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Eurogamer: Nintendo Switch's online N64 games have some issues.

Vae_Victis

Banned
How can a billion dollar company not get this right with their own property? It's frankly embarrassing.
The goal is not to make it right, it's to make money out of it.

It doesn't need to be "right", it only needs to be "right enough" for people to pay for it. And the more you work on it, the more you spend on it, the more money you then need from people to turn as much as a profit.

As long as Nintendo is happy with the money they are making on their releases, there is zero incentive for them to spend time and money on making a product better.
 

nkarafo

Member
Was better than this one on Switch… see Zelda rendering bugs.
Sure but not as good as emulators on PC, if you were up to date and used GlideN64.

Though, both solutions had glitches of their own. I did like the F-Zero X emulation in VC more but you didn't see many more games that were hard to emulate. Of the 20 something games in total, only a couple had graphical features that were hard to emulate on homebrew, like the shiny vehicles effect in F-Zero X.

But i doubt the VC emulator could handle all the effects in, say, Perfect Dark the same way GlideN64 did perfectly.
 

nkarafo

Member
The expectations on this service is not a generic emulator that handles thousands of titles at launch, but an emulator that on Switch matches the speed and accuracy as it did on the single core 700 MHz Gekko CPU on Wii… also, per title patches to ensure the emulator has per title hacks to ensure accurate and fast emulation are expected when you are drip fed titles.
Some titles are harder to emulate than others. Some games need a more accurate LLE solution to render everything correctly. HLE and hacks can help, but nowadays N64 emulation is moving past that and that's why it improved so massively the last few years.
 

balt1kr1s

Member
Please mods don’t ban me but I can’t control myself
GXj0rRP.png
 

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman


We're comparing the Wii U Virtual Console versions of these Nintendo 64 games to their Switch Online counterparts!

0:00 Super Mario 64
1:32 Yoshi's Story
2:05 Zelda: Ocarina of Time
4:02 Mario Kart 64
4:35 Star Fox 64
6:53 Mario Tennis
7:34 Sin & Punishment
 

Shut0wen

Member
The N64 for the Wii was very good and better than any emulator. On WiiU it started to get wrong: black filter and lags. Power has very little to do.

I bought 2 N64 games on WiiU: Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64, and then moved back to emulators. Then Nintendo gave the GBA to M2… It is still so good! So Nintendo knows what they are doing and doing trash on purpose.
I thought mario 64 ran ok but your right about them running perfectly on wii but then that was on nintendos own cudtom made chip, don't know if them moving from amd to wii u then nividia has caused them problems, it did the same with sony for a good majority of ps2 and ps1 games for ps3, i just cant get my head over nintendo doing a shit job when they have been emulating for so many years, i get it nintendo can be a shit company at times but this is just incredibly low and just seems like a waste on everyone involved because they are gunna offer a service people aint going to pay for, btw did you get f zero for wii u? Im on the fence about getting it lately
 

BlackTron

Member
They would make so much more money if they just sold all of these games (and more---like what was on the 3DS) for $5-$10 each. I would buy more than a few each year. And I would actually own them rather than renting.


Nintendo doesn't give a shit that you would buy the games. There is more money elsewhere, so fuck you.

Iwata would not have done this. Because he is gone Switch has no VC. We live in a dark time.
 

Daymos

Member
Ah the predictable cynical nature of the internet. Why didn't I go into business to capitalize on this emotion.

Maybe Nintendo released it broken on purpose. They knew you would all RANT, which gives them publicity, then all they have to do is fix it and viola they net MORE money than they would have by charging $10 for a well working upgrade.
 

TLZ

Banned
The goal is not to make it right, it's to make money out of it.

It doesn't need to be "right", it only needs to be "right enough" for people to pay for it. And the more you work on it, the more you spend on it, the more money you then need from people to turn as much as a profit.

As long as Nintendo is happy with the money they are making on their releases, there is zero incentive for them to spend time and money on making a product better.
I miss Iwata.
 

TheDreadLord

Gold Member
What I don’t get is that Nintendo has access to all the technical details of the N64 and they could have built a very (very) good emulator. But no no, they decided to go through cash grab route.
 
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tassletine

Member
The goal is not to make it right, it's to make money out of it.

It doesn't need to be "right", it only needs to be "right enough" for people to pay for it. And the more you work on it, the more you spend on it, the more money you then need from people to turn as much as a profit.

As long as Nintendo is happy with the money they are making on their releases, there is zero incentive for them to spend time and money on making a product better.
That's untrue. The Japanese have a high sense of honour, and Nintendo has a reputation for quality. Bad press affects stock prices.
 

radewagon

Member
If you're going to charge a hefty premium, maybe you should make sure that you offer a premium experience. If not, then don't charge more for it. I wonder which cynical Nintendo peeps are responsible greenlighting a decision to more than double the price of their current subscription model in exchange for shoddy emulation.

It's just so.... nakedly scummy. They know it's not ready. They know it's not worth the asking price. Who cares, do it anyway because Nintendo fanboys forgive everything. Hopefully they won't forgive this.
 

cireza

Banned
N64 games should be played on accurate homebrew emulators like m64p or RetroArch+Mupen/Parallel RDP.

Homebrew emulation will always offer the superior experience compared to every half assed official effort.

Unless you like those darker colors, that high input lag, those ROM changes and those 50hz PAL roms (at least they doubled down with that last one).
Obviously, my answer was for people looking for a legal way of playing and owning the games without resorting to buy used games on eBay. Because of course, you own an original copy of every single game you emulate, don't you ?

Finally, the only true answer on how N64 games should be played is on the original hardware on a CRT TV.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Some titles are harder to emulate than others. Some games need a more accurate LLE solution to render everything correctly. HLE and hacks can help, but nowadays N64 emulation is moving past that and that's why it improved so massively the last few years.
How does this have anything to do with quality of what Nintendo provided with NSO this week? What should people worry about doing something beyond the basics if Nintendo is not meeting the basics even? It makes them look even worse not better…
 
I thought mario 64 ran ok but your right about them running perfectly on wii but then that was on nintendos own cudtom made chip, don't know if them moving from amd to wii u then nividia has caused them problems, it did the same with sony for a good majority of ps2 and ps1 games for ps3, i just cant get my head over nintendo doing a shit job when they have been emulating for so many years, i get it nintendo can be a shit company at times but this is just incredibly low and just seems like a waste on everyone involved because they are gunna offer a service people aint going to pay for, btw did you get f zero for wii u? Im on the fence about getting it lately
No and I'm pretty shure the Wii version runs better.



The black filter is not that bad with some of those 3D games;
 

SegaShack

Member
I finished a bunch of games, tested many more and the performance and graphics were flawless. I'd say it is the best emulator, by far, ever seen on a Nintendo console.

Never got any crashes, only graphical errors in some games, like Goemon DS.

A bunch of examples:







All of those were captured with the emulator.

For me it wouldn't run The World Ends With You once a battle started and had numerous other issues freezing or having graphical bugs in other titles.
 
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hmm sad to say the nintendo seal of quality means jackshit these days.. we went from unbreakable devices like the gameboy series to weak hinged dual screens, drifting joy cons, general cheapness and poor build quality.
 

BlackTron

Member
Ah the predictable cynical nature of the internet. Why didn't I go into business to capitalize on this emotion.

Maybe Nintendo released it broken on purpose. They knew you would all RANT, which gives them publicity, then all they have to do is fix it and viola they net MORE money than they would have by charging $10 for a well working upgrade.

Something tells me that they didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.

The part where they fix it.
 

Jsisto

Member
The lack of a black border option is what bothers me the most. I just don’t think I’d be able to get immersed in a game like OoT without it. It just looks so distracting.
 

Dream-Knife

Banned
No and I'm pretty shure the Wii version runs better.



The black filter is not that bad with some of those 3D games;

I'm convinced that black filter is there because they plugged a 64 into a modern tv and saw how bad it looked, then tried to replicate that.

You need a CRT or plasma tv to get good image quality. I do remember rear projection tvs being ok, but also dim. Even oled is inferior to CRTs.

hmm sad to say the nintendo seal of quality means jackshit these days.. we went from unbreakable devices like the gameboy series to weak hinged dual screens, drifting joy cons, general cheapness and poor build quality.
They changed it to "Offical Nintendo Seal" during the Wii.
 
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