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S3 Ep244: Nintendo 64
83 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about all things N64 - games, controller, style, and the waves of childhood nostalgia in this week's episode!
Intro:
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Intro:
- Perfect Dark - Institute
- Diddy Kong Racing - Title Theme
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Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Transcript
Puberty and Humor in Eden
00:00:57
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soap of Stone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? I think good. I messed up the cadence of that, something fierce. How's it going tonight, Dave? Night, Dave.
00:01:14
Speaker
You know, not like that. That would have been funny. Just just get your puberty, like the voice cracking like super late. Oh, my gosh. I remember when a friend had that happen, like we were 14, whatever the fuck the age was, we were hanging out and he was going through that phase.
00:01:37
Speaker
There's just like a week or so, but like we're at his house one day after church and it was like everything he said was like fucking funny and I would just Make fun of him for it all the time. Yeah, it's like
00:01:47
Speaker
I don't know if I got the squeakiness. At some point, my voice just went from like, hey, guys, to like, hey, guys. And I'm like, oh, it just drops. Right. You're just like, I would sure love to have a lollipop. That wasn't the only thing that I could pop that day. But yeah, he had like such a high squeaky thing. So I just repeat what he would say back to him in a very, you know, inflammatory way. And it was
Aging in Fiction
00:02:13
Speaker
fun. Got to do it for like a whole day.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's, um, I think that that's probably one of the, uh, there's, there's few like current, uh, like core touchstones that persist all throughout history. But like when Adam was going through puberty in the garden of Eden, like God was making fun of him for it. Like that's where it started. It's been since then. Are you saying that God made Adam as a 12 year old initially, a free teen, if you will.
00:02:46
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know if they talk about, hey, you naked kids, don't get up to anything until at least another six years. I mean, I don't know if the Bible says a lot of the time that passed for early things there. I don't know if that would be.
00:03:02
Speaker
Theologically, I mean, obviously, that's not what people think of. But, you know, maybe maybe could have been made as a kid and then aged up. And then it's just like, oh, man, you're hitting like your midlife crisis and you're a loner. Eve, I guess. That's true. At some point, you just like took a rib out like I don't need this. Mm hmm.
00:03:25
Speaker
I don't even need this. I can manifest things like theoretically, you know, out of thin air. Right. I prefer thicker personally, though.
00:03:35
Speaker
I think it's kind of like the Wolverine thing, where out of either convenience or just like magical genetics, you stop aging at a convenient point for all future interactions with people. Old enough to murder people,
Recording Rituals and Gaming Memories
00:03:51
Speaker
old enough to bang, all that stuff. But that's the point where you stop aging. What are your 20s, 30s? Yeah. Oh, OK. Yeah. I won't press any further questions. How long have you been in your 20s?
00:04:06
Speaker
I don't know.
00:04:15
Speaker
We have like an hour long preamble before we started recording this episode. We should stop doing that. We should just talk throughout the week. What's funny is I'm tired tonight. Like we're going to have to get through this. All right. We'll delay everything by an hour. It's just going to be funny for that though. Well, I was, uh, I was letting you warm up.
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair. Jake hasn't spoken all day until that hour. We brushed the dust off his lungs and lips. Uh-huh. If you have dust in your lungs, that's actually, that's its own problem, I think.
00:04:54
Speaker
That's called asthma, I think. Yeah. That is fair. But. Sorry, was this the segue? Go for the segue, you take it. I'm sorry, I'm sure you had a really good one. Did you want to? I was just going to say. I was going to say speaking of asthma.
00:05:15
Speaker
Do you remember having to blow into video game cartridges to get any dust out so it could actually connect with the console correctly and read Read the game against all Advise conduct with those kind of cartridges. I think like since people started doing that
00:05:32
Speaker
the manufacturers of the systems were like, don't do that. You're just you're hitting spit lit droplets on copper wires and things and then plugging them into the chip set. Like, why are you doing this? But I mean, sometimes
Nintendo 64 vs. PlayStation
00:05:49
Speaker
it temporarily helped and that's all you need. Yeah, if you have this is before we had canned air, I think. Yeah, that's the first time I think I learned about what hyperventilation was. Hmm.
00:06:02
Speaker
which is not an HVAC term for really good ventilation. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I definitely remember that. You were kind of you were in a bad spot if you had to do that for a cartridge, though. I don't think it was going to last too much longer. No, but it was primarily for like. Not as much original Nintendo, some of Super Nintendo because it's top loaded, but also a lot with the evolution after that, which would I would say is N64.
00:06:34
Speaker
There you go, he said the thing. That's what the episode is, that's what we titled it, I think. Unless we think of a better one, so. That's all we had to do. We speed run, wrapped it up, sub six, time. Yeah, now we're talking about N64.
00:06:53
Speaker
today though, that was, um, that was definitely a decision. Dave, I know is more of a PlayStation man, but, um, I was like, Dave, I'm cutting you off. Like this is, this is it. This is make or break. No more podcast episodes. If we can't cover freaking Nintendo 64.
00:07:20
Speaker
So jokes aside, I grew up on N64 and we talked about it a little bit and we had a retro gaming topic episode like some years ago at this point.
00:07:33
Speaker
I'm
N64 Design and Accessories
00:07:34
Speaker
purposefully not trying to guess the specific year because I know I'll be off by like three but yeah in 64 was like massive part of my childhood and Pretty much all of my pre PC gaming was in 64 Yeah, it was Kind of like the biggest fucking deal Like if people had a PlayStation you're like, okay cool. I guess we can do a Tony Hawk and
00:08:02
Speaker
Which was honestly good, but like, that's the only game I remember from PS1. Yeah. That's it. But if I looked at N64 games, I'm like, I played that. I played that. I played that. That was on here? Holy shit. And like the list goes on and on for like how many good or like the start of major IP like game franchises like it had so fucking much.
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah. And it was a beautiful console that had multiple colors. I don't know if other consoles even fucking did that. No, not so much. PlayStation was gray. Yeah. Mm hmm. And they had their their their logo colors on the PlayStation symbol. But that was about it. And then they went to black, which to be fair, as an adult, black is a great, great color for a console. It's slimming, which is why they have the PS2 slim.
00:08:55
Speaker
But N64 was just like, man, let's freakin' matte color everything. Do you want like a freakin' yellow controller? Sure. Here you go. Pikachu on it? Yeah, why not? You can talk to him too if you want. Like Mad Cats, we don't make those, but whatever. People buy them anyways. But they also had translucent ones you could get. And for the controllers as well.
00:09:20
Speaker
But it was a lot for the handhelds. But yeah, yeah, they started with the controllers and the the purple, I think was the big one. Right. Like that was pretty huge. But it's it's crazy how much that they put into this. My voice is cracking. And I also had like fucking extensions for the controller itself. Like one of the biggest games for N64 Pokemon Stadium. Oh, you can slot in your own
00:09:48
Speaker
game of Pokemon Red and use those Pokemon? What the actual fuck? Transfer Pack. Yeah, it was huge. Yeah. They had different size. There's the Rumble Pack as well. So it had like that slot on the back that was multi-purpose. And
GoldenEye Nostalgia
00:10:08
Speaker
memory cards, which were either, I think, full or like half. I had one that would sit flush.
00:10:14
Speaker
up against the the back and then one that would extend a little bit longer a little bit more but it had more capacity um and that was really funny right it's funny to think about now in like modern times even even just memory card slotting into controllers in the first place but like you could legitimately in the rumble pack like shook right it's like it's literally just like a bouncy ball inside of a piece of plastic
00:10:38
Speaker
That's it's flubber, basically. That's what they put in there. But to finish the thought, which I'm failing to do, you would literally have a group of friends playing, you know, up to four controllers and it's like, all right, well, one of you is not going to get the rumble pack today because we need to be able to load our save game. So let's go. Right. Just hilarious. But yeah, like that and PS two's dual shock.
00:11:05
Speaker
controller, like if you had them on a wooded surface, like if you had hard water, you put it like up on like a kitchen table, you'd hear it for like three minutes and then it would fall off because it would just vibrate through time. This is wild. Dual shock was better, but infinitely. Yes, it's much more tame. The rumble pack.
00:11:26
Speaker
Which is kind of absurd, right? It's just like, why does everything need haptic feedback? I don't even remember what N64 game supported it. Maybe one of the early shooter titles.
00:11:40
Speaker
That's a segue. Probably. To answer your question, I think probably. This is clearly getting into the games. I mean, the early one is GoldenEye, right? There were others, actually. Earlier than that, I think. I'm not sure exactly when it came out, but Turok.
00:11:58
Speaker
which I don't think was on either of our lists to run the dinosaur hunter. It was a game. But back to Goldeneye. Did you play it back in the day? I didn't play it back in the day, but I actually played it within the last week and on at 64. Yeah. What? There's a certain restaurant near me that has an N64 there and we were there for somebody's birthday and they wanted to play Goldeneye. So we played some Goldeneye. Interesting.
00:12:29
Speaker
And I was literally playing with one hand while talking to somebody else. I wasn't winning, by the way. I spent two hours looking for a gun. Yeah. Yeah, this was the start of, hey, do you know the level? Do you know the spawns? Are you going to rush proxy mines and just barricade yourself in some place?
00:12:51
Speaker
I don't know, not that games have gotten super great at balancing since then, but I just think they remember in Goldeneye, you could like put a mine up above a door frame or something, and unless you had a grenade, there was no way to actually see it. Get through the door and detonate it, right? It's literally like if you saw it, you're already dead because it killed you. Great balance, that.
00:13:16
Speaker
And it's also weird to like have a shooter like for that time that wasn't dual analog as we know it today. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because the controllers, I don't know if you remember, it was like one controller and then they jammed another half of a controller in there. So you never knew exactly how to grab it to do the wide stance. Yeah. But with GoldenEye, you had to put your hand over the the trigger in the middle analog.
00:13:41
Speaker
It does seem like society has standardized that your controller should have two places for two hands. And the N64 was like, let's do three places for two hands, literally that. And I think that the only sane way to play, because it was like, you're either going to use the D-pad over here or the joystick. But the joystick was kind of a big deal back then, not compared to like PlayStation, which just had the better controller.
00:14:10
Speaker
But it was kind of a big deal compared to just like a d-pad so like no games. We're just having you use the d-pad And you left it's just such a bad controller. It's really bad I remember specifically controls for GoldenEye like you run around with the with the analog and then It auto aims for you
00:14:33
Speaker
like some of those old shooters did. But if you really wanted to get a headshot or maybe it was a long distance shot, they weren't close enough to auto him, you'd have to hold the Z trigger. Yep. And manually try to adjust with a joystick up to wherever you're trying to fire. And this is not
Perfect Dark Multiplayer Adventures
00:14:49
Speaker
a sensitive controller. It would basically freeze where you were looking at.
00:14:53
Speaker
and then will allow you to just move the gun to try and line that up. It's tank controls with one stick, which isn't really good. And yeah, I mean, that same control scheme, I think, was used for for most of the shooters that came out there. I can't remember for Doom or Turok or some of the others, but I mean, I mean, Perfect Dark was definitely the same way.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Because Perfect Dark was literally just GoldenEye Plus. Really. Yes. They had some of the same levels, the facility and stuff. Like graphically, it was just a little bit better of assets, but still polygonal as fuck. Yeah. The guns have better sound effects. The main menu music slaps. Oh, yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
Did you play Perfect Dark back in the day? Did you? Did you get through it? I did some multiplayer with my cousin back in the day. Anytime I bring up my cousin, I still need to like give the context of up until I was like 16 or 17, like I'd go up to my cousin's place for like a week.
00:16:06
Speaker
I would drive, I drive myself up there and my parents would like drop me off and be like later. Um, and I would just hang out with him for a week over the summer. Obviously we didn't have any responsibilities at that time and we would just play video games. And I thought he was like the coolest, most lucky guy. Cause he had all of these games and his game consoles that I did not have or have access to. So we would just try out different things. Um, for me, it was all new and shiny. He's like, man, we can do this one.
00:16:33
Speaker
Right. Yeah. But I do remember in perfect dark setting up like a laptop gun several times. Yep. Which is basically acts as like a remote turret that you can actually hold it as well and use it as a gun if you'd like. Yep. And then going into the bathroom and getting out the the far site to shoot through walls. That is the classic. Then the far site is such an iconic. I got to talk about perfect dark a little bit because I freaking.
00:17:03
Speaker
I love that game, but Farsight is like, it had two fire modes. One of them was manual mode, which to this day, I think was unusable, like literally insane. I don't know how you could possibly use it where you're in control of, we should describe Farsight. It's literally like a very, very long alien sniper rifle. Yes. That shoots through all walls on the level.
00:17:32
Speaker
And one hate kills, I think, if I remember correctly. Yeah, you can body shot for lethal. Yeah. And the manual mode was like, OK, you're in this position now through all three possible degrees, like through 3D space, like try to find a target. And that didn't make any sense. That's not really possible to do. You're not going to go through like 16 layers of walls to find a person.
00:17:59
Speaker
Um, so you had an automatic mode that would target in on, I think the closest, uh, to like where you start aiming and get you like around, it would kind of track them sort of like nearby, but you'd have to zero in on them with some manual fine input, which again, the N64 controller was excellent at.
00:18:20
Speaker
So if you imagine kind of like looking through a telescope where somebody's kind of like moving it for you loosely to follow the target and there's like some heat vision. Yes. This is a body and like you don't see some other like walls and things come up, but they're pretty translucent. So it was easy enough to be like, oh, I have to kill that moving person. Yep.
00:18:43
Speaker
Meanwhile, they're just like, all right, I think somebody's coming around the corner. I died. Who killed me? People think people complain about like snipers and overwatch and other things like that, but no one knows how bad it is to just be doing something somewhere on a level and you're one hit killed by you don't even know how many walls. Right.
00:19:06
Speaker
This is made worse by the the the common camping spot for the farsight was like in a bathroom stall and body blocking the door. Yeah, it was it was not balanced. It was designed for, hey, wouldn't this be cool to throw this in here and try it out? I think that's how a lot of those things come about is someone's just. A designer or a tester, they're like, hey, wouldn't it be funny if yeah.
00:19:35
Speaker
I love the laptop gun, the design of it, the fact when you're playing protagonist as Joanna Dark, when you're playing through the campaign as Joanna, there was a mission, I think, where you're in disguise or you're stealthing into a place and you have, in quotes, a laptop. It's your laptop gun. It's just really cool. It's got this space espionage type vibe that descends into just a whole bunch of aliens.
00:20:04
Speaker
At the end of it, there's a lot of aliens. There's a lot of aliens. No, it was incredibly cool. The other thing that one introduced was some of the early co-op experience for N64, because unlike Goldeneye, where there were no bots, Perfect Dark actually added bots. You could have, they would call them Sims.
00:20:28
Speaker
Um, and they had like a maximum player kind of some absurd, it was like 18 or 16 or something like that. Um, and most of those are obviously bots, right? But you could have like all these different configuration for bots ones that'll like.
00:20:43
Speaker
only run away from you, or they'll only attack you unarmed, or they're super deadly accurate. And you could customize all of this stuff and then assign people to teams. So you could play a team of four players versus like four bots or eight bots or whatever, which was just absurd. You can't take it for granted now, but GoldenEye didn't have anything like that. So it's fun if you got tired of like destroying your younger brother as I did.
00:21:10
Speaker
Um, and instead we're like, okay. Well, I need a challenge. I'm crying. We'll play on a team together. No, it's fun. Uh-huh. Yeah. Don't, don't tell mom.
00:21:23
Speaker
Speaking of Tell Mom, for Perfect Dark, the way that I got that game bought for me was by saying, don't worry, I've been on cheat code central. I have the code to turn on paintball mode. We can disable all the blood. It's rated M, but you can turn the blood off completely and just have paintball mode.
00:21:43
Speaker
which to be fair, I did for a while and then I stopped doing it. It's not like your mom was playing. So unless you, unless you had, did you guys have a TV in the living room or like, yeah, yeah, big CRT. That makes it harder for sure to get away with stuff. If it's like everything's in public view, I think there was some sort of, um,
00:22:06
Speaker
Some sort of absurdity to it, though. Like, I could be making this up, but I remember if you shot people, there'd be a blood stain against the wall behind them. And I think in paintball mode, it was paint on the wall behind them. You just have somebody with a paintball. There's just this splatter of paint. It punctured their body with so much paint.
00:22:32
Speaker
But yeah, perfect art. Freaking excellent game. Yeah, I'll always have fond memories of it. Fond snippets of memories. Basically, the two things I mentioned of the farsight multiplayer with my cousin and the music. Yeah. Beyond that, I didn't do campaign. I didn't play it that much. I honestly probably played it like two or three times and it just stuck with me. Yeah.
00:22:54
Speaker
I remember the alien, the gray was named Elvis. I have like just completely random memories about that game. I don't even remember most of it. You have, he's part of like an escort mission or something. It's a good game though. I don't think, um, yeah, right. It's an escort mission. It's a good game. Those lines. Oh, yeah. No, that would be, I don't know if I could have convinced my parents to buy the game if that was in it. Um,
00:23:21
Speaker
I don't think that the the follow up perfect arc series of games was reviewed very well though. The first one was and then it kind of I think there was just the other one that they had on Xbox 360. Yeah. And there was the initial talk of like, oh, they're making another one. And then
Mario Kart 64 Dynamics
00:23:38
Speaker
when it happened, nobody talked about it. I'm like, it must have been bad. Yeah, I think it was one of those. Which is unfortunate, but yeah.
00:23:48
Speaker
Sure ones just don't last, but like that's one of the few because like Mario Kart was on here. Yep. Really. Mario Kart 64 was the biggest, I think multiplayer game that we had at the time. Yeah.
00:24:05
Speaker
And it wasn't until college, years later, that I learned you can actually, like, get speed while you're drifting. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was like, what? It's cool. Yeah, you just hold this button. Then when you let go around the corner, like, OK. I didn't know that. I actually had a lot of holding in the the go button and trying to turn around corners. Uh huh.
00:24:27
Speaker
We're just here spinning out at the start of every race because you were holding. Holding accelerate when it went to green. Yeah, yeah. Instead of tapping the button to get the boost.
00:24:39
Speaker
Wait, what? So if you tap the button like in time with each of the lights as they come down, ending on green, and you tap the button at the final time, you'll launch with a boost like you just used a mushroom. Yeah. So there's the three lights, right? Like the red, yellow, green. Yeah. I thought if you press
00:25:02
Speaker
Accelerate button right after yellow. That's when you got it. Maybe that's true See this is the problem is like I didn't know this so I just developed a technique and was like, yeah This is this is science But I was talking about like you can you learn or you pick up something and then for like 10 or 15 years? there's literally no reason for you to question it nobody else brings it up and
00:25:23
Speaker
And you're like, that's just a fact of whatever the fuck it is. It is. And then you can talk to somebody else about it. And then your reality gets shook. And you're like, how many other things are like this? And it's scary. This is why hint hotlines were such a thing back then, right? Like a lot of this people weren't expected to figure it out by plane. Not everybody had a subscription to Nintendo Power. So yeah, that's the other thing.
00:25:53
Speaker
Um, played that a ton, obviously. And then they never stopped making that game. I think somewhere along like DS or something like that, they were like Mario Kart nine. And I was like, that sounds about right. Like people rag on call of duty, but Mario Kart is off the road. Call of duty, Mario Kart land before time. How many are there? Dear God. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:21
Speaker
But I still think it's been like a very fun multiplayer. Everybody has like a loose idea of how to play the game type series where people can just kind of hop in. It's also not like.
00:26:32
Speaker
It's not entirely skill-based. You can't oppress someone in Mario Kart to the same extent you can in GoldenEye or Perfect Ark. It's just like, oh, you have all the map knowledge, all that stuff? Great. That helps. It definitely helps to not get crushed by the Stompy things. I can't remember the name of the big blocks. Yeah. Yeah. As you say, flomp. Flomp. Flomp. T-H-W-O-M-P. OK, that makes more sense. Yeah.
00:27:00
Speaker
But if you're in front all the time, like you are going to face the ire of a blue shell, which is a cultural thing now because of how big of an impact it's had on Mario Kart. Hey, we should we have like a rubber band or maybe a ketchup mechanic? No, no, no. Let's kneecap the person who's doing well. Uh huh. That seems best. You know what your teacher graded on a curve?
00:27:25
Speaker
And he said like, all right, this person who got 100, you now have an 80. Yeah, the messed up curve. They just cut off both sides and then curve. They just average out the grades. Yeah, that's not the right way to do it.
00:27:43
Speaker
The blue shell was actually worse too because red shells specifically, although they were guided, they wouldn't go around walls. So you could kind of like hug a curve or something like that to avoid it. Sometimes it would hit the wall on its way to you. Um, blue shells are like, nope, whirlwind center course, like right up until it's time to divert off and kill the person. Like it was programmed for pain. Yeah.
00:28:09
Speaker
But it's fun though, cause it was, it was simple enough to learn all the items. Um, once you learn how to like drag some items behind you, when you made a tight turn around something, you could just like slide and then be like banana, banana, banana. So everyone else who's following you had to like basically peel out, um, or take a, like a less optimal path to get to where you're going. Mm-hmm.
00:28:35
Speaker
Or you could just like, oh, I got three green shells. Just shoot them all off. Whatever happens, happens. But then you could technically get hit by your own shell. Right. Which always felt
Super Mario 64 and Innovation
00:28:45
Speaker
great. Green shells have no allegiance. They're just out there doing God's work. Yeah, it was it was it was honestly a party that Mario game. So Super Mario 64.
00:29:02
Speaker
We could talk about that once you I actually didn't own Mario Party so I could talk about The idea but it I didn't have it which Mario parties have you played? I probably played like Briefly, I think at like a party For church or something back in the day like Mario Party 3. I think it would have been around like the GameCube or we I Mean a lot of them played the exact same. It's just the minigames change over time I'm sure that Mario this first Mario Party was not
00:29:32
Speaker
the best one by any means. But man, I still remember going to like a neighbor's house down the street. You know, when you knew neighbors, you could just like walk over like, are you home? Hey, do you want to play in 64? You call up the house and ask for the person because it's just a landline. Mm hmm.
00:29:56
Speaker
But that was another group. They're like, no, they're not here right now. I'll tell them you called. That was it. That was the end of the communication. Wait, patient. What would you say was. One of your favorite and 64 games or one of your first ones.
00:30:16
Speaker
So we got like, we kind of got like a booster pack bundle when we picked up the N64. Cause we got it used, um, at like a yard cell. And the previous owner had like pretty good taste. So it had like Ocarina of time, Mario cart, Majora's mass golden. I did not have perfect arc. I had to convince my parents to buy that one. Um, and then it has some games that were like not as good. I think it had like pilot wings or something like that.
00:30:45
Speaker
Um, but I think it had super Mario 64 also, which was like really good. Really. Yeah. It's, it's crazy how that still gets played today. Yeah. Backwards and very fast. How do I jump up these steps? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Uh-huh.
00:31:11
Speaker
Yeah, the amount of time that people spent in that game. But to be fair, like this was one of the earliest breaches between here's a 2D game versus hey, here's a 3D game with platforming and there's a lot of places you can explore. And then people found a way to exploit mechanics of things later on and do some crazy shit. But it was a huge divergence that paid off well for them. And now they still do 2D Mario games, but
00:31:36
Speaker
The amount of 3D Mario games they have, Odyssey is the eventual current result of building off of Super Mario 64. Yeah. Have a bunch of unique worlds to have some good kinetic energy, some good music, and let people jump around within them. Honestly, the formula is very similar. In Super Mario 64, you jumped into paintings.
00:32:05
Speaker
And there you go, you travel to the world, try to collect your stuff, get out. And this is, you know, a development over what like there was the overhead sort of map of the older Mario games where you're not the first, which I think was just level to level, but it'd be like Super Mario Bros and
00:32:22
Speaker
Oh, you mean the other world. Yeah. Yeah. You pick the level to enter. There was just something like cool about the hub world and being able to jump into paintings to initiate that. And there were secrets to find and things like that. So, yeah, you were basically exploring the castle and around it and under it to find all these cool new things. So, yeah, as a youth, that sense of wonderment and discovery was through the fucking roof.
00:32:49
Speaker
Oh my gosh, yeah. And it is crazy how many YouTube videos I've watched since where I'll hear like a sample and like, oh, it's from a game or something. It fits whatever they're showing in the YouTube clip. And then later I'll go watch something else and be like, oh, that's Metal Mario's theme that Dunkey used. I didn't realize that was ever that. And it's just it's just a good song. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:11
Speaker
The invincibility songs in Nintendo games tend to sometimes pop off for this and Kirby and others. Yeah, Kirby just goes real fast, I think, in a lot of them.
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, it was awesome, and it pulled all of that off without the expansion pack, which is something we haven't mentioned. But the latter couple years or so of game releases for N64, they were like, hey, four megs of RAM is actually not a lot.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
00:33:47
Speaker
That's a problem. Well, thankfully,
00:33:51
Speaker
It was too expensive at the time to actually include this, but I think since it launched, it had the socket for this little... It looked kind of like a memory card. It had a red cap to it. And it was another four megs of RAM. It doubled. Double the RAM. Twice the RAM.
00:34:13
Speaker
to 8 megabytes. But games like Perfect Dark took advantage of it. We actually tried Perfect Dark without the expansion pack and I think it caps how many bots you can have because it's just like you're going to have a bad time. Donkey Kong 64 required it.
00:34:34
Speaker
And, um, some of the games just ran better if they weren't optimized, like when they launched, but things like super Mario, like, I remember that running like silky smooth, even without it, they just made all of the concessions along the way. They're like four megs is enough. Hashtag. Um, and we're shipping like freaking amazing games. Yeah.
00:35:00
Speaker
As I'm looking at the list, I'm realizing a lot of these are platformers. Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong 64. I was tempted to say, I'll win Ocarina of Time, the Zelda games are. I mean, Ocarina almost basically isn't really a platformer, though. It's more of an exploration game. A little more open, yeah, because there's like.
00:35:24
Speaker
It uses three dimensions, but so Ocarina of Time is like in the running for the best game ever made, right? It shows up like on the number one spot, a lot of lists for the best game ever made and.
00:35:39
Speaker
I don't think it's like the most playable game ever made, but I completely understand it's running for it. I freaking loved it as a kid. It was too scary for me though. The opening cutscene. Oh, there's that guy on his horse. He's terrifying. That was, that was suspenseful, but the things that were too scary for me were, um,
00:36:03
Speaker
under the well where you find the lens of truth as young link and the shadow temple as old link um which to this day i mean if this was upresed i think they literally would just need to change the rating on the game because you had like walls like covered in bone with like eyes that would just watch you and
00:36:33
Speaker
invisible enemies and giant hands that would fall out of the ceiling and try to grab you and and redeads and redeads yeah you know i had a oh my gosh reminding me just some of the impulses i had as a kid as soon as i got the um uh sun song if i entered an area and there was any chance not even confirmed but like
00:37:00
Speaker
Reports that redeads may have been in the area at some point I Would play the Sun song to freeze them because I was just like I cannot do this There's a point like in the high rule The center of high rule there that the fountain if you're an adult you go there as an adult and there's redeads there because everything's gone to crap after again and has made everything go to crap and
00:37:26
Speaker
And you don't even have to fight them. You could just actually run past them and you'll basically be fine. If one of them stuns you, it won't even reach you before you unfreeze and can leave. I still froze them every time. I mean, they definitely had like a, we're slow, we're slow, we're slow. Gotcha. So yeah, riding that tension was never fun with them. It's such a good game though. Like it was very long.
00:37:56
Speaker
Um, but it had a main quest that took you through like your whole collect-a-thon of three dungeons as, um, as a kid into like something like eight as an adult. It was a lot eight sounds like too many, but there's fire, water, forest, shadow, light desert.
00:38:25
Speaker
That was there's a fire. I think that was. Oh, yeah, you're right. Desert because light was actually the realm itself. That one you don't actually go to. Yeah, so that would have been that would have been desert. I'm wondering if I'm missing any now. Hmm. That's right. Truthfully have not played in so long. No.
00:38:47
Speaker
I think both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, I more so know from hearing the music fucking everywhere. Uh-huh. Oh, is somebody doing a song, a Storms remix? Oh. But like, here's the thing. It's all indie classic. It holds up, which is why people keep doing covers of it. But yeah, like everything with Majora's Mask seemed also weirdly terrifying for me.
00:39:12
Speaker
Also, you have to imagine like video games are like at the time These were the best graphics we had for like polygon ass people but the way they had the setting and the Interactions with characters like the mask salesman Everything about it was just so weird and unsettling in a way. Uh-huh. So it's cool that they managed to
00:39:38
Speaker
capitalize that with again, I don't want to say low poly because it's not super hot, but it's the polygons were limited. Yes, yes, very limited. Majora's Mask is a much more like filled in world, but it's just the thing for me was like once I got over the fact there's a time limit in quotes, which I have talked to people and it was
00:40:05
Speaker
That's the reason they didn't play the game. They're like, Oh, I saw there was a timer and like that bothered me. I'm like, I mean, fair, but it's, it's kind of unfortunate because the game is literally like, if you play it for 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes, it's like, Hey.
00:40:22
Speaker
Uh, here's the inverted song of time. Here's the song of time. One of them makes time move half the speed. The other one rewinds you to the first day. The game is really not timed in quotes. There's only one dungeon that is even close to running out of time. And it's like, uh, I can't remember the name of it, but in I kind of Valley stone tower temple. Hmm.
00:40:50
Speaker
And everything else is like, no, I don't. Yeah, you could like beat it in a day. So you have like three days before the moon crashes and Majora's Mask proper ruins everything. And pretty much all of the dungeons in the game, you could be in one to two days, like casually going through it and doing everything. So the game was not really like timed. And once you beat a dungeon, you didn't need to go back.
00:41:16
Speaker
Because key items stay in your inventory when you rewind. Rewind.
Transitioning Zelda Games
00:41:24
Speaker
So are you saying that minute produced by developer digital is actually not original idea? No. Yeah. In fact, I know Nintendo doesn't like to do this, but they should sue. They should sue. They should sue. Yes. The litigious Nintendo.
00:41:46
Speaker
No, two great games, though. I mean, they've probably been talked by everyone else enough. I don't feel like we have to add too much to them, but like literally formative for my interest in adventure games. Yeah, Zelda going from 2D to 3D in a big way.
00:42:03
Speaker
I didn't play 2D Zelda or 1D Zelda until 1D Zelda. What is that line? 2D Zelda like side scroller or 2D Zelda top down. I didn't play either of those until after.
00:42:21
Speaker
Ocarina of Time, and I've actually really struggled to get into the 2D Zelda games. I think it's hard to go back to that unless you grew up with it, would be my assumption. Because you're like, oh, I remember this medium. There's a certain comfort in it versus you see everything else in modern graphics with technology, and then you're going back to a very limited space.
00:42:45
Speaker
Which is why I
Pokemon Stadium and 3D Evolution
00:42:46
Speaker
refuse to check it on your tail. Yeah, that's not true. It'd be like if you played Metroid Prime and then we're like, huh, this is I must like these Zelda games. Let's go check out what else they've got in this or not Zelda, these Metroid games. Let's see what else they have in the series. Right. Yeah, that's that's going to be a bit of a shock. Bioshock, but that was not 64. So Bioshock for the N64 would be like,
00:43:15
Speaker
We painted the walls blue. That indicates that there's water here. Great. But also on here, like they had Star Fox 64, which again, I'm not a huge Star Fox person, but like that was pretty huge. Conquered that for a day. Yeah. It was a, it was big and wildly inappropriate. I could not play that one. That was too far into the list of
00:43:44
Speaker
Things I would never be able to sell my parents on. Yeah. How much would you get for selling your parents, by the way? Let me know. Let me know in the comments. Are there comments? Oh yeah, okay, on Facebook. I was like, how do we have comments? Is there a live chat that's going on right now? I still think Pokemon Stadium was like a big one for me.
00:44:05
Speaker
Because again, I could actually hook up and again, I was borrowing my cousin's Game Boy, but I had a save file on Pokemon Red. So I could bring my level 98 Mewtwo and just psychic everything. Yeah.
00:44:20
Speaker
I was only limited by my pee pee. Wait a minute. I'm going to let that joke go. But the other thing is like people to put yourself in that headspace, we're talking about like a 2D Pokemon game. You can take literally the data from that and your Pokemon become 3D. Like this is something that happens in a children's commercial to represent a toy that they want to sell to you, not like an actual product you can engage with.
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's again, a lot of the stuff was, hey, we've had the 2D iterations on Super Nintendo.
Kirby and Yoshi Adventures
00:44:59
Speaker
How do we change this now that we have access to 3D technology? So it was a huge jump. That was Kirby as well. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I already talked about crystal shards, but.
00:45:15
Speaker
It's good. You guys, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, we're like 15 percent of the way through the OST at this point in the songs. I freaked out. It comes up a lot for intros and outros. But it was really cool to have 3D Kirby and then to be able to combine powers. Yeah. Again, if we're talking about like being a kid and wanting to explore and just have your mind blown, that was really fun because you're like, oh, I can mix.
00:45:45
Speaker
ice and whatever else and I'm now in the fridge. What if I mix ice and something else? And then you play around with stuff and it's just hitting those spots in your brain where you feel rewarded for experimenting and trying things out.
00:46:00
Speaker
And you're having fun the whole time, because you're using your experimentation to kill enemies. Yeah. Electric and sword turn into Darth Maul. It was just like. Yup. It's funny. Bring him a lightsaber, and he'll dance across the screen while murdering everybody. Uh-huh. Like, I still think that that was probably part of the inspiration there, because otherwise, I have no idea why they would have made it double-bladed. But they did. And so that's why you're Darth Maul.
00:46:27
Speaker
Fridge was hilarious because you could self heal and it's like, all right, no boss is going to be a problem as long as I don't lose this power. We won't. We won't. We will atrophy the boss through time. We're going to take like metal gear, solid, the end strats to be. You combine rock and rock, right? To just have bigger rock. Yeah. I guess stone is the ability. Yeah.
00:46:54
Speaker
There was, there was a tremendous number there and it was, it was a really good time. Um, played that a lot for one weekend, as I've said in the past, it's just a really, really good game and the Kirby bosses and, and, and particular like final bosses continue to just be cosmic cores, cosmic horse. Yeah. Yeah. HP Lovecraft.
00:47:16
Speaker
They call them up every time, seance, I guess, at this point. They're like, yeah, yeah, racist stuff, whatever, all that. But tell us about a monster. We're going to make a game for children. All right. And this monster, he hates Kirby. Kirby is Jewish, right? Sure, HP. Anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can be. We'll phone it in.
00:47:41
Speaker
All right. You're going through all the games. I'm going to pick one or two. Okay. Um, so, uh, one that I really enjoyed is a Yoshi story. I don't think it's like the best game on N64, but it did. I don't remember if Yoshi ever had much of a standalone title prior to this. And this one just like injected so much flavor and fluff and lore and all of that nonsense.
00:48:09
Speaker
into, um, like Yoshi's character. Cause the whole thing is like, Mario, Mario is going out there. He's fighting like the big bed. He's fighting Bowser and the Yoshi's are like, well, Mario is a baby. So, you know, we've got to protect that.
00:48:26
Speaker
Um, but like we can't fight Bowser. Who should our final boss be? Let's just be like, well, like freaking Bowser Jr. I guess they were babies. Let's find another baby. They just scaled all the threats. Um, but it was, uh, it was, it was a fun time and they had like the live system was you had your, I don't know if their colony pack heard.
00:48:50
Speaker
of Yoshis of various colors. And if you died in a level, then you lost that Yoshi and you had to pick another one to retry the level as. Which was kind of funny once you got to like the secret Yoshis that you could find the white and black Yoshi that had the black Yoshi's favorite food was like spicy peppers, which the other Yoshis, I think,
00:49:18
Speaker
If they ate it on accident, it would like hurt them, which is kind of a nice touch. Um, and then the white Yoshi was just like, I was going to say the best, but that sounds really wrong. It's correct though. I think like it could eat anything, but I don't think it had a favorite food if I remember correctly, but otherwise it was pretty good.
00:49:41
Speaker
Oh, oh, yes. Omnivore Yoshi, a.k.a. Omniscient Yoshi. He sees all he knows all he eats all. But it's a very cute game. And the intern out throw songs are all Yoshi singing together and stuff. And that's what I remember about a lot of N64 games, especially like first party Nintendo is like Nintendo has a tone for their games. Oh, yeah, it's very good theming and it's cute and it's warm and it's fun. Yeah.
00:50:12
Speaker
And this is one of the first times they kind of like leaned in. Maybe not the first time that's given them too much credit, but they kind of leaned a little bit more into this drawn style, not to the extent of like Kirby's Epic Yarn or anything like that. But the the graphics were very much like, hey, this is more of a coloring book than something else. So yeah,
Ogre Battle 64 and Tactical Gaming
00:50:33
Speaker
but again, that fit the fit the whole theme of the game. Exactly. Yeah. Anyways,
00:50:43
Speaker
That was me trying to alt tab to maintain pacing, but instead I have to describe this There is some that I really enjoyed as well that Were less popular and I don't I put them on my list, but I'm not really gonna talk about them ogre battle 64 I
00:51:00
Speaker
is Person of Lordly Caliber, which is apparently like a queen song or something like that. So what they were trying to reference. I got this game and I was like, this is really incredibly cool, real time overworld map, real time combat, like in versus, and it all depends on whether your characters are in the front or the middle or the back to determine what moves they do. And like you can lose people forever and like,
00:51:26
Speaker
It was Fire Emblem basically, but like I never played Fire Emblem and this series didn't really continue much longer. And it was very much like so complicated I couldn't really wrap my head around it. But I could tell that it was like just a tremendous amount of effort went into the game.
00:51:48
Speaker
So is this like an early tactics game? Yeah, it kind of was. It wasn't like tactics in that you're moving people around in squares on the map. It was more like you have all your units and you can start moving them in directions. If they encounter an enemy, then you'll clash, you'll fight. If they can reach like a settlement, they'll claim it. And there was this whole like hidden system where the ending that you got at the end of the game was based off of whether you captured or liberated
00:52:15
Speaker
more locations. And there was no real explanation for when you were capturing or liberating. It just happened. And I think like years later, I discovered if a place had like low morale, you had to send like evil characters there and then it liberated it. Otherwise, you had to send high morale people the good characters and you would liberate it. Didn't really make any sense.
00:52:42
Speaker
Yeah, that seems very nebulous or not, not well conveyed. Again, maybe a reason to utilize that tip line. Yes, exactly. Back when the phone still existed. Yeah. But it does show up on a lot of top lists now, even though I don't think it sold very well.
00:53:03
Speaker
No, I think a
Super Smash Bros. Origins
00:53:05
Speaker
lot of these things now come up as just rare games to be separated from rare titles on the platform, such as Bandicazooie and Perfect Ark and GoldenEye.
00:53:21
Speaker
like because it's not in active production anymore and like there are some very niche titles that didn't sell so well and things like Buck Bumble I'm sure are worth like several hundred dollars. Oh, yeah, I believe it. I'm gonna fact check you right like in real time, but I believe it. How much for Buck Bumble?
00:53:43
Speaker
Let's see, Amazon, $37, which is honestly 100. Oh, this is one left in stock though, so this could be... Oh no, buy you 70 bucks. 70 bucks? Wow. Use 70 bucks or new 37. Yeah. Yeah, there's not many here.
00:54:03
Speaker
But this is kind of funny because pretty much all the games I bought, I didn't buy retail games back then. It was very, my parents liked eBay. And I remember the one thing I was, I convinced them to really pick up on eBay was Super Smash Bros. I think it was like 30 bucks. And I was like, this is pretty good. I know this is a lot of money. Like, I will do chores for a month.
00:54:28
Speaker
And they were like, we already make you do chores. You're going to need to do additional chores. And I was like, dang, I failed the negotiation. Um, but, uh, do you know what initially got me into super smash brothers? Do you remember that commercial?
00:54:48
Speaker
Do you remember that commercial where they played a Beatles song and they have Pikachu and Yoshi and Mario and like Donkey Kong just like prancing through a field so happy together?
00:55:01
Speaker
And then it just devolves into them beating the shit out of each other. It's like it's just people in costumes. But it was such like a nice marketing hook. And I'm like, oh, all of my favorite Nintendo characters fighting each other together. How cool is that? Game controls like shit. Well, yeah, yeah. But that seed was planted for many years. And it would grow into a tree that would yield fruit for Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, but also Melee.
00:55:31
Speaker
Yeah. Everything along the way got a lot better. We had the opportunity to play Smash Bros sometime back at a local restaurant. And that just has video games as it turns out.
00:55:47
Speaker
Yes, I agree with Dave. It is aged something fierce. Um, as it turns out, switch super smash bro's ultimate has come a long way. If I were to hold them up side by side, I wouldn't say there's many things from the first that I prefer to the fifth or whatever it is. Um, but, uh, I do remember playing it a lot. And this also found that co-op camp of like.
00:56:12
Speaker
My brother didn't really like getting beat up on a lot, but there's four character slots. So you can go up against a couple of nines, but, but who are level nine as far as to be able to make to be sad. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was, I put a lot of time, a lot, a lot of time into it.
00:56:38
Speaker
No, it's great because it was another one of those, hey, anybody can like pick up and just start playing hanging out. Obviously, if you own the game, you'd be playing a lot more and practicing. Yeah. But it felt like every match was fresh. There's so much replayability because you have your cast of
00:56:55
Speaker
20 or so characters and by playing against boss, by playing on teams are items in there. Like she was just popping off all the time. Like you'd go to Corneria and be chucking Pokeballs at somebody and then trying to land a hit with the worst frame timing. But it was all fun because maybe you'd miss. Maybe you get hit by a fucking laser and get shot off the stage. What the fuck? Yeah.
00:57:19
Speaker
blast you off the stage. It was just controlled multiplayer chaos and it was glorious. Yeah. It was also like, I think that first smash, it didn't have as much to learn or catch up on because it's missing so much tech from the old ones, right? Like.
00:57:38
Speaker
Or from the new ones, I should say. Even the old ones at this point actually had a lot more tech than the first one. If you get hit into stage, you can't press shield button to not die. That doesn't work here, I don't think. I don't remember that working at least.
00:57:56
Speaker
How many buttons how many special attacks do you have well the one I? Think oh no no you have your recovery, and then you have another one Yes, you've got your your neutral be up being down B, but there's no side B. There's a three yeah, yeah, and then there was like I Can't remember. I don't think the game had tilts. I think it was basically just jabs and smashes and
00:58:22
Speaker
And so there's just so many things that are missing. I don't think it had spot dodge. It just had shield and not shield. And not shield was a grab. Yes, yeah.
00:58:35
Speaker
just a lot of stuff you didn't have to worry about back then but you didn't have to worry about the balance because some characters were just way better than others it isn't like when we played for my friend's birthday he was playing Captain Falcon which if you've ever followed Soul Calibur lore
00:58:53
Speaker
you know that at a point, Nightmare was just one character, and then they split him out into two characters. Because Falcon had the damage of Ganondorf and the speed of Falcon. And he would just stomp people. And my friend was just stomping people. It was wild. And I'm like, I play ultimate. I can definitely, nope, didn't really have the option for a lot of things.
00:59:19
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's it's it was a crazy experience, but it introduced concepts that are like known to us today.
N64's Multiplayer Legacy
00:59:27
Speaker
It had the secret characters, the challengers that was established all the way back then. Had a bunch of stages, I think, like eight, something like that, which seems absurd now that there's like 50. But, you know, it was a lot back then. What do you want to have one of the stages be? Well, we like the tree from Kirby's. Let's add wind into this mix. That would be cool.
00:59:49
Speaker
Yeah, now it's classic. Why? Always the first boss, or dang near always. But yeah, it was good times. And I'm glad that it's kind of come full circle. Because Smash Bros, I played a lot of, I put a lot of time in games on N64, but time wise, I think Smash Bros beat them all. Like, it was the first game I would just sit down and play
01:00:19
Speaker
without the intent of like beating it. Um, and it was great. Yeah. Just like with ultimate for games like that back in the time, literally for every era of smash.
01:00:33
Speaker
I have a memory of a game that I played. I have a memory of just hearing the menu music or like the character select music just going on for hours and you just keep playing with friends. Like, oh, let's do another one. Let's do another one. You're just in a basement with like your friends. And then like six hours has passed and you're like, we should eat something, huh? Or somebody needs to go home or something else. Cause you would just get so lost in it.
01:01:03
Speaker
And that's what, that's what in 64 was good for. Um, like playing, playing with friends, multiplayer for that. That was the one thing like.
N64's Nostalgic Impact
01:01:10
Speaker
I do think PlayStation ultimately turned out to be a better console, and it had a lot of games on it. Disks were a very big thing for everything after N64 until basically the Switch. Just talking about home consoles, not handhelds, which obviously continued to use cartridges. But N64 had four controller slots. You could plug in all this stuff. PlayStation had two.
01:01:36
Speaker
for you and one friend you can smash on the ground. Yeah, I remember being like such a big complaint because you had like Xbox game key and PS2 is like.
01:01:49
Speaker
We're going to sell an additional pack that you can plug in if you want to have more controllers, I guess. Yeah. Three people were playing. Three people were playing Killzone, maybe. Yeah, it was crazy that I didn't have that. Yeah, because even N64 did. So did Sega Saturn.
01:02:08
Speaker
I think. I think, but it's been a while. I think of Dreamcast when I hear Sega Saturn, so that's how I know it's the same. These are pretty old at this point. I think of Dreamcast, or I think of Dreamcast, I can only think of like Crazy Taxi and some Sonic game, I think. It's the first Sonic adventure, I think. Yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker
But yeah, well, that's N64. This is going to be the first of a 30 point series where we cover every console that's ever been made. Please stay tuned for our Neo Geo episode. It has brought me a lot of good times.
01:02:51
Speaker
Most of it's just nostalgia now. Cause if I go back and play anything, I'd be like, ah, no. Yeah. Yeah. I think I could handle some, some remakes and remasters on the switch for things I particularly like, but I'm also playing different games than I used to. And I mean, let's be honest, if I'm going to play Zelda, it's probably going to be breath of the wild. It's not going to be Ocarina of time, but that's okay. You know, I think so.
01:03:22
Speaker
And if you guys are okay, just kidding, if you have any memories, nostalgia, maybe stories, playing some old consoles, maybe even N64, you can go ahead and send those in, we'll anonymize your names, and as long as it's not too raunchy, bring them up in the special guest mail episode on the next soapstone. If we don't do that, then...
01:03:48
Speaker
Uh, it was all too raunchy and so dial it back a bit. Um, but you can send that into soapstone podcast at gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Oh, we forgot about Diddy Kong racing.
01:04:23
Speaker
you