game...

But on a rally-racing note, the first rally game I got was RAC Rally Championship for the PC, which released in 1996. It's sort of in between arcade and sim. Unlike Sega Rally, you are racing for time, and don't see the other cars all that often; your goal is the best overall time, when your times for each segment are added up. I found the lack of other cars to race against kind of boring, and while the game has a lot of tracks they are all very similar. Yeah, I was somewhat disappointed by that game, it didn't make me want to try rally racing games again for a long time.


For rally-themed racing games on the N64, none are full-on sims. In order from best to worst, Top Gear Rally is a great game, it's the most popular of the four N64 Top Gear games and plays great. It's really a traditional racing game, not much "rally" to it apart from the types of cars you drive. Rally Challenge 2000 is a game clearly inspired by Sega Rally. It's actually fairly good, despite few people seemingly having played it; I really had fun with the game. Top Gear Rally 2 tries to be more realistic, it has car damage and one-way courses, and some other things. It's good, but the least fun of the four N64 Top Gear games for me. And last, V-Rally: '99 Edition is a port of V-Rally for the PS1. It's a bad port and has awful graphics and subpar gameplay, unfortunately.

It had the happiest Game Over in existence.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

This is wrong, or else the Playstation and Saturn, and perhaps also the 3DO and Jaguar, would have had analog controllers packed in with the systems when they shipped. They did not. The XE-1AP controller (for various computers, Genesis, and Turbografx with an adapter) is very cool and an obvious ahead-of-its-time item, but it did not create a new standard for game controls. It was only after Nintendo showed the N64 controller that suddenly everyone else started working on analog.

And again, that Sony didn't have an analog gamepad until a full nine months after Nintendo and Sega really shows that Sony particularly were not thinking about analog until long after their competitors. (And no, the neGcon is not the same thing, that game has only one analog axis, not tow. Big difference.)

While it is likely that eventually everyone would have adapted analog, the fact is that it is Nintendo who pushed the industry towards it faster than it otherwise would have gone.

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Please explain how Nintendo could have influenced Sega's work on an Analog controller when Sega started working on the 3D Controller 6 months prior to Nintendo revealing their analog stick in November of 1995?

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

This is completely false. The Nintendo 64 pioneered home console use of ... gouraud shading.

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WHAT?! Are you really that deluded? There's launch games on the PS1 that do Gouraud Shading! Hell what do you think Final Fantasy VII is doing with the character models? Shining Force III, Fighting Vipers, Mystaria, Burning Rangers, Fighter's Megamix, etc. all make use of it too on the Saturn.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

I don't know about that, remember that Sony started bundling their analog controller with the system fairly soon after its release in 1997. Sega had a long head start over Sony, releasing theirs in mid '96, but never bundled it with the system, and it remained a niche controller for relatively few games. The result of this is that many, many Saturn games from '96, '97, and '98 that should have analog don't have it, unless they are racing games of course in which case they almost all do (because of the wheel).

I think that had Sega bundled the controller in with the system starting from mid or late 1996, you would have seen MANY more Saturn games supporting the 3D Controller, instead of leaving it for only a limited number of titles. Sega just didn't quite recognize the use of analog in most games, it seems, while Nintendo did a better job of that either through accident (wanting everyone to play Mario 64 the way it should be played) or design. That is, either Nintendo knew that an analog stick on the controller would be good for all games and put it in the box because they wanted 3d games to play better, or they just wanted people to play Mario 64 right and the rest of it was a happy coincidence.

Sega, meanwhile, never got to either of those points -- they never packed it in, and never seem to have realized the advantage of doing that, something Sony did realize by later '97. I know the 3-in-1 bundle was quite successful in the US in '96, but I still think an alternate Nights+3D controller bundle, either then or new for '97, would have been a very good idea. Earlier would be better though, the sooner you push developers to support analog the better! Of course you need it in Japan too; games like Bulk Slash and Willy Wombat really should have had analog support... ah well.

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The reason Sony was able to pack it in easily was because their system was actually selling. They weren't sitting on warehouses full of unsold stock. Sega had a system that wasn't selling and a bunch of unsold stock to get through before they could even think of making a new package that came with the Analog controller.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

I've explained this before, but I guess you forgot. Panzer Dragoon 1 supports the Mission Stick, not the 3D Controller. However, when Sega designed the 3D Controller, they decided to make it mostly compatible with games designed for the Mission Stick and also the Arcade Racer. There are a few games designed for those controllers that do not work with the 3D Controller -- Hang-On GP and Virtua Racing for the Arcade Racer, and Midway's Greatest: Atari Collection 1, Black Fire, and some more for the Mission Stick -- but most games are compatible with the 3D Controller because all three of Sega's analog control types were designed to be inter-compatible. Only the light gun doesn't work with anything else, for obvious reasons.

Panzer Dragoon 1 does have some issues with the 3D Controller -- because of the circular joystick well, you cannot get the stick into the corners of the screen, and because PD1 uses a system where the cursor matches where the stick is in the well, you can't shoot into the corners of the screen without a Mission Stick. This is of course because the game thinks you have a Mission Stick even if it's actually a 3D Controller.

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The point is, Sega was working with and thinking about Analog controls long before Nintendo unveiled the N64 controller.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Thanks for finding this again. By mid '95 when they said they came up with the idea Nintendo surely already had their analog stick designed, the N64 was originally supposed to release in 1995 after all. I don't think it had been publicly shown then, yet, so both do seem to have come up with it independently, Nintendo almost certainly first and then Sega second. Sony then presumably decided to copy the others once the controllers released and showed their advantage, and put two sticks on the thing because the Playstation Analog Joystick had had two joysticks.

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We have no confirmation that Nintendo came up with theirs first. What we do know for a fact is that they were both working on the idea at around the same time.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

This is speculation of course, but I give my opinion on this above.

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So it's ok for you to speculate about what Nintendo was doing, but it's not ok for us to speculate about what Sega was doing?

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

A lot of that is shaded, more so than done with more complex textures. The parts that are more complex textures, such as the text and graphics on the backs of some clothing, show the pixelization I was talking about off quite clearly.

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None of that is using flat shading or Gouraud shading. It's all texture mapping. The text isn't pixelated, it's crystal clear and crisp. None of those textures are pixelated either. They're crisp and clean. You have no clue what a real pixelated texture looks like. But when you're blinded by blurry N64 textures I guess everything that's not covered in vaseline looks pixelated to you.

Here's some more Saturn shots for you:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psco69kdxh.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psvypqtne4.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pshw9wrsgf.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pseb5sfa86.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps7yhhxr2w.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psydmzwsu8.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psfvm3vnzg.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pssqaaotpm.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psmejip6ov.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pslnvaipfy.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psdg1ngen0.png

None of that is pixelated. You can tell what things are supposed to be and there' pretty crisp and clean looking. If you want to see pixelated textures, go play Virtual Hydlide or House of the Dead on the Saturn:





Now those are pixelated textures. The shots I posted are crisp and clean with no pixelization.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

I don't have a narrative. I chose those two because they are two of the more technically accomplished games for their platforms. Doom doesn't disprove anything, that games' polygon count is clearly much lower, and PowerSlave is more like Doom than Turok in terms of graphical design.

As I said, polygon count is the issue.

Polygonal enemies adds a lot to the polys-on-screen count.

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Turok's geometry doesn't look anymore complex than what I'm seeing from Quake on the Saturn, which also has a better draw distance.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

We know, you really, really hate Turok, and exaggerate how big of a problem the fog is. But again, polygon count. Most of those games have sprite-based enemies, that cuts down on polys of course. Turok's environments are also larger and more complex than any of those games. Quake (the PC version) is of course by far the best game on that list, and probably the best looking, but that's a PC-first game, so the comparison isn't really fair. Comparing the console versions of Quake to Turoks 1 or 2 show advantages and disadvantages for each game, visually.

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I'm not exaggerating the problem. You literally can't seen more than a few feet in front of you which is pretty horrific for a First Person Shooter. I'd rather have sprite based enemies if it meant I could see more.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Interesting, most games wouldn't have such a huge draw distance difference between indoor and outdoor areas... I never got far into Ghen War, don't think I've seen that before. The environment indoors is fairly simple, which is probably what allows the better draw distance, though, so this supports what I say above. But it's interesting that they'd have any difference at all.

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Turok's geometry isn't really that complex either you know.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

The N64 pioneered all of those things on consoles. 3d in general is a very different thing from having hardware anti-aliasing, buffering, perspective correction, etc. Just adding more RAM isn't the same as being the first to put new 3d hardware features into a system.

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The Saturn "pioneered" having better hardware for 3d, the ps1 "pioneered" having even better hardware for 3d (in some ways) than the saturn.
The N64 "pioneered" having even better hardware, again, in some ways, than those two.
The dreamcast, ps2, oxbox, gc, 360, ps3, etc, etc all "pioneered" having better setups for 3d.

General advances in hardware is not even remotely the same thing as pioneering something. The N64 had some nice hardware for its generation. It was also massively offset by the choice of going for a cart storage mechanism which couldn't even remotely compete with the price per MB of a CD rom.
But again, it was not "pioneering" any of that. the entire computer graphics landscape was going towards that route. You could remove the N64 from the equation completely and you likely wouldn't have more than minor changes in the way graphics advanced in general, let alone the following consoles.

This doesn't make the N64 a bad system, but lets all be real here. It really had little impact on the industry in general. Many of the things people tout it doing were all in motion by several players at around the same time in one form or another.

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Originally Posted by EclecticGroove

The Saturn "pioneered" having better hardware for 3d, the ps1 "pioneered" having even better hardware for 3d (in some ways) than the saturn.
The N64 "pioneered" having even better hardware, again, in some ways, than those two.
The dreamcast, ps2, oxbox, gc, 360, ps3, etc, etc all "pioneered" having better setups for 3d.

General advances in hardware is not even remotely the same thing as pioneering something. The N64 had some nice hardware for its generation. It was also massively offset by the choice of going for a cart storage mechanism which couldn't even remotely compete with the price per MB of a CD rom.
But again, it was not "pioneering" any of that. the entire computer graphics landscape was going towards that route.

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Perspective correction particularly isn't just a "general advance". It's one of the most important things 3d games can have. There's a huge difference between Playstation 3d and N64 3d because the PS1 doesn't have perspective correction, it's one of the most noticeable things going from other systems to the N64. The 3DO and Saturn can partially hide it because they use quads, but there are visible perspective issues on both systems if you look. Getting rid of pixelated textures was also an advance.

Anyway, being the first hardware in your category to support some new important 3d graphics features is a big deal. The 3DFX card was a big deal and so groundbreaking for PC gaming not because there had never been graphics like that before on high-priced arcade systems and such, but because bringing that level of graphics home was a pioneering effort. The 3DFX Voodoo card was a huge, huge thing as a result of that, and thinking like yours would ignore its importance because "3d hardware existed" or something silly like that. That S3 ViRGE card I had was not 3d like the Voodoo2 I got in late '98 could do, that's for sure.

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It was also massively offset by the choice of going for a cart storage mechanism which couldn't even remotely compete with the price per MB of a CD rom.

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This is your opinion, and it is an opinion I would, of course, very strongly disagree with. The N64's hardware was not hurt by its choice of storage medium; carts were, as I always say, a net positive for the N64. Carts brought faster loading and easier access to all of a games' data. Not having FMVs or CD audio aren't that big of a deal, those things are nice (I liked CD games on my PC for sure, back then!) but not necessary. N64 carts were big enough for huge 3d games. 16MB carts existed by late 1997, 32MB by '98, more later. Without CD audio or FMVs, the rest of games' data back then didn't need more space than that.

And just having CDs would not have fixed the textures, that would require a larger texture cache; N64 carts were big enough to hold better textures had there been a large enough cache.

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You could remove the N64 from the equation completely and you likely wouldn't have more than minor changes in the way graphics advanced in general, let alone the following consoles.

This doesn't make the N64 a bad system, but lets all be real here. It really had little impact on the industry in general. Many of the things people tout it doing were all in motion by several players at around the same time in one form or another.

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I hope you're only talking about graphics here, because in game design games like Mario 64 and Zelda: OoT had fairly obvious huge impacts on the industry. But even just in graphics, you never know what removing one thing would do. We can speculate, but how do we know for sure how things would go without one system? I think PC gaming would have gone differently without the 3DFX Voodoo card, for example, I really do. And the N64 had an impact somewhat like that; the two released a few months apart, and both had key hardware features previous things didn't -- perspective correction, etc.

Nintendo really should have focused more on their security bitd. I've never heard of so much corporate spying.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

Please explain how Nintendo could have influenced Sega's work on an Analog controller when Sega started working on the 3D Controller 6 months prior to Nintendo revealing their analog stick in November of 1995?

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I said the industry as a whole there; yeah, probably not so much Sega in specific. Sony, 3DO (remember, the M2 prototype controller looks like a knockoff N64 pad), and others were significantly influenced, though. But as for Sega, honestly, I don't know if Sega influenced the industry as a whole all that much in the second half of that generation, particularly outside of Japan... the Saturn failed badly, after all. That is, without the N64, I can't see the Saturn 3D controller having nearly the same level of impact on the industry (outside of Saturn owners) that the N64 controller did. If Sega had made it a pack-in with the system and pushed for most games to support it maybe it could have, but they didn't do that.

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WHAT?! Are you really that deluded? There's launch games on the PS1 that do Gouraud Shading! Hell what do you think Final Fantasy VII is doing with the character models? Shining Force III, Fighting Vipers, Mystaria, Burning Rangers, Fighter's Megamix, etc. all make use of it too on the Saturn.

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Shouldn't have had that one on the list, sorry. The rest do apply though.

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The reason Sony was able to pack it in easily was because their system was actually selling. They weren't sitting on warehouses full of unsold stock. Sega had a system that wasn't selling and a bunch of unsold stock to get through before they could even think of making a new package that came with the Analog controller.

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New bundles are one of the major ways to sell a console, though. Remember how decent marketing and the 3-in-1 bundle were some of the key reasons why the Saturn did okay in Holiday '96 in the US. Bundles can draw attention, particularly if a good game is being bundled.

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The point is, Sega was working with and thinking about Analog controls long before Nintendo unveiled the N64 controller.

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Sure, though Nintendo probably was working on an analog gamepad first, Sega had done other analog controllers of course. Sony was the one who really lagged behind; Sega had done things like the Arcade Racer and Mission Stick, while Sony had at first left analog to third parties, so Sega clearly had more interest in analog than Sony. I mean, the Namco neGcon was the first analog controller for the Playstation, and that is a third-party format. Sony itself didn't have one until the Playstation Analog Joystick in April 1996! In comparison Sega released the Arcade Racer in April 1995 and the Mission Stick in September 1995. That the PS1 didn't have an analog gamepad until nine months after the N64 and Saturn is understandable in that context, Sony was behind in analog for some time.

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We have no confirmation that Nintendo came up with theirs first. What we do know for a fact is that they were both working on the idea at around the same time.

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Confirmation, maybe not, but it'd be very hard to believe that that they weren't working on that analog stick until only months before it was unveiled.

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So it's ok for you to speculate about what Nintendo was doing, but it's not ok for us to speculate about what Sega was doing?

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Sure, go ahead and speculate. I speculated on what Sega was doing too. I've done that a lot here. :p

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None of that is using flat shading or Gouraud shading. It's all texture mapping.

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That's true, but the characters mostly look kind of shaded -- it's mostly solid colors and the like.

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The text isn't pixelated, it's crystal clear and crisp. None of those textures are pixelated either. They're crisp and clean. You have no clue what a real pixelated texture looks like. But when you're blinded by blurry N64 textures I guess everything that's not covered in vaseline looks pixelated to you.

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Crisp and clean? Every one of the screenshots you posted are full of blocky pixels! Can you really not see them? Look at the ground, the water, the text or graphics on shirts, all of those things are loaded with blocky pixels.

That generation, you had a choice: pixelated textures, or smooth but low-rez textures. There was no console with actual good textures, for that you had to skip a generation and wait for the Dreamcast.

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Here's some more Saturn shots for you:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psco69kdxh.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psvypqtne4.png

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Look at those floorboards. Pixel city!

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http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pshw9wrsgf.png

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N64 smoothing would make those rock and grass textures on the ground look better for sure. Some visible pixels.

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http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps7yhhxr2w.png

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The ground and shadows here are all VERY pixelated.

(similar issues in the other VF shots)

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http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psfvm3vnzg.png

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The water and ship are super blocky.

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http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pssqaaotpm.png

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Everything is so pixelated!

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http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psmejip6ov.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pslnvaipfy.png

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...psdg1ngen0.png

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The sand probably looks better than the water, but it's still very obvious in those shots that it's made up of blocky pixels.

I mean, I love Panzer Dragoon, it's one of the best rail shooters ever, but the pixelization is obvious.

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None of that is pixelated. You can tell what things are supposed to be and there' pretty crisp and clean looking. If you want to see pixelated textures, go play Virtual Hydlide or House of the Dead on the Saturn:





Now those are pixelated textures. The shots I posted are crisp and clean with no pixelization.

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Those are worse, but every one of those shots has pixelated stuff in them.

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I'm not exaggerating the problem. You literally can't seen more than a few feet in front of you which is pretty horrific for a First Person Shooter. I'd rather have sprite based enemies if it meant I could see more.

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As I said, we know, you hate Turok. The game is playable and fun once you get used to it. It's not the best FPS, but it's far from the worst either. It's a solid above-average game.

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Turok's geometry doesn't look anymore complex than what I'm seeing from Quake on the Saturn, which also has a better draw distance.

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Quake for Saturn did have the benefit of releasing like eight-plus months after Turok, and Turok had been delayed for several months to improve and bug-fix the game, it was originally going to release earlier. Also Quake was Lobotomy's third Saturn FPS, it benefited from their experience with the hardware.

With experience you get better at programming for a system. For Acclaim, their next N64 FPS, Turok 2, which released in late 1998, still has fog, but it's been pushed back a bit, and graphics as a whole are improved. Graphically Turok 2 is very impressive in every way other than its framerate, but even that isn't so bad as long as you don't use high-res mode.

As for Quake though, I think that game shows a good example of the irreconcilable differences in what people like in graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQd5EN9ivME

I mean, the N64 version has smoothed textures with no visible blocky pixels, while the Saturn version is quite the opposite, with lots of pixels everywhere, particularly up close to things. But some people like the look of the Saturn version anyway. I don't own either version myself, so I can't really say what I think in this case. In general though, when you get close to a wall on the N64 it looks bad, but the pixelated blocks on PS1 or Saturn walls look even worse.

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Turok's geometry isn't really that complex either you know.

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Turok's not flat -- it's got bumpy ground, cliffs, suspended walkways, etc. The world is large, too. Complex environments. Of course everything that gen was done at a relative minimum of polygons though, sure.

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Originally Posted by zetastrike

Nintendo really should have focused more on their security bitd. I've never heard of so much corporate spying.

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Hah... but not spying, copying. Nintendo has remarked before on not wanting to reveal things too early, because whenever Nintendo has a good idea (new, improved version of some previous tech that hadn't caught on before, whatever), shows it, and the idea starts to catch on, everyone else comes out and starts copying it... look at how after the Wii's success suddenly everyone needed motion controls, etc.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Yeah, the first XG game I played is the PC version of XG2, which looks great and doesn't have nearly as close a draw distance as the first game. XG2 for the N64 looks similar to the PC version, but at a lower resolution and framerate of course. When I first played XG1 for the N64 sometime in the '00s, I was somewhat disappointed by the only okay graphics and how close the fog is. It's playable -- I beat the game -- but it is a bit closer than in most N64 racing games. I love XG2 a lot, but XG1 definitely isn't quite as great.

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You're missing the point. Sega Rally Championship was a 1995 title for the Saturn, which was pretty much a 1st year effort. Extreme-G was a 2nd year attempt on the N64 and it looks and performs much worse than the Saturn game.

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Originally Posted by Soulis

That's that they made the stick an industry standard.

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3D games made the analog stick an industry standard, not Nintendo.
It really is that simple.

Did Nintendo invent 3D games? no. Did Nintendo singularly make 3D games popluar? no. Did Nintendo invent a control interface for 3D games? no.
How the fuck are people even still fixating on crediting Nintendo with some paradigm shifting game conventions when the paradigm shift was aready well on its way?
"Oh! But they popularized it!" ~ no, only in your myopic perspective.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

I said the industry as a whole there; yeah, probably not so much Sega in specific. Sony, 3DO (remember, the M2 prototype controller looks like a knockoff N64 pad), and others were significantly influenced, though. But as for Sega, honestly, I don't know if Sega influenced the industry as a whole all that much in the second half of that generation, particularly outside of Japan... the Saturn failed badly, after all. That is, without the N64, I can't see the Saturn 3D controller having nearly the same level of impact on the industry (outside of Saturn owners) that the N64 controller did. If Sega had made it a pack-in with the system and pushed for most games to support it maybe it could have, but they didn't do that.

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Sega is part of the whole industry. So once again, please explain how Nintendo could have influenced Sega and the rest of the industry when Sega was working on the 3D controller before Nintendo announced theirs.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

New bundles are one of the major ways to sell a console, though. Remember how decent marketing and the 3-in-1 bundle were some of the key reasons why the Saturn did okay in Holiday '96 in the US. Bundles can draw attention, particularly if a good game is being bundled.

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Yes they can sell a console, but you need to have some demand for new stock in the first place or your new bundles will just fill up more warehouses. That's the situation Sega was in. The three free games weren't actually packaged in the box, they were just given out separately with new systems.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Sure, though Nintendo probably was working on an analog gamepad first

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Complete speculation.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Confirmation, maybe not, but it'd be very hard to believe that that they weren't working on that analog stick until only months before it was unveiled.

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Who knows, Sega went through 100's of prototypes for their controller in just a few months.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

That's true, but the characters mostly look kind of shaded -- it's mostly solid colors and the like.

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Except they don't look shaded at all. They all have textures with detail in them. I'm freaking colorblind and even I can tell that they're not mostly solid colors.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Crisp and clean? Every one of the screenshots you posted are full of blocky pixels! Can you really not see them? Look at the ground, the water, the text or graphics on shirts, all of those things are loaded with blocky pixels.

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They're not full of huge blocky pixels. You can see pixels in them because the images are made up of pixels (duh). Pixelized means it's so compressed and downgraded that all detail is lost in a mess of pixel vomit. That's not happening in any of the shots I've posted. Hell they don't even look blocky. And none of the shirts look bad either. It all looks crisp and clean. You can tell what everything is supposed to be, there's a good amount of detal in there too.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

That generation, you had a choice: pixelated textures, or smooth but low-rez textures. There was no console with actual good textures, for that you had to skip a generation and wait for the Dreamcast.

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Sorry but the Saturn has pretty good looking textures. Definitely better looking than the N64. Is there any filtering? No, but the textures still have good resolution and details.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Look at those floorboards. Pixel city!

N64 smoothing would make those rock and grass textures on the ground look better for sure. Some visible pixels.

The ground and shadows here are all VERY pixelated.

(similar issues in the other VF shots)

The water and ship are super blocky.

Everything is so pixelated!

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You're confusing crispness and low resolution with pixelation. Nothing in any of those shots is pixelated. Yes you can see the individual pixels that make up the textures, but that doesn't mean the textures themselves are pixelated. Pixelated means it's so heavily compressed and downscaled to the point that it just looks like a mess of pixels and you can't tell what it's supposed to be. That's not happening in any of those Saturn shots.

In each and every one of those shots you can tell what those textures are supposed to be. The floor in Shun's stage is clearly wood in every shot. The floor in Jacky's stage is clearly rock in every shot too. The character textures are crisp and clean too with no pixelization. In the Panzer Dragoon shots you can clearly tell the ship is made up of metal plates bolted together, the water is water, the ruins are made of stone with carved details in them. Those textures are NOT pixelated.

And I love you how ignored some of the better shots.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

The sand probably looks better than the water, but it's still very obvious in those shots that it's made up of blocky pixels.

I mean, I love Panzer Dragoon, it's one of the best rail shooters ever, but the pixelization is obvious.


Those are worse, but every one of those shots has pixelated stuff in them.

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No, they're not pixelated. You're just a blind N64 fanboy who can't accept that yes, the Saturn and PS1 can do better textures than the N64 and present them cleanly.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

As I said, we know, you hate Turok. The game is playable and fun once you get used to it. It's not the best FPS, but it's far from the worst either. It's a solid above-average game.

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I shouldn't have to get used to a piss poor draw distance.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Quake for Saturn did have the benefit of releasing like eight-plus months after Turok, and Turok had been delayed for several months to improve and bug-fix the game, it was originally going to release earlier. Also Quake was Lobotomy's third Saturn FPS, it benefited from their experience with the hardware.

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Then how about Powerslave? It's environments have more going on in them than Turok, and it has a better draw distance. Sure the enemies are sprites, but I'd say the environments are more detailed than Turoks.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

I mean, the N64 version has smoothed textures with no visible blocky pixels, while the Saturn version is quite the opposite, with lots of pixels everywhere, particularly up close to things. But some people like the look of the Saturn version anyway. I don't own either version myself, so I can't really say what I think in this case. In general though, when you get close to a wall on the N64 it looks bad, but the pixelated blocks on PS1 or Saturn walls look even worse.

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Lots of pixels everywhere is a pretty big exaggeration and you know it. Saturn textures aren't typically pixelated, they're just not filtered. There's a very big difference. In Quake, Powerslave, and Duke Nukem 3D on the Saturn the textures all have decent resolution and clarity. Even when you get close they still look decent. You're making it sound like they all become pixelated messes, which isn't true at all:



You need to learn that just because you can see the pixels that make up an image, doesn't mean it's pixelated. Take a good long look at the following examples. In both you can technically see pixels everywhere, but one is considered pixelated while the other is not.

This is Pixelated:
http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps3180af0f.png

This is not:
http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...te118/Ryu2.png

Learn the fucking difference.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Turok's not flat -- it's got bumpy ground, cliffs, suspended walkways, etc. The world is large, too. Complex environments. Of course everything that gen was done at a relative minimum of polygons though, sure.

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I'm not really seeing anything particularly amazing or more interesting than Powerslave or Quake.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

You're missing the point. Sega Rally Championship was a 1995 title for the Saturn, which was pretty much a 1st year effort. Extreme-G was a 2nd year attempt on the N64 and it looks and performs much worse than the Saturn game.

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Extreme-G was Acclaim's first racing game for the N64. They had some learning to do to get better at programming for the console, and this really shows when you compare it to its sequel.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

Sega is part of the whole industry. So once again, please explain how Nintendo could have influenced Sega and the rest of the industry when Sega was working on the 3D controller before Nintendo announced theirs.

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Again, I was not only focusing on Sega there, but I explained this in my last post so I won't repeat it.

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Yes they can sell a console, but you need to have some demand for new stock in the first place or your new bundles will just fill up more warehouses. That's the situation Sega was in. The three free games weren't actually packaged in the box, they were just given out separately with new systems.

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They sold something like 500,000 systems in holiday '96, and you're saying a new bundle wouldn't have worked to help continue sales momentum? What? That's nonsense!

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Complete speculation.

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No, an educated guess. It doesn't really matter who started their project first, though, not as long as we don't know for sure.

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Except they don't look shaded at all. They all have textures with detail in them. I'm freaking colorblind and even I can tell that they're not mostly solid colors.

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The point is that when you have large blocks of similar colors smoothly fading from one color to another, you notice the pixels less, but when you have different colors close together you notice them unless the textures are smoothed or are high enough resolution to not be noticeable. That latter one isn't going to happen at 480i, that's for sure. And the former causes N64-style blurring.

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They're not full of huge blocky pixels. You can see pixels in them because the images are made up of pixels (duh). Pixelized means it's so compressed and downgraded that all detail is lost in a mess of pixel vomit. That's not happening in any of the shots I've posted. Hell they don't even look blocky. And none of the shirts look bad either. It all looks crisp and clean. You can tell what everything is supposed to be, there's a good amount of detal in there too.

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No, you're using the wrong definition of pixelization. Nintendo emphasized texture filtering back when the N64 was announced, and talked about how when you get close to something you still can't see the pixels, because they were proud of their new tech that could get rid of those blocky pixels and instead show just a smoothed texture. That is the point here, that on N64 textures are smoothed instead of pixelated, so when you get close to things, or look at things with complex textures, they do not fall apart into a mess of pixels.

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Sorry but the Saturn has pretty good looking textures. Definitely better looking than the N64. Is there any filtering? No, but the textures still have good resolution and details.

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Good looking if you like the look of blocky pixels, sure. I think that look is kind of ugly. Panzer Dragoon is great for its gameplay and art design; technically it looks somewhat ugly, but for 1995 that can't be helped.

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You're confusing crispness and low resolution with pixelation. Nothing in any of those shots is pixelated. Yes you can see the individual pixels that make up the textures, but that doesn't mean the textures themselves are pixelated. Pixelated means it's so heavily compressed and downscaled to the point that it just looks like a mess of pixels and you can't tell what it's supposed to be. That's not happening in any of those Saturn shots.

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No, you're just ignoring the whole point of why N64 texture smoothing exists.

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In each and every one of those shots you can tell what those textures are supposed to be. The floor in Shun's stage is clearly wood in every shot. The floor in Jacky's stage is clearly rock in every shot too. The character textures are crisp and clean too with no pixelization. In the Panzer Dragoon shots you can clearly tell the ship is made up of metal plates bolted together, the water is water, the ruins are made of stone with carved details in them. Those textures are NOT pixelated.

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It doesn't really matter if you can tell what a texture is supposed to be if it still looks super blocky!

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And I love you how ignored some of the better shots.

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Even the better shots have pixeley stuff in them, though. What's the point of saying the same thing for every shot?

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No, they're not pixelated. You're just a blind N64 fanboy who can't accept that yes, the Saturn and PS1 can do better textures than the N64 and present them cleanly.

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The Saturn and PS1 can do higher-resolution textures than you see in most (not all, most) N64 games, but they absolutely CANNOT present them cleanly. Cleanly is Dreamcast, it's textures that actually look good and not like a blocky mess. No 5th gen console has that.

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I shouldn't have to get used to a piss poor draw distance.

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Early games on consoles usually have their drawbacks.

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Then how about Powerslave? It's environments have more going on in them than Turok, and it has a better draw distance. Sure the enemies are sprites, but I'd say the environments are more detailed than Turoks.

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The environments don't have more going on than Turok, most of them are quite flat compared to the scale of Turok areas... some aren't, but still.

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Lots of pixels everywhere is a pretty big exaggeration and you know it. Saturn textures aren't typically pixelated, they're just not filtered. There's a very big difference. In Quake, Powerslave, and Duke Nukem 3D on the Saturn the textures all have decent resolution and clarity. Even when you get close they still look decent. You're making it sound like they all become pixelated messes, which isn't true at all:

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And again here's your key mistake -- no, you are wrong. Unfiltered textured polygons, at the resolutions and power levels 5th gen console run at, are pixelated. This is exactly why Nintendo decided to have texture filtering on the N64, to reduce this issue. It worked. The result was blurry textures, but again, the choice that gen is blocky or blurry, pick one.

The early N64 techdemo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlbx5niBu8 shows what I'm talking about. Of course the video probably overhypes the system, the kind of thing that got people expecting that the N64 would look better than it did once they saw games like Cruis'n USA and were disappointed, but "there are no blocks" are the point. To simplify, pixels are blocks. Nintendo 64 smoothing hides the blocks. The quality of the results depended on how good the development team was, but that was the goal anyway.

What would you say, that Nintendo only focused on that pre-release because of the hardware having limited texture cache? I don't think so, if Nintendo thought that the cache was such a big deal they'd have surely increased the size of the cache. That they focused instead on smooth textures shows their focus on getting rid of that blocky look. Not everyone likes the results of course, but that was what they did.

One of the best-looking games on the PS1 is Wipeout 3, that game looks a lot less pixelated than PS1 games usually do probably because it runs at a higher resolution than most PS1 games. The heavy use of texture that have only a few colors (solid or shaded or that sort of look) also surely helps. Anything shaded, of course, isn't going to be pixelated. And the game does have popping polygon issues because of the PS1's lack of perspective correction, of course, though they minimize it versus other PS1 games.

I will add that scanlines will soften those Saturn VF2 textures, that's they way it was meant to be viewed, plus the hi-res shimmer and running at liquid-smooth 60Hz is also a big part of the appeal of that game's graphics. (As an aside IMO I'm not sure anybody can be in a position to judge a systems graphics and what is/isn't acceptable in terms of 'pixelization' using anything less than a CRT with a nice video connection)

For anyone playing the amazing arcade version back in '95, the sharp, detailed appraisal of the graphics were a major technological draw, and the Saturn conversion, while understandably dialed back in certain areas, managed to capture this hi-res sheen very well.

In light of that I don't think an N64 style Vaseline fest would improve VF2's textures at all.

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Extreme-G was Acclaim's first racing game for the N64. They had some learning to do to get better at programming for the console, and this really shows when you compare it to its sequel.

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Yeah and Sega Rally Championship was AM3's 1st attempt at a racing game on the Saturn. You were comparing Acclaim's second effort to a 1st year title.

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

I'm not really seeing anything particularly amazing or more interesting than Powerslave or Quake.

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You would if it wasn't covered in fog. :p

I don't know why people are so fixated on Turok. It was an early release by a developer that loved fog in all their games. Disruptor for the PS1 was just as bad when it came to fog and popup. The Alien Trilogy and Amok games on the Saturn also had plenty of dark areas that could be considered fog. So it could really be a matter of who was developing it. Please don't try and tell me they did it for environmental effects.

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Originally Posted by old man

I don't know why people are so fixated on Turok. It was an early release by a developer that loved fog in all their games. Disruptor for the PS1 was just as bad when it came to fog and popup.

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Because a lot of those early fog-fests for some reason aren't heaped with the same praise Turok has.

Turok is full of fog on the PC too which is just stupid.

My reason for not giving a shit about Turok is, Quake is just a much more fun game tbh.

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Originally Posted by Gogogadget

Because a lot of those early fog-fests for some reason aren't heaped with the same praise Turok has.

Turok is full of fog on the PC too which is just stupid.

My reason for not giving a shit about Turok is, Quake is just a much more fun game tbh.

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I remember it getting praise BITD, but now it seems like people only praise it in defense of when it's used as a reason to bash the N64. There's a disparity between the number of people who seem to be ripping it and the ones putting it on a pedestal. It just seems to me like a convenient way for haters to bash the platform while ignoring the better games. And for the record, I don't like the Turok games either.

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Originally Posted by old man

I remember it getting praise BITD, but now it seems like people only praise it in defense of when it's used as a reason to bash the N64. There's a disparity between the number of people who seem to be ripping it and the ones putting it on a pedestal. It just seems to me like a convenient way for haters to bash the platform while ignoring the better games. And for the record, I don't like the Turok games either.

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At best Turok is a 6/10 game.

For a console FPS for it's time it does some things that we're pretty impressive for people who had never seen a PC fps but it is sure as hell no Goldeneye or Perfect Dark.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Again, I was not only focusing on Sega there, but I explained this in my last post so I won't repeat it.

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Yes, you're focusing on the industry. Sega is a part of that industry. So for Nintendo to have been setting an industry standard and pioneering analog sticks on consoles, that would require us to either A) Say that Sega was not part of the industry, or B) pretend Sega wasn't working on Analog controllers before Nintendo unveiled their own. Both are silly options.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

They sold something like 500,000 systems in holiday '96, and you're saying a new bundle wouldn't have worked to help continue sales momentum? What? That's nonsense!

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It entirely depends on how much inventory they were still sitting on. I think you'll find a lot of Saturns being sold in the US from 97-99 were actually manufactured in 1996.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

No, an educated guess. It doesn't really matter who started their project first, though, not as long as we don't know for sure.

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Speculation when we do it, educated guess when you do it. Got it.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

The point is that when you have large blocks of similar colors smoothly fading from one color to another, you notice the pixels less, but when you have different colors close together you notice them unless the textures are smoothed or are high enough resolution to not be noticeable. That latter one isn't going to happen at 480i, that's for sure. And the former causes N64-style blurring.

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Or it's that the textures just aren't pixelated you moron. The Virtua Fighter 2 character textures aren't pixelated either. Being able to see a pixel != pixlated you nitwit. Quit making up definitions on the spot.

The textures the Saturn uses in most games are higher resolution than what the N64 is using, that's an established fact. The N64 isn't blurry just because it's using filtering. It's blurry because the textures are low resolution pixelated messes that are being heavily filtered. If we were to compare the raw textures from these games, the N64 ones would be the ones that look like a pixelated mess. The Saturn and PS1 textures on the other hand would look pretty clean and crisp.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

No, you're using the wrong definition of pixelization. Nintendo emphasized texture filtering back when the N64 was announced, and talked about how when you get close to something you still can't see the pixels, because they were proud of their new tech that could get rid of those blocky pixels and instead show just a smoothed texture. That is the point here, that on N64 textures are smoothed instead of pixelated, so when you get close to things, or look at things with complex textures, they do not fall apart into a mess of pixels.

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No, you're using the wrong word. The true words to use here are filtered and unfiltered. N64 textures are filtered. Saturn textures are unfiltered. We can get pixelated messes on any of these systems, but to say the textures you saw in Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon, etc. are pixelated isn't correct. They're unfiltered which is true. But they're not pixelated as they still look pretty crisp and clean. You can still tell exactly what things are supposed to be and they still have a good level of detail.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Good looking if you like the look of blocky pixels, sure. I think that look is kind of ugly. Panzer Dragoon is great for its gameplay and art design; technically it looks somewhat ugly, but for 1995 that can't be helped.

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You think it's ugly because you're a fanboy. You can't for once admit "Yeah, the N64 has shit low res textures because of cartridge limitations." You have to come up with all these fake categories to try and put the N64 on a pedestal and make yourself feel good about liking the N64.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

No, you're just ignoring the whole point of why N64 texture smoothing exists.

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The whole point it's there is to hide the fact the N64 has significantly worse quality and lower resolution textures than the Saturn, PS1, and even the 3DO due to cartridge limitations.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

It doesn't really matter if you can tell what a texture is supposed to be if it still looks super blocky!

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Except they're not super blocky.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Even the better shots have pixeley stuff in them, though. What's the point of saying the same thing for every shot?

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Except they're not pixelated and you know it. You know damn well those Saturn shots look crisper with better textures than any of the early N64 games had. The only stuff to come close to that on the system are the later games that used the expansionpack.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

The Saturn and PS1 can do higher-resolution textures than you see in most (not all, most) N64 games, but they absolutely CANNOT present them cleanly. Cleanly is Dreamcast, it's textures that actually look good and not like a blocky mess. No 5th gen console has that.

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The Dreamcast textures look good because they're higher resolution, just like Saturn and PS1 textures in comparison to the N64.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Early games on consoles usually have their drawbacks.

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Yet those early Saturn and PS1 games that have been mentioned seem to fair better...

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

The environments don't have more going on than Turok, most of them are quite flat compared to the scale of Turok areas... some aren't, but still.

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Maybe that would be more apparent if you could actually see the environments. From what you can see of Turok at a given moment it doesn't look that fancy. Powerslave has a better draw distance and I can see a lot more of the architecture and detail as a result.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

And again here's your key mistake -- no, you are wrong. Unfiltered textured polygons, at the resolutions and power levels 5th gen console run at, are pixelated. This is exactly why Nintendo decided to have texture filtering on the N64, to reduce this issue. It worked. The result was blurry textures, but again, the choice that gen is blocky or blurry, pick one.

The early N64 techdemo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKlbx5niBu8 shows what I'm talking about. Of course the video probably overhypes the system, the kind of thing that got people expecting that the N64 would look better than it did once they saw games like Cruis'n USA and were disappointed, but "there are no blocks" are the point. To simplify, pixels are blocks. Nintendo 64 smoothing hides the blocks. The quality of the results depended on how good the development team was, but that was the goal anyway.

What would you say, that Nintendo only focused on that pre-release because of the hardware having limited texture cache? I don't think so, if Nintendo thought that the cache was such a big deal they'd have surely increased the size of the cache. That they focused instead on smooth textures shows their focus on getting rid of that blocky look. Not everyone likes the results of course, but that was what they did.

One of the best-looking games on the PS1 is Wipeout 3, that game looks a lot less pixelated than PS1 games usually do probably because it runs at a higher resolution than most PS1 games. The heavy use of texture that have only a few colors (solid or shaded or that sort of look) also surely helps. Anything shaded, of course, isn't going to be pixelated. And the game does have popping polygon issues because of the PS1's lack of perspective correction, of course, though they minimize it versus other PS1 games.

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It seems I need to bring up this example again for you. Let's say this is our texture for a game, a shot of Ryu:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps43ogx5yy.png

Sure, we can see pixels, but the texture isn't pixelated by any means. It's clean and crisp. On the Saturn and PS1 textures are not filtered, so it will appear pretty close to how it appears right now.

This texture however is a pixelated mess:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pse7rpbi6e.png

And yes, this is the true definition of pixelization, as this is what GIMP or Photoshop do when you ask them to pixelize something. This texture is a total mess, the only reason you would use it would be for a place holder or to save memory space.

Here is our original texture filtered:
http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...pslqnidxk6.png

Overall it's a tad blurry, but it's acceptable. We can tell what's going on and there's still decent detail. This is a close guess to what Saturn and PS1 textures would look like if they had texture filtering capabilities. In fact when you play with emulators that support this you get something close to that.

This is clearly what you think N64 stuff looks like through your rose colored glasses. If N64 textures looked like this no one would be complaining. But it's not what most N64 textures look like, because most N64 games are not using textures as high of quality as our original texture that would be used on the Saturn or PS1. They're instead using textures on par with that pixelated mess to fit on a cart. So in reality our N64 textures end up looking like this:

http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps4lrjq2ah.png

Having the choice between that or the original, pixels and all on the Saturn and PS1, I'd take the original image any day.

So in conclusion, are Saturn and PS1 textures unfiltered? Yes, no one is arguing that. But what we are telling you is that in many cases the textures are higher resolution and of higher quality, so even without filtering they still look better and are crisp and clean. Most N64 games are using very low quality textures and heavily filtering them to hide the fact they're low quality. This is why a lot of people will admit that Quake looks better on the Saturn than it does on the N64.

Why are you bothering to argue with ABF over the N64

You'd have an easier time arguing with a cat.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

-----------------------SAT/PS1-------------------------------------------------- N64-------------------------
http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps43ogx5yy.pnghttp://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m...ps4lrjq2ah.png

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This pretty much sums up the texture quality comparison IMO. "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to TrekkiesUnite118 again."

And even with the expeansion pack and bigger carts the thing doesn't get really great because the texture cache of the N64 is really limited:
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/2517/n9k8.png

And just 'cause the PS1 and Saturn couldn't have detailed (with foliage!!!) fully 3D games where you could jump, swim, run and fight against big and well animated enemies prior the Nintendo 64 telling them how to do so with Turok and its great draw distance:

I will admit that Tomb Raider on the Saturn has some pretty awful and pixelated textures in some parts though. I wonder if a lot of them are placeholders that never got replaced with finalized ones. I know that's what happened with House of the Dead on the Saturn.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gogogadget

Why are you bothering to argue with ABF over the N64

You'd have an easier time arguing with a cat.

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I put him on ignore long ago.

The only bad part is he spews so much nonsense that he's quoted far too often.

@Trekkies, loved the speculation/educated guess comment.