N64 graphics still look gorgeous almost 30 years later

I agree OP. Something about the look and they usually hold up better than PS1 and Saturn. At least to me. I always preferred the look. Star fox, wave race, Zelda still look good, can depend on game obviously, mind you I liked the controller too. Curious to see how the analogue 3d handles things, retrottink 4k in needed.
 
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Was amazing at the time, but I can't say I think it has aged very well.
 
Doom 64 was the best looking game of that generation IMO.

It's also devoid of any "N64 issues". It has no blur, no fog/pop-up, no lowres textures and runs at a steady 30fps.

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I didn't like N64 graphics that much when it released and I still don't care for them. I greatly prefer the Saturn and PS1 graphics to the blurry N64 ones. That's why I owned a Saturn and a PS1 at the time.

Even now I haven't bought games like the Turok remastered games and Shadowman remastered, because I still don't care too much for the N64 graphics. I did buy the Powerslave Exhumed remastered game not too long ago.
 
I'm more fond of PS1 visuals, the warping image and dithering made it look like there was more detail than was actually present and masked many of the issues of the time nicely. N64 was very blurry even back then and textures look awful.
 
As someone who still has a fuckload of N64 games & hardware including the stupid obscure stuff like 64DD that i got back in the day. LOL hell no the N64 has aged terribly they were serviceable back then as they were played via crt but now they look like blurry utter shit unless you go through huge lengths to either apply hardware mods or use a decent scaler. Non polygon games fair a bit better but N64's low poly blurry low textures look rancid now, out of all the nintendo systems it's probably my least favourite with it's weak japanese 3rd party library.

It's weird that in recent years al of a sudden people simping for N64
 
WaveRace for sure, due to to the amazing water tech at the time. Maybe add Conker to that.

Otherwise, PS1 games look much better to me. We need more modern games with prerendered backgrounds!!
 
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Early 3D graphics never actually looked good, people were just impressed that they worked at all.

The jump from Super Nintendo's 2D pixel art to early 3D was the biggest downgrade in art direction in gaming history.
 
Both of those systems you mentioned blew N64 graphics out of the water. There were some good games on N64, but if we are talking about graphics…hell no. N64 looks like someone stacked a bunch of fuzzy cardboard boxes together to make objects and then painted those objects.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Indeed

The anti-aliasing and texture filtering fixes a lot of what made PS1 and Saturn 3D games look so rough.

By contrast Saturn's 3D games (barring the 3D fighters with flat backgrounds) look frankly hideous by comparison.

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I prefer the PS1 pixelated look to the blurry smudged N64 look by a mile. I even quite like this early 32 bit 3D look in certain games with a good artistic direction (not all, most look like shit let's be honest).
 
Yeah they were amazing back then and still look quite pretty to me, and I don't emulate.

I don't get the people saying those games looked like shit even back then, to me they look way better than anything 3D on the Saturn or the PSX.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
Background, I grew up with MegaDrive and SNES as a child and was hotly anticipating the N64 (mainly for Mario 64).

Once N64 was delayed to March 97 in the UK I gave up waiting and got a Saturn with NiGHTS, Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2 for Christmas 96. However Saturn was past its peak by then and never really improved after those 3 games. After some convincing by friends I eventually got a PS1 before moving on to Dreamcast.

Nintendo 64 completely passed me by, I played it in shops and at friend's houses now and again but largely ignored it.

After recently coming into possession of one, wow, this completely blows the Saturn and PS1 out of the water doesn't it.

It's a combination of texture filtering, dramatic shading and anti aliasing that does it for me. It really replicates the look of late 90s arcade games (Model 2 particularly) very well.

What do you guys think?


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needs more jpeg
 
TintoConCasera said:
Yeah they were amazing back then and still look quite pretty to me, and I don't emulate.

I don't get the people saying those games looked like shit even back then, to me they look way better than anything 3D on the Saturn or the PSX.
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However, if we ask how much of the Saturn and PS1 library you explored, you'll say you played some games at a friend's house.
 
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They haven't aged well on the original hardware but newer developments like the Render96 ray-tracing in Super Mario 64 or the Mario Kart 64 HD texture pack look awesome. It's close to how the games were represented in magazines ads back in the 90s.



 
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LordOcidax said:
Probably young people. I remember when the first gameplay of Mario 64 was revealed…
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Yeah my guess is that it's either that, or people who never had it back then and which first contact with the console is playing those games on the Switch emulator on their 4K displays.

On a CRT they look great, and I can't imagine anyone on the year 2000 trying out Jet Force Gemini or Perfect Dark and going "yeah this looks like shit".
 
TintoConCasera said:
Yeah my guess is that it's either that, or people who never had it back then and which first contact with the console is playing those games on the Switch emulator on their 4K displays.

On a CRT they look great, and I can't imagine anyone on the year 2000 trying out Jet Force Gemini or Perfect Dark and going "yeah this looks like shit".
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This… By that time Nintendo was in the top of the hill when it comes to graphics.
 
Geometric-Crusher said:
However, if we ask how much of the Saturn and PS1 library you explored, you'll say you played some games at a friend's house.
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I own both systems. I appreciate the high framerate on many of the Saturn games but they still look worse and imo don't have anything at the level of the N64.

I was never a big fan of how full 3D games looked on the PS1, bar a few exceptions like MGS, Megaman Legends or Vagrant Story. Imo their best looking games are either 2D or use pre-rendered backgrounds which can look amazing.

LordOcidax said:
This… By that time Nintendo was in the top of the hill when it comes to graphics.
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Yeah I thought that was the consensus back then.
 
They did a lot with what they had back then.

The thing I appreciate about old games is the developers had to throw away everything that wasn't important.
 
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Blurry image quality due to the RGB output being skipped, bad framerate, poor textures, MIDI sound much worse than the competition due to expensive cartridges, it was passable back in the day but today pffffff.
 
No. The bleeding effect on CRTs provided more than enough aliasing. The blur on an N64 was like a thin layer of Vaseline on top of that. Even with polygon warping (which was often hidden by the low resolution of CRTs) the best looking PS1 games were more impressive than N64 ones.
 
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