Nights into Dreams

[Anonymous No.9851994]

Is it as good as good as Super Mario 64?

[Anonymous No.9851996]

>>9851994
Yes, Miyamoto agrees too so if you disagree you're disagreeing with the god of Mario.

[Anonymous No.9852016]

Not even a little. It's a great first draft, but there are a lot of little design decisions that are baffling and should have been either iterated upon in a sequel or questioned during beta testing.

The children and the A-Life system are utterly pointless in the final game as released. Why go to the bother of programming an explorable 3D environment with a rich artificial life element when the game itself actively dissuades you from exploring it due to the alarm clock mechanic? It doesn't matter how lush the environments are or how deep the nightopian breeding system is if you're never given any chance to explore it. Being able to disable the alarm clock after finishing the stage as NiGHTS would at least afford the opportunity to explore. Maybe the children would have to find some form of boss key and bring it back to NiGHTS to finish the stage.

[Anonymous No.9852018]

Yes this game is really advanced for its time. It runs all of the cool 3d stuff with one chip at a solid 20fps give or take. Then it uses the other chip to render the skybox and background at silky smooth 60fps. It kinda tricks the brain into thinking the game is playing smooth. This really enhances the flight gameplay and takes it to the next level. I just don't think Mario 64 performs as well since it doesn't have another processor for the all the background stuff. Maybe it could have run smoothly with that kind of tech. Instead the machine struggles to do all of its music in software and to render all of the graphics on one chip. Mario 64 is fabulous but I have to give it to nights on this one. And making all of the npcs happy was a little more fun than collecting all of the stars for me personally

[Anonymous No.9852024]

>>9851994
It's a very good arcade game.

[Anonymous No.9852061]

>>9851994
No. I liked it for the novelty and own two copies but no

[Anonymous No.9852089]

Much better of course, Mario 64 wastes your time with chasing rabbits and stuff.

[Anonymous No.9852143]

>>9851994
From an artistic standpoint it's far better even

[Anonymous No.9852147]

>>9852016
The kids add a little bit of risk/reward depth to the mechanics which can push your score a little further if you're good and give you a chance to recover if you're bad. If you're bad and run out of time and lose Nights, you still have a chance to sprint back to the pagoda and regain control. If you're good and know the map well and can consistently triple jump with the kids, you can use them to collect chips early and bring them to Nights to blow the Ideya Capture up faster and thus give you more bonus time. Also, if you time your jumps right, you can hit the time egg and stun it for a little bit to give you more time to run.

This also kinda sells the story of the game a bit more: these kids are basically learning to lucid dream. They're obviously nowhere near as capable in the dream world as Nights himself, but they're there nonetheless and are necessary to Nights for their ability to dualize with him. At first they're a liability because they have no idea where they are and what they're doing and are liable to wake up at any time. But as they get more comfortable with themselves in the dream world and its logic, they become able to hold their own and even actively valuable to Nights in exploring the dream world, akin to how their character arcs involve them growing in confidence and inner strength. Of course, given that all of this is largely up to the player to either figure out by experimentation or learning from a guide/other players, it can just be frustrating to deal with for new players.

[Anonymous No.9852164]

Watching this game is really disorienting as someone who's never played it

[Anonymous No.9852165]

I feel like the whole point of this game was to put something out very quickly with what sonic team already had. I don't feel that way with something like sonic adventure which has cutscenes and lots of levels with plenty of diversity. And that's a game that also stretches things out a lot to extend the experience. I feel like nights is 90% a trick to get you to play a short game repeatedly. And I bet the awesome Christmas nights disk took Sega's janitor 20 minutes to make because the game was designed to be made quickly. I mean I'm exaggerating but I really do feel that the game is fundamentally built as an illusion of a more substantial product.

[Anonymous No.9852208]

As someone who consciously lived the 2D to 3D process in gaming history, nothing compared to Super Mario 64. It's so advanced in not only the scope of the 3D maps but also the physics and controls it's utterly ridiculous.
I had PC, PS1, N64 and Saturn, was playing all the 3D games available at the time and I was looking for something as impressive or similar to SM64, but there just wasn't any. On PS1 I liked Jumping Flash 1 and 2, they were very fun but simpler, smaller than SM64, also while the triple jet jump mechanic is super fun, it's not quite as complex as all the physics in SM64's movement, nor as fast. I also tried other PS1 3D platformers like Floating Runners and Crash, but again, they were very small, linear in 3D scope, and the controls were not really complex, rather quite basic.
Nights is a very pretty game,

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.9852213]

>>9851994
No, it's a vastly different kind of game

[Anonymous No.9852272]

>>9852016
There's an interview on shmuplations (https://shmuplations.com/alife/)) with Tetsu Katano, Takashi Iizuka, and Yuji Naka where they talk about the A-life stuff. From the way they talk about it, the final result was because of scheduling deadlines, hardware limitations, and the conscious design decision to make the game feel like a unique, personalized object to explore and experiment with as well as having all the systems of the game intersect with each other.
>Naka: Actually, the truth is I wanted to make the A-LIFE sim more meaningfully connected to the game itself, but that would have meant changing the underlying gameplay of NiGHTS. For awhile, I thought we should just make the A-LIFE sim its own game. We talked about it, but eventually settled on the way it is today.
>Katano: We had an overall tight, very limited schedule for NiGHTS, and the A-LIFE part especially took up a lot of that time.
>Iizuka: I’m glad that there’s many different ways to enjoy NiGHTS. I’ll be very happy if players get so into the A-LIFE system that they become experts with the controls and ultimately get an A rank on all the courses.
>Naka: We had originally wanted players to be able to name the individual Pians. If you pressed the pause button, their name would appear and you could change it there. The names would have carried on in some form, like the genes, too, gradually changing with each successive generation... Unfortunately, it would have made the save data too large, and only people with the backup RAM carts would have been able to play. So we cut that idea. And there are other places where I think we could have given them more stats, or done something more interesting with them.
>Q: One of the fun things about the A-Life system is that when something cool happens, it feels like a private discovery, like you’re the only person to witness it.
>Naka: That’s great—that’s very much something we were aiming to create.

[Anonymous No.9852274]

>>9852208
(cont)
I just wanted to add that Nights is actually pretty fun and has a "feel good" feedback between what the player does on the controller, what the character does on screen, and what the player feels when it receives the visual and audible feedback from the game. It's a really well made game and I'm not surprised someone like Miyamoto, who prioritizes said "feel" before anything else in games, would like Nights or praise it.
But, Nights' actual gameplay is in 2D. The only time you actually get to use both X and Y axis in the game is when you run out of time and Nights disappears, leaving you in control of either the boy or the girl, who can't fly, and can only walk and jump on the ground. And this is when you notice, as a 3D game, it's a mess. I mean, it's not unplayable, you can do what you need to do (either get the fuck back ASAP to the nights vault, or explore a bit for any missing Nightopian around the map, but there isn't much else to do really. The ground maps are just simple in design, as the kids, you just walk and it doesn't really matter if it's a 90 degrees hill, the kids will go at the same speed no problem. It feels definitely tacky and like it's a total afterthought in the game design, main gameplay being on Nights itself, but hey it's there. As a kid I liked exploring the maps with the kids, just for the novelty of exploring some more in a 3D game, but Super Mario 64 was light years ahead. Not even comparable, really. Pilotwings is a thousand times more complex and impressive than Nights.
Nights just wins because of the aforementioned game feel, controls are good, and just the beautiful, creative audiovisual fest that it is.

[Anonymous No.9852721]

>>9851994
I can't beat first boss in xbox360 version.

[Anonymous No.9853147]

I've never played this game, is it supposed to be anything like Super Mario 64? When looking at gameplay footage, it looks like it's about flying through rings, Superman 64 in 2D.

[Anonymous No.9853208]

>>9853147
It’s nothing like SM64; so it’s like comparing apples and oranges, as they say.

As someone who owned both titles on launch, SM64 is the better all around title, but NiGHTs is my jam; loved it so much I even bought Christmas NiGHTs from Blockbuster. It’s simple fun

[Anonymous No.9853302]

Probably not, but it's still a really good game. I hate having to pick one or the other in threads like this.

[Anonymous No.9853398]

>>9851994

no. but it does have better music.

[Anonymous No.9853416]

>>9851994
fuck no this game sucks lmaoooooooo

[Anonymous No.9853535]

>>9851994
It's not really even in the same category, it's more of a score attack action game than a proper 3D platformer. As fun and inventive as the game is, I have to admit I still prefer the Sonic games, 2D and 3D. It's fun for a while but going for a high score/A Rank usually requires going around the same loop over and over again as opposed to Sonic and Crash which are just straightforward.

Flying in Mario 64 is a little more satisfying although you can't really pull off all of the same tricks, but it's a real treat being able to fly in 3D which you obviously can't really do as much in NiGHTS.

>>9852016
I tend to agree with this post in regards to A-Life and 3D. It feels like they are both semi-functioning but it's never really properly explained, especially the A-Life system.

>>9853208
The mere existence of Christmas NiGHTS is bizarre to me, it's fun but really silly to me that it exists solely as a Sampler disc and not a part of something bigger. It really feels like Sonic Team's priorities were all over the place on Saturn

[Anonymous No.9853618]

>>9852016
I agree, as an 11 year old i was disappointed that i couldn't explore the game world in 3D with the kids, which seemed really cool.
I also didn't 'get' the appeal of the score attack back then, and i still think it's a niche appeal.
The A-life system is so obscure, i still don't really understand how it works or the value it adds.

[Anonymous No.9853626]

>on rails flying androgynous sanic jester
no

[Anonymous No.9853637]

>>9853535
Not everything in life is a soulless corporate product. Christmas NiGHTS exist because the devs were passionate about the game and wanted to create. If that's "priorities not straight" than fuck the industry as a whole, cause it's what we should have been encouraging.

[Anonymous No.9853821]

>>9853637
I feel like this exact mentality is why we never got a proper Sonic game on Saturn

[Anonymous No.9853860]

>>9853637
It should've just been part of the main game. I really feel like Saturn is the only console that can get away with these weird filler releases and people act like they're amazing games. Imagine if they released the Genesis with three slightly different versions of Sonic 1 instead of actual sequels. Experimentation is great, sometimes I want actual full games though, not just demos, compilations, CG collections etc.