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Mechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console
by derefr 3y ago
Mechanical sympathy. Rather than designing a game on a PC to take arbitrary advantage of modern tech and then trying to cram it down onto a more limited console platform, Nintendo ask, at design time, what the most interesting things they can do are that would work perfectly within the constraints of the platform — and then do that.
(And Nintendo engineers can have perfect knowledge of "the constraints of the platform", because 1. they built the platform; 2. it's the only platform they ever code for, never porting to anything else; and 3. for late-in-generation titles, they have been developing for it for years already, while also doing platform-SDK support for every third-party development studio.)
Oh, and besides that, because they design each platform initially specifically to work well for the types of games they want to make. (This goes all the way back to the Famicom, which has hardware PPU registers that were specifically implemented clearly to make the launch-title port of Donkey Kong extremely easy to code.)
- realusername 3y agoAnd also Nintendo has a long history of developing games for outdated hardware, their consoles were never that powerful
- pjmlp 3y agoWith exception of N64.
- cylemons 3y agoEven that had limitations regarding textures. See the third paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229447
- pjmlp 3y agoAll hardware at the time had limitations.
- johnchristopher 3y agoSo, n64 wasn't an exception ? Got it.
- pjmlp 3y agoIt appears I have to do an 5y old explanation. 1 - In the product line of Nintendo consoles ever produced, the N64 by being an SGI Onyx in a box, was the exception in regards to IP before technical specifications. 2 - In 1996, when the N64 was released into the market, ALL game consoles had hardware limitations of some sort. This includes Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Playstation 1.
- johnchristopher 3y ago> 2 - In 1996, when the N64 was released into the market, ALL game consoles had hardware limitations of some sort. This includes Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Playstation 1. So, N64 wasn't an exception since it's a console with hardware limitation ?
- pjmlp 3y agoIn the product line of Nintendo consoles ever produced, the N64 by being an SGI Onyx in a box, was the EXCEPTION in regards to IP before technical specifications.
- johnchristopher 3y agoOh, so it's about IP, not technical specifications or hardware limitations ? edit: Quite frankly, comments like With exception of N64. throw me off in the long run.
- hmry 3y agoAn exception to being outdated or significantly less powerful than the competition... Like the original comment said...
- tarsinge 3y agoI dunno, on paper maybe but in practice N64 look no better or worse than PS1, textures were very low quality (I think it was a texture cache size problem). Games like MGS or Vagrant Story looked better than anything on the N64 for me.
- realusername 3y agoN64 also had the advantage to not suffer from the "wobbling walls" effect of the PS1, at least to me
- peruvian 3y agoN64 limitations came in cartridge size — 64MB vs 600+MB for CDs. Voice acting and cutscenes were largely nonexistent.
- r00fus 3y agoAs someone who hates cutscenes, that was fine by me. Cutscenes rip you out of the game to present a story in a different mode, and often it could be completely done by using the game mechanics directly. Not to mention until quite recently they would also take large loading times.
- peruvian 3y agoEven if you take cutscenes out of it, there's simply almost 90% less space for a game - and cartridges were more expensive for the publisher to boot. There's no denying that there's great N64 games, but Nintendo crippled the console outside of first and second (Rare) party development. The same trend continued with the Gamecube (despite it being more powerful than the PS2, the Gamecube disc held 25% of the capacity of a PS2 DVD). If their portables hadn't dominated the market, the mid 90s to mid 00s would've been a terrible time for the company. Of course Nintendo is doing great now, so you could say it's all a moot point.
- derefr 3y agoI know that there’s been activity in the emulation scene around “extending” the SNES emulators with features the SNES never had during its lifetime, like CD-quality audio aka the PSX, or hi-res texture packs, or faster + higher-resolution poly rendering for games using the SuperFX chip; and there have been ROMhacks and home brew that take advantage of these extensions. Has anyone tried doing the same for the N64? Seeing what would be possible for an N64 game given an emulator tweaked to allow an unlimited ROM and VRAM size budget and (effectively) zero DSP DMA delay?
- kibwen 3y agoGamecube was also arguably more powerful than its peers (PS2 and original Xbox).