"The N64 is an Excellent console, read why."

The Nintendo 64 is Nintendo’s follow up console to what is regarded by the majority of gamers as THE BEST game console ever: the Super Nintendo. Did nintendo knock the SNES off as the best console ever? Did they create a great follow up to the SNES? Did they create an average console? Or did they manage to wrap a turd in a plastic shell and pass it off as a console? You are about to find out….

Durability
Nintendo has a reputation for making “invincible” hardware. They also offer a LIFETIME warranty on all of their consoles, games and accessories.
My n64 has taken some harsh treatment over the years, from being dropped off the top of my TV onto the floor, to being stood on (60+ Kilograms of weight), and I have even been body slammed onto it (thanks to ShadowHunter), of course landing on the n64 wasn’t intended, but it still happened. Through all of this my n64 still works 5 years down the track and has never had any trouble working at all. I’m sure my N64 will still be working years and years after the time of me writing this review.

Sound
The N64 has received a fair amount of criticism about its sound capabilities. Nintendo opted to stick to cartridges rather than CD’s when they created the n64. While the actual sound capabilities of the Nintendo 64 are of CD quality, to actually have all sound at such a high quality would just about use all of the room on the entire cartridge, and leave no space for any actual game :P

The Nintendo 64 has had some really great music featured in games throughout it’s time. Jet Force Gemini featured some excellent and high quality orchestral scores, which are very, very well done.

Summed up, the N64 can do very high quality music, but because of the limited cartridge size (512 Megabits or 64 Megabytes is the size of the largest N64 cart to date, which was Resident Evil 2) a lot of developers have lowered sound and music quality, or used smaller sound files in midi format to be able to fit more in. So, you won’t be hearning many “real” songs with lyrics and all, there is still loads of excellent music to be heard, and music that is of good quality too.

Graphics
At the time that the Nintendo 64 was released, NOTHING looked as good. It was well ahead of the top PC’s of the time, and aeons ahead of it’s nearest competition, the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation. Sure in the early days a lot of the games featured simple textures, and low-polygon models, but this was soon to change as developers became more familiar with the N64’s hardware.

The release of the Expansion Pak later on in the Nintendo 64’s life was a brilliant idea. It increased the N64’s video ram from 4 Megabytes to 8. The graphics of games slowly improved, with some games offering a hi-res mode that worked only with the expansion pak, and some games eventually requiring the expansion pak to run (not just for improved graphics though, the expansion pak was used to do other things like improve enemy AI for example).

Some examples of Expansion pak enhanced games are Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Donkey Kong 64 and Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

The expansion pak brought the N64’s graphics to a new level, but didn’t exactly have people comparing it to the Dreamcast :P

Over time, the N64’s graphics just got better and better.

Overall the N64 was the best looking thing out at the time it came out, and still today looks great. It will still be a little while before people look at it’s graphics and laugh at them.

Games
The N64 has a few hundred games, which isn’t as many as most other consoles, but a good lot of them are fantastic (mostly 1st and 2nd party releases). The N64 has some of THE BEST games ever created on it, in a big variety of genres. Some noteworthy games are: Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Super Mario 64, Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, 1080 Snowboarding, Mario Kart 64, Wave Race 64, Ridge Racer 64, PilotWings 64, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Harvest Moon 64*, Paper Mario* and Ogre Battle 64* (* They never came out in Australia, but I hear they are quite good), Jet Force Gemini, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (not out yet, but I’ve seen a lot of it and it is looking to be great), Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong 64, Beetle Adventure Racing, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and F-Zero X to name a few. Who cares about having a lot of 3rd party support when you have so many great 1st and 2nd party games?

The N64 has loads of awesome games, but not a lot of 3rd party support. Almost every genre and type of game is covered, from all kinds of sports games (Baseball, Basketball, Soccer, Fishing and more) to First Person Shooters, Action, Adventure, Puzzle, Real Time Strategy and Racing. There are very few true RPG’s on the N64, and most of the RPG’s that it does have are poor. Overall the N64 has a great (though slightly on the small side) and varied library of games.

Controller
The N64 controller is very nice. It fells nice to hold and has plenty of buttons, which are well placed and also smartly placed.
The N64 controller has 3 handles, and two main positions for you to hold it.
The leftmost handle had a Digital (8 directional pad) on it, which is ok, but a little unresponsive and the left “shoulder” button, which is a bit like a gun trigger, and is positioned on the controller’s “shoulder”. The middle handle has a thumbstick (introduced in a console controller for the first time in the N64) and on the bottom has the “Z” trigger, which is placed like a gun trigger on the underside of the handle and lastly a Start button, mainly for pausing games. The rightmost prong is where it’s really at, with two main action buttons, A and B (which are the two biggest buttons), and 4 camera buttons (used for many other things) which are placed in a diamond shape, and are fairly small, then you have the right “shoulder” button, which is just like the left shoulder button, but on the right side duh :P

The most common position to hold the controller is left hand on the middle handle, and right hand on the right handle.

As I said, the N64 controller is well designed, comfortable, functional has plenty of buttons, and is pretty much better than good, but not an absolute dream to hold and use (unlike what the GameCube controller is shaping to be ;)

My only real problem with the N64 controller is the fact that after some serious long-term use the thumbstick gets a dead zone in the centre and gets a bit unresponsive. Luckily though, Nintendo has a lifetime warranty on the controllers (as with everything else) and with one phone call they will replace the thumbstick for free ^_^

Multiplayer
The N64 console has 4 controller ports in it, making for some great multiplayer possibilities.
Up until now 2 controller ports seemed to be the standard for consoles, but after the N64 the Dreamcast had 4 controller ports, the PS2 stupidly only has two (well actually this is just a ploy for Sony to make some extra money with people paying for multitaps), the Microsoft Xbox will have 4, as will the Nintendo GameCube.
With all these companies putting in 4 controller ports now they must have seen the success Nintendo had with four player games and realised 4 player games are a winner.

Some of the great N64 multiplayer games are:
<*>Goldeneye 007 (to this date is my favourite N64 multiplayer game, excellent First Person Shooting action)it’s just so damn fun you can play it all night, literally.
<*>Perfect Dark (apart from 4 friends, you can play with up to 8 simulant players, making for up to 12 player First Person Shooting action)
<*>Mario Kart (simple, but very addictive multiplayer, one of the N64’s first games, and still one of it’s greatest)
<*>Ridge Racer 64 (Very good when having a quick break from Goldeneye ;)
<*>Mario Tennis (Nintendo let Camelot develop this game, and it turned out to an absolute gem. It’s fast, furious, intense and damn fun. Mario Tennis is one of the best multiplayer games ever).
<*>F-Zero X (Insanely fast 4 player racing action, it’s very fun and addictive).
<*>Beetle Adventure Racing (One of the most fun, and underrated games of all time. Everyone should own this, but unfortunately, not many people do).

Game media
Nintendo decided to break away from cartridges, in about 1993 when they decided to develop the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) CD add-on. They approached Phillips, to help with the console, but then asked Sony and decided to stick with them. Near the end of the SNES CD’s completion Nintendo for some reason or another decided to get out of the project, and so Sony modified the SNES CD and released it as the Playstation.
Nintendo would have been monitoring how the Playstation went very closely, since they had made most of it. In it’s first few years the Playstation didn’t do very well, and really only took off in the last half of it’s life.
It may have been the lack of initial success of the Playstation that made Nintendo decide to stick with cartridges, or it may have been the practically non-existant load times that were achieved with cartridges, only Nintendo knows for sure, but they tell us it was the load times. But they decided to use cartridges for the Nintendo 64.

Cartridges have limited storage (the biggest N64 game was 512 Megabits, or 64 Megabytes). This wasn’t a major concern, but did lead to Squaresoft leaving Nintendo and jumping ship to the playstation to make it’s masterpiece Final Fantasy VII (which was full of very large, high quality Full Motion Videos, which just couldn’t have been fitted on a Cartridge). Loosing Squaresoft may have been one of the worst things that could of happened for the Nintendo 64, because when you think of the millions and millions of Square games that have been sold for the Playstation, and realise that they could have been on the N64, you will see how valuable a developer like Suaresoft really is.

The good points and bad points of cartriges:

GOOD:
* Almost non-existant load times
* Very durable

BAD:
* Limited Size
* Costly

Nintendo sticking with cartridges for me was really not a big problem, and didn’t effect the quality of games at all in my opinion.

Nintendo has said that the main reason they stuck with cartridges was because of load times, which is fair enough I guess. They have moved on to special discs now (that store 1.5 Megabites of data, at a 6:1 ratio of compression) for the GameCube, and load times are a big issue with them, most of the GameCube games load within 5 seconds though, which is really quite good.

Accessories
**Official**
Rumble Pak – This was the first appearance of a rumble feature in video game consoles that I know of. It’s very nifty, and rumbles (shaking the controller) say for example when you fire a gun, crash your car, take a blow, fall from a great height, or just to make you aware you are near a secret etc. It is a really cool idea, and it’s worth it to buy one for sure.

Memory Pak – Needed to save some games, and in some cases to save extra data, like ghosts in racing games, or custom characters, custom levels in a game. Pretty much an essential purchase.

Expansion Pak – A must have now days. A lot of games require one to run, and others just use it for enhanced graphic modes. It was very smart for Nintendo to make the Expansion Pak., and it’s really essential to purchase one of these to play some of the best games on the N64.

**Un-Official**
Pro Action Replay/GameShark – An excellent hacking device. It is a great buy if you like hacking games. It can get you all sorts of secrets in games (hidden levels, cars, weapons, options, items etc) plus you can use it to cheat in all sorts of ways, like becoming invincible, getting extra health, getting all items, cars etc. The best feature by far in my opinion is the ability to hack things that aren’t available in game, some cool examples of this are in goldeneye where you can get a secret island on the first level, see pictures of characters left out in the final version, open up extra areas in multiplayer levels, and even open extra multiplayer levels!
Excellent.

Dex Drive – I personally don’t own a Dex Drive, and have never used one (they never came out here) but I had intended on buying one of them when I first heard about them, because they give you the ability to put game saves on your PC, and even download them off the internet (including here at GameFAQs). I would have bought one if they came out here, and I think the Dex Drive sounds like a great investment.

Prices Hardware/Games/Acessories

(note: this is based on Australian prices)

The N64’s game prices are generally a little bit more expensive than games on other consoles, but are still very good value for what you get. The Rumble Pak is reasonably priced, the Memory Pak is a little on the dear side when you consider the price of some third party cards up to 20 times as big. The expansion pak is extrmely well price, when you consider what you are buying. The N64 itself is very well priced here too and can be picked up for about $130, the Playstation One here is about $180, the Dreamcast can be found for $200, and the PS2 is $750.

The N64 is very good value itself, and none of the prices are too bad in other areas.

Pros
* Great games
* Good controller
* EXTREMELY durable
* Pretty much no load times
* Excellent 1st party games
* Excellent 2nd party support

Cons
* Small Cartridge size in some cases caused a few hassles, such as a lack of high quality music, sound and FMV, but still this is nothing too terrible.
* Not a HUGE amount of 3rd party support

Overall

Plenty of EXCELLNT and INNOVATIVE GAMES, which is the main, and by far the most important area. Great graphics (that still look good today). Pretty good sound. A nice controller, and plenty of cool and innovative accessories. Also, currently the N64 is selling for a really great price (In Australia at least).
The N64 is also extremely durable, and if anything ever does go wrong with the console, an accessory or even a game Nintendo offers a lifetime warranty on everything.

I’d say that the N64 is a really great purchase for anyone at all, wether you own a Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, other older consoles (if you read this after the GameCube and Xbox are out, I still say get one) or any other console. It’s a great console that should not be passed up by anyone.
If you don’t already have an N64 get out and pick on up! (and while you’re at it give yourself a beating with a frozen marine animal of some sort :P)