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Wave race was legit. I still think about that game and I’m an old gamer
We are old, but it was a great generation.
Its crazy how much graphics evolved during that time period, just two years later we got this:
I’m still impressed by the way wave race feels, not going to lie.
When Sony saw Crash Bandicoot running on a PS1 for the first time, they had no idea how the PS1 actually was able to run it.
When even the developers of the system you are using have no idea of how a program is running on their new system, they you know you have some advanced stuff:
I’m 3:30 in and they’re just rambling. Who makes this kind of content?
I know the story because I’ve seen this video where the developers actually talk about how they did it. Watch it instead.
Karl Smallwood makes this content, some like it, others don’t.
I never had an N64, but my buddy across the street did. Waverace 64 was incredible for its time.
I remember going over to a kid’s house that lived up the street from my cousin. He had Pilotwings on Super Nintendo like right after it released. And he had a big screen TV!
My god man, you would not believe how picture perfect those pixels the size of a finger tip were.
Oh man you just took me back. I was dirt poor as a kid and my mom always busted her ass to get us the latest Nintendo, but we usually only got a couple games. We rented and borrowed the rest.
Anyway.
I went with my step brother to his grandpa’s house one day. He said nothing to prepare me for the glory I was about to see. When we came through the door his grandpa greeted us and said, “Jason, take your brother to the game room.”
We walked down into the basement and there in the coolest, most badass, teen movie room, was this giant rear projection TV. There on the floor sat a console I had never seen before. The original PlayStation with the original controllers and Nascar Racing. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I swear to god I said, “OH MY GOD IT LOOKS REAL!” We played Tomb Raider. I just kept jumping into the pool. Mortal Kombat Trilogy, man what a game.
That Christmas two of my closest friends got the N64. One showed me Doom, the other Mario 64.
I ended up with the N64, my best friend got the PlayStation.
I’d love to go back for a day just to hang out with him. I wish he’d lived to see the graphics of today. Shit, if he’d made it long enough to see The Last of Us I’d be stoked.
This was shit graphics even back in 1996 because it only uses primary or fully saturated colors. It’s “dev art”, made by someone with no artistic talent. Or maybe made for 4 year old kids. I missed out on a lot of games with good gameplay because I just can’t stand on this abomination of a color palette.
The worst thing? When games actually went with a more pastel or naturalistic color palette, moronic games journalists would say the colors look “drab” or some shit.
You’re a wacky little guy, aren’t you?
I just want to comment to say realism is not good graphics, even if that’s all the AAA studios aim for because the executives have no artistic sense. I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but just looking more “real” doesn’t make it better. Vibrant saturated colors have a utility too, if they’re used well.
The first time I interacted with water and it did something in response instead of being static blew my mind.
Seeing my own reflection in a game hurt my brain.
wait what game has water effects with water reflections?
I still remember seeing this for the first time, absolute mind blower for sure back then.
You’ll be hard pressed to find any games that have better water physics than this game.
I loved how the water was a part of the course, just like the track. It never changed no matter how many times you play it. My fastest times were based on knowing where the waves are going to be as I’m coming around a corner.
Only issue with the technology is that the waves were not dynamic; they were deterministic/the same every race.
From a speedrunners’ perspective, that’s a blessing, not an issue!
If you played multiplayer, that made it even more fun. Being in first place meant you’d trigger certain waves, but then that could fuck up or really help someone behind you.
That’s true. They triggered different waves depending on your location.
But I’m willing to bet any recent games that focus on water do the same thing, just with bigger areas, and a few more trigger types.
Random seeds are pretty easy to do these days.
Yes they are. Not what I was talking about though
For real. They really went all out on the water.
Weird… the game has barely anything to do with water in the first place!
Wow those waves are GORGEOUS for N64 graphics. Dang! I remember I loved Blue Storm on the GameCube. I spent a while just moving that little bubble around the main menu hahaha. It’s still gorgeous!
It’s hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I’m an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother’s Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it’s SMB3 and I’m holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters… The music gaining in complexity…
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7… Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps… But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
I laugh every time I see the words “literally unplayable” because of minor headache
Started with Atari 2600, now VR simrig racing.
I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.
Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn’t interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.
I feel it’s similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.
My biggest “wow” effect was Gran Turismo (1). The moving reflections on the cars!
～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
I legit thought that was a pre-rendered video until I saw them crash in the same place I did.
And yet in most of my games for Switch they can’t even do half-assed mirror reflections :(
N64 was doing that years earlier with Top Gear Rally
I think the next couple jumps were very good too.
Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.
Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.
After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.
After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.
Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.
The closest I’ve felt to those monumental leaps in recent history was the first time I played VR. It feels similarly mind-blowing.
VR is great, but it’s just so hard to convince people with a trailer, it really is something that you have to experience, I’m glad there was a VR arcade here for me to try it out.
It’s just a shame that only one company wants to bring it to the masses, and they’re one of the worst companies I can think of.
Although the last few years have certainly given them competition on that front, if not the VR one.
Meta will brick my headset unless I tell them my birthday within 30 days, and just by using the device it links to multiple emails, my phone number, phone, and laptops. The OS feels cooked to grab data and many of the TOS agreements say it explicitly.
But at the same time it’s under £300 and doesn’t even need a PC or PS5 to run it.
A PSVR2 with console will set you back just under £1000. A Valve Index setup with good PC is probably going to be close to £2500.
It’s not hard to see why the Quest outsells all the others by miles.
Very true. I’m definitely softer on Zuckerberg and his company after owning a couple oculus headsets, my misery is less, I live another day. It feels like doing something I know I shouldn’t do but I can’t help but enjoy it.
I’m still mad that Microsoft is deciding to just brick WMR devices. It’s such a scum move. They should require unlocking and open-sourcing the firmware at that point.
“But muh companee seecrets :(” Clearly you’re done with them, M$ / HP / Samsung / Asus and friends!
I’m happy Monado is a thing but right now it just feels like a very big “if” for these devices, and I refuse to give facebook any money for any reason.
At least there’s hope with possibly lightly used Vive kits or something? Idk…
What? I assume you’re referencing Meta, but Valve cooked their own VR solution years and years ago (Valve Index) and it’s pretty much the best one out there, and the software gets an update about once a week.
Yes, but it’s not really for the masses is it? It costs over a grand which is a big ask for hardware that few people actually make games for.
I vividly remember when I saw the first game with filtered textures on a vodoo 1 gpu. The individual pixels… were gone! It was mind blowing :)
My first videogame machine was for black and white TVs and had 10 games, and all of them bar the target shooting game were variants of Pong.
PS2 was the last really big graphical leap. My fucking mind was blown by GTA3.
Since then we’ve had higher resolution, normal maps, physically based rendering and now raytracing, but none of it really feels that huge when moving from one gen to the next. PS2 came out and everything from before was obsolete, instantly. It even had backwards compatibility but I think I used it exactly once just to see the texture “improvements” (they actually just blurred them). This gen I’ve used it all the time.
For me it was call of duty 3. Right before one of the most epic runs of a series of all time. But the graphics blew me away. Some of the in-game graphics looked just like old war videos. It was crazy how real everything felt.
I’m an elder millennial (1984)
As a millennial born a few years before you, I don’t really appreciate the “elder” wording you used there. I’d threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don’t think that’d be good for either of us.
I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend’s house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago… Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics… It was mind-blowing.
Also being from '84, I can absolutely relate. Although I mostly skipped ps1 for the N64. Super Mario 64 was a masterpiece.
I’m from around the same time and the amount of content to get through nowadays is insane by comparison. I could easily go and pick up a game that’s 10 years old and enjoy without feeling that old, I mean, GTA5 is 10 years old now, and Skyrim’s 13 years old.
In 1996 Mario 64 came out but if you went back 10 years people were still playing the first Super Mario Bros.
I’m a bit older than you but I feel that games have stagnated. It’s the same games over and over again with some exceptions.
Some of y’all are gunna learn today that on this same system there was StarWars Pod Racing, and you could use 2 controllers, one for each engine. You’re welcome.
I am one of the lucky 10 000.
I always played podracer on my HOTAS like a pleb.
I wish I had known that back in the day. It was one of my favorite games on n64.
Yeah, I don’t think I knew about the two controller thing. I guess with emulation, PC releases, and dual sticks it wouldn’t be necessary now
A Switch with the controller disconnected gets you pretty darn close to the same feeling these days.
Good point
You could dual stick Goldeneye as well.
That was the “kismet” config right? I remember you could still aim and shoot with the second controller during cutscenes…so it was possible to kill Bond or other characters during the short scene after beating a mission. 😂
I had the PC version growing up. So, I mostly played with a Gravis Stinger, or a that weird Nintendo branded joystick. The yaw was how you rotated your engines.
Honestly, it’s still impressive that they were even able to do that on the N64.
I really love the atmosphere and ambiance of Wave Race 64
