Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I love N64 but it is absolutely the moment when 3rd party support fell off a cliff. Mostly because the PS1 was cooler tech that a lot of companies were interested in and AFAIK those companies were sick of Nintendo's policies at the time. They'd get the occasional port from these companies (outside of Square who entirely bailed and became more popular simultaneously), but they clearly relied a lot more on what western companies they could get on board.

Though while I do agree games were often beaten by subsequent sequels on later systems (it does probably say something that OOT is still one of N64's best games, but imo is a lesser 3d Zelda), I do think there's more that haven't been than you're given credit for. There's enough types of games that were specific from that era, and seemingly no one who could make something better were the ones still making games like them by the GCN/PS2/Xbox era. As someone who grew up with and loved the GCN, I never fully bought into the hype of ANY 3D platformer release on it, with the exception of Rayman 3 (which had less hype than 2 anyway). Maybe PS2 kept literally all the best ones, I dunno. And there's just a number of cool, memorable games from that system that AFAIK didn't reflect anything that came afterwards because they also had outdated elements, so I guess they decided to ignore them entirely instead of improve upon them. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.

I'm going to echo the N64 controller dragging the system down. NES to SNES feels like a natural evolution. The N64 controller is unintuitive compared to its two competitors. The PS controller feels like it builds on the SNES' stellar foundation and the Saturn pad builds on the Genesis 6-button pad (and is still the basis for the pads I prefer for 2D fighters).

One thing to consider too is that a dev creating multiplatform titles would have had an easier time porting between PS and PC (or PS/DC, PS/SS) than with the N64 in most cases due to the space and audio capabilities the PS offered over the N64. This might have harmed 3rd party support in the long run.

Of course, I can still remember being blown away by the snowspeeder stage in Shadows of the Empire and having a blast playing endless afternoons of GoldenEye at my friends' house. I don't dislike the N64, I just feel in many ways it had some questionable choices and failed to innovate as a console the way its competitors did.

That's... not what they said at all

Well the similarities can be found in all collectathon platformers of that era but Banjo Kazooie came out before DK64 so surely DK64 ripped off Banjo instead.

@Dogorilla so what did they say? MsJubilee said I needed to not get so uptight when people don't agree with me, and kkslider told me I'd be violently assaulted for my beliefs. sounds like I responded to both of them pretty well.

@jump I totally remember Banjo coming to later. whoops. okay I changed my opinion, thanks for the clarification.

@Slowdive saying 64 was better then virtual boy was obviously wrong, but the 64 was definitely a bad console. I agree with what you said.

I think you missed read that, the assault comment wasn't aimed at you. They were comparing the Virtual Boy to being assaulted due to the complaints of it causing vertigo and headaches plus the general uncomfortableness to use. There was even suggestions that long term use could cause brain damage.

Also it wasn't a main console, it's was considered portable rather than a home console

@jump oh I see! I had to read the darn thing 20x to finally understand. Cool.

I wouldn't say it's usually considered the weakest, it's pretty divisive. There are a ton of people that seem to absolutely hate it, but there are also a lot of people that consider it their favourite Mario, or close to it. I agree it's not really an unpopular opinion to dislike it, but I also wouldn't consider it an unpopular opinion to love it. Closer to 50/50 I'd guess.

@Cynas True, there are a lot of people that love it and to be fair it does have several fun levels (the haunted beach/hotel/casino was probably my favourite). And it's had a bit of a renaissance with the Teletubby Generation coming of age. It's the Nickelback of Super Mario games. If you were to ask everyone to score it out of 10, the standard deviation of scores would be much higher for Sunshine than for Odyssey, 64, or Galaxy.

I think Animal Crossing: Wild World is the best Animal Crossing experience. It's a simple game to get into as it can be entirely played via the touch screen. The game doesn't require much thinking to travel around the town, as it's not multi-leveled like City Folk and New Horizons. Wild World can be taken anywhere obviously be being on the portable Nintendo DS. Overall, it's the most laid back, relaxing game in that franchise.

Paper Mario: The Origami King is the best Paper Mario since TTYD, and the best release from the Mario IP on the Switch in my experience (better than Mario Kart 8 DLX, Odyssey and Super Mario Party). I feel the game has continued to get better. The game's lowest points were in its tutorial stages and in early ring battles with regular enemies. The game has the best of both worlds in my opinion. It generally has focused, linear progression that delivers an engaging narrative while having open environment designs that offer plenty points of interests to discover, mainly Toads in need of rescue, holes in the world, treasure chests and signs of hidden blocks.

I loved Paper Mario as well, but I wished there was more to do after the game. Got tiring after a while finding toads and ? Blocks

Actually thinking about this enough time has passed that a lot of people now view the Virtual Boy as this goofy VR experiment Ninty tried and failed at rather than viewing it as a dangerous product that wasn’t properly tested due to concerns of its high expenditure.

If it had been more successful like a Gameboy or NES it could have led to huge lawsuits and permanently damaged Nintys reputation the following years. Imagine early 90s news talking about a video game that literally damages your brain.

The best outcome that could have happened for Ninty with The Virtual Boy was as a quiet failure rather than a high selling success.

Agree with a lot of the above. SNES was a huge improvement on the NES. N64 came out and.....Nintendo didn't feel like Nintendo anymore. The consoles were expensive, the games were expensive, there weren't very many games to pick from, and the games that were there, including Mario 64 seemed like short experiments rather than polished games like I was used to on NES/SNES. It felt hollow. I always felt like I was missing out not having one and yet never went all in on having one. Eventually I could have got one for like $50 in shrink wrap in a dump table at Gamestop and passed. They had a mountain of them. The controller was a mess....but I understand why. It was the FIRST analog thumbstick controller design, and Nintendo was banking on the dpad remaining the dominant control overall. They weren't quite sure how the analog would fit into all gameplay at that point and that the dpad would become secondary. Additionally everyone forgets that at the time, Playstation had no analog stick, and no rumble.

They redesigned the PS controller into the famed DualShock AFTER the N64 controller introduced analog and rumble and sold the controller to PS owners after the fact. The end result is the reason they have the parallel sticks at all - they literally just took their original controller that had no analogs (it was basically just an SNES controller with extended grips) and added two analogs in the only empty space available in the design without moving the existing controls. Then for some reason people actually liked that ergonomic nightmare of a controller that appeals only to visually symmetric OCD types, and they kept it forever.

It's a funny retrofit scrambling to do what Nintendid (albeit better....kinda....in a glued together way.)

I mean, it was a weird time in gaming when everyone had to pivot to 3D, but almost no one knew how. Chaos ensued.

It's actually really fun to see how things changed just on those systems. N64 and PS1 games in 2000 were often so different from the games in 1996 that it might as well be a whole different era of gaming. Compared to nowadays where most games from 2015 haven't aged a day.

@kkslider5552000 That really highlights the technical plateau we've been on for a while. Generational shifts and progression has been more incremental than the leaps they once were.
32/64-bit era was a huge leap and not many knew what to do or how to do it. By the time you got to the end of that generation, you get companies putting out some really good stuff as they learned and honed how to make use of those systems. That was pretty typical of how it was, though for most generations back then. Even the NES, look at stuff like Donkey Kong and even Super Mario compared to late generation with stuff like Mario 3. That's a huge difference on the same hardware. SNES is the same, by the time you get to the end of the generation games looked and sounded better than early games. Usually.....Nintendo was always ahead of the curve back then, but considering they designed the hardware, it makes sense they would know how to get more out of it sooner.
There was always this huge leap that had a learning curve and you only ever saw what the hardware was actually capable of toward it's end. Nowadays it just seems like something new comes out and sometimes the changes are so subtle, I don't even notice. Like slightly better shading, certain amount of more particles and etc.

On a related note, I'm wondering if the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox will be the last because where can you even go from there? I don't know much about the technological aspects of game development so maybe there is still room for improvement, but would the jump from PS5 to PS6 be big enough for casual consumers to care about?

@Dogorilla I think that the focus this gen should be more on performance rather than looks. Games look amazing right now so if they can make it even better but make 60fps/4K the standard for all games, that would be amazing. Good FPS over Looks for me

@Laoak I agree 100%.

They should focus more on the gameplay content. The graphics are amazing already. Just make the games smooth and worthy of their price tag.

I never understood the gaming industry's obsession with graphics. Countless times has it been proven that the general public doesn't care which console is the most powerful. PS1 won over N64, Wii won over PS3,...

The last couple of gens Nintendo has clearly shown that artstyle is much more important. With good artstyles, even simple games can look amazing and they age much slower. Compare WW and TP for example. Even though TP is technically the more advanced game graphics wise, it aged very poorly compared to WW, which was more stylized.

Which game do you think will be the more pleasant to look at 20 years from now: The Last of Us 2 or Super Mario Odyssey? I'm putting my money on the latter.

@Rexenoboy
I voted cartoonish graphics like Super Mario Odyssey. They are look pretty.