Released in 1996, the Nintendo 64 was Nintendo's third home console and marked a significant leap in polygonal 3D gaming technology. While Sony and Sega were focusing on CDs, Nintendo stuck to cartridges much to the chagrin of third party developers. It featured a unique controller sporting an analog joystick - something that had not been a standard in home console controllers for quite some time. Despite its odd look, the controller was remarkably forward thinking as gaming transitioned into the 3D era.
While the N64 struggled to attract third party support, it boasted an impressive first party library and several second and third party classics. Super Mario 64 was a groundbreaking 3D platformer that set the standard for future games in the genre. Ocarina of Time is often hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. Other classics like GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Mario Kart 64, and Super Smash Bros. also contributed to the console's success.
Another unique feature of the N64 was the four-player multiplayer support (without a multitap), which led to many memorable gaming sessions with friends. Whether it was competing in Mario Kart races or engaging in Super Smash Bros. battles, the N64 provided countless hours of multiplayer fun.
Share your fondest memories of the Nintendo 64. What were your favorite games? Did you have epic Goldeneye sessions with friends? How did you feel about the controller then and do you still feel the same way now?
Thanks for posting the thread for this month, bmoc!
I have a lot of good memories with the N64. I got the console for Christmas in 1996, along with Super Mario 64, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Shadows of the Empire.
My sister and I had a great time with Super Mario 64, as it was a pretty mind blowing experience at the time. My friend that lived down the street also received Pilotwings 64 and Cruis'n USA, so I had a chance to experience those early on as well. It seems like Shadows of the Empire has a middling reputation nowadays, but I really enjoyed it when I played it back then. The Battle of Hoth level was awesome to experience back then as well. Mortal Kombat Trilogy was fun but I didn't think the N64 controller was well suited for a fighting game.
Multiplayer wise, Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 were our go to's, as I'm sure was common with so many kids at the time. Mario Kart 64 is probably still my favorite in the series, as my sister and I still play N64 during our family holiday get togethers. Goldeneye was another game we played with friends, neighbors, and cousins. I recall playing a lot of The Man with the Golden Gun mode, but it was always fun to play with different people and see what modes were preferred and what weapons they wanted or didn't want to use. Does anyone recall their preferred settings for multiplayer? Just curious!
Another great memory I have is of the day I received Star Fox 64. My parents took me to a Toys 'R Us on July 4th, a few days after the game came out, on our way upstate to a family get together, so I purchased the game in the morning, and we stayed most of the day at the gathering. I had a good time, but I kept thinking I can't wait to get home and play Star Fox. Lol. The Rumble Pak was also a great accessory, and was another feature that was mind blowing to me as a kid. It's cool that feature became an industry standard nowadays. Over the years, Star Fox 64 has grown into my favorite single player game on the system and I like to revisit it at least once a year.
I got my Nintendo 64 in March 2007 cheap off of Craigslist. I think I paid $20 for the system with the expansion pack and three controllers.
I got Resident Evil 2 for $10 shipped off ebay. I got Conker's Bad Fur Day and Super Smash Bros. together for $22 shipped
Apart from playing briefly at friends' houses and once when a friend actually brought his over, I never really played Nintendo 64 before then.
I played through Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine in 2009. It was impressive, but was easily the most bug-riddled console game I had played at the time.
The N64 is one of my favorite consoles of all time. It's maybe only second to the SNES, but sometimes I feel like it's tied with the SNES as my favorite console. Go figure, those are the two consoles I spent the most time with as a kid.
Me ranting about Nintendo's decision to stick with carts...
Then and now, the N64 gets a lot of flack for Nintendo's choice to stick with a cartridge when everyone else was jumping on CD's. Often you hear it was because Nintendo wanted to control piracy (it would be infinitely easier and cheaper to reproduce a CD versus a cartridge) but there were other reasons. One being load times. Not that the Saturn and PS1 were all that bad with load times, but it still doesn't compare to a cartridge. And two, Nintendo has always been concerned with the quality of their products holding up to kids' abuse. You can throw around a video game cart on the school bus and it'll be fine. You can even bake a Super Mario 64 cart in the oven LOL. But how many kids ruined there Saturn and PS1 games from scratches?
Nintendo's decision to stick with carts for the N64 might have famously lost them Square's support. Which was kind of huge, being that Square was so prominent on the NES and SNES. But Nintendo has always been one to beat to their own drum. They do what suits them best. Carts were fine for the types of games they wanted to make. And although third party support is always a good thing, Nintendo first and foremost makes their consoles to support their own games. I wonder if Nintendo had known Square would move to Sony if they still would have stuck with carts. I bet they would have.
All I can say is, all these years later, I'm glad the N64 used carts. I have had Saturns and PS1s with disc drive problems. And while I've always taken care of my own discs, I've acquired many discs over the years that were badly scratched. Some have issues playing, some don't play at all. But I've never had an issue with my N64 reading carts (aside from the occasional cleaning) and I've never acquired a cart that I couldn't get working (if not work straight away). Try having your one and a half year old son put your copy of Metal Gear Solid in the oven and see if it still works! (this is referencing the thread linked above).
Having owned a SNES, my brother and I were super hyped for the N64. My first experience with it was actually renting the console from Blockbuster along with Super Mario 64. I can remember firing up Mario 64 for the first time, and being blown away by the graphics. And on top of that, the game was an absolute blast to play. We only rented the console the one time, and then decided to save every dime to buy our own N64. I can remember my brother getting pissed at me any time I made a small purchase. That could have been $5 put towards getting an N64! Eventually the console got a price cut, but we still didn't have enough money. So we did what any kid would do, we begged our parents to put up the difference LOL. And they did! The only thing was, we didn't have enough cash left over to purchase a game. So we rented a game on the way home from purchasing the console. I can remember arguing with my brother in the car on the way to the rental shop. I wanted to rent Super Mario 64 because I couldn't wait to play it again, but he wanted to rent Shadows of the Empire because we already saw Mario 64 and he wanted to check out another game. He won the argument, we rented Shadows of the Empire. But a short while later, a few days or a week about, my mother bought us a copy of Super Mario 64. She said it was stupid that we owned a console b but not any games for it. And she might have heard my brother and I arguing about not getting Super Mario 64. In retrospect, it was better it happened this way. If we rented Mario 64, I would have lost that save file.
Super Mario 64
From the time I rented the Nintendo 64 console from Blockbuster until now, Super Mario 64 has not only been one of my favorite N64 games, but one of my favorite games of all time. How do you turn a 2D hop and bop into a 3D game? You make him do acrobatics in a diorama. Who would have thought that the gameplay would be so fun that I would still enjoy it decades later. Everything about this game was absolutely epic and groundbreaking at the time. But the charm of it has been everlasting.
Star Wars Shadows of the Empire
This was the second game that I ever experienced for the N64, and the game that we rented on the way home from purchasing the console. I know the controls seem a little rough these days. But you know what? They were a little rough back then! But I don't care, I love this game. I think what did it for me was the excellent soundtrack. Most (or all?) of the soundtrack was ripped straight from the movies and sounded fantastic on the N64. And the music wasn't just shoved into the game, it seemed to fit really well. Between that and the environments, it just felt like you were inside the Star Wars universe. I still love playing this game, despite the 3rd person levels being difficult to control.
Cruis'n USA
Cruis'n USA was an early rental after first getting the N64, and I fell in love with the game. It was one of those games that I rented several times during the lifespan of the console, but it was never priority enough that I purchased my own copy. I know that the two followups on the N64 are probably technically better, but my heart will always be for the first game.
Star Fox 64
My brother and I were fans of the first Star Fox on the SNES. So this was a natural rental for us. And we were completely blown away. It didn't just turn Star Fox up to 11, it slammed a Red Bull and took a shot of adrenaline! Between the awesome graphics, the voice samples, the better narrative, and holy shit the Rumble Pak, this game blew our minds. I can remember being in an Electronics Boutique and finding a used but complete in box copy of the game. My father purchased it for us. I played the hell out of this game. At some point, I used a Game Shark to get medals on every stage. I had the game completed 100% on that cart like that ever since. Until earlier this year, I deleted the save data on the cart. Which was hard to do, knowing that it has been on there so long. But I started fresh, and hundred-percented the game without using a Game Shark. I did, however, use a turbo controller LOL. Is that still cheating? Well if it is, it's less cheating than using Game Shark codes! Either way, I still have a great time with this game all these years later.
I'll post about more games later!
Note wrote:Multiplayer wise, Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 were our go to's, as I'm sure was common with so many kids at the time. Mario Kart 64 is probably still my favorite in the series, as my sister and I still play N64 during our family holiday get togethers. Goldeneye was another game we played with friends, neighbors, and cousins. I recall playing a lot of The Man with the Golden Gun mode, but it was always fun to play with different people and see what modes were preferred and what weapons they wanted or didn't want to use. Does anyone recall their preferred settings for multiplayer? Just curious!
My brother and I played a lot of Super Mario Kart on the SNES, but strangely we never got Mario Kart 64. I mean, I have a copy now, but I never played it back when the N64 as relevant. Instead we had Diddy Kong Racing, and that was our kart racing game on the N64. Having eventually played Mario Kart 64, I couldn't say which one is better. They are both ridiculously fun games. But Diddy Kong Racing is the one I have nostalgia for. And Rare's take on a kart racer is pretty unique, somehow making it an adventure collect-a-ton with boss battles and secrets to unlock LOL.
My first experience with Goldeneye was over a friend's house. We would play it often. But since he owned the game and I didn't at the time, he would whoop my ass in it. He would always choose the setup options, and would pick ones that gave him all the advantages. Like picking Golden Gun mode, and knowing the spawn locations for the guns, he would race straight to the Golden Gun and then squat in the spawn area so I didn't have a chance. So I don't have the greatest memories of playing Golden Gun. Eventually I got my own copy, and I played the multiplayer a whole lot more with my brother. But we very rarely played The Man with the Golden Gun. I think most often we just put it on the time limit, random level, and cycled through the weapon load outs every match. I would always put on the cheats No Radar and Paintball.
Note wrote:Another great memory I have is of the day I received Star Fox 64. My parents took me to a Toys 'R Us on July 4th, a few days after the game came out, on our way upstate to a family get together, so I purchased the game in the morning, and we stayed most of the day at the gathering. I had a good time, but I kept thinking I can't wait to get home and play Star Fox. Lol. The Rumble Pak was also a great accessory, and was another feature that was mind blowing to me as a kid. It's cool that feature became an industry standard nowadays. Over the years, Star Fox 64 has grown into my favorite single player game on the system and I like to revisit it at least once a year.
Awesome story. That must have been the longest day ever, waiting to get home to play a new video game.
Now as an adult, there's no magic in buying a new video game. I can go on Amazon right now and have a new game at my doorstep tomorrow. Or drive a few miles to the nearest Wal Mart or whatever and buy any game behind the glass. But it would be almost as boring as going grocery shopping. But being a kid in the 80s/90s, game purchases were far and few between. Outside of getting a game or two for your birthday or Christmas, or maybe saving up birthday money, games were rarely purchased. That made each one that much more special. That's why you can vividly remember where you purchased a specific game, and what you did that day. Most of the games I purchased for the Switch, I don't know. I probably very boringly got many of them from Amazon. And sometimes I don't even remember that I purchased a game, that had lead me to once accidentally buying the same game twice. That's how mundane it has become.
Ziggy587 wrote:Most (or all?) of the soundtrack was ripped straight from the movies and sounded fantastic on the N64
It was a mix of Empire Strikes Back and music from the Shadows of the Empire soundtrack. The Shadows of the Empire soundtrack wasn't created specifically for the game. It was created as soundtrack to the novel.
Sometime in late 1994 or early 1995, I walked into an Aladdin's Castle arcade inside my local mall. A new arcade game was at the front of the arcade. It was then that I heard the words in a loud and slightly modulated voice.
Nintendo hadn't done much in the arcade space since the VS cabs of the mid-80's so I was intrigued. I watched the Killer Instinct intro intently and was blown away by what I saw. Graphically it was leaps and bounds better looking that any other fighter at the time. The game's soundtrack was pure 90's bliss with its catchy guitar riffs. I pumped quarters into that machine every chance that I got and I knew that I had to have one of these Ultra 64 consoles as soon as it came out.
I had also just subscribed to GamePro through a school fundraiser so I was fed constant news about games coming to the Ultra 64. GamePro was directly responsible for the first E3 and had plenty of coverage on the nextgen gaming consoles that were all about to drop in 1995. Sadly, the Ultra 64 faced many delays and Killer Instinct was instead ported to the SNES. Additionally, the Ultra 64 eventually became the Nintendo 64. Some speculate that it was renamed due to Konami's trademark of Ultra Games. Which, if true, is hilarious because Ultra Games was founded to get around Nintendo's publisher restrictions on the NES.
I was saving up for an Ultra64/Nintendo 64 since that fateful day in Aladdin's Castle. As mentioned in previous Console of the Month discussions, I occasionally dipped into my Nintendo 64 nest egg to buy JRPGs on the SNES and also Killer Instinct. So the extra time to save up again, was appreciated but it was still an agonizing wait.
Something that made the wait more tolerable was the arrival of a demo Nintendo 64 unit along with Mario 64 at my local Wal-Mart a few weeks prior to the September 1996 US release. My parents liked to go grocery shopping on Sunday mornings which was fine by me because that meant I got the demo unit all to myself for 30 to 45 minutes every week. It didn't matter that Killer Instinct wasn't coming to the Nintendo 64, Mario 64 was just that good.
Preorders for video games and systems weren't commonplace in my area at that time. When the Nintendo 64 was finally released, I had a hard time finding one. It wouldn't be until December before I was able to get one. One of my sister's friends knew that I was looking for one and called my house late one night to let me know Wal-Mart had some in stock. I had already gone to bed but my dad was cool enough to take me to Wal-Mart to get one. I got Mortal Kombat Trilogy while I was there because they were out of Mario 64. I asked my dad if we could go across town to the K-Mart and check for Mario 64 to which he agreed. K-Mart had it and I was so excited by that point, I could not count the money. I handed my wad of cash to my dad and had him count it out because I was quite literally shaking with excitement.
Despite going back to bed when we got back home, I did not sleep one damn bit. I had school the next day and let me tell you, that was the longest day of school in my entire life.
The next game that I got was Shadows of the Empire. I was a huge Star Wars geek at the time and I already had the novel and soundtrack. Eventually, I would also get Turok, Ocarina of Time, Rogue Squadron, and Banjo Kazooie. I wouldn't own more N64 games until adulthood but I also played some Goldeneye with friends in college. I was used to PC FPS games so I found Goldeneye somewhat hard to play via splitscreen. I don't hold it in high esteem but I understand why some do.
These days I've trimmed down my N64 collection to just a handful of games that hold nostalgia for me. Through HD remasters and collections like Rare Replay, there are plenty of ways to play the popular N64 games on modern consoles. Even still, I'll never sell my N64 console since it was the first console I bought with my own money.
bmoc wrote:K-Mart had it and I was so excited by that point, I could not count the money. I handed my wad of cash to my dad and had him count it out because I was quite literally shaking with excitement.
Awesome memories, bmoc. Thanks for sharing! I especially laughed out loud at the above quoted part.
bmoc wrote:It was a mix of Empire Strikes Back and music from the Shadows of the Empire soundtrack. The Shadows of the Empire soundtrack wasn't created specifically for the game. It was created as soundtrack to the novel.
I know there's music from Empire in the game, and mostly from Empire. But IIRC there's some music from A New Hope as well. I think music during The Battle of Yavin. But I didn't realize there was a Shadows soundtrack with original music. Makes sense though, the whole Shadows thing was meant to have all of the supporting pieces of a movie. Books, comics, video games, toys, and I guess a sound track too!
Nintendo was the best developer in the 8/16-bit generations, so I was fully expecting to badly want the N64. Alas, Mario 64 wasn't my kind of game, GoldenEye just made me want to play Quake, Mario Kart 64 had lame level design, Zelda 64 was nice but more of the same. And where was Metroid?! Interestingly, my favorite game on the console was NBA Hangtime (which I bought and played on friends' consoles) until Mario Party came out. I got mine really late and had no regrets.
Because the N64 turned out to be so lacklustre, I almost got a Saturn, which had the best library going into late 1997. Luckily, I held out for the PS1 because Final Fantasy was my favorite series. After that, the PS1 was easily the best. Take into account, I was 16 and didn't have enough money for multiple systems.
The Nintendo 64 was the last console I had as a kid where I was still with the console generation. It was the console I had in High School and I remember many times during those days talking about Ocarina of Time or the amount of hours we all put into Goldeneye and Mario Kart. In a way, it still is the go to multiplayer console as I put many hours into Dr. Mario and still the Mario Party games to this day. I will always have fond memories and nostalgia for the console.
Going back to it nowadays is probably my hardest console. I can go back and discover new NES games and enjoy them quite easily. Same thing with the modern consoles. For the N64, it is much harder. They aren't as classic to me and the early 3D feel to them lacks the polish and modern amenities that I am used to. Also, the N64 has some of the highest of the highs when it comes to its library. Once you are done with those games, the drop off for the rest of the console is rather steep. It has very little in the middle category and there are just a ton of bad for it. But, those best games are some of the best games ever made.
Goldeneye is basically synonymous with the N64. Of course I had a lot of fun with the multiplayer, as many did, but I actually had more fun with the single player. Because the levels had an almost sandbox feel to them, and because Rare is so awesome at their world building, the game was just so immersive to me. I spent many hours trying to beat every level on every difficulty and unlock every cheat. To this day, I still have a blast starting a new save and unlocking everything. That cymbal roll when you beat a cheat time, it's still so satisfying to hear. Especially for the cheats that give you a run for your money, no matter how good at the game you are. This game was actually my entry into the James Bond franchise. After falling in love with the game, I rented the movie on VHS. So yeah, Goldeneye was the first Bond film I ever saw. After that, I rented Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun because the game references things from those movies. After that, I watched every Bond film one by one. So I was watching the Bond films for the first time, and have a great time playing the game at the same time. I don't want to say I have a favorite N64 game because there are a few that are on my all-time-favorites list. But during the lifespan of the console, Goldeneye was probably my favorite N64 game.
The World Is Not Enough
Ah, the lackluster follow up to Goldeneye that was still a fun game. Yeah, I think that perfectly describes TWINE. I remember when the game first came out, someone at school told me not to rent it and to just buy it because it's another Goldeneye. It's really not a bad game at all, but it is NOT another Goldeneye. It just has none of that Rare charm and magic that they were known for on the N64. But yeah, a decent game nonetheless. Being a certified Bond fan at this point, I still had a lot of fun with this game even if it was in the shadow of Goldeneye. It was not nearly as satisfying to unlock cheats, and the levels didn't seem as well built as Goldeneye. But it followed the movie decently and the FPS gameplay was fun enough. There were some upgrades from Goldeneye, such as modifying weapons (adding a silencer or changing firing mode), voice acting in cutscenes, and some other stuff. One thing that always bothered me was when you failed a mission. In Goldeneye, if you failed an objective you could still play and exit the level. You just didn't get the ending cutscene, and obviously don't advance. But in TWINE, you can still play the level, however there's a MISSION FAILED ABORT message that flashes right in the middle of the screen making you not want to continue playing. The multiplayer was actually a lot of fun, and in some ways better than Goldeneye. The addition of bots, for example. And IIRC it had some better game modes.
The N64 was released the fall I started college, so everyone I knew had other priorities and, in rare cases, an existing video game system (most college students at my college, my year at least, did not seem to bring consoles with them from home). So I actually interacted with the Dreamcast before I really had any time with the N64. Kinda ruined it for me.
