what are the best games to get for the nintendo gamecube and N64?

I loved Blast Corps on premise alone (smash a bunch of stuff up) and while it's sometimes really annoying, it's overall worth it if you can find it for ten bucks or less.

The Zelda games are good, with Majora's Mask being the better of the two despite a very stupid Groundhog Day gimmick being central to gameplay.

Fuck Nintendo 64.

Plus, that game kinda sucks.

-- Doctor Casino (agode...), March 26th, 2006 11:44 PM. (Doctor Casino) (later) (link

Bah reading the OP is for PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE GOLDENEYE.

Eternal Darkness
Harvest Moon
Metroid

ZELDA!!!!

if you liked golden eye then Resident Evil 4 may be good for you. (i don't rate either that much)

(i am so pleased that Majora is getting it's righteous props now)

i got really lucky thrift shopping on sunday and picked up a Nintendo 64 with all the cables and two controllers for $25.

it came with no games which kinda sucks but there is lots of stuff i have always wanted to play id like to eventually check out. how much are used games? thinking of hitting up Book Nook or Play N Trade or something. so far it seems like ~$20 per game is the current market. is that accurate? i don't care about boxes or manuals i just want the cartridge.

definitely going to track down Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Goldeneye. Mario Kart. Pilot Wings 64. i don't know what else, i never had one. i think there was a great 2.5D Goemon but was that Japan-only or did it get a release in the states? Mischief Makers is a pretty cool game (and hell yes, by fucking Treasure)

what are some of the must-play games for N64 that get overlooked?

i remember f-zero and wave race both being great multiplayer games.

F-Zero X is so cool. but damn those upside down twisty tracks! lol i used to fly off the track so much.

WWF No Mercy for N64 is widely regarded as the greatest pro-wrestling video game ever. It may be overlooked outside that niche. If you have any interest in pro wrestling, or wrestling games, or even fighting games, you must play it.

majora’s mask!!!

also iirc banjo kazooie and diddy kong racing are great

Pikmin

Paper Mario

Yoshi's Story is a lot of fun.

oh and Tetrisphere, always Tetrisphere

Perfect dark

seconding Banjo Kazooie

majora’s mask!!!

also iirc banjo kazooie and diddy kong racing are great

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Friday, January 12, 2018 1:40 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

These are completely OTM, though you need the expansion pack for MM (totally worth it imo)

need it for perfect dark too! i think you can get off-brand ones for $25-30.

Blast Corps is pretty unique/quirky and I think worth tracking down. Though it's on a lesser tier than Goldeneye/PD, I will offer a qualified recommendation for Turok 2! It had some interesting level design and some enjoyably OTT weapons.

Yeah turok 2 is batshit in a great way

it is stunning to me that no one has ever attempted a blast corps remake, such a brilliantly stupid and satisfying appeal to the 10-year-old brain.

Mischief makers is an amazing side scroller. Blast corps Cosign as well

Castlevania 64 is a lot of fun and as usual has a wicked score

god, majora's mask is so beautiful and perfect. i wish i could play it again for the first time

San Francisco rush is a lot of fun for multiplayer

oh god I spent so much time as a kid playing those moon levels on Blast Corps

honestly think that had one of the all-time greatest premises in any video game ever - "an unstoppable nuclear missile is mounted on a slow moving truck headed towards the city and you have to demolish everything in its path to save the planet", and then "the nuclear truck is on other planets now too"

oh yeah we had a ball with san francisco rush. might not age as well as some of the others - i have memories of boxy collision detection and getting stuck on corners and stuff. and presumably it's no longer a deliriously realistic experience of careening downhill through a city. my older brother had that, mario kart 64, and cruisin' usa - they must have meant so much to a child of the 70s who'd once sunk hours into "dragster" on atari 2600 with our dad. mario kart obviously the one to own if you can only own one, tho i'm sure it's expensive these days.

Can't recall a good FIFA but I think the pro evo ports were worthy

Yeah doctor, San Francisco rush is glitchy as hell and has other performance issues like slowness. Soundtrack contains a vocal track that is forever stuck in my head, but won't force that on anyone here...

All the Mario - Zelda games have kept their value, got about 40 bucks when I sold ocarina. A mistake obvs

seems like prices for these have cooled down just a little these days. been reissued enough times maybe. i felt like i was really getting away with something when I snagged ocarina for ten bucks at a thrift store circa 2014.

they must have meant so much to a child of the 70s who'd once sunk hours into "dragster" on atari 2600 with our dad

heh we had Pole Position for Atari 7800.

i just got Mario Kart for Switch so likely i'll wait on Mario Kart. though you can't deny the 64 Kart had a killer 4 player couch co-op mode

some friends and i still regularly get together for 4 player n64 kart, it's so good. then it dawned on me that that's the first video game i played in 3rd/4th grade and that as a result mario kart might be the activity i've regularly done for the longest my life

speaking of Kart this video always gets a chuckle out of me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUULD_L0Uo

Battle on kart 64 is soo good

majora's mask is sublime. the world's a fairly cramped place cobbled together from recycled art assets (alternately: a nightmare prison universe populated by doppelgangers) but adam i know at the very least you'd be into the inverted temple, the plot's eternal recurrence, the loneliness of the villain (so like link's own), the general death vibe, and uh the nightmare prison universe populated by doppelgangers

challops: the rareware games to get are perfect dark and diddy kong racing. banjo-kazooie is an exhausting mario 64 manque and goldeneye is v frustrating if you've ever played any pc shooter; but DK racing is rly fun to explore and perfect dark is a hilarious, varied, goofy update on goldeneye, fun to play and fun to watch, tho its dirty secret is that even after making you buy the expansion pak it doesn't actually run on the hardware.

on n64 i actually prefer turok 1 to 2, because the dense jungle setting and low-level enemies and low-tech weapons fit v well with the omnipresent claustrophobic fog the hardware requires. in turok 2, which is a ridiculous mid90s gonzo shooter where everyone's a mutant armored dinosaur pig and you're in space half the time, the platform's limitations are more of a problem. you can get a nice cleaned-up pc port of turok 2 on gog tho; it's like the daikatana that's good. overpriced when not on sale but a secret highlight of the genre for sure.

i know slippy's annoying but i love starfox 64. it has the arcade virtue of taking ~45min to play all the way thru, so it is a game about beating yr high score (and abt exploring the modestly branching paths you can take to the end). consistently very easy and probably not on the list of anyone seriously into shmups, but looks great and full of camp dialogue moments.

star wars episode one racer is fun cuz you go fast. i bet you can find it cheap cuz episode one.

i'm not sure where the 64 super smash bros is meant to rank-- think it's the gamecube one people really exalt?-- but it was certainly a high school party staple.

everybody otm that it's downright weird not just that blast corps has not been remade but that blast corps was not itself a remake of some primordial 80s form like tetris or space invaders. (or bomberman. bomberman 64 is not very good btw. except it's bomberman.)

Oh star wars racer yes

banjo-kazooie is an exhausting mario 64 manque

i see this, but idk, i replayed the game relatively recently and just had a blast the whole way through

bomberman 64 is not very good and bomberman hero is probably objectively terrible but i looooooved both when i was a kid anyway

Banjo Kazooie AND Banjo Tooie. Best british games ever. I do like the first game a bit better than Mario 64.

Donkey Kong 64 seemed unnecessarily complicated but still pretty good as far as I got but Conker just wasn't that fun to play.

full disclosure re the above post: just discovered i am wearing a majora's mask tshirt rn

I remember Diddy Kong being massively hyped, it was like Mario Kart + Mario 64 overworld mechanics? It was good but got very very hard after a while and eventually just turned into a collectathon

Goldeneye, man, the greatest game of all time, but it's probably unplayable now

original SSB was pretty good but iirc the throw mechanic was way way too powerful and I think the game favored Captain Falcon (the fastest character) way too much

I tried the Kart games on Gamecube and Wii but they never had the same "feel" as N64. Too slidey or they'd lost the sense of the racers' weight or something. But if you have and love those then probably no urgent need for N64 one which is prob expensive.

Goldeneye, man, the greatest game of all time, but it's probably unplayable now

― frogbs, Friday, January 12, 2018 10:49

Why? Just takes an hour or two of getting used to older games.

oh yeah i can see why. i was into Wolfenstein/DOOM/DOOM II in the 90s so was used to 60fps 3D years before the N64 came out. DOOM II even did lag free network play w serial cables. by the time Goldeneye 007 came out Quake II was out.

Goldeneye is a great game though! it excels in spite of its technical shortcomings and certainly did so at the time. like many i have fond memories of staying up late w friends doing 4 player death matches. just scrolling through that character list was a trip. you can play as Grace Jones! plus the music absolutely rules.

Bomberman 64 is worth it for the battle mode which is hard to beat.

Doc, kart was good for wii in the online mode despite the proliferation of bad player names like Hitler. Also there was a lot of players hacking it, but Nintendo was smart enough to only award more points to players with lower scores, so when a cheater died they would lose massive amounts or points. Nintendo axed the online when the next gen came out causing some ballyhooing around this house

best part of goldeneye was going into crouch mode so that the gun model loomed over half your tiny square of screen and then convincing your opponents you "found the big moonraker". second best part was the snow level

perfect dark's comparative obscurity is natural because a lot of goldeneye's stature is that of a successful tech demo-- you can make a successful multiplayer shooter on a one-stick console-- and perfect dark was a total mechanical retread coming out the same year as a wave of two-stick consoles (and a year before halo).

but quick list of things perfect dark has: a female protagonist; a sassy roswell grey; a lock-on submachine gun (real treasure in this degenerate hintergenre); a gun that shoots across levels and through walls (lol); some darkly lovely glass-and-chrome art design that puts you in a good cyberpunk headspace (i wish unatco or versalife, in deus ex, had the office block elevators perfect dark's evil corp flaunts as opening-level spectacle in appreciation of your expansion-pak dollar); a remote-controlled spy drone that causes enemies who sight it to exclaim "it's a spy!" while firing wildly; and a villain who at one point threatens a subordinate in words that caused my friend's dad, who like mine was a software engineer at an astronomical observatory, and who came thru the front door at just this moment, to laugh really caustically in a way that haunted me for years whenever i thought of adulthood: "so, the devices we gave you are working correctly? good. because WE believe that anything that does NOT work correctly SHOULD BE DESTROYED!!!"

Blast Corps is pretty unique/quirky and I think worth tracking down.

blast corps was a fantastic game

(caveat: in my memory, it was, at least. sometimes i'll revisit games that i once thought to be flawless and find them to be nearly unplayable. i haven't played blast corp since it came out and we rented it 4 weekends in a row.)

i've posted abt this before but goldeneye was barely playable at the time imho - its dominance was from offering single-screen multiplayer killing at high speeds, a niche that deserved to be filled with a more fully-featured game. blah environments, mazelike deathmatch maps where even finding anybody to kill takes half the time, blah design generally, maddeningly stupid burdens on several of the single-player missions, no jumping (not even falling iirc?), too many too-similar weapons cluttering things up. oddly i managed to have more fun with it when my roommate pulled it out a couple years back, maybe because i was playing it as a vintage game that inevitably had its own weird quirks and conventions and restrictions.

mazelike deathmatch maps where even finding anybody to kill takes half the time

this is a game iirc that had one level called "archives" and another called "stacks"

the former a faithful recreation of one of the most spectacular locations from the film!

(really did love the snow level)

Starfox

Jet Force Gemini

Fighters Destiny and Beetle Adventure Racing also great

i went to the used games store today but they only thing worthwhile was Smash Bros. 64 and it was $60 out of the box so i passed...

I just got the Dolphin emulator on my computer and suddenly Gamecube is back in my life (I never actually owned it, but I've played it often with friends in the past).

SSX Tricky was laggy but so far everything else runs beautifully.

One of my favourite games ever is the N64 "Sin And Punishment"-- the Wii reboot is great too-- I bought the cartridge for it, and "Bangai-Oh", when I was in Japan, on a whim. Used a hot knife to burn off the edges so it'd fit in my North American system. One of my favourite games ever

It did look great. I bought the sequel and it quickly got too difficult for me.

I remember liking Eternal Darkness for the 'Cube a lot. Probably most notable for its "insanity" effect which includes some fun 4th-wall breaking stuff. Which sadly they copyrighted so no one could ever do it again. Cool game though, great story and voice acting, was fun even if the game mechanics were pretty flawed

My lil NUC can't handle even PS2 emulation it is a tragedy

fav 64 games from memory: smash bros, mario kart, diddy kong racing, goldeneye, yoshi's story, wayne gretzky's 3d hockey (i had the 98 vintage), starfox, rampage world tour, 1080 snowboarding, nba hangtime (basically nba jam but rebranded for no good reason)

Really wish I had Yoshi's Story, but I think my brother sold the N64 by that time. I loved Yoshi's Island so much.

I remember Yoshi's Story being very poorly received for being too easy and not half the game the original was though.

1080 snowboarding was the best. The only snowboarding game that seemed to really care about physics!

wave race blue storm is imo the best racer of ALL TIME

Funny you mention that because that game shares 2 characters with 1080 (Ricky Winterborn & Rob Haywood)

ok i got some games from an amazing place near where i grew up. "Video Game Trader LLC" in Buford, GA. they have an insane selection, everything from SNES to Atari 2600 to 3D0/Jaguar/etc. they also have hacked carts - a "Master Quest" N64 hack of OOT i passed but so i could play the og first. there was a full shelf of cheap cart-only N64 games. they had a cart only "Conquer's Bad Fur Day" for $99.

ended up getting "Turok: Dinosaur Hunter", "Wave Race 64", and "Shadows of the Empire". gave all three a quick span and tbh "Turok" is the most intriguing at the minute. it's like a weird cross between fps and collect a thon with a strong dash of "Far Cry Primal"

It was a Master Quest N64 cart? Because Maser Quest OOT came out for gamecube as an official release.

yeah it was a hacked rom repro cart

I'm playing Master Quest on the 3DS right now. It's great, but I'd definitely play the original first. The rearranged dungeons are less polished and more purposefully silly. Jabu Jabu's belly is full of cows for some reason. Are the Zoras raiding Lon Lon Ranch to feed their fish god?

Turok is really pretty cool. im finding the low draw distance and fog really adds to the atmosphere. heh the controls are going to take a minute to get used to (they have left/right-handed configurations to try which is cool)

i was trying to think of what one part in particular reminded me of and it just dawned on me. there as a moment where i was jumping up platforms and climbing up vine walls and i realized, this is exactly like climbing a up a tower in Far Cry 3!

love turok, otm abt the draw distance, always nice 2 see an exploited limit. gnarly death anims too iirc

some games arrived in the mail this week:

Super Mario 64
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Donkey Kong 64
Goldeneye 007

they are so much fun to play! im about to start a new game of OOT and i have the music really loud and it projected on the wall, it looks way better that way than it does on my HDTV.

unfortunately i tried playing DK64 and it said i need to install an expansion pak. wut?

Goldeneye has some incredible tunes. the industrial stuff at the start of "Dam" is so cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yik4Vxh61wc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etRxv1Lvf1E

the pause music is all-time. i love when a game has great pause music.

Hmmmm one of the systems had some hunk of plastic you stick in the back of the controller. It vibrates or adds memory or something?

the expansion pak was discussed upthread - order one in for around $25, you need it for majora's mask and perfect dark also. it's just RAM iirc. it goes in the little panel on the top of the console, between the logo and the cartridge slot.

That is an incredible quartet of games

wave race blue storm is imo the best racer of ALL TIME

I don't know a game with as good water simulation as that game, both the choppiness of incoming ocean waves and the cool placidly of when you emerge into a shallow-water straightaway

Oh cmon ecco

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag was very good w water. the ship sailing over waves in the deep ocean, rainstorms and waterspouts, etc. sometimes there are huge waves and you have to brace the ship or it will be torn apart. then you can sail to an island, jump off the deck, and swim right up to a calm sandy isle or lagoon. the water in this game was very impressive tech.

playing OOT for the first time was very cool. i like the 2D CGI backgrounds, they remind me a bit of Final Fantasy VII. the controls are nice and this is night and day better than playing on emulator. there is a huge difference between playing this on emulated PS2 controller vs. og hardware with the peculiar N64 trident of multi-color buttons, sticks, pads, triggers, etc. the combat is surprisingly really like BOTW, with all the dodge rolls, backward flips, etc. i even have a tree stick to fight with, just like BOTW. that first area where they have the z targeting training spot is incredible. i can't believe this came out in 1997.

er, 1998

not a new year or fourth of july goes by i don't pretend "pop pop snappers" are deku nuts

i'm sure there are precedents but ocarina's autojump was bizarre and revelatory to me. a way to build 3d environments without actually building a platformer. navigation never (intentionally) a challenge but exploration still thrilling. at the same time there's the occasional platformish bonus, usually involving the magic beans.

the autojump is really cool and likely solves a lot of problems w 3D right out of the gate. some games where you can jump the geometry is not so clear and a player may get stuck on a spot where they think they can jump, say up a mountain, or something. autojump in a way smooths the transition from 2D to 3D for the series, OOT is not entirely 3D like BOTW but not really 2.5D like DOOM (yet you kind of are stuck to the floor). imo its a cool design choice at any rate, way to go Nintendo.

the Big Penguin Race in Super Mario 64 is so tough. i can do pretty good until i get to the last sharp right curve but i always overshoot it. i can see a shortcut but i still have to deal w Dead Man's Curve.

I finally got all 120 stars in Mario last year, I never had the focus to complete the game as a kid. Those levels upstairs get fuckin hard

mario 64 is the rare game that I once spent weeks on maxing out completely, and yet any time the game comes up part of me is like "man you know what would be fun is to spend weeks maxing that out completely." i'm sure i'm forgetting some of the star tasks being infuriating bullshit but just now thinking of racing the giant belly-flopped penguin down the track is like oh yeah, that's a sunday afternoon i can get behind

there are so many shortcuts in that level! it's crazy there are like a million things you can do in every stage. i ended up taking one shortcut going through an entirely optional Goonies-style slide right to the finish line and the Big Penguin called me out for cheating lol

mario 64 is the rare game that I once spent weeks on maxing out completely, and yet any time the game comes up part of me is like "man you know what would be fun is to spend weeks maxing that out completely." i'm sure i'm forgetting some of the star tasks being infuriating bullshit but just now thinking of racing the giant belly-flopped penguin down the track is like oh yeah, that's a sunday afternoon i can get behind

― Righteous wax chaperone, rotating Wingdings (Doctor Casino), Sunday, January 28, 2018 11:23 AM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i’ve replayed mario 64 so many times as a result of this exact line of thinking

If
someone
were
to
start a kickstarter to make a sequel to Mario 64-- in the style of Majora's Mask-- i.e. not the "Groundhog Day" mechanic, but some other similar upending of the original structure-- I would donate for sure

I sometimes feel like this game must exist but it unfortunately doesn't

I'd also do the same for a Starfox 64 sequel

I miss playing star fox 64 a lot, great game

finally won the race fair and square! this took me an hour or so retrying over and over, and i won several times but apparently if you use any short cuts he refuses to give you the star!

this game is probably the toughest Mario since Super Mario Bros. 3. i've seen five or six 1-UP mushrooms and haven't gotten a single one. they are more elusive than the crystal lizards in Dark Souls (in fact i bet Dark Souls based them on this).

not a ton of competition there tbf - mario world is generally easy except for the outrageous bonus stages and some of the off-the-branched path stuff, and yoshi's island only gets sustainedly hard in its later worlds and if you're trying to max out everything. actually all three have a similar approach to difficulty, where the main game does get gradually harder (but in keeping with your developing mastery of the established moves) but you can always choose to make it even harder by going for full completion.

oh duh i guess there's also the gameboy ones... never played those.

First gameboy Mario was hard, largely due to weird hitboxes and hard-to-see projectiles and enemies, but very short. Probably the least fun, least polished Mario game I've played, of the platforming ones (though maybe I'm forgetting something). Second GB one is way more fun and polished but extremely easy

on the topic of the GB games: I'm still kind of amazed that Wario, who seems like the game designers conceived of, named, and drew in under five minutes, became such a beloved character in the Mario universe as to star in like 20 games

the NES/Famicom Super Mario Bros. games were all pretty tough. i would rate them:

Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan
VS. Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Bros. 2 USA

SMB3 was a big step into the expanding Mario world, with its geographically themed levels and world maps. once the 16-bit era hit and RAM/storage limitations were no longer a thing the games were more about exploring this graphically diverse world. so difficulty went down in order to encourage exploration.

the funny thing is with N64 we were almost at a resetting of the technology, by having 3D be such a new thing. now they are cramped by technical limitations again. levels can only be so big, there can only be so many, so there are only 15 levels (w multiple stars making for essentially 5 or 6x15 stage variations). the multiple stars level variations are a great way to use difficulty and skill tests to get more out of the hardware. some of these stars take far longer to get then just playing through a level in one of the older games. it's just too bad we didn't get a SM64-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YzrzMI0k7s

hazy maze cave is so cool. this is way better than the Mario 3 or Mario World cave levels imo.

its this trippy low poly psychedelic 3D place.

has anyone done any VR with N64 emulators? with the 3D you could easily do the visuals even if 3rd person. it would be crazy to see this shit in VR.

this and the Golden Saucer rollercoaster in VR. i want to see that.

my n64 randomly resets now :[ think its a bad or loose power supply

I remember being in a Wal-Mart as a kid and playing N64 for the first time on a demo. it was on the Hazy Maze Cave level and I fell into the place with the giant sea monster. probably the most mindblowing video game experience I've ever had (I was like 10, but still). I thought about that pretty much every day until we finally got one many months later

https://melmagazine.com/an-oral-history-of-goldeneye-007-on-the-n64-129844f1c5ab

btw I got an Everdrive with an SD card loaded with every possible game and sold off the rest (except Mario Party 3 for sentimental reasons) and wow it is wonderful