Support NeoGAF

[cinnamonandgravy]

And yet Super Mario 64 remains the greatest game ever made. Never diminished from its perfect scores and just as magical when you boot it up today. I played it last week on NSO. Still wonderful.

blew my mind when it came out, but ill need to be 90 and have a hardcore neurodegenerative disease to truly enjoy it again

 

[buenoblue]

It's the same gap between Dark Souls and the Elden Ring. Or the gap between Diablo 3 and 4 (in fact, that one is a bit bigger). GTAV was also released 11 years ago so it's distance with GTA 6 will be similar.

These aren't major improvements really. Not much has changed. The time passed between them doesn't seem significant.

But the time between Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 felt like a century of advancements. When i was playing the latter on release date, the former was a relic of a prehistoric era and pretty much obsolete and retro. Can you say GTAV is a retro game nowadays?

Also, i know time runs faster when you are older but damn.

Yeah yeah everything is shit now I get it

 

[March Climber]

Angry_Megalodon I understand what you mean but you can't beat their nostalgia, the game is rigged.

The house(nostalgia) always wins. Always.

You will simply have to wait until 2044 when a new batch of people finally feel nostalgic about a game you're discussing.

 

[Krathoon]

We need another C&C Red Alert game that is batshit crazy.

 

[Ecotic]

I feel like there's mind-blowing leaps in environmental interactivity that would be similar to the leaps that we experienced each generation in the 90's, but the gains in technology necessary to pull them off are so vast to accomplish in time, that you would need something like 20 years of time to pass to realize them.

I remember in the early 2000's playing a first-person shooter and thinking one day you'd be able to shoot an assault rifle into a tree and have splinters flying off everywhere before the tree eventually snaps in two and falls down realistically. Photorealism is easy compared to being able to expect stuff like that on the regular.

 

[JordiENP]

When I saw Super Mario 64 at Toys r us it was the most magical feeling ever. Then I played ocarina of time without seeing any trailer after playing a link to the past for years.

 

[Dorago]

2009 vs 2019

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

2-3 years were a geological age in tech back then.
A game 2 years old felt like a generation prior. In 1994 Street Fighter II seemed archaic already. We got so many iterations of a title in such a short time, and every one was visibly improving upon its predecessor.

Today the gaming world is waiting with bated breath the DLC to a game that’s fundamentally the same as its 13yo originator.

 

[CamHostage]

Sure, but then again, the gap between Beauty and the Beast (with one main scene of CGI) and Toy Story (with all-CGI animation) was just 4 years; the gap between Toy Story and previous CGI animated cartoons was infinite because nothing else like it came before*.

We're talking about sudden revolutions of technology, and we only get those sudden revolutions every once in a great while; what comes after is evolution of the form, and it is rarely as formidable a jump once the technology matures.

That pioneering period of game technology was unusually active with radical revolutions of technology, from "missile sprites" to traditional 8/16 bit sprite blocks to polygons to graphics acceleration to textures to deferred rendering to PBR and all kinds of things in between. Now, we've figured out how to make games (or at least, we think we have the best way games to make games, and it's hard to think of alternatives even though some roads are untrodden out there,) and change is natural rather than ballistic.

The one constant was Mario, who was lucky enough to be of a brand surviving and thriving from these changes, capable of riding each wave in.

(*Technically, Toy Story's history as the "first" all-CGI feature-length movie is in contention; a movie called Cassiopia has other claims to historic milepoints in CGI animation, even though it didn't get distribution until a year later and is not nearly at the same production quality level.)

 

[Jack Package]

I was so, so lucky to be a kid in the golden age of gaming. Super Mario Bros was my first game. Without Mario, I'm not typing this post.
I will never forget the first time I got to play Mario 64 at home. Me, my sis, and my mum all round my wee tv, all of us with big daft smiles on our faces shouting "WOW!" at every little thing.

I still play it now, and I still marvel at it. Most Mario games make me feel like I'm 5 again and playing SMB for the first time, there's an honest to God magic about them no one else can replicate except Nintendo themselves with a handful of other titles.

 

[Dacvak]

And yet Super Mario 64 remains the greatest game ever made. Never diminished from its perfect scores and just as magical when you boot it up today. I played it last week on NSO. Still wonderful.

My fuckin dude.

 

[Hoddi]

I believe this gif is obligatory for these types of discussions.

It's also appropriate since SMB released closer to WWII than today.

 

[Guerilla Munch]

no tech advancement has given me the feeling I had playing Mario 64 for the first time at the Toys R Us demo kiosk, not even VR

 

[Trilobit]

Advancements felt bigger back then because we were still in the early days of gaming. As tech matures improvements become gradually lower.

We went from this

To the fucking moon in 60 years

And now we're going back there! Progress!

Imagine being a kid in the 60s fantasizing about what humans would do in space in the coming 60 years. And then you get teleported to the year 2024 and find this news article:

 

[Evil Smurf King]

I believe this gif is obligatory for these types of discussions.

Classic Gaf second post, keep the tradition alive

 

[Astral Dog]

I am more impressed that the gap between the release of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime was only 8 years which is crazy considering the leap in graphics and how adapting the 2D gameplay into 3D was a massive shot in the dark at the time. And even crazier when you think that with just a graphical update Metroid Prime Remastered just showed it is still as solid and as well designed as any top-tier modern game 20 years later. Truly incredible stuff.

Nintendo knows that their games need to be remembered and celebrated 10 years after the day of release,not for their graphics but because they were good, i can't wait to see Metroid Prime 2 remastered, since it was an even better sequel that unfortunately was ignored by most gamers, they better show up this time