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[QLQ]

Nice troll account.

It didn't get the first one. You correct me and that makes me a troll account? Gtfo

 

[Jubenhimer]

You shouldn't look at it as "American PC games" but rather "Western support", because in that context, yes, the N64 and OG Xbox absolutely have that in common. You have DMA Design (now Rockstar), Interplay, THQ, Acclaim, iD Software, Codemasters, Midway etc. all throwing a lot of support behind the system, not to mention even ones like Psygnosis (post-Sony acquiring them) supporting it with various ports of Western IP as well.

In terms of Japanese support, aside from Nintendo and arguably Treasure, it was quite light or token at best. Namco did like 1-2 games in total for N64 which paled in comparison to the PS1 versions, Squaresoft obviously were MIA, Konami gave them sloppy 3D Castlevania games, Capcom gave them less than a handful of games including a super-late port of RE2 farmed out to Angel Studios, I can't even remember if Tecmo had anything for it (maybe some 3D puzzle game with a construction worker, I think it's called Charlie's 3D Blast? Maybe that was Kemco), list goes on.

It was an interesting dichotomy within Nintendo that generation because while NCL (Japan) had convinced themselves that the N64 didn't need third party support, Nintendo of America put a lot of effort into getting whoever they could to support the N64. I think that's reflected in the third party lineup for the system, because support from Japanese publishers was pretty non-existent compared to support from Western publishers. And while the PlayStation was still leagues ahead in terms of support worldwide, the N64 fared better in terms of western support than people give it credit for.

Ironically, the Xbox did a lot better with Japanese support than the N64 did, with companies like Capcom, Tecmo, Sega, and Konami regularly supporting it (PS2 was still the leader obviously, but the Xbox wasn't too bad on this front either) and it had even better western support than the N64 as well.

That top 30 is like 27 Nintendo games with a few Star Wars in the mix...Western support was there, but it's not like they benefited much from the lack of third-party Japanese hits, people still bought the console to play Nintendo games. Actually this may have been the start of Nintendo consoles doing poorly for anything not Nintendo except few exceptions.

Nintendo games often sell crazy numbers though, due in part to how tightly integrated their software and hardware are with each other. I can't say anything about the N64 in this regard, but third parties have seen success on Nintendo hardware even after the SNES. Nintendo games doing so well doesn't necessarily mean third parties sell badly. It really depends on the success of the system itself.

 

[Xaeroxcore666]

Exactly, that was wonderful time with every console having their own very distingtive high quality exclusives, n64 had plenty musthaves on its own, mario64, re4, goldeneye, perfect dark, banjo-kazooie, banjo-tooie just to name a few, we talking well above 90meta of quality, not ur random 85metascore title

Dreamcast had also lotta musthaves and actual killer apps which made history. DC has 16 games with 90 or above metascore vs 16...the same number for N64!!! But DC lived less than half the lifetime of N64 on the market...So go wonder what could had achieved if it would had lived at least 1 or 2 years more... And yes, before you say it, ik now Ocarina is Number 1, but Soul Calibur is 2nd, or Third, not sure why when you look the whole list now PS1 Pro Skater 2, which has 98 metascore, is not showing...By the way, some of the PS1 titles above 90 metascore are also available on DC, and improved to be the best versions from that era, like THPS2 itself , THPS1, RE3, Street Fighter Alpha 3...So, no random titles.

OP is full of failed mediocre systems ..lol

Look, it´s the 12 yrs old Sony fan roaming around....

 

[PeteBull]

Dreamcast had also lotta musthaves and actual killer apps which made history. DC has 16 games with 90 or above metascore vs 16...the same number for N64!!! But DC lived less than half the lifetime of N64 on the market...So go wonder what could had achieved if it would had lived at least 1 or 2 years more... And yes, before you say it, ik now Ocarina is Number 1, but Soul Calibur is 2nd, or Third, not sure why when you look the whole list now PS1 Pro Skater 2, which has 98 metascore, is not showing...By the way, some of the PS1 titles above 90 metascore are also available on DC, and improved to be the best versions from that era, like THPS2 itself , THPS1, RE3, Street Fighter Alpha 3...So, no random titles.

Look, it´s the 12 yrs old Sony fan roaming around....

I loved dreamcast here, i kinda knew its gonna fail so i never bought it myself, instead i played it fanatically durning summertime when i borrowed it from my buddy(he got my ps2 instead, so both of us benefited greatly ;p ).

 

[cinnamonandgravy]

my first thought was no

and after reading everything, its still no

 

[RoboFu]

Wut?? No

 

[Xaeroxcore666]

I loved dreamcast here, i kinda knew its gonna fail so i never bought it myself, instead i played it fanatically durning summertime when i borrowed it from my buddy(he got my ps2 instead, so both of us benefited greatly ;p ).

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

The only caveat I'd make is that Konami, among the major players in Japan at the time, was perhaps the only one that provided at least a minimally reasonable level of support for the Nintendo 64. You mentioned Castlevania (which were actually pretty bad games, but still a serious attempt nonetheless), but they also made Goemon (Legend of the Mystical Ninja), Hybrid Heaven (an interesting experiment that mixed traditional RPG gameplay with 3D fighting in the style of Tekken/Virtua Fighter), several sports franchises like ISS, Nagano Winter Olympics '98, NHL Blades of Steel, Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball, International Track & Field and NBA In the Zone; Rakuga Kids, and a pretty bad fighting game called Deadly Arts. Not to mention Hudson, which at the time was also strongly supporting Nintendo consoles.

Oh man, I completely forgot about the Goemon games xD. Probably because last time I tried playing one, the robot boss fight pissed me off to the point I stopped playing, and I've tried blocking out the memory (this was Goemon 64).

In USA:

Xbox (OG)'s top 10 doesn't have the same overlap.
You could draw some parallel between GoldenEye 007 and Halo (multiple games) and say Star Wars shifted toward the american console (Knights of the Old Republic I&II and Battlefront I&II were hits), even though Star Wars Rogue Squadron II was also successful on GC but that's it.
There is no parallel with Super Mario 64/Donkey Kong 64, Mario Kart 64/Diddy Kong Racing, Zelda, Smash Bros, Star Fox and of course Pokemon.

EDIT:
As for Sega mass exodus post-Dreamcast, Sonic and Super Monkey Ball franchises found home on Nintendo platforms.

IMO you can't just go by Top 10 lists or expect exact parallels of SM64/DK64 etc. to the Xbox, and then use that to dismiss parallels.

I'd still say a strong through line of both systems is the Western support they received; I'd actually say the Dreamcast benefited a lot from the N64 in that respect, and of course the Xbox benefited from Dreamcast given it was such a spiritual successor in many ways.

This is something I'll never quite understand. Despite Sega investing heavily in the OG Xbox, most of those titles failed badly, like Panzer Dragoon Orta, Sega GT 2002, Jet Set Radio Future, Shenmue II, Toejam & Earl III, The House of the Dead III, Crazy Taxi III, and Gunvalkyrie. And yet, despite their poor performance, all of them remained exclusive to the OG Xbox. Meanwhile, as you mentioned, Sonic and Super Monkey Ball alone sold far more than any of those Xbox titles, arguably even Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2, which, despite launching on a system that completely ignored online functionality, still had reasonable success. And yet, all the GameCube games ended up going multiplatform for later releases.

A similar situation happened with LucasArts. Even though Rogue Squadron II and III were successful, and they released a few other Star Wars and other franchises titles with decent sales, they eventually decided to almost completely drop support for the GameCube.

These decisions felt more like industry politics than purely technical or economic choices.

I think SEGA simply didn't want to bet the farm on one given system that gen because even tho Dreamcast died before PS2 really took off (with its library), they probably still thought that gen could've played out closer than it did sales-wise between PS2, GameCube and Xbox. A lot of people did, in fact.

That, and there wasn't a genuine multiplatform engine with wide support available that gen until RenderWare hit the scene, but SEGA (and most Japanese devs) didn't use RenderWare; they went with proprietary in-house engines and those engines were seemingly platform-specific. It might've actually been even more unique than that, as in specific games just had their own engine environments bespoke to them that'd maybe get re-used in parts by other games, or maybe not.

Stuff like RenderWare or even multi-game reusable in-house engines just feels like it was a quite Western thing during the late '90s and early '00s.

How is the Xbox a failed console? It's a first gen product made in essentially a year that came in 2nd place in it's generation.

PlayStation coming out and selling 100M is not the norm.

As somebody else said Xbox changed how we played certain genres (Halo is ultimately the first big modern shooter. It took what stuff like Goldeneye did and evolved it and took a genre that never had much console representation and made it one of the biggest things in gaming), changed the direction of console hardware, brought mainstream online gaming to consoles, and in general shaped the future of gaming for nearly 2 decades.

Well, not by itself that's for sure. PS2, Wii, DS and PS3 contributed a hell of a lot too.

But yeah, OG Xbox did contribute a lot to gaming, same with 360. Everything just started slowly falling apart with Xbox once 8th gen started, and it's basically a dead console brand this gen, or in a zombie-like state at best.

Yup, a failed system even MS shelved it early. Also coming second when your competition is GameCube is nothing to be proud of. It sold ~25m units , GC ~21m vs PS2 160m units

Yup Xbox, N64, GameCube...etc are failures

Not a good idea to measure a console's impact simply by its sales numbers. Or a game's, for that matter. Sales only tell one part of the story.

As in the SNES, Gameboy and NES didn't have a lot of Western support? I'm not seeing anything special about the N64 in terms of non-japanese games being big there or carrying the system.

Yes those other Nintendo systems had Western support, but they were always outshined by Japanese devs since Japanese devs actually supported those systems heavily. That wasn't the case for N64, so in that vacuum the Western support got some room to shine on the stage, as it were, than in gens before that.

It was an interesting dichotomy within Nintendo that generation because while NCL (Japan) had convinced themselves that the N64 didn't need third party support, Nintendo of America put a lot of effort into getting whoever they could to support the N64. I think that's reflected in the third party lineup for the system, because support from Japanese publishers was pretty non-existent compared to support from Western publishers. And while the PlayStation was still leagues ahead in terms of support worldwide, the N64 fared better in terms of western support than people give it credit for.

Yep; due to the absence of high-profile Japanese support, Western 3P had a lot of room to shine on N64 that they didn't get on PS1 because, usually, on PS1 a Japanese 3P would outdo them in the genre spaces typically present on console at that time.

Like sure, a Western 3P would've put out a better console FPS, but FPS on console was quite niche during 5th gen in terms of being one of the "big" genres, unless you were on N64, and even that was only a bigger genre post-GoldenEye, not prior.

Nintendo games often sell crazy numbers though, due in part to how tightly integrated their software and hardware are with each other. I can't say anything about the N64 in this regard, but third parties have seen success on Nintendo hardware even after the SNES. Nintendo games doing so well doesn't necessarily mean third parties sell badly. It really depends on the success of the system itself.

SEGA, IIRC, were actually the best-performing 3P on GameCube, thanks largely to Sonic. But that makes a lot of sense considering the audience crossover despite the 16-bit rivalry.

 

[Celine]

IMO you can't just go by Top 10 lists or expect exact parallels of SM64/DK64 etc. to the Xbox, and then use that to dismiss parallels.

I'd still say a strong through line of both systems is the Western support they received; I'd actually say the Dreamcast benefited a lot from the N64 in that respect, and of course the Xbox benefited from Dreamcast given it was such a spiritual successor in many ways.

Obviously a top 10 best selling games list is composed of just 10 games, a small size compared to the entire library even for the anemic N64 library, however they are the most representative games that pushed the adoption of the console.
In fact, unit sales wise, those 10 games represents about 28.6% of all N64 software sales in U.S. based on NPD estimates so if one of the parallel exposed in the OP is how both N64 and Xbox OG were strongly carried by the U.S. market I'd say an analysis of the leading software [in the U.S. market] is of significance.

Surprised to see the pushback against the OP. I always thought the same thing, between the Rareware games, the PC ports and the big American presence..

PC games later ported to N64 represent a small subset of the N64 library.

Rareware offerings on Xbox (OG) pales compared to the one on N64 and I'd even say it's weaker than what Nintendo platforms received that generation.

Xbox (OG): Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Conker: Live & Reloaded.
Gamecube: Star Fox Adventures.
Game Boy Advance: Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, Sabre Wulf, Donkey Kong Country 2, Banjo-Pilot, It's Mr Pants and Donkey Kong Country 3.

Best selling/most popular Rare game of that generation: Star Fox Adventures.