As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.
Can you list 20 great first party games on any platform?
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.
Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.
I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.
I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.
Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.
If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.
I agree, not common, which is why I don’t understand the “only 20 or so great games” take.
Here’s the difference:
On the Super Nintendo, I can name 20 great, all-time classic games if restricted to first and second party titles, so made by Nintendo and Rare. If you open me up to 3rd party titles I can probably come up with 100 all time classics like Lufia or Desert Strike.
On the N64, I’m going to struggle to make it to 20 all-time classics if restricted to first and second party titles, and I might make it to 25 if you let me have the whole catalog. Of the remaining 350+ games made for the system, some of them were unfinished garbage like Superman 64, some of them were badly designed crap like Quest 64, and a lot of them were competent but not memorable things like Extreme-G or The New Tetris, competently made and legitimately fun games we played, finished, put away and forgot about forever.
Us N64 owners tend to have very similar memories of the platform. There aren’t many hidden gems to rediscover.
Oh right I see it’s like a quality vs quantity thing. To me I’d pick quality (as that is what triggers my nostalgia).
If I want quantity there are thousands of modern indie games I’d rather play.
Bringing up the topic of nostalgia, I think there are two audiences to talk to here: Those who had those old systems at the time they were relevant and those who weren’t.
I mentioned the game Extreme-G. That was a personal favorite of mine. I occasionally set up an old CRT and my old N64 and during my nostalgia trip Extreme-G and Extreme-G 2 both spend some time running. Just hearing the British cyberpunk announcer chick say “mull tee pull miss aisle” makes 25 year old neurons fire. And I also fully acknowledge that it was an above average 8.1/10 game, that it’s basically Mario Kart hosed down with Axe body spray, the Forsaken brand of 90’s drum & bass cyberpunk is a bit passe these days, and despite the very fast graphics kids these days are going to look at it and go “…okay. Pretty low resolution, isn’t it?”
And from that perspective, I don’t think the N64 aged well at all. Even Ocarina of Time, hailed for over a decade as the greatest video game ever made…is aging like a potato. It kept for a long time but it’s starting to show wrinkles and is distressingly wet on the bottom.
On c/[email protected] or however you do that on Lemmy I answered the question “Was Wizardry a good series?” with “Was. Yes.” Because Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was phenomenal…in 1981. You just couldn’t get computer entertainment like that in the Carter administration. Not sure how well it holds up 43 years on.