32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).
In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'
Not the ones kids wanted most.
Tekken, Rayman, Road Rash, Twisted Metal
Even random racing games were for the first time rendered in 3D so it was really mind blowing going from sprites to that.
The opening line up is god tier by modern standards
https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-ps1...
Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console.
But a better launch lineup would've been nice.
I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.
Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of the other hardware, and would have been tough to release elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction, TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at attracting developers at the time.
Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD, PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it actually blew away the arcade version (!)
NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got correspondingly high reviews as well
Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time, I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)
Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch of other solid ones. Day one.
https://www.mobygames.com/group/13786/launch-title-dreamcast...
Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of a notoriously bad game.
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/06/playstation-launch-titles/
But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything right and hit the ground running with what many consider the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their rep was too tarnished.
The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken and Rayman are not.
If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2 and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time significantly earlier than the competition)
Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a
dime a dozen and no one cared by that point. That's
why Sonic Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable
where Tekken and Rayman are not.
For everything about to say, please note that I'm not arguing one system was better than the other. Just talking about how they fit in historically. I owned and enjoyed all of these consoles.
For me, the Dreamcast was the first "modern" 3D console where everything came together.
PS1 3D games were largely pretty ugly. Jaggy warping textures and the hardware was not really powerful enough for big worlds. Perhaps even more importantly, the lack of analog controls was a very very serious impediment.
Obviously despite this there were a lot of classic PS1 titles. A few games like Gran Turismo even seemed to pull off miracles graphically while other titles like Metal Gear Solid just leaned into the grimy pixelated look.
The N64 was largely a joke to me. You had a standard analog control, but the hardware was clearly a mess. Specifically there was far too little texture memory so every game had these giant low-res smoothed out blurry textures. Again obviously a few games transcended that but in general, man, yikes.
The Dreamcast was the first modern 3D console. The one where things came together. Enough horsepower and texture memory to render actually good looking worlds and the flexibility to do things like cel-shading. You play DOA2 or Soul Calibur and those models still look pretty good today. Lots of games were locked in at 60fps. Etc. Even had the first console MMO.
The Dreamcast really was a wonder and it has a huge place in gaming history.
Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on them, but that was as far as I went.
DVD player
It had far too little time as the best hardware before PS2
BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the Dreamcast.
IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.
PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:
- Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them that's an enormous win [1]
- Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much less video memory [2]
Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and internet chatter at the time was largely (and understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.
In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually was superior once developers (and particularly middleware developers) mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn't consider it to really surpass the DC for a while.
That, and the controller was obnoxious.
___
Meanwhile, PS2 may have had a poor launch lineup but by 2001 it was rapidly improved with Gran Turismo 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 (by itself a killer app), Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Jak and Daxter, every sports franchise you could want, other smaller hits like Devil May Cry, Max Payne, etc. Meanwhile the Dreamcast was discontinued by March of 2001, just 5 months after PS2's North American debut.
I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored.
The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
I'd rather be the creator of the worst thing that people want to buy than the best thing that nobody's ever heard of.
This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
Sega also had tons of mindshare. They fumbled the ball and Sony ran with it for a touchdown. End of story.
Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling.
Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular.
The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for.
If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation.
> The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre".
Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
The problem is worse than that:
1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts
2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
> The largest N64 cartridge is 64MB
Hopefully it was clear I meant N64, not NES from context and the PS1 comparison
The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that.
What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made.
Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.
Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES.
Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc
It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip.
Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.
So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were basically nil, compared to SNES or hell Neo-Geo which are very powerful.
It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it.
The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise).
Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.
I'd need to go look to recall correctly, but honestly it's 7:30am and I'm waaaay not into doing that rn....
I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.
The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.
Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.
I'm mainly talking about 3rd party publishers and specifically the JRPG genre. The N64 suffered from a lack of games compared to PS1. It was difficult to do 3D development back then, developers were just getting the hang of it.
In fact that you bring up Game Boy dev as a thriving platform for 2D content is an important point. Pokemon came out during this era. And a 2D N64 based Pokemon would have sold like hotcakes. Instead they built these half baked 3D Pokemon experiences like Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, which featured no storyline and no overworld.
Even something resembling Super Mario RPG with prerendered graphics on a isometric view would have been fine. It just wasn't generally done on N64. Everyone wanted to mimic Mario 64. The few RPGs N64 did get, like Quest 64, felt so empty, that it would have been much better to just ship it in 2D.
If textures looked better in FF Tactics vs Ogre Battle 64, it is purely due to storage on CD vs cartridge, a notable 10x plus advantage.
Square used a ton of prerendered graphics in their PS1 games. That is to say, they'd farm out the graphics to super computers and then store them as rasters on disc.
Second is Game Freak proper. They have always valued a small headcount. This has been a problem consistently. They never had the staff to make a console game. They always had the same difficulty with building new ideas. And when they were forced to move to consoles with the Switch, they released their worst games yet, absolutely dispiriting games that probably soured millions of kids on the franchise.
They certainly had the staff to make Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. Most 2D games in the SNES era only needed like 4 to 7 developers. It would have been fine and trivial even to pair Nintendo game artists with Pokemon developers for a true console Pokemon game. It just wasn't done. It took until the Switch to see a true console Pokemon game.
We don’t know everything about the Pokémon corporate structure in the English-speaking world. Presumably Florent Gorges is researching this as we speak. But the common theory is that when Nintendo invested in Game Freak in the early 90s to bail them out, there must have been a requirement of exclusivity for the franchise in the contract. Game Freak made games for other consoles after Pokémon, and the Pokémon cards had Windows games, but the main RPG series that’s been both only on Nintendo and only done by GF. Last year was the first time another company touched the mainline RPGs: another company did the remake of Pearl and Diamond.
With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.
It's a silly argument, IMO, but at the time "RPG" in everyone's minds meant either JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) or PC RPG (Baldur's Gate, etc).
Without Sony's big name and 3D graphics, $299 would have spelled doom ($199 was the standard price before).
I also remember wanting to know what a 'panzer dragoon' was but a lot of the commercials made it seem like you should already be aware and they may have just misspelled dragon.
Virtua fighter was a fine game in the arcade but none of my friends were going to buy a saturn for one game they could play at the arcade or some weird flying sonic game.
When playstation came out, battle arena toshinden felt fast and the characters looked cooler. Ridge Racer felt Way faster than Daytona the music was great and the textures blew my mind.
So even though saturn had a earlier launch the Playstation came to the party with more to offer.
But yeah, having that as a launch title was a big mistake. The gameplay is a weird and unapproachable genre, and the characters flopped as mascots. It was actually made to show off the then-new analog 360º control stick (the "3d control pad"), but nobody cared about that.
The Saturn needed Sonic and didn't have it, and everything else from there was deck chairs on the Titanic.
Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a system seller.
Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.
Sometimes I think about how weird it was that a JRPG was somehow the most important game launch of its era in America. Everyone bought that game and I'm not sure why. It's a fine game if you're a JRPG fan, and they did a great job moving it away from the usual themes, but it's so weird that it caught on with so many people that had never even heard of the genre or wouldn't have wanted to play a JRPG before.
Was it the FMVs during summons? Why was that particular FF game so culturally relevant unlike any before or after? It was so successful that there was a bubble of JRPGs put into the mainstream for awhile there in the late 90's.
Sony threw a truck load of money into marketing.
When I was in high school I recall taking a bus to school once and the entire bus was covered in a FF7 advertisement.
Early JRPGs felt comfortably Western to me because they just lifted the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy vibe whole cloth.
But FF7 felt like a totally random pastiche of genres that were jammed together in such an unusual combination that I could only imagine someone from another culture thinking to combine them.
Like making an apple pie with hotdogs in it. Yes, nominally it would be super American, but no American would ever think to put those together in that way.
Final Fantasy was already a guaranteed hit in Japan, but the success in the west can be greatly attributed to a successful marketing campaign by Sony.
Additionally, the non-medieval theme really helped setting it apart. There were guns, cars, televisions, and motorcycles!
It's fascinating to recall the TV commercial in North America featuring the motorcycle cinematic scene, which, ironically, constituted only 2 minutes of the game 50+ hours of gameplay.
Regardless, FF7 was an exceptional game that truly showcased the remarkable progress in video game development, appealing to a wider audience.
I still have goosebumps thinking about the first chapter of the game. It really was something when it came out.
FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept everything good about the gameplay.. I didn't play it until it was ported to PC, and the 3d accelerated video cards made it look much nicer than it even did on the PSX. It was a masterpiece of a game, the character development was extremely engaging and memorable. And the cinematics of Aerith dying, or Sephiroth walking through the flames... I had never seen anything like that up to that point.
FF7 and Zelda64 (ocarina of time) were the last games I really got into before I shifted to wasting all of my time on the internet instead of video games. I feel like games haven't been as good since that era, but it's probably mostly me that has changed.
> FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept everything good about the gameplay
Respectfully disagree. FF7 is not an S-tier JRPG by any means. It was a regression from FF6 in that it was linear, had very 2D characters, inferior story and boss, and the fighting system was really basic and lame. But it turned a generation onto the genre and I played it recently and it has aged well in some ways. The Chocobo stuff was great and Golden Saucer for its time was amazing. So a good game but not a great one. Even in the list above quite a few are better. Xenogears in particular.
FF7 is iconic though and easily the most important game in the fanchise. Cloud is iconic even if he's sort of lame IMO.
> I feel like games haven't been as good since that era, but it's probably mostly me that has changed.
I'd agree that Ocarina of Time was probably the most anticipated game I've ever had. But modern games are amazing. They're just better in every way. I don't play nearly as much as I used to but games are just so refined and built on so many years of knowledge now.
The menus and ATB are obviously basically a straight port over, materia are pretty much an adjustment of the similar re-slottable espers from 6 that taught magic, characters' limit breaks from 7 are sometimes clearly based on the unique abilities from 6 (Tifa's for example basically combining Setzer's slots with references to Sabin's martial arts), limit breaks themselves being an evolution of 6's desperation attacks..., even some really specific stuff like the opera house rafters vs. Aerith's chapel.
And then even items like the Atma Weapon or choices like using some thing like Ragnarok to create a weapon or a spell. Totally up to the players style.
Everyone has a different story on how they got through FF6. FF7 was linear.
And yes the Opera House - quite possibly the peak of 16-bit RPG gaming. Absolutely beautifully done.
The FF7 remake is really good FWIW.
I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.
If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it. Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted. Marketing and the hardware didn't matter to me. It was the games.