Beaucine

It's a masterpiece, one of the early walking simulators — along with Dear Esther, another Half-Life 2 mod — and still one of the best. Curious about this new version of it. This'll be my third go-around. (First the mod, then the commercial release, and now this.)

It's the arm from Princess Mononoke, obviously.

As for the question posed here:

Favorite Zelda: Majora's Mask or Breath of the Wild. Least favorite: Skyward Sword (which is still good, but the worst of the "Ocarina but with more errands" era of the franchise)

Favorite Mario: Mario 3, World, or 64. Least favorite: Sunshine (which has good parts, but it's janky, filled with filler, and it misunderstands 64's structure)

I'll never understand the issues people have with the 3-day cycle in Majora's Mask. If you use the song to slow down time — which isn't that hard to learn, because an unmissable NPC tells you about it 20 minutes into the game — you should have several hours to fool around per cycle. That's plenty. I'm replaying the game right now and, even having forgotten most of the puzzles, I'm still finishing dungeons by noon of the second day. That's not even half-way through the cycle. The game's fame as the most stressful Zelda ever is somewhat unearned, in my opinion. The atmosphere, yes. There's an air of urgency and gloom that's pervasive. But the time limit isn't that overbearing. You just need to set out discrete goals per cycle: do the pre-dungeon quest in one cycle and the actual dungeon in another. You don't need to cram. That's why every dungeon has a warp point next to the entrance. So you can get right into it at the start of the first day.

I'm enjoying the service quite a bit. I finally got to play Banjo and Sin & Punishment, which I missed as a kid. Awesome games both, lived up to the hype.

Personally hoping for some out-of-left-field entries — eventually. Stuff like Body Harvest, Robot on Wheels, Silicon Valley, etc. Or — dare I say it — more Rare games, especially underplayed titles like Jet Force Gemini or Blast Corps (though I found Blast Corps really frustrating back in the day).

As far as first-party goes, I'm mostly looking forward to Wave Race 64, because I never played it.

In gaming circles, Ocarina of Time has gone from overrated to underrated, honestly. Kind of like Final Fantasy VII.

Anyhow, I think these lists are about cultural and industrial impact in a wider sense, not necessarily about quality. I think Ocarina of Time's influence is profound, but also harder to pinpoint. It wasn't the first in a genre or in a franchise. It wasn't a dramatic turning point in the evolution of the medium or in the public's perception of video games. What it did was refine, popularize, and introduce an array of ideas and standards for third person adventure games, from camera angles to cinematic progression, lock-on combat, game feel, and environmental puzzles. Even today, you'll see shades of Ocarina of Time in nearly everything from Elden Ring to Final Fantasy VII Remake and A Plague Tale.

But this influence, though profound, was also gradual, aesthetic, mechanical. So it's harder to place on a timeline of the medium's evolution. I just finished reading Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games, and it just glosses over Ocarina of Time. Probably because you can't point at it like you can with Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Tetris, or even Halo, and say: "This game began a trend or changed the industry." Even though it kind of did — but more quietly.

@BloodNinja

Not yet! I'm holding off because I know that once I get started on it, it'll just be Elden Ring for months. Haha. So I want to finish the games I've already begun (Death's Door, Majora's Mask, and A Plague Tale) before that.

@Nontendo_4DS

Yeah, exactly! I had the opposite experience: I dabbled in SMB when I was very, very young, practically a toddler, but it wasn't until 2020 that I sat down to actually finish the thing. And it was hard at first, because it's a lot like Mario 64: if you're not basically playing like a speed runner and leveraging your inertia, you can't pick up altitude in your jumps. So you keep falling. Once that clicked for me, I absolutely loved SMB. But I had to forget everything I learned from SMB 3 and World.

@BloodNinja

Haha! In my case, it's kind of the other way around. Dark Souls taught me the patience and confidence I needed and didn't have for many other games (and areas of life!)

@Nontendo_4DS

Yeah, the turning... I mean, I now love Mario 64's controls. The skill ceiling and creative freedom are sky high. But the game really punishes you for being too careful with your movements — which you inevitably are when you're starting out. So you keep doing wide U-turns on small platforms or slipping off... However, in my case, this issue started to fade over time, because by now I'm side somersaulting and long jumping all over the place, and performing skidding about-faces at full speed, and it's awesome. Later 3D Marios are more polished and comfortable right off the bat — namely Galaxy and Odyssey — but the platforming isn't as visceral or inertia-based anymore. Mario 64's roughness becomes an asset in high-level play. Yet it's a roadblock until then.

@Nontendo_4DS

It's probably the least accessible 3D Mario. It's my favorite, though. I played it for the first time in 2019. But I had to get pretty good at it before I started to really love it. And I still have trouble with the camera, even after 100%-ing it three times.

@TheRedComet

Yeah, there was definitely a conceptual shift in the 80s and 90s, as developers came to grips with how and why console games were different from arcade games. Stuff that's valid in an arcade setting is awkward in a domestic context. I think some of Nintendo's own games for the NES were partly responsible for this shift: Zelda lets you save, Mario has warps, Metroid has passwords, Kirby automatically saves after every level, etc.

@Mgalens

Yeah, that's partly what I had in mind, too.

@StarPoint

Dread's lack of remappable controls is wild when you consider Super was already giving us that option almost 30 years ago. (And thank Samus for that, because I never use the standard configuration.)

I think difficulty is given too much importance in these discussions. It can be an aesthetic choice, as long as most players have a similarly brutal experience.

(Hypothetically, since video games are an art form, you could create a game so difficult no one can ever beat it, to make a point about the ruthlessness of war or whatever, and that'd be a valid artistic choice. Maybe not a wise economic choice, but that's on you, the game designer, to decide whether or not your artistic vision is worth the low sales.)

Now, if your game is not supposed to be impossible, then, for people with disabilities for whom picking up a controller is already a challenge, you might need to add accessibility options to level the playing field. That might mean granular toggles and sliders for specific gameplay elements (like in Pathologic 2 and System Shock). Or it might mean embedding difficulty options (or paths) into the game world itself (like in Star Fox 64). You can also have an Assist Mode (like Celeste). But whatever you do, I think clear labelling is important, so that the canon experience is obvious to everyone.

(Labelling is also important so your accessibility options are easy to find. My personal experience, as someone who's hearing-impaired: Final Fantasy 7 Remake has an extra layer of subtitles for random NPC chatter on the street. This allowed me to pick up on a massive amount of world-building that I'd otherwise have ignored as barely-audible background noise. However, on the menu, it shows up as "Chat Log" and, on my PC version, was off by default. Needless to say, I spent about 10 hours assuming the game didn't have subtitles for NPC chatter, because "Chat Log" wasn't a clear description of that option.)

But I don't think Easy Mode is always the answer. Because the problem is that easy games aren't necessarily accessible. I'm not sure Mario Odyssey is any more accessible than Elden Ring. It might even be less accessible, because at least in Elden Ring you can grind, use magic, or summon help. But since Odyssey isn't "hard," it doesn't come up as much in discussions. (It's mentioned here, but in passing and only to talk about tell-tale shadows under the character.)

Can't wait to replay it. Never liked the visual style, not even in the 90s. The SNES aesthetic is far more charming and ageless. But X is a very good, intense racer. Hope the 64DD content makes it into the service at some point.

@Stocksy

A lot of gamers don't understand the difference between simply recognizing that a game is 20+ years old and "aging badly."

Like others mentioned, EMMI encounters are not primarily about stealth. They're about speed and figuring out the path as you go. They're closer to the Badeline chases in Celeste.

Eh, difficult to measure. I'm at about 300 or so hours, if not more. That's down to playing Normal Mode very slowly, meticulously combing the environment for shrines and side quests; then starting all over again on Master Mode with self-imposed rules, like not using teleports. I did "beat" the game at around 240 hours, which is when I was satisfied enough with my Normal run (which included maxing out my preferred gear and completing most of the DLC content) to actually go fight Ganon. But is that really being "done" with a game when I still have stuff to do? What about games like Bayonetta, where the Normal play through is just a tutorial for Hard? Or Star Fox 64, where the whole point is to "finish" the game dozens and dozens of times, trying out different routes and high-score runs?

Metroid Dread.

I got up to the final boss last year, then got sidetracked with other games. Decided to pick Dread back up and start over, since I really didn't want to face the final boss so out of practice. I wanted to give the whole game another go anyway. Was pretty cold on it during my last play-through.

I think Majora's Mask is ultimately better, but we'll see what I think after my inevitable replay on NSO.

Having just replayed Ocarina of Time twice on the service, I admit I might've underrated it all these years. (Well, compared to Majora's Mask.) Its grasp of flow and pacing — unless you get stuck trying to get into Jabu-Jabu or whatever — is peerless in the franchise. And its succession of dungeons is like popping in a great album. Majora's Mask doesn't really match that — though, of course, it does other amazing things instead.

I like the HD-2D style, don't get me wrong, but I do wish they made the originals widely available first. Or better yet, just have an in-game toggle, like in the Halo Anniversary collection. There's artistry to old-school graphics that's lost when you start modernizing them, and this has nothing to do with nostalgia. Any "modernization" will eventually be dated itself, too, and you can't keep remaking the same games over and over again just to catch up with time. I think simple access is a more sustainable practice in the long-term, rather than this demand for remakes and remasters. For example, I would have liked the original Link's Awakening as a bonus in the recent Switch remake. The new toy-like graphics are very pretty, but movement is also inevitably slower and game-feel inevitably different than old-school Zelda. Now Nintendo's re-released the original in that Game & Watch contraption, which is, um, cool, I guess. But unless a Game Boy NSO app is released, I can now only play the original through emulation. And we're talking about a major videogame from the 90s, not a niche cult hit or something.

@Don

Seriously, the Remake, like Tim Rogers says on his 3-hour video, is actually a sequel in disguise. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but many of the plot beats in — and much of the narrative meaning of — the Remake hinge on your familiarity with the Original. I'm not talking about fan-service-y winks or call-backs, but the whole point of entire scenes and episodes, with virtually no context for newcomers to understand what the heck's going on. I know plenty of newcomers enjoyed it anyway in a bewildered End-of-Evangelion-y sort of way, but they're still missing a lot.

@Caolan114

You're never really in any rush, except during the prologue, which is admittedly one of the most intense openings in videogame history. But after that, it turns into a much more chill experience. At least, as chill as the apocalyptic concept allows. You do have a "timer" in the sense of the three-day cycle, but you can restart that cycle whenever you want and you keep all the items you've gained. Most dungeons are built in such a way that you can beat them across two cycles: you usually get the dungeon item about half-way through, which opens up the second half of the dungeon. That lets you skip ahead if you have to restart the cycle and come back. As for freely exploring the landscape, doing side-quests, or completing pre-dungeon missions, you can slow down time and get about two hours of comparatively relaxed wandering. It's not Breath of the Wild either, so you can definitely explore whatever area you're exploring within that time frame. You just have to manage your goals for each cycle, kind of like managing daily goals in Stardew Valley (except I find Stardew Valley about twenty times more stressful than Majora's Mask). I've read people online complaining about, say, not being able to finish a dungeon when they enter in the third day. Well, yeah, if you do that, you're not gonna make it. You're supposed to restart the cycle and walk into the dungeon at the start of the first day. That's what the fast-travelling's there for.

@FargusPelagius

I think in the late 90s there was Doom-like fatigue. After all, the entire genre was just called "Doom-likes," not FPS. So a lot of perfecly worthy games were dismissed back then as "more of the same" and didn't acquire the classic status they may have deserved. Now after two decades of post-Half-Life linear corridor shooters, all these Doom-likes seem fresh again.

@WaveBoy

I don't love the terminology either, but that's what everyone's calling these post-Doom/pre-Half-Life shooters now, generational inaccuracies aside. The term's used even in the text of this review.

Oh, very much my jam. I used to hate boomer shooters when I was a kid, but the Switch has allowed me to come around to them, mostly with Doom (including 2 and 64) and Quake. This looks dope, too.

@BananaMetallurgica

They didn't: a full-color map came in the box with the location of several dungeons. (The first four spelled out; others cheekily referenced with question marks). The map had blank spaces at the very top you were supposed to draw in yourself, but those are all late-game areas. You can check it out here, at the bottom: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/en/pdf/CLV-P-NAANE.pdf. Yes, Nintendo did ask that people use the map "as a last resort," but it's certainly there and most kids probably used it. (I certainly did for my own playthrough in 2020.)

@chipia

If you consider the manual akin to Navi's or Fi's hints — and I certainly do --, then the original is frankly not that cryptic. Outside of maybe that one bush you have to burn. (The vast majority of bombable walls are optional secrets, so I'm not counting them.)

I... don't really mind Navi. Having replayed Ocarina of Time twice in the past month, the only things that really stick out to me as "flaws" are: unskippable text boxes (quite frankly, my main complaint) and a couple of "is this even a puzzle tho" rooms that should've been cut. And I guess the camera isn't modern, but it (mostly) works in the context of Ocarina of Time. Oh, and Hyrule Field is clearly designed around riding Epona and hunting for Big Poes, because it's a drag otherwise. Navi, though? We're cool.

A lot of the creative jumping around in Sunshine is gone if you remove FLUDD. But it's my least favorite 3D Mario, so whatever, let modders have at it.

Can't wait to try it out. Never really played it back in the day. I rented it once but never got far into it.

I think a 10 for an old game is perfectly acceptable. I see a lot of modern games get full marks even when they're transparently dated, too, in very specifically 2020-2022 ways that old games don't suffer from (and 2030 games, I hope, won't either).

Like with all art, the medium evolves and becomes different, but old experiences are still valid. Some stuff objectively improves, mostly UX/UI and graphics. But since video games are not, say, an app you use (because video games have no purpose) but an experience you play, there's something to be said for how an overall experience can remain timeless, even if its separate parts aren't. (Also, as with all art, it's pretty challenging to figure out what's a "flaw" and what isn't. Some people think labyrinthine level design from the late 90s is "dated" and, well, it is. I hated it back in the day. But now I love it because it provides a very unique experience that I don't get from modern AAA corridors. Trends wane in popularity and become fixed to a time and place, but that doesn't provide some objective insight into their inherent validity.)

Of course, old games suffer from their own stuff, like unpolished cameras and so on. Every era has its own quirks. Mario 64 has a lot of quirks, for example, but I got used to them back in 2020 and now it's legit one of my favorite games. Not the most accessible Mario ever, but the more you play it, the better it becomes and the more creative you can get with the level design and controls. The amount of traversal possibilities is insane. By now, only the camera's still occasionally annoying to me. The way Mario handles took some getting used to, definitely, but his slipperiness does become an asset in high-level play. (It's not just jank you overlook, but a tool you can take advantage of.) I don't expect the same degree of mechanical complexity from Banjo, but we'll see what else it's got.

I love Nightdive's entire philosophy behind remasters. They make old games look relatively good on modern displays, while still keeping — and sometimes even enhancing — the original vibe and look. They're also allowing me to discover lots of gems I missed back in the day. I bounced off on Turok 2, personally, but Doom 64 and Quake were incredible.

@TheRedComet

To be honest, I'm playing Ocarina of Time again and I'm shocked at how non-linear it actually is, at least during the adult portion. Without using exploits and glitches, and just knowing where stuff is, you can really customize your path through the dungeons. It's not the original Zelda or Breath of the Wild, but it's far more open than it lets on. (You do have to ignore Navi's constant suggestions, of course.) There's also more freedom than I remembered for many puzzle solutions and battles, if you experiment with items.

One of my most anticipated on NSO, since it's one of the N64 classics I missed out on.

@MarioBrickLayer

I don't think it's the amount of time you spent dungeoning that counts for people, but rather how even smaller dungeons in the older games functioned as short, self-contained stories. Think of the mini dungeons in Ocarina of Time, like Bottom of the Well, and how they spin a kind of narrative, from the moment you walk in and fall into invisible pits everywhere, until you finally get the Eye of Truth and make sense of the place, so frustrating forty minutes ago. That's not a long dungeon by any means, but it's very memorable because of the storytelling embedded in the progression. The shrines don't have that. They're neat, small-scale puzzle rooms, like in The Talos Principle, the first Portal, or Baba is You. They're great fun, but large-scale dungeons are very rare in videogames, because of the architectural complexity they entail, and basically only Zelda games really do it well. And that's where the dissappointment with the shrines stems.

For context, I think Breath of the Wild is one of the top three Zelda games and one of my favorites of all time. But I get where the complaints are coming from.

@johnvboy

Yeah, I think a lot of people misunderstand what these lists mean. They talk about the rankings as if there were this one person who sits down and says: "This game is scientifically better than this other game." When in reality it's an aggregate of thousands of lists and invidual opinions. It's anthropologically interesting and all, and these lists have their place, but they're not meant to be rigorous.

@johnvboy

I have no idea what debate I just walked in on, but: lists like these are interesting to gauge popular opinion on a wider, even national level, but it's not a curated list with unique, interesting choices and recommendations; it's always going to be a popularity contest with necessarily well-known titles. That's not a complaint, just an observation.

Not a bad list, considering it's a public poll.

Looking forward to this! Never managed to complete it back in the day. So far, I've been giving the N64 app plenty of use. Finished four games. Three were fantastic (Ocarina of Time, Star Fox, and Sin & Punishment) and one was interesting but really janky and unpolished (Winback).

@CharlieGirl

I'm not disagreeing with that, though.

@CharlieGirl @SwitchVogel

I think there's definitely a fine line, though.

When playing an old game, I usually try to keep in mind the time it was released. It's not really about "tempering expectations," as @SwitchVogel would put it, so much as it is about understanding the game's context and contemporary player expectations. We don't have to carry out that adjustment with modern games because, well, we're living in that context already. It's automatic.

But, sure, I do think our opinion of an old game should depend on how fun or interesting it is right now, not on nostalgia or historical importance. I just don't hold it against an old game if I have to ​do a little bit of work to get to that fun or interest. I would have missed out on many of my favorite games if I did.

@Kiwi_Unlimited

It got some good reviews here and there, but it was a pretty tepid response overall. Check out some of the contemporary blurbs from its 2003 PC release: https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/bloodrayne

I mean, THIS is the most positive take on there: "While the action and graphics are cool to look at and play through, a poor excuse for a story and a general lack of depth to most of the game could turn off some gamers."

From there you go all the way down to: "If you can get past the unresponsive controls and don't mind the overall tasteless but campless tone, Bloodrayne still offers only a few hours of moderately entertaining carnage" and "This game simply isn't fun for very long."

@Dingelhopper

I agree with your point, though I don't know if I'd phrase it as "Zelda 1 and 2 are bad by modern game design."

In my opinion, people (not necessarily you) talk too much about "modern standards" without understanding what those standards are or what they mean.

Games — like all art or software — are made for certain audiences. In UX terms, those audiences operate under "mental models," that is, they have certain expectations about how stuff is supposed to work.

But such "models" are of their time and place. When we pick the game up years later, we have to adjust to these outmoded "mental models" if we want to make sense of the game. But this isn't really the game's fault. And, to be entirely honest, it's not climbing Everest either. I adjusted to Zelda 1 in 15 minutes.

"Modern standards" will follow the same fate: gamers in 2030 will probably be complaining about our convoluted UIs and overdesigned gameplay systems. But today we're just fine with all of it, for the most part, because we're used to it. It's the context we live in, so we don't have to adjust to it like we do when playing Zelda 1 .

I went with Skyward Sword because I haven't played any of the others in contention (i.e. the mobile Zeldas and Zelda II). It's not an outright bad game, but, out of what I've played, and I've played nearly all the mainline games (except II), it's the only Zelda I wouldn't consider for a personal best list, along with Twilight Princess. But I never finished Twilight, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt and looking forward to replaying it whenever Nintendo releases it again.

This game didn't exactly get glowing reviews back in the day. Just like not every old game is a classic, so is not every old game an opportunity to wax lyrical about "how far we've come."

For me, I guess it depends on the game and the nature of the framerate issues.

Frame drops and stuttering take me out of the experience. I stopped playing Death Stranding because of that. I put it down last year (after about 20-30 hours) until I could buy a better computer. (Which I just did, so I guess it's time to restart it.) A few years ago, I did likewise for Nier: Automata, just quit and picked it back up once I upgraded.

If it's consistent, though, I can adjust to low framerates, like with Ocarina of Time. Especially so if animation and movement are tied to that frame rate.

There are limits, of course: Star Fox for the SNES is a fine game, as I discovered last year, but the framerate is nauseatingly low. I soldiered on, but it wasn't wholly enjoyable. Stunt Race FX was even worse. I tried it on NSO and I was actually impressed with the track design and general vibe, but it's unplayable for me at that framerate.

Of course, 60 fps or higher is usually preferable, but I dislike the framerate wars being fought on comments sections. They're boring and filled with terrible arguments.

Do we really need to remember how great things were last week, though.

Man, that Xbox Museum thing with the creepy music and robotic avatars running around feels like The Matrix if the machines hadn't bothered to dress their virtual reality up as 1999.

I love it.

Definitely gonna get this once I'm done with Dread! Looks great.