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What I don't get is that Goldeneye came out the following year was way more impressive in everyway but it's quake and quake 2 that's remembered as ground breaki

What I don't get is that Goldeneye came out the following year was way more impressive in everyway but it's quake and quake 2 that's remembered as ground breaking. I had an N64 and was convinced by hype to get a 3dfx card for my pc. To be honest it was a bit of a let down.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Goldeneye may have been a very good game, but visually, what the Quake 2 engine was capable of on PC, was far ahead of what the games running on the N64 hardware could ever dream of as it was limited to only 4k texture cache vs PC GPUs back then had 4MB or more of VRAM for textures. This is why N64 textures were blurry. Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64. Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  You make some fair points. Thing is I've been back to Goldeneye a lot, on original hardware, emulators and even the leaked Xbox 360 version. Gameplay wise it feels quite far a head of quake 1 and 2. I read that the half life team saw Goldeneye and went and made significant changes because of it. The fact that quake 2 and Goldeneye came out in the same year is strange, Goldeneye plays like it's a generation a head of, it's environments are way more interactive, it's level design is also something that still stands up (this might be something to do with designing the levels as real places and fitting the game around it). Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff). If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)
klodolph 5y ago
Goldeneye is remembered as groundbreaking everywhere I go, it seems. A lot of it comes down to split-screen multiplayer and its ability to run on a $200 console. It sold at least 10x as many units as Quake 2. People you meet by chance, in person, are more likely to remember Goldeneye. People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  That's a good point, it also seems to gaming press too.
- everdrive 5y ago
  I vividly remember my first experience with Quake. I had to turn the settings all the way down as far as they would go, and the game barely ran. We have a 486 DX33. It took me hours to download the 8mb shareware version, and the game stuttered badly. I remember the sound effects would echo badly as the computer could not render the game at full speed. I could hardly make any of the platforming sections, since the frame rate was so low, and there was a palpable delay between hitting the buttons, and getting a reaction. A year or two later, we got an upgraded PC which ran at ~100 MHz, and of course this handled Quake just fine. It was only then that I played it online. I remember distinctly: 800 ping was "pretty good," while over 1000 ping" was on the boundary of playable. We had dial-up only, and were very rural, so our connection quality was not simply slow, but also spotty and high-latency.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    I remember that Quake was not designed to run on a 486 at all. The vertex transformation code that did a perspective divide was optimized around the Pentium microarchitecture and wasn't as efficient on other microarchitectures, sometimes much less efficient. Quake is cited as one of the reasons why Cyrix disappeared.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

Goldeneye may have been a very good game, but visually, what the Quake 2 engine was capable of on PC, was far ahead of what the games running on the N64 hardware could ever dream of as it was limited to only 4k texture cache vs PC GPUs back then had 4MB or more of VRAM for textures. This is why N64 textures were blurry. Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64. Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.

bennysomething 5y ago
You make some fair points. Thing is I've been back to Goldeneye a lot, on original hardware, emulators and even the leaked Xbox 360 version. Gameplay wise it feels quite far a head of quake 1 and 2. I read that the half life team saw Goldeneye and went and made significant changes because of it. The fact that quake 2 and Goldeneye came out in the same year is strange, Goldeneye plays like it's a generation a head of, it's environments are way more interactive, it's level design is also something that still stands up (this might be something to do with designing the levels as real places and fitting the game around it). Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff). If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)

klodolph 5y ago

Goldeneye is remembered as groundbreaking everywhere I go, it seems. A lot of it comes down to split-screen multiplayer and its ability to run on a $200 console. It sold at least 10x as many units as Quake 2. People you meet by chance, in person, are more likely to remember Goldeneye. People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.

bennysomething 5y ago
That's a good point, it also seems to gaming press too.
everdrive 5y ago
I vividly remember my first experience with Quake. I had to turn the settings all the way down as far as they would go, and the game barely ran. We have a 486 DX33. It took me hours to download the 8mb shareware version, and the game stuttered badly. I remember the sound effects would echo badly as the computer could not render the game at full speed. I could hardly make any of the platforming sections, since the frame rate was so low, and there was a palpable delay between hitting the buttons, and getting a reaction. A year or two later, we got an upgraded PC which ran at ~100 MHz, and of course this handled Quake just fine. It was only then that I played it online. I remember distinctly: 800 ping was "pretty good," while over 1000 ping" was on the boundary of playable. We had dial-up only, and were very rural, so our connection quality was not simply slow, but also spotty and high-latency.
- klodolph 5y ago
  I remember that Quake was not designed to run on a 486 at all. The vertex transformation code that did a perspective divide was optimized around the Pentium microarchitecture and wasn't as efficient on other microarchitectures, sometimes much less efficient. Quake is cited as one of the reasons why Cyrix disappeared.