The Nintendo Lineage 3: N64
Part 3 and my Most Conflicted Review Yet
Alright, we’re in controversial territory now. My opinions on the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube are a bit more complex than on the previous two consoles; I owned both systems as a kid and have a lot of memories and experience with them. Hell, I started this Substack originally with the aim of reviewing every FPS on the N64.
Once again I’ll be ranking the console based on its hardware, software, impact and sentiment: my general ‘gut-feeling’ and how much I personally enjoy it.
HARDWARE: * 1 Star
I’m going to be brutally honest: as a piece of hardware, video game storage medium and playing experience, the Nintendo 64, its controller, cartridges and the myriad of accessories are an absolute disaster.
Let’s start with the actual console. I like the N64 logo but the colour scheme is like a bloody Epson printer and the design isn’t flattering either; there was nothing stopping them from making the N64 a nice box-shape, instead they put these bulbous feet on the front of it, giving it a very ugly profile.
It is true that the Nintendo 64 is quite a bit more powerful than the PlayStation 1 and the Sega Saturn (let’s forget about the Atari Jaguar, everyone else did) this is entirely negated by Nintendo’s stubborn commitment to cartridges; while this does make the N64 a very reliable console, it also severely hampered 3rd party support for the platform and made designing games for it much more difficult. Textures were usually compressed to fit on the cartridges, full motion video was usually too large to be included too and music suffered the same fate, so that power advantage was only seen in 1st party games. The ‘Expansion Pak’ didn’t help either, that thing is only necessary for 3 games off the top of my head and they still run like crap. To top it all off, the copper pins for these cartridges are starting to oxidise these days so there’s a good chance you’ll need to give them a bit of a clean or some light restoration work.
Last but not least: this is a controller from hell, it even resembles a pitch fork. The Nintendo 64 controller’s shape makes it uncomfortable to hold, the buttons are awkwardly arranged around the C-pad, the red Start button is too far away to hit without stretching your thumb across the whole pad, the trigger is really just a slightly tilted button, the whole thing is absurdly huge: almost the size of the console! And they have the gall to put a damn exit wound on the back of the controller where all the awful accessories plug in, like the Memory Pak that you’ll constantly take in and out of the slot like intercourse because the Rumble Pak, which requires 2 AAA batteries and weighs disconcertingly heavy on the wrist, wasn’t added to the controller with a later revision or included by default. I’m not even finished yet! The solitary, hard plastic analogue stick stuck on the front of this thing like a baby with cyclopia isn’t lubricated at all, so moving it around feels awful, the ridges on it leave an imprint on your thumb and over time, little crumbs of plastic and dust will accumulate inside the analogue stick so you have to take the thing apart and blow all the debris out. The tragedy of this all is that if you hold it like a normal controller, it feels really good! But that one decision to put the stick where it is dooms the whole design.
The Nintendo 64 feels like a prototype for a better console to me: namely the Dreamcast. They share very similar design principles and features, except the Dreamcast controller is amazing and it is the most aesthetically beautiful console ever made, while the Nintendo 64 looks and feels dreadful. I grew up with this thing but I will not defend it.
SOFTWARE: ***** 5 Stars
The quality of the Nintendo 64’s library of games is insane.
Ocarina of Time, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Super Mario 64, Goldeneye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Doom 64, The World Is Not Enough, Perfect Dark, Pokémon Stadium, Pokémon Snap, Mario Kart 64. I could sit here for about 30 minutes typing out 10/10 games for this system and not even mention your favourite. I’m going to be 100% transparent and say for the record that the N64 has my favourite game library of all the Nintendo systems and maybe of any console ever made. My profile picture is N64 Pierce Brosnan for a reason.
For sure there are a few stinkers here and there or games that haven’t aged well: Goldeneye’s framerate and controls can be very difficult to return to for example, and poor camera controls plague most early 3D games including Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time but I think it’s important to compare consoles more to their contemporaries than to today and in my opinion? The PS1 and Saturn suffer from these issues much worse. On the topic of the Saturn and PlayStation, I’ve come to realise over the years that those consoles had very few true exclusives unlike the Nintendo 64 which was packed with them; Resident Evil, Symphony of the Night and Tomb Raider: iconic PlayStation games, were all released on the Saturn and often PC as well, I even learned recently that Rayman was actually an Atari Jaguar game.
The only real weakness of the Nintendo 64 library I can say is that it lacks 2D platformers but after all of gaming history up to that point being 2D, I can forgive it. The collection is also only about 245 games strong which could be seen as a negative but I like it; unlike a lot of systems, the idea of owning every N64 game on your shelf is pretty plausible, especially as most of them aren’t too expensive and what a collection that would be.
IMPACT: *** 3 Stars
I find it really hard to judge the impact of the Nintendo 64, so I’d love to discuss this with others in the comments.
On one hand, the Nintendo 64 proved that console shooters could work well and could even drive innovation in the genre, it popularised 4-player co-op as the standard, it pioneered 3D game design in a way that the Saturn and PS1 didn’t, established that 3D games should control with an analogue stick, laid the groundwork for Nintendo’s more experimental Gamecube era and produced some of the most beloved video games of all time; I’d go as far as saying the Nintendo 64 was the beginning of speedrunning too.
On the other hand, the Nintendo 64 was absolutely obliterated in sales by Sony’s PlayStation 1 which sold about 70 million more units; despite the gap in popularity, the N64 didn’t sell that much better than the Sega Saturn either, crucially, the Saturn did better in Japan too, a big humiliation for Nintendo. It missed out on many of the defining classics of the late 90’s like Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid and the first Resident Evil game, the Nintendo 64 was plagued by software droughts and its final game released before the Gamecube was even a year old.
The PlayStation 1 may have been unreliable, graphically weaker and in my opinion, had an inferior library to the N64 but I don’t think there’s much denying that the PS1 has the greater cultural weight; Nintendo fans and kids who grew up with their systems adore the N64 but pretty much everyone has fond memories with the PS1.
I’m still very conflicted on this score so please do comment below but my gut and my cultural background as a UK-based, primarily retro gamer who grew up in the 2000’s tells me that the general populace care more about the PS1 than the N64; when Tekken 8 came out, even my mum let slip that she knew who Jin Kazama was from living room matches of Tekken 3 decades ago.
SENTIMENT: ***** 5 Stars
In Blackjack, the Ace card can be counted as 1 or 11 based on the player’s choice and I think that kind of sums up my sentiment with the Nintendo 64.
When I’m playing Goldeneye 007 with a nice bar of chocolate and a preferred beverage, immersed in the game, partway through Silo on 00 Agent difficulty, the music kicking in as the final 1 minute countdown begins and a little slither of red health remains and I hit that perfect headshot and make it past Ourumov without dying, when that results screen pops up and the sheer stress melts away into the thrill of passing such a hard mission at last, in those moments, this is the greatest console ever made and there is literally nothing else I’d rather be playing.
But when I’m playing Turok 2 and the game can’t hit a framerate in the double digits despite the RAM expansion I paid £50 for, the Rumble Pak (which I have to swap out to save my game) has consumed 2 batteries from one of my TV remotes, the draw distance fog is making it impossible to find what I need, my hand feels squashed and cramped, sandwiched between two grey plastic prongs and when I lose 20 minutes of progress in my game because my hand brushed the cartridge as I reached for my phone… this is a 1/10 console and has aged so poorly that I struggle to comprehend how people put up with this, begrudgingly admitting that I also put up with it as a kid.
For all its flaws though, the Nintendo 64 is very special to me and has had a profound influence on my life both inside video games and out.
The first ever video game I played on a home console was Ocarina of Time; I didn’t play the Nintendo 64 version mind you but without this console, that wouldn’t have existed. When I turned 9 years old I still remember opening a big brown box on my bedroom floor and finding a Pikachu N64 inside along with a copy of Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Stadium and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, it was like everything I loved all in one and for maybe a month those 3 games must have been all I played, it was the first time I saw a Pokémon game in 3D and just riding along, taking photos and triggering little easter eggs was magical to me; I purposely didn’t print off any walkthroughs so I could discover it for myself. Nobody I knew had an N64, it was like a hidden little thing just for me.
I don’t consider myself a video game collector; I buy stuff I want to play and that’s it, I don’t care about having a ‘full set’ or ‘most rare’ anything and seeing people with every colour of Gamecube on the shelf just makes me shake my head at their gluttony, but there’s something so damn collectible about those big, chunky, grey N64 cartridges and this is one of maybe 2 consoles that I am actively looking to build a full collection for. Besides my PS2 and Xbox collections: games that have somehow survived from my childhood move to the big city, the Nintendo 64 is the console I have probably bought the most games for because I just love this damn thing.
I started my gaming journey with N64, I started this Substack with N64, I started buying retro again with N64, damn, at this point I should be buried with an N64.
The best console of its generation, the greatest library of games ever created but an absolutely dreadful piece of hardware. I love it.
FINAL SCORE: 14/20
Next time, I’ll be taking a brief detour to review Nintendo’s first line of handheld consoles: the Gameboy and Gameboy Colour. If you liked my review of the Nintendo 64 and want to see more as well as weekly posts about other topics, as voted on by my readers, please hit that Subscribe button.
When the N64 was released I was already firmly a PC devotee, and from what I saw of most of that generation's console offerings, they looked like desperate and pathetic attempts to imitate what was becoming possible on a proper gaming computer. It wasn't until years later that I finally got a chance to sit down and experience the handful of really great first-party games that had profoundly affected the people who DID play them before, for example, Quake and Half-life, stuff like OoT, Goldeneye, and SM64. And those games really were, in many ways, better than anything else of their era. Then I decided to dig deeper, check out some of the possible 'hidden gems' on the console... and found out why I'd never heard of most of them even from people whose gamer identity revolved around their memories of the N64. There's a couple games with an absolutely staggering amount of work and talent poured into making the most of the cutting edge hardware of the mid 90s, and that's pretty much it, and you have to play them with a controller that looks like it was built to be gnawed on and hurled into building blocks by toddlers.
I do want to push back slightly on your assertion that the N64 is the beginning of speedrunning - speedrunning, as it's now understood, was almost certainly birthed by the sharing of .lmp demo files from Doom, and then expanded by the online exchanges of similarly compact demo files for Quake a few years later. The N64 has some of the titles most beloved, popular, and ripe with potential exploits for speedrunners, and a lot of the 'modern' era of speedrunning [i.e. the age of YouTube and streaming] has some of those titans of the N64 as their entry point or lifelong passion, but it wasn't until video files could be saved and shared online that it really picked up, and that was long after the id games already had dedicated sites. Even if you just mean people speedrunning in isolation and posting times and tactics online, that was happening before the console in question released.
The N64 is a real conundrum, isn't it? It has some of the best games and even genre-defining classics that people still use as a reference to this day. But the console itself always felt like a prototype in design and execution. I always felt that the N64 crawled so that later consoles could walk and eventually run. I feel that while many games blew our minds graphically, they are akin to something like the CG used in the "Money for Nothing" music video by Dire Straits. Looked upon as an advancement, but now kind of laughed at for how simple and archaic it looks.
I think your review is pretty honest and on the nose. This was not a perfect machine, but it does sort of set the stage for so many things after, doesn't it? You hit the nail on the cultural impact, but I think on hardware or just 3D, the N64 took chances that the other systems just could not at the time. Hence, my opinion on crawling before others.