Topic: Recommend Any Good Gamecube Games

[Ian Sane]

  I have always wondered what would have happened if the N64 used optical media? Would Nintendo have had a stronger third party to carry over to the Gamecube.

I think this would have changed everything.  Nintendo didn't have a great relationship with third parties but really, are you going to leave the market leader?  The cartridge thing was the perfect excuse.  It was just obvious to jump ship because of that.  That was when Nintenod just pushed it too far.  The cost to the third party of using cartridges over CDs was just too much and this also prevented them from making the games they wanted to make.  Cartridges were the breaking point.
 
Without the breaking point would so many have left?  It wasn't just a few here and there it was an outright exodus.  If they didn't do that I think they would have kept a lot of the old guard like Capcom and Square on board.  Sony might not have been able to break in so well without being the de facto choice after Nintendo scared everyone away.  At the very least you figure any game that was reasonably successful would have been ported to the N64 if it could have been.  If Capcom were willing to go to the work to port RE2 to the N64, surely if it was a CD system they would have done that with all the RE games.  They ported those to the Saturn and Dreamcast.
 
I figure the third party support would have remained exceptional and would have carried over to the Gamecube.  And the Wii might have been totally different if the Cube had strong third party support.  If it was really successful Nintendo might not have felt the need to attract casuals to carve their own niche in the market.
 
One thing to note is that Nintendo's problem with third parties is that they don't care about third parties and make hardly any concessions for them.  If they went with CDs for the N64 that would have suggested a different attitude from Nintendo.  Miyamoto is pushing for carts for Super Mario 64 and Nintendo tells him "no".  Nintendo wants to use carts but decides not to.  A Nintendo that would do that would probably be more accomodating to third parties.  I don't think Nintendo could have made that decision while still being the same Nintendo.

[NWR_insanolord]

Using cartridges cost Nintendo third party support, but the games that were there were better because they were on cartridges. The load times inherent in the CD technology of the time period would have been horrible for Nintendo's games. Imagine waiting upwards of 30 seconds every time you go into a level in Mario 64. The massiveness of Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time that was so mind-blowing never would have worked with CDs. Nintendo's decision hurt them financially and in terms of market share, but it was the right decision for game quality, which is why Miyamoto pushed for it.

[Ian Sane]

What if the N64 was a cart/CD combo?  I guess that raises the cost of the system but it would allow the most flexibility.  Think about it.  Logically with the CD attachments both the Genesis and TurboGraffx 16 became cart/CD hybrids.  So why not make the whole system like that?

Though I figure that with Nintendo's expertise they would have found a way to make their games work.  Look at Metroid Prime's clever way of hiding load times.  The Playstation had some awesome games within the load time limitations of the CD medium.  I'm sure Nintendo could have made it work.

[NWR_insanolord]

Putting in both would have made the hardware very expensive, in PS3 launch price territory. They had to choose one medium, and either way there would have been limitations on what kind of games could be made with the hardware. You could have FMVs and CD audio or you could have no load times, but not both. In my opinion, Nintendo made the absolute right choice.

[Ian Sane]

You could have FMVs and CD audio or you could have no load times, but not both. In my opinion, Nintendo made the absolute right choice.

Well actually the choice is you can have FMV and CD audio and amazing third party support or you can have no load times and practically no third party support at all.  In that case I think they made the absolute wrong choice.  Waiting around for months at a time for the occasional great game, nearly all of which are made by Nintendo, while the other consoles just get all sorts of great stuff has NEVER been fun.  15 years of this **** (and counting) so that Super Mario 64 has no load times was totally not worth it at all.
 
NES, SNES, GB/GBC, GBA, DS --> normal and healthy third party support.  Anything that does not compare to this is unacceptable and a failure.  Any decision that directly caused such a failure was also unacceptable and a mistake.  That's the way I look at it based on my priorities.

[UncleBob]

You're priorities are wrong then.  All you need are first party games to be happy.

[Kytim89]

You could have FMVs and CD audio or you could have no load times, but not both. In my opinion, Nintendo made the absolute right choice.

Well actually the choice is you can have FMV and CD audio and amazing third party support or you can have no load times and practically no third party support at all.  In that case I think they made the absolute wrong choice.  Waiting around for months at a time for the occasional great game, nearly all of which are made by Nintendo, while the other consoles just get all sorts of great stuff has NEVER been fun.  15 years of this **** (and counting) so that Super Mario 64 has no load times was totally not worth it at all.
 
NES, SNES, GB/GBC, GBA, DS --> normal and healthy third party support.  Anything that does not compare to this is unacceptable and a failure.  Any decision that directly caused such a failure was also unacceptable and a mistake.  That's the way I look at it based on my priorities.

Looking at the success of the DS I am now convinced that third parties have no problem with cartridge development as long as it is cheap. I am curious to see what kind of format the Wii successor will  utilize. I would love to see how the market would react if Nintendo were to return to cartridges. Somthing like a bank card that is similar to what the TG16 used in its day.
 
 

[NWR_insanolord]

You could have FMVs and CD audio or you could have no load times, but not both. In my opinion, Nintendo made the absolute right choice.

Well actually the choice is you can have FMV and CD audio and amazing third party support or you can have no load times and practically no third party support at all.  In that case I think they made the absolute wrong choice.  Waiting around for months at a time for the occasional great game, nearly all of which are made by Nintendo, while the other consoles just get all sorts of great stuff has NEVER been fun.  15 years of this **** (and counting) so that Super Mario 64 has no load times was totally not worth it at all.
 
NES, SNES, GB/GBC, GBA, DS --> normal and healthy third party support.  Anything that does not compare to this is unacceptable and a failure.  Any decision that directly caused such a failure was also unacceptable and a mistake.  That's the way I look at it based on my priorities.

From a business perspective, it was the wrong choice. From a creative one, it was the right choice. The second one is a lot more important to me than the first. I'm sure if Nintendo had it to do all over again they'd go with CDs, but I'm glad they did what they did. I like to see Nintendo do well financially, but what I really care about is the quality of their software. Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are two of my favorite games ever, and they would have been significantly worse, as would countless other titles, if the N64 had used CDs.

[Mop it up]

I don't think it can be so simplified as to say that if Nintendo had used CDs for the Nintendo 64, it would have been the market leader for that generation. There are a lot of reasons why both companies and consumers chose the PlayStation so simply using CDs would not have been a magical cure-all. First of all, Nintendo charged higher royalties than both Sony and Sega, which would have still made the PlayStation a better choice than a CD Nintendo 64. Also, a lot of companies hated Nintendo for their controlling ways, and even though they were more lenient by the time the Nintendo 64 launched, the PlayStation had no restrictions. One such company was Square, who I believe publicly insulted Nintendo, and likely would have still released all their games exclusively on the PlayStation. Without Final Fantasy VII and all of Square's other titles, there's no way the CD Nintendo 64 would be the market leader, especially in Japan, though it probably would have ended up closer than it was. Then there's the controller, which, after Sony slapped on the two analogue sticks and rumble, most people considered it superior to Nintendo's three-pronged monstrosity (I'm not one of them though).

It's easy to look back and see why Nintendo should have chose CDs, but take a step back to 1995 and look at it from that perspective. Up to that point, no CD system had been very successful; the closest is the Sega CD which could maybe be considered a moderate success, but things like the Atari Jaguar, CD-i, 3DO, etc all failed miserably. Neither the Saturn or PlayStation were selling very well either, so it's easy to see why Nintendo would stick with the medium that had brought them much success up to that point.

What if the N64 was a cart/CD combo?

It almost was a combo system... sort of. The 64DD was revealed before the Nintendo 64 launched, and was originally scheduled to launch close to the N64's launch. Although the 64DD's disks were still far smaller than CDs, they could store more data than the N64's cartridges (at that time) and were cheaper to produce. Supposedly, part of the reason the add-on as created was to address concerns of low space and production costs, but I don't know if that's true or not. What I do know is, the 64DD had amazing potential, and if its hardware were integrated into the N64 itself and its disks were used instead of the cartridges, it might have fared a little better in the marketplace.

[Chozo Ghost]

The 64DD ultimately did come out for near the end of the N64's life, but only in Japan and there were very few games which made use of it. The 64DD used magneto-optical disc which basically is like how Floppy disks work, but the 64DD was capable of like 100mb or something so they were like Zip disks.

Although they didn't have as much space as CDs they did have the advantage of being rewritable, which would have meant that users could save their games and created content directly to it instead of needing a memory card. It would have been a cool feature if Nintendo had made a Mario Paint game that made use of it (which they actually were planning on doing but ultimately never did).

I remember looking at Nintendo Power magazines as a kid and reading about all these awesome games that were in the works for the N64 (whose names I have now forgotten) but eventually most of them ended up being cancelled. It was sad...

[Kytim89]

This is slightly off topic, but would anyone have a problem with me creating two threads about Wii 2 launch titles and Ideas for the next Starfox?

[Chozo Ghost]

An alternate question would be: if the N64 were CD based would it have been the A+ critically acclaimed system that it was?

When you add on a CD-Rom drive you then have to deal with things like load times, and the extra space would have been filled with bullshit FMV crap as opposed to quality gameplay. I have no doubt there would have been more games and 3rd parties would have stayed on board, but quantity isn't everything.

[NWR_insanolord]

There's no reason you couldn't have quality gameplay and lousy FMVs, but the load times would have been unavoidable.

[Mop it up]

the 64DD was capable of like 100mb or something so they were like Zip disks.

They were 64MB, which just so happens to be the same as the largest size N64 cartridge created.

It would have been a cool feature if Nintendo had made a Mario Paint game that made use of it (which they actually were planning on doing but ultimately never did).

They did release those, as the Mario Artist series.

An alternate question would be: if the N64 were CD based would it have been the A+ critically acclaimed system that it was?

This was already answered earlier in the thread: Nintendo's creative vision is one if the things which led them to use cartridges, so if they had used CDs, it means that they would have had completely different games in mind. There's no way to know how good these hypothetical games would have been, but it's hard to imagine they would be better than what Nintendo created on the N64.

[TJ Spyke]

This is slightly off topic, but would anyone have a problem with me creating two threads about Wii 2 launch titles and Ideas for the next Starfox?

IMO, way too early as we don't even know what year it will come out and no developers have announced or hinted at games for it.

[Chozo Ghost]

One such company was Square, who I believe publicly insulted Nintendo, and likely would have still released all their games exclusively on the PlayStation.

I don't think that's right. Are you sure you aren't thinking of another company? It always seemed to me that Square and Nintendo had really close relations, remember they even went so far as to work together to collaborate on Super Mario RPG, and that game I think came out in 1995, so it wasn't far from when the N64 launched and everyone abandoned Nintendo.

I think the reason Square moved on was because they wanted more storage space which they could fill up with FMV and voice acting. I've played FF games on the SNES and FF games on the PS1/PS2 and there's a world of difference between them. The Playstation games are basically just interactive movies that's how bad the FMV sequences in them are. I don't know why, but obviously this was the direction they seemed to want to take their franchise and obviously they couldn't do it on cartridges. I don't think its because they suddenly did a 180 in their relationship with Nintendo which was very close not that long before with Super Mario RPG.

I remember in an old Nintendo Power magazine Square was originally on the N64 "dream team" and there was even some pictures of an FF game that was supposed to be for the N64 but later on was abandoned.

ETA: I checked on Wikipedia and SMRPG actually came out in 1996, so that's only a few months before the N64 launched. That just shows Square and Nintendo were close just months prior to their split.

[Mop it up]

It's hard to find Internet accords of things that happened in the late 90's, but I definitely remember it being someone from Square (probably the director of Final Fantasy VII) who criticized more than just the N64's cartridges, but also Nintendo's marketing strategy as well.

I remember in an old Nintendo Power magazine Square was originally on the N64 "dream team" and there was even some pictures of an FF game that was supposed to be for the N64 but later on was abandoned.

That was nothing more than a tech demo using characters from Final Fantasy III/VI, used to experiment with the N64 hardware. Square never actually had a Final Fantasy game in development for the N64.

[Stratos]

There is no such thing as Final Fantasy 64. That was not even developed for the N64 hardware. It is a common misunderstanding. It is actually known as Final Fantasy SGI Demo. SGI helped Nintendo with the N64 hardware so it was assumed this was related. Square never had plans for an N64 Final Fantasy.

[Mop it up]

It was the same hardware, it was just a work-in-progress version of what became the Nintendo 64.

[Ian Sane]

An alternate question would be: if the N64 were CD based would it have been the A+ critically acclaimed system that it was?

Despite what some Nintendo fans think, the Playstation is generally regarded as a critically acclaimed system.  So I would assume the N64 would remain so as well.  One thing to note is that if the N64 was CD based, we would never know what Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time as cartridge based games would have been like.  I highly doubt that playing Nintendo's classic N64 games with load times would have made us declare them to be horribly flawed.  With no frame of reference you wouldn't notice.  Yeah, if we played OoT with load times before you entered each dungeon NOW it would be come across as inferior.  But then?  The thrill of Zelda in 3D would completely overshadow it.  Plus with it being the norm in the industry you would get used to it like, you know, all the Playstation owners did.
 
At the time the N64 was revealed the assumption among my group of friends was that the reason Nintendo went with carts was because it gave them control.  The carts were proprietary, they owned them, and they controlled and sold them.  Nintendo does not own CDs so they did like the idea of having to pay for the rights to use them.  They didn't like how a third party could obtain CDs from manufacturers aside from Nintendo.
 
Considering that Nintendo did not go immediately with the DVD standard on the Gamecube I think this theory is very plausible.  It fits Nintendo like a glove while the load times issue seems a little too feel goody to a cynic like me.  What is more believable?  That Nintendo don't go with CDs for essentially artistic reasons or because they didn't want anyone else to get a piece of the pie?  Remember these are the guys who during the NES days required exclusivity from third parties and limited them to five games a year.  They like control and don't like to share.
 
I have similar theories about their stubborness with online gaming last gen.  They don't control the internet.  All sorts of ISPs and such would make money off their console without them getting a piece.  Can't support HD or they might help sell TVs where again, they would get no piece of the action.  They'll "give in" when they know they cannot possibly continue to hold out.  They agreed to play ball regarding optical discs and online gaming only when it was clear that not doing so would completely sink their product and it became a matter of self-preservation.  Next gen they will support HDTVs but they will grumble as they do so and it will only be because they know if they don't, they're probably sunk.

[NWR_insanolord]

The N64's cartirdges (and the GameCube's mini discs) were used because of their lower or nonexistent load times and because they made piracy harder.

Stuff like lack of HD support and their slowness in terms of online implementation aren't so much control as the fact that Nintendo didn't care about those features. Up until the 3DS, Nintendo designed hardware based on what they themselves wanted to do with it, with no regard for what anyone else might care about. I'm not defending that attitude or saying it's any better than what you accuse them of doing, just clarifying what Nintendo was doing.

[Chozo Ghost]

Insanolord is right. CD based systems like the original Playstation were notoriously easy to pirate on as all one essentially needed was a CD burner, and those were becoming common with computers at that time. But N64 carts aren't something you can buy a blank spindle of. You'd have to pretty much own your own factory to make them, but even then it might not have been possible due to their complexity.

[Mop it up]

What is more believable?  That Nintendo don't go with CDs for essentially artistic reasons or because they didn't want anyone else to get a piece of the pie?

Why can't it be both? Nintendo aren't a single person, they are one large company with hundreds (thousands?) of employees who all have their own visions and opinions. Quite a bit of the Nintendo 64 hardware was designed around Super Mario 64, so I'm pretty sure game designers like Miyamoto wanted the use of cartridges as much as the corporate side of Nintendo.

[Chozo Ghost]

Miyamoto has always taken a minimalist approach to voice acting and FMV in his games. If that sort of thing is there at all its only very sparingly. So from his perspective cartridges are the way to go because his games are all about the gameplay and there's no FMV sequences you have to sit through. Although for the first time ever you heard Mario speak saying things like "Woohoo! and "Here we go!" and so on. N64 carts were capable of that much at least. They just weren't able to have 2 hours of FMV on them like many playstation games did.

[Mop it up]

Well, technically they were, but it would have had to use a large capacity, expensive N64 cartridge, and be heavily compressed, making it really low quality.