/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4565912
>why were so few 2D games made for a 3D system?

Golly gee whiz, I don't know.

Because 2D games didn't sell very well at the time

>>4565916
>>4565917
It wasn't a deterrent for PSX/Saturn, which got plenty of 2D stuff

>>4565919
Saturn was crap at handling poligons, but was fair at handling 2D sprites, not as well as the PS1 though.
PS1 had actual transparent sprites which the Saturn had to make do with dithering, and it tended to double-space pixels every few columns so diagonal lines would look rather wonky.

>>4565916
That didn't stop several sprite-based games being made for PSX despite being hardware tailored for 3D.

Because 2D games looked worse on the n64 than they did on the psx because of texture filtering

No success in Japan.

There were way more games period for Playstation because they were easier to develop and cheaper to produce.

If you weren't alive/aware at the time or your memories have faded you might not understand how massive the push for 3D was, especially nowadays where it's sort of in vogue again with indie shit and steam greenlight or whatever else. A lot of people wouldn't even play something that was 2D at that point. Things really were very different from how they are now

Because 3D was hyped and the public wanted it.
There was Mischief Makers though. That's an interesting thread idea, best 2D 5th-gen games.

>>4565948
X4

2d games were more popular in Japan, the n64 wasn't that big there (it's core audience was america).

>>4565951
Half of X4's level design is trash, though, and then the end-game doesn't even have levels.

Megaman 8 is the much better 2D fifth-gen MM game.

>>4566003
What half is trash exactly? Just curious.

>>4565912
3D is kew. All the kids are doing it.

>>4566009
Split's and Jet's were bad. Slash's, Owl's, Frost's and Spider's were meh. Dragoon and Peacock are alright.

>>4566056
Could you explain why you feel this way? I guess you dislike autoscrollers in these.

>>4565927
Actually, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m a retarded faggot.

>>4566064
same

>>4565948
I think this is the reasonable answer. Realtime 3D games was a extremely cool and fancy thing, and so was having a camera with perspective on everything.
So the N64 can do 3D really well. The PS1 can't really do that, its painful to watch even.
The SEGA thingy had no marked share.
You can see this even on the PC platform, where a lot of sprite based 3D games went to real 3D, and it was really horrid.

Now, on top of this, you get shit like how the generation went. From CD versus cartridge, marked share split, the dev kit policies and evolution of their devkits, licenscing cost, who had access to render farms and quality 3D suits.

>>4565912
The N64 was released a year after the PS1 and the Saturn. While Nintendo originally wanted to create some 2D content (Killer Instinct was supposed to be the killer-app for N64), they saw that Saturn was bombing horribly because of its inability to do 3D and the PS1's library for the first year was super heavy with 3D games.

Ridge Racer, Toshinden, Tekken, War Hawk, Twisted Metal, WipEout, Need for Speed, etc. were all games that sold huge on PS1.

What PS1 really struggled with however, was 3d games in open worlds and Nintendo knew what they had to do with Mario 64. Nintendo wanted to fill the niche that PS1 and Saturn couldn't do - really good games in full 3-d worlds.

Also, the N64 cart limitations meant that they HAD to use polygons for many games. Sprites were too space heavy - this was why some genres like 2d games never made it on N64

It has the best 2D game of 5th gen anyway

>>4565912
BILINEAR FILTERING

>>4566492
I love that fullscreen vaseline.

>>4565912
>N is 14th alphabet
>6
>4

1+4-6+4=3
=> 3D

There you go, pretty obvious if you ask me.

>>4565930
>>4566492
>>4566525
>brainlets.png

You can turn off texture filtering on N64.
https://level42.ca/projects/ultra64/Documentation/man/pro-man/pro12/index12.5.html

>>4566559
Or just play on a CRT at original resolution and ratio as intended.

The real reason is that there was no good reason to develop games for N64 unless you needed to leverage its powerful 3D hardware.

Otherwise you were just pissing your game’s budget into the wind paying for cartridges.

>>4565924

Actually it's even more complicated than that. Some games on Saturn had transparency but only in one layer. The whole console was a convoluted mess.

>>4565938

To be fair, most of those old 2D games played and looked like complete crap.

>>4566003

Oh hell no. X4 was by far the most solid X game in the whole series, especially if you played as Zero. X5 and X6 had their unique nuances that made them good and decent respectively (why do people hate X6 again?), But MM8 was just entirely unfun from start to finish.

IMO.

>>4566956

Idk Inuyasha Feudal Fairy Tale or whatever would have been much better on N64. The game content probably could have fit on a small cartridge, albeit with compressed or midi music. The loading times on PSX were horrendous. Story mode saw 2-5 minute loads for every 2-5 minutes of actual gameplay.

>>4567023
Sure, I think a lot of the 2D fighters like Alpha 2 would have been way better on N64 than PS1, but Capcom weighed it up and having shitty load times was worth the trade off against an expensive cartridge.

>>4565912
Nintendo and second parties did develop a few 2D games during the N64 era but they released them for Super Famicom/SNES instead, it's just that barely any crossed the pond. This includes games like Kirby's Dreamland 3(released in US, not PAL) and Fire Emblem Thracia 776.(1999 NP release with 2000 retail release) A lot of the Satellaview's support was post N64 launch as well.

>>4567017
Yeah, I don't get this Knuckles guy, 8 has uneven levels with annoying gimmicks on some. Not bad to me, but meh. I even prefer X6 except for maybe Blaze Heatnix's stage.
>>4567013
t. 5h gen babby

>>4567481

I am both of those people. I just think a lot of old school games had really bad art direction. Some games were absolutely beautiful or charming though. Like, Pokémon Gold basically ran on NES hardware and is simply lovely, even according to some people who are just now picking it up.

t. Grew up with a NES and SNES as a babby

>>4567995

And yeah I realize Gold is a different generation all together, but the hardware it ran on is comparable.

>>4567995

And, to add, Kirby for NES and Yoshi's Island on SNES are what I would consider to be outstanding in both art and gameplay. Crystalis also comes to mind.

Space issues. Sony bribing to not put on n64.

2d games with fmw needed space.

This is like asking why NES didn't have games with Atari 2600 graphics.

>>4565919

You are aware PS1 was a 32 bit system? 3D games looked and played like shit on it.

>>4568017
LOL, retard, Sony didn't bribe anybody to purposely prevent the N64 from having 2D games, that's the stupidest shit I've ever heard. It had primarily 3D games because it was marketed as a 3D console and had an analog stick out of the gate. If anything Sony would have been bribing devs not to make 3D games because that's what people cared about at the time, it was the hot new shit and nobody cared about 2D at the time -- the PS1 only got a bunch of 2D games because it was an appealing platform with amateur devs with low budgets. Not that you'd know any of this because you weren't even alive.

>>4568034
Not him, but Sony offering full marketing funding to Square for FF VII is kiiiind of bribing. Sort of.

>>4568034
Retard I'm 33. It was already reported in Japanese insiders mags that they bribed.

Many RPGs and fighting games stil had 2d.

Nice bait.

>>4568035
>Not him, but Sony offering full marketing funding to Square for FF VII is kiiiind of bribing. Sort of.
Yeah... and that's a 3D game, what's your point?
>Retard I'm 33. It was already reported in Japanese insiders mags that they bribed.
Then you are an extremely stupid 33 year old. Let's see a source on that.
>Many RPGs and fighting games stil had 2d.
Okay, and? As we've already established, PS1 was a huge draw for devs because of much lower licensing/production costs compared to N64. It literally had 6x as many games, no shit it's going to have a lot of 2D games and particularly fighters when all the Jap devs flooded onto Sony's platform. You're conflating "bribing" with economic feasibility.
>Nice bait.
Nice non-argument you dumb faggot.

PS1 and N64 actually don't have hardware sprites like the Saturn does, games simulate them with flat-textured polys.

>>4568043
Second point meant for >>4568036

>>4568043
Sweetie, time for your meds. Reality hurting you nimrod?

>>4568048
>Sweetie, time for your meds. Reality hurting you nimrod?
Lmao, exactly, no fucking argument. Get bent retard.

>>4568036
>the most popular console with Japanese developers that was also the cheapest to develop for, was out 2 years earlier and used primarily d-pad controls and had more buttons also had more RPGs and fighters
>this means Sony bribed devs not to make 2D games for N64

>>4568008
>>4568027
>Kirby for NES
>outstanding gameplay
>This is like asking why NES didn't have games with Atari 2600 graphics
Global Rule 2

>>4568068
What?! Kirby's movements were so fluid! I'm honestly surprised you would disagree, even though you totally have that right.

>>4568046
Is that really bad in any way? Those systems could push out more polys than you would ever need for a sprite based game.

>>4568064

Yeah I don't know about bribes, but even with the delayed release the N64 was still considered a juggernaut in the eyes of consumers. The lack of third party support is certainly what killed it, but it wasn't like everyone thought the system would be dead on arrival. Someone with a deeper market understanding probably knew how things would turn out, but that's certainly not the majority.

>>4568083
I love the N64 but they made a lot of retarded decisions when designing it. The sad thing is, if they had done a few things differently, it could have very well been one of the best designed consoles ever made. Unfortunately, they used the cartridge format compounded by a pathetically small texture cache, an analog controller with a bizarre design that wasn't future-proofed by including a second stick, the needless addition of clumsy accessories like a rumble pack and expansion pack, or memory cards without a dedicated memory management menu... it was just a fucking mess. It was a unique console that produced some of the best games ever made, but it's no wonder it got assraped by the PS1 because it was just a better designed machine.

>>4568036
Source?

The anon saying Sony "bribed" companies is just probably baiting for some console war shitposting, possibly false-flagging too.
However, there's many things that can be taken into account regarding Sony and the first PlayStation. They owned the factories where CDs were manufactures and pressed, meaning they had an already advantage over Sega or any other company that wanted to use CD medium, since they had to pay royalties to Sony, even indirectly. That means Sony received a small percentage of every Sega Saturn game sold, for example. It also let them reduce the costs for 3rd party publishers.
So, it's not that they bribed them, rather they just used their corporation advantages to kill its competition. It didn't kill all of it, but it helped kill Sega for sure.
In my opinion, the Nintendo 64 has some questionable design choices, main one being the use of carts, but at the same time I feel it's kind of nice to have a last cart-based home console system. Its only real advantage over CDs is the lack of loading screens, however, in more subjective sensibilities, I really like that N64 games are in cart format. It's the swan song of cart-based consoles, probably along with the Neo Geo which also kept getting games into the 2000s, but that's a totally different kind of beast, it's arcade hardware.
I think despite the arguments about N64's problem with texture caché, etc, the 2D games I've seen on N64 look pretty good. Wonder Project J2 being one example, and that was an early 1996 game.
I just think the few amount of 2D on N64 is simply due to business standpoints. If you're going to invest on a N64 game development and/or publishing, that means you're picking the most expensive of the main consoles, and that's because the system's main thing is making more advanced 3D than the other 2. And remember N64 was the most advanced home-system at release, and wasn't until a year or so later that PCs got the first voodoo 3dfx card. 2D was an unpopular idea at the time.

>>4568190
>I think despite the arguments about N64's problem with texture caché, etc, the 2D games I've seen on N64 look pretty good. Wonder Project J2 being one example, and that was an early 1996 game.
The texture cache is more of an issue with 3D games. Funny enough, had devs actually been interested in developing 2D games on the platform, the N64 had the best hardware for 2D out of the bunch. Yoshi's Story is still one of the most impressive 2D games of that era.

>>4568076
Sure, Kirby itself has nice movement, but the stage and enemy design doesn't do absolutely anything with it. It's a boring baby game with no challenge whatsoever.
What I mean is that game mechanics have no meaning if what you are interacting with isn't engaging. You could have the most interesting character to control but the entire game be an endless flat surface and therefore suck. Kirby doesn't get to this extreme but you get the idea.

>>4568214
Would you also be able to fit a whole lot more sprites into those tiny catridges?

>>4568234
They aren't that tiny. Remember most space filled on CD games was FMVs and, sometimes, redbook audio.

>>4568234
Sprites aren't the problem. Like >>4568236
said, it's audio and FMV which really eat space. Just look at this sprite sheet for Yoshi, it actually used a rather complex method of animation each appendage separately and then piecing them together, making for some very fluid animations. This is just for Yoshi, not all of the other dozens of items/enemies, and it was released on the smallest cartridge available and even had great audio to boot.

>>4566535
>1+4-6+4=3
Nice work brainlet

1+4 = 5
6+4 = 10
QED
5-10 = -5

>>4568334
Another game with insane 2D animation is Rakuga Kids, a sorta obscure fighting game made by Konami. The character designs are simple, and look like crayon drawings ala Yoshi's Island, but pay attention to the amount of frames. Pic related is just 1 of the dozen or so characters the game has.

>>4568341
>implying parentheses

>>4568349
That's really cool, I wish this had been released in the states. It's a shame more developers didn't try their hand at 2D games on the N64, it was really perfect for it in a lot of ways. Didn't have very complex sprites, but on a side note, I always thought Ogre Battle 64 was a really beautiful game as well.

>>4568334
>it was released on the smallest cartridge available and even had great audio to boot.
That's my point!?

>>4565924
>PS1 had actual transparent sprites which the Saturn had to make do with dithering
This is wrong.

>>4568036
>i was already reported for underage redditing
FTFYK

>>4568228

Yeah you actually make a really good point. I felt that way too while playing it. I guess I just saw the potential and it kinda made up for the reality of the game.

>>4568454
>That's my point!?
Uh, what's your point retard? My point is that Yoshi had a fuck ton of sprites and yet still managed to fit on the smallest available N64 cartridge with plenty of room to spare and good quality music. There were multiple sizes of N64 cartridges, you understand that right?

>>4568504
Stuff like this becomes more apparent when you replay a game.
I'd gladly play a game with Kirby's controls and actually interesting levels, too bad it's probably not going to happen since Sakurai has a hard on for making game for babies and babies only.

>>4568495

Wasn't it a fairly complicated ordeal with the Saturn because of its multiple processors not getting along well when multiple transparency layers are introduced? Like one would work find, but for a second you'd need dithering?

>>4568507
lol what kind of asshole is this

>>4568560
What kind of retard are you?

>>4568109
>pathetically small texture cache
I love bringing this up, but did you know the N64 had the largest texture cache ever put into a consumer GPU at its time of release? The PSX texture cache is half its size.

For 2D graphics a 64x64 texture cache is absolutely plenty for tiling. The real reason N64 games often had bad textures is because between the z-buffer and anti-aliasing developers ran out of memory bandwidth to stream in larger textures into 3D. Guess which two N64 hardware features 2D games specifically DON’T need?

>>4565912
I'm the best and never wrong.

>>4568109
>an analog controller with a bizarre design that wasn't future-proofed by including a second stick

This is a non issue. Most PS1 games did not use the second analogue sticks. Hell, most early PS2 games still did not use it. Even when games started using a second stick people complained at how hard it was to control. The N64 including a second stick would have been just a waste of money.

>>4568838
Not to mention the PS1 controller didn't come with any sticks originally. Also the stick/c-buttons or stick/d-pad hand configuration is essentially the same as dual-analog.

I always wondered about that, nintendo itself should have made more 2D games

>>4565912
Wondergirl J2 right? I remember reading about that in a gaming mag as a kid. Was it any good?

>>4568891
Why did 5th gen sprites look so shitty compared to 4th gen?

>>4568786
Wrong. PS1 can stream textures from its 2KB texture cache or directly from its 1mb of VRAM, whereas the N64 is limited by its 4kb cache no matter what. That's not say that the N64 didn't have some games with impressive texture work due to workarounds (Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark come to mind), but generally the PS1 was better at texturing.
>>4568838
It would have made some games a lot smoother. Not being able to manually rotate the camera in a game like OoT or using twin sticks in Goldeneye is a drag. The games usually played great regardless, but it would have been nice to have and while I imagine Nintendo was trying to account for people not liking analog controls by giving them the option to use one side of the controller or the other, the trident design was just stupid in retrospect.

>>4568919
>Not being able to manually rotate the camera in a game like OoT
Is it really, I never had trouble with re-positioning the camera behind the player with Z

>>4566559
I highly doubt nintendo would let developers turn off bilinear filtering

>>4568906
????????????????????????????????
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZfNrJXTeCA
????????????????????????????????

>>4568214
there's nothing impressive about yoshi's story

>>4568334
then why did mortal kombat trilogy on the n64 have drastically reduced animation from psx and other arcade mk games?

>>4569037
They could. Quake 64 had a menu option.

The Vaseline AA filter that overlayed the entire screen though, no.

>>4569048
It didn't you despicable fanboy. They only cut the sub zero character.

>>4569058
what? mk trilogy on n64 has shit loads of animation missing. Just look at their idle frames

>>4569057
I've used that and it barely makes any difference. Textures still look like smeared shit

>>4569063
Well yea, the N64 had a whopping huge 4KB texture cache.

>>4569065
but according to people here that was plenty?

>>4569065
If only they devised a technology to load things in and out of memory instantly, you fucking retard.

>>4569070
Oh, with the world's slowest shitty high latency RAM? Yeah great idea anon. That is why all n64 games have gorgeous textures after all!

>>4569075
God you're such an idiot.

>>4568341
Ahaha this has to be bait

>>4569063
>>4569065
>>4569070
>3D cartridges were usually 32MB.
>Texture cache is 4KB
>Assuming Uncompressed RGBA, this is a 512x256 Texture unit.
Therefore, divided into 64x64 areas, there is room for 32 of these textures.
So 32 of these textures could feasibly be loaded on screen at a time, without work around, and without compression.
With compressions, you could probably use more textures but you would have to stretch these textures, hence the blurred mess. Not to mention the AA.

>>4569107
This also does not deal with Mipmapping.
Which mean either less textures or less resolution

>>4568919
>Wrong. PS1 can stream textures from its 2KB texture cache or directly from its 1mb of VRAM, whereas the N64 is limited by its 4kb cache no matter what.
Eh, true. But for 2D games tiling is significantly more important which is where having the larger texture cache is more handy. It's definitely an advantage to have a texture cache which can tile 64x64 textures at a time instead of 32x64 on PS1. In fact, the larger texture cache is probably better (theoretically) in 3D as well, since texturing directly from VRAM wouldn't be very bandwidth efficient.

Problem on N64, as I said, is that it's extremely easy to run out of memory bandwidth in 3D games due to the z-buffer and anti-aliasing guzzling it all up leaving little left for textures. Having to refresh the texture cache constantly only adds to these bandwidth woes. Had the texture cache been bigger then it would have been less of a problem, but given it was the biggest texture cache to-date that's not a realistic possibility. Only thing that would have made texturing better on N64 would have been to throw in more memory bandwidth, like an extra RAM channel, not make the texture cache bigger.

For 2D games this will all be irrelevant as I doubt they would give the N64 bandwidth problems, given you don't need z-buffer or anti-aliasing, and the N64 has more bandwidth than the PS1 (and theoretically way higher potential VRAM bandwidth because of the unified RAM).

>>4569107
>>4569115
Excuse me. I did a grievous mistake in my calculations. Let me mull on them further. In the mean time, accept my apology, I am tired.

>>4569037
Perfect Dark uses point sampling for a few textures. Not sure about other games, but that's one good example. I think it was done just for aesthetic purposes. Bilinear filtering on N64 is 'free' so unless you are doing it for aesthetics there's no reason to turn it off.

>>4569057
>>4569063
Quake 64's turn-off-filter mode doesn't turn off bilinear filters from textures. All it does is turn off the N64's post-processing (e.g. the second edge-AA pass, dither filtering, transparency filtering, etc). The bilinear filter on textures is not a post-process feature, it's a pipelined feature.

>>4569075
The high latency part was true, but it isn't 'slow'. The raw bandwidth was pretty incredible for single-channel RAM in 1996. Latency is actually 'random access' latency, which means there's no latency if you access RAM linearly rather than randomly. This presents a complex programming challenge, however.

>>4569115
There's not too much benefit in using mipmaps in Quake, the game doesn't have significant draw distance. Mip-maps are really best for Mario 64 / Banjo-Kazooie style games where you can look over a big map into the distance. It's true that it cuts the texture cache in half, but you also gain memory bandwidth savings from the LOD.

>>4568017
>with fmw
???
FMV is the biggest source of usage of disc space on the Playstation, and the Saturn.
But its also really prominent, because the PS1 have bad polygonal graphics, so unless its metal gear, in engine cutscenes look awful.
Now, there are exceptions, but there was a lot of horrible trends in the PS1, that also impacted how games for the N64 were made

>>4568341
underage detected

>inb4 I just was acting like I'm retarded

>>4565912
People who liked 2D games bought a PC-FX instead anyway.

>>4568523
Saturn can support transparencies but since the system was so quirky it couldn't do transparencies "the right way." Devs used a few creative ways to accomplish their goals, meshes were just one of them. Considering the dominant video signals of the time, using meshes to fake a translucency is acceptable.