Thinking about getting a refurbished N64 someday

Post Reply New Topic

Or just really long.

Pretty sure I was jittery on caffeine when I wrote all that. Not that I'm good at being concise anyway....

It's fine. Actually what you said made me realize that maybe PC gaming isn't so bad afterall. If I can find my favorite classic games for it I might look into it someday.

You're absolutely right about big name game publishers only caring about milking their customers for as much money as possible . One of the many reasons why I think games today suck. They're way overpriced and the games themselves are mediocre at best.

And the sad thing is, "overpriced" doesnt even cover it. I mean, you buy the game for full price, but you dont actually get the full game you just paid for. Ridiculous! But somehow these nasty publishers have gotten players conditioned to it, to the point where some players will outright defend it. Even though some of those greedy practices can be literally damaging to people. Such as those who are susceptible to things like gambling addiction... it can really hurt them! But players STILL defend that crap. I could almost call it brainwashing.

Pathetic, all of it.

And more and more gamers are starting to hate the consoles in general because of it. There's just so few other options on consoles since not just anyone can get a game onto there.

I will say though that I do have alot of respect for Nintendo. Theirs is the only remaining GOOD console. Buy a game that they made, and you get the full freaking game. What a concept, right? Somehow they havent fallen into the abyss, and boy am I glad for that. The day when Mario games start offering microtransactions will be a dark day indeed. For right now though, I quite like the Switch (particularly with Smash on it). Wheras the PS4 on the other hand... glorified paperweight, really. All it's used for is to play Dont Starve on a big screen when I'm down south at the island house. Bloody thing has no other function. Sometimes I wonder why I dont sell it off.

I actually fried my PS4 when I was going manic.

I never should have wasted money on it.

I used to really love PlayStation games but the PS4 sucks. The PS3 was a surperior system in every way and you could even download classic PSone and PS2 games which I thought was awesome, and you could import games from other countries and play them easily.

And yeah I really despise DLC. It makes you feel compelled to waste money on downloading a bunch of extra content just to have a complete game, some that is quite boring. The old game systems never had that crap.

I miss the days when everything wasn't conntected to the damn internet.

Nintendo do have the sort of games you're thinking of though. Free games with microtransactions, gacha gambling mechanics, etc. It's just relegated to their mobile games for now though.

I think Nintendo would benefit from a shake up of how they do business. Their Virtual Console is a fragmented mess of drip feed releases and poor curation; they'd be far better offering a cross platform subscription service with robust online features such as server side save backups, but they insist on treating rereleases of old games like a big release, with a price to match, yet with anemic features.

Free games, I always feel, dont really count. Well, it depends on the nature of the publisher.

Look at something like Warframe or Path of Exile. They use MTX-based monetization, but rarely will you see anyone complaining about them. They're the sorts of devs where people will buy into those not because they feel compelled to, but because they genuinely want to support the devs. Ive seen stuff like this from even actual mobile games too. One of my personal favorites, which I have on my iPad, is Pac-man 256. I freaking LOVED that game. Utterly incredible game even if you didnt buy anything at all. I bought a few things just because I was satisfied with it. Same with the more traditional Pac-man game, which comes with about 50 zillion mazes that you can unlock, and the option to buy some more. Did in fact do so, was satisfied with them. Even the unlockable ones in that... you CAN pay money to unlock them faster, but they're not done in a way that you feel like you need to. Play well, and you'll earn the coins soon enough. Do the "missions" and you'll earn them faster. Wasnt long before I'd unlocked like 30 of them.

Those are good examples of what I mean. Microtransactions and stuff arent inherantly bad. But unfortunately the Big Guys took the concept and corrupted it so heavily that now it's universally loathed.

Now as for Nintendo's online stuff, I tend to think that doesnt count either, but for a very different reason. Nintendo has proven, over and over and over and over and over that they just dont "get" the internet, or online stuff in general (and they even had that really bizarre reluctance to go anywhere near mobile). I still remember, way back when Xbox Live was first starting to really take off, Nintendo stating, and I quote, "Customers do not want online games". In relation to the Gamecube. The same Gamecube that later contained Phantasy Star Online, which was extremely popular (surprise). Their views and such towards all aspects of online everything never evolved past that point. Chances are, they never will. They will always be the one that lags behind. Always. Even with the Switch, they had been proving that since well before the "service" came into being.

As for the retro games they sell... feh. They've always done that. Even before they started doing so online. Rereleases of old games have always been a thing for them. The derpy part isnt the fact of it, or the price, or anything like that... it's that so many players wont do what they SHOULD do, which is just use a bloody emulator. I mean, really. Took me all of 5 minutes to find and download the entire NES and Famicom library. And then a bazillion options for playing them on emulators... even in VR. But people still just buy the things outright. Of course, there are also people that'll buy a physical copy of freaking Stack Up on the NES for over $100. So I guess none of this is too surprising.

As for the curation aspect, hmm... keep in mind how very, very subjective that is. I can think of a few games that alot of people hate, but I quite like. I'm sure plenty of others can as well. Even considering that though, yes, their selection process seems to be all over the place. Varying things up is great and all, but watching what they put out, it does almost seem like they choose by throwing darts.

The issue is they don't even come close to competing with emulation. Obviously, they can never compete with free, illegal access, but they can at least try to compete in ways that matter to a consumer - convenience, quality of life improvements, netplay. You could play all the old NES, SNES, GB, Genesis etc games online over a decade ago - I have fond memories of playing Mario Kart and Puyo Puyo with my MMO guild in the 90s, but somehow in 2019 Nintendo is still rereleasing their backcatalogue with the minimum of effort, including broken PAL releases (with messed up aspect ratios and gamespeed) that aren't worth playing for free, let alone paying money for.

The microtransactions in the Nintendo games I've played on mobile were the type I'd consider inherently bad - ones that redefined the gameplay around the funding model.

Keep in mind that Nintendo's internal development teams are not the ones that make those games.

Whenever I say "Nintendo games" I dont just mean "stuff with Mario's face on it". I mean stuff they themselves created internally. So something like Pokemon Go isnt included in that.

....I also tend to NOT mean mobile at all. The mobile market is... a very strange place. Even indie devs *must* use monetization schemes to survive on there. It's not even a choice at this point. There are ALOT of reasons for that, almost all of them fantastically stupid, but that's a topic for another day.

Now as for them not competing with emulation... I never said that they did. As I said, people SHOULD just be using normal emulators on a PC. It doesnt matter how many options and things Nintendo stuffs into that stuff... it will never equal proper emulation on PC. It will always, always seem inferior. The thing is though, most consumers not only dont think about that, they dont NOTICE it. Diehard fans who are familiar with the technical aspects, or people that pay REALLY close attention to details, those sorts will spot it. But by far the vast majority of consumers are neither. All they see is "wow it's that old game from my childhood!" and that's all they care about. Bloody stupid, yes, but consumers are like that. I've never liked Nintendo's virtual console thing, but at the very same time, I can see WHY they do what they do.

I don't think there's any reason they couldn't compete with emulation. There's a lot of fiddling around with even the best emulation software, that an official well supported solution would be welcomed by a lot of people. It's no different from Spotify, Amazon Kindle or Netflix; make it streamlined and convenient and people will pay for those features.

Even Sega's implementation of its Mega Drive and Genesis Classics shows more forward thinking. Online multiplayer, achievements, the ability to play them in VR. It's too bad that their emulation isn't very good, but it offers features that are genuinely compelling to consumers beyond 'here's a ROM running in an emulator without any way to tune it to your liking'. There's a ton of people who would play online multiplayer but would get lost having to input details like an ip address, setting up port forwarding, or a Hamachi VPN and Sega's emulation offers that convenience.

The Megadrive Classics and such wasnt made by Sega... they just published. It was made by D3T, the same company that made Shenmue. And to be honest, the fact that they added VR probably wasnt a very good idea, business-wise. Unless they just happened to have piles of spare money lying around. That's only going to even affect a tiny portion of that game's audience, and there's already a better option for a VR emulation experience (a MUCH better option). Dunno what they were thinking with that one. One of those things where it's like, okay, that's cool I guess, but.... why?

Back to the topic though, Nintendo isnt exactly a big fan of outsourcing things unless they absolutely have to (such as the case with Pokemon Go, there's no way in hell they could have produced that on their own, so Niantic was brought in). And even if they do have to do it, that sure doesnt mean they are going to always choose the correct developers, or ask those developers to do the proper things for that product.


Now that being said, in a purely practical sense, you're right: There's nothing stopping Nintendo from competing properly with emulation.

But again, this is NINTENDO. They have proven, time and time again, for years and years, that they STILL just dont "get" the internet, or anything to do with it. And "emulators" are very definitely an internet thing. The idea of having all these technical functions and super perfect emulation doesnt make sense to them. In their eyes, they give you Zelda on NES... it runs, it doesnt crash, what more could the consumer possibly want? As usual, they dont know, because they dont get it. They never really have, and chances are, they never will. I mean, they cant even get basic online functionality right in pretty much anything. There's no way they'd ever get emulation down.

Nintendo is good at creating the games themselves.... very good. They are also good at creating hardware that is sturdy, and weird gimmicks for that hardware to have. Other than that... they really arent very good at much. They're a laser-focused company that seems to be extremely resistant to change of any sort.


Beyond that though, Nintendo is still, at it's heart, a corporate entity. They have many talented people working for them, but they're still a business, and that side of them couldnt give less of a crap about emulation. That part just wants money. And the virtual console stuff is one of those things where they know people will buy it, because there's no other option... it's not like you can go buy Mario 3 from some other developer on Steam or something.

And to a degree, their logic makes sense. Most consumers not only dont know anything about real emulation, they also dont care. "OMG it's Zelda, I havent played that since I was 10!" is all that most consumers need to know, and Nintendo's business side fully knows this.


In the end, it doesnt really matter all that much. Anyone that's into emulation enough to know much about it is going to be doing it on PC anyway. Hell, I know I wouldnt be bothering with doing it on the Switch, even if they got it right on there. I already have a PC that can do the entire library, with many emulation options. Hell, I can do it in full VR. Wouldnt have any need for it on the Switch.

You can go to special gaming stores and buy the classico N64 controllers that are brand new. Places like Game Star sell them. Any store that sells used video games may have brand new N64 controllers. Companies make products for old gaming systems and only these stories will carry them.

You shouldn't buy an N64 if you intend to use it on an HDTV unless you plan on getting the very expensive HDMI mod done. It's the most CRT-dependant system I've come across; I found the games virtually unplayable on two different flatscreens. RGB might yield better results but that still requires a mod and I can't imagine S-Video being much better than composite or RF. And this is assuming your TV has legacy inputs.

I use my N64 on my trusty TV/VCR combi with an Everdrive 64 cartridge. The system is worth having if you can set it up right by either using a CRT or modding for HDMI.

I'm 99% certain I've still got my n64, with one fully functional controller, both original colour. I really liked that console, I think it's aged infinitely better than the PlayStation 1.
Is it worth much, am I sitting on a goldmine!?

No, it's worth very little. There are tons of N64s around. It's not even that old a system.

there goes my retirement plans.

You could always get a handheld Nintendo 3DS. It has a lot of the classics like those you mention on it - remade with better graphics.