petran79
Banned
I dont think thats true. On PC emulators of 2d arcade games were the main focus back then and were very popular.
Unfortunately the PS1/N64 generation could not connect with arcade games the way the previous gen did.
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So...did the Nintendo 64 just not do 2D well or did devs not want 2D games on it?
- Thread starter bman94
- Start date
I dont think thats true. On PC emulators of 2d arcade games were the main focus back then and were very popular.
Unfortunately the PS1/N64 generation could not connect with arcade games the way the previous gen did.
daTRUballin
Member
I'm sure Nintendo had some level of restrictions for 2d games as well, but I totally remember reading about Sony being very strict with 2d games back then. So I just wanted to point that out.
A Black Falcon
Member
PC games and gamers, and console games and gamers, were very different markets then. Yes, on the PC side people were much less anti-2d, though I'm not sure why you say "emulators of 2d arcade games were the main focus", emulation has never been any kind of "main focus" of PC gamers. There were many major, popular 2d games though, including lots of strategy games (Starcraft, etc.), building sims (SimCity, The Sims, and such), RPGs (Baldur's Gate and such), adventure games, and more. Strategy and building-simulation games only really started going 3d in the '00s, for example. There were plenty of popular 3d PC games too, first among them FPSes, but 2d was hardly some unpopular archaic thing.
The same goes for handheld consoles of course. However, TV console audiences absolutely were strongly biased against 2d games. As for arcades, they were dying out in the West in the later '90s, they didn't matter as much anymore, and many top arcade games were 3d anyway.
The N64 d-pad is large and plenty precise! It is a bit stiff, that is true, but that's not bad, just different from the often super-soft SNES d-pad... and yes, some of that is probably just that N64 d-pads get used a lot less. The N64 d-pad is very good.
sketchsanchez
Member
The attitude that made people be anti 2d back then still exists today when you see people using "looks like a ps2 game" as an insult.
if your game wasn't 3D, it got SLAMMED for it
2D was SHAMEFUL
yeah, since 3D was new, 2D was seen as something old, outdated, and inferior as opposed to a design decision.
see above
Throwing out a single example of a Nintendo published 2d game is hardly evidence to prove Nintendo Neo wasn't pushing developers hard for 3d games
PC and console were a separate market before the first xbox. Still a lot of people that don't respect PC devs like they do console devs.
.... They were the main focus of people fiending for it. Niche popularity does not equal mass popularity. The masses did not do that. If they did there wouldn't have been such a drought. I remember clear as day most people saying 2D was dead. I felt back when I was a teenager closer around to 96 or 97, the polygonal craze took over and you saw a mass decline in sprite based and or 2D offerings.
KingdomHeartsFan
Member
Came to post this masterpiece.
Not even close. Were you unaware that the following PS1 games exist?
Megaman 8
Megaman X4/5/6
Castlevania Chronicles
Klonoa
Alundra
Suikoden
Suikoden 2
Tales of Destiny
Tales of Eternia
Star Ocean 2
Wild Arms
Lunar
Lunar 2
Legend of Mana
Saga Frontier
Saga Frontier 2
Valkyrie Profile
Tomba
Street Fighter Alpha series
X-Men vs Street Fighter
Darkstalkers
Strider 2
Adventures of Little Ralph
Gunner's Heaven
Silhouette Mirage
Gradius Gaiden
Donpachi
Dodonpachi
Harmul Park
Adventures of Lomax
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Oddworld: Abe's Exodus
The Neverhood
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Umihara Kawase Shun
Mr. Driller
...and on and on and on
dcx4610
Member
At least on PCs back then, you needed a dedicated/separate 2D and 3D card. It wasn't until the Voodoo 3 that combined them into one card that worked decently well.
I'm sure someone can prove me wrong but I think proper 2D was probably difficult to pull off on the N64 since it was catered to 3D.
I'm sure someone can prove me wrong but I think proper 2D was probably difficult to pull off on the N64 since it was catered to 3D.
MrCunningham
Member
I thought it was a bit of a mixed bag when compared to the PS1 and Saturn ports. Mortal Kombat Trilogy was a launch window game in North America, and was the third game to get released in NA after Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64. The cartridge size is only 12MB (96megs) and because of that suffered from missing content and weak audio. If the cartridge size wasn't an issue, the game could've been solid. Killer Instinct Gold was released two months after Mortal Kombat Trilogy and was also limited to a 12MB cartridge as well.
encephalon
Member
A number of these are 3D. Klonoa, Star Ocean 2, Saga Frontier, Wild Arms ...
mariosbrother
Member
Pretty sure it was simply due to the mindshare of 3D polygonal graphics. Nintendo themselves touted the 2D capabilities of the system claiming that there were virtually no limitations for 2D games. Nobody* cared.
*Virtually
*Virtually
Nintendo was discouraging developers from making 2D games on the N64. Since the game cartridges had to be manufactured by Nintendo at the time, they could dick publishers around, and could limit/prohibit their production numbers and release windows. Ultimately most N64 developers typically decided to playball with Nintendo and develop 3D games (for business reasons most likely), or take their games to another platform.
For what it's worth, 3D was new and exciting at the time, and I imagine many developers were excited by the idea of creating 3D games, but Nintendo's policies further alienated them from 3rd-party devs.
For what it's worth, 3D was new and exciting at the time, and I imagine many developers were excited by the idea of creating 3D games, but Nintendo's policies further alienated them from 3rd-party devs.
That Nippon Ich best years were the PS2 ones, one should reexamine Victor Ireland/Working Design's fractious history with all it's partners.
With all the weird personal cat fights Ireland seemed to generate it might be truer to see Working Design sabotaging 2d RPG's in the US.
Especially with the existence of things like; Viewtiful Joe, Nippon Ichi games, Gradius V, KOF, Guilty gear, various capcom and SNK fighters, and Vanillawere with Grim Grimore and Odin Sphere, on the PS2 in the US.
Ninja Scooter
Member
The size of the carts to house games like that would have been prohibitively expensive for publishers I think.
petran79
Banned
There were the main focus if you had a weak PC not able to run the latest games, something rather common back then. I mean completely not be able to run a game, not just play on 15-20 fps.
There was no way you were a PC player and had not heard about or tried emulation. Even players with high end PCs and the latest 3D games usually had a spare folder with the popular emulators. They were free anyway. I even remember a PC game magazine of that era that had a dedicated article to emulation and included some on their CD-ROM, minus the ROMs of course.
Thats how I got to know games like Street Fighter EX existed. Saw it in the late 90s-early 2000 on a friends very good PC that had a Voodo brand SVGA card. My PC was far too weak to run Zinc, but sufficed for MAME, Neo Geo and Raine emulators
Emulation at that time was also a counter-measure against all that focus on 3D. No major company backed that project. The opposite. They even tried to shut them down. There were just individual developers and groups, most of them doing it on their spare time. But it was evident that there was a market for the older games. The advantage you had on PC as opposed to consoles at that time, was that there was more room left to explore an alternative way. While on consoles you were forced to go with the latest trends.
Another reason was that arcade games focused also on 3D and smaller arcade malls in your neighborhood with 2D games became less and less common. You had to go further away to large malls that were able to host all those huge 3D game cabs. I remember one. On the basement it had the large cabs with 3D games (MK4, HOTD, Lost World, Time Crisis, Mace Dark Age, Gauntlet Legends etc). The upper floor was reserved for the few 2D games that continued to be released after the mid-90s. It had games like Puzzle Bubble 4 and Rampage World Tour. Very few players would go up there. Mall ended up closing in early 2000. It was a surprise and a blow to me
Capcom makes SMT in addition to Castlevania, who knew?
Klonoa I could see discounting but the RPGs I listed were 100% 2D outside of battle. If you want to discount every game that uses a single fully 3D polygon anywhere then you're missing the point. The games I listed all managed to exist despite using sprite based 2D graphics for the bulk of gameplay.
Small Mailman
Member
If you weren't 3D you were CHUMP CHANGE, MAN!
2d games were doable, but no one bought them. street fighter alpha came out and no one gave a fuck. i remember people standing in stores checking street fighter alpha and street fighter EX and everyone said, tekken2 is dominating, why play a franchise from the last generation.
no one wanted to play 2d, because 3d was the thing. it doesnt matter of the controls or the graphics not apprehendable=it looks better than 2d.
in the end, the psx/n64 days are laughable. rarely did some of those old 3d games age well. most of them do look like garbage these days.
no one wanted to play 2d, because 3d was the thing. it doesnt matter of the controls or the graphics not apprehendable=it looks better than 2d.
in the end, the psx/n64 days are laughable. rarely did some of those old 3d games age well. most of them do look like garbage these days.
A Black Falcon
Member
Everyone's experience is different. With all of the 2d PC games out there during the 5th-gen era, there would have been no need to go to emulation if your computer was older; you could just play some of the many 2d PC games.
Myself, I didn't own any consoles other than handhelds until late 1999 but we did have PCs, and while I had heard of emulation (that first N64 emulator (UltraHLE) is the first one I remember really paying attention to, though I never did try it), it wasn't until the '00s that I actually used any emulators. Whether our computers were newer or aging, which of course changes over time, I played computer games, not emulated old arcade games. I've still got my big-box PC game collection.
Part of why is because I wanted to play legit games, not illegal downloads, but even for people who did want to download games, remember, downloading things was nontrivial for a lot of people in the '90s; dialup is slow and often drops your connection... it was some time after I got POD before I could finally download that 30+MB patch that makes the OEM version into the retail one, for example.
Huh? As I said, many popular PC games of the late '90s to early '00s were 2d games. Starcraft is one of the most popular games ever regardless of its 2d graphics, and the first two Diablo games, Civilization III and below, The Sims 1, SimCity3000, C&C: Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, etc etc... there were a lot of very popular 2d games in the later '90s to early '00s.
Now, over time more and more games and genres slowly did go 3d, and graphics have always mattered a lot on the PC so I'm sure there was a 3d bias. There certainly was a "dated graphics" bias, for either 2d or 3d, no question. But for an anti-2d bias in particular, I really think that it wasn't as strong as the 2d-hating stereotype you see from the N64 and Playstation. I do not remember Diablo 2 or Red Alert 2 being criticized too harshly for their 2d graphics in 2000 when they released, for example. And additionally, in genres like strategy games, while 3d had an appeal, it also led to problems, particularly in game cameras. For example, it took years before I accepted the idea of a decent polygonal 3d RTS, my favorite genre at the time! I disliked most of the polygonal RTSes I played in the '90s, either because of bad 3d cameras (moving 3d cameras in RTSes does not work well, I have always thought) or other issues. It was only with Conquest: Frontier Wars in 2001 that I finally found one that was great, and it solved the problem by sticking to a classic overhead camera, and only using the polygons for the graphics. Warcraft 3 would do the same, after Blizzard tried but thankfully abandoned the idea of a more mobile 3d camera.
So yeah, personally, I thought 3d was pretty cool, but never hated 2d either.
Well, computers are open platforms, so anyone can make whatever they want for them. That is their great strength.
encephalon
Member
Wild Arms had full 3D battles. I think that should count for something. Star Ocean and SaGa Frontier had 2D sprites moving on a 3D plane applied to a prerendered backdrop. They were still 3D games, just like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy that also used prerendered backdrops (but also used 3D models).
butman
Member
Reading the first pages with a lot of "3D was the bomb and stuff" but what about with all these amazing 2D Arcade Ports and 2D Platforms that PSX and Saturn had and blew people minds?
Symphony of The Night
Marvel vs Capcom
Marvel Superheroes
Vampire Savior
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Guardian Heroes
Real Bout 2
KOF 94 to 98
Megaman X4 to X6
Alber Odyssey
Magic Knight RayEarth
and so on...
Why N64 didn't had ANY?
- It was because the cartdrige capacity was too small for all these tracks?
- It was, like always, Nintendo doesn't give a f*ck about multiplatforms and live in an alternate universe?
Symphony of The Night
Marvel vs Capcom
Marvel Superheroes
Vampire Savior
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Guardian Heroes
Real Bout 2
KOF 94 to 98
Megaman X4 to X6
Alber Odyssey
Magic Knight RayEarth
and so on...
Why N64 didn't had ANY?
- It was because the cartdrige capacity was too small for all these tracks?
- It was, like always, Nintendo doesn't give a f*ck about multiplatforms and live in an alternate universe?
Andyliini
Member
I can't really say about many 2D-games back then, I only heard most of them were not selling very well.
I heard Sony America outright refused to license Megaman X4 for PS1, for they wanted only 3D-games. They only agreed when Capcom threatened to leave them without Resident Evil 2. No source for that on, though.
I also remember Symphony of the Night bombed commercially, especially in Europe. Maybe that's why Konami went full 3D on N64.
I heard Sony America outright refused to license Megaman X4 for PS1, for they wanted only 3D-games. They only agreed when Capcom threatened to leave them without Resident Evil 2. No source for that on, though.
I also remember Symphony of the Night bombed commercially, especially in Europe. Maybe that's why Konami went full 3D on N64.
petran79
Banned
Everyone's experience is different. With all of the 2d PC games out there during the 5th-gen era, there would have been no need to go to emulation if your computer was older; you could just play some of the many 2d PC games.
Myself, I didn't own any consoles other than handhelds until late 1999 but we did have PCs, and while I had heard of emulation (that first N64 emulator (UltraHLE) is the first one I remember really paying attention to, though I never did try it), it wasn't until the '00s that I actually used any emulators. Whether our computers were newer or aging, which of course changes over time, I played computer games, not emulated old arcade games. I've still got my big-box PC game collection.
Part of why is because I wanted to play legit games, not illegal downloads, but even for people who did want to download games, remember, downloading things was nontrivial for a lot of people in the '90s; dialup is slow and often drops your connection... it was some time after I got POD before I could finally download that 30+MB patch that makes the OEM version into the retail one, for example.
You could also borrow the CD-ROMs of friends who had all the ROMs, like I did.
I was mostly interested in emulation because I had played most of those old arcade games, solo or co-op or wanted to see things that I missed. I had spent quite a lot of coins there. They even might have been bootlegs. So I did not regard it as stealing. Besides, most of the boards were either replaced or the mall had shut down. No luxury to process legalities! Some games werent so old. Eg you could play Samurai Shodown IV and Last Blade 2 (1997) and KOF97 in 1998. Neo Geo and CPS1 games, the latter through Callus95, were our most played games. There was also Nesticle but I had already sold my NES and had played to death all its games, so I was not interested.
Indeed, isometric games like Diablo or Crusader were well received. Even todays popular multiplayer RPG games would adopt a camera resembling those old games, mimicking that isometric view. There due to the nature of the game, players accepted that it was not possible to switch to full 3D.
Ironically one of the most popular RPG games of the 80s (Gauntlet), failed to make an impression and popular transition to 3D. They even used the latest arcade hardware and had both N64 and Dreamcast ports. Should be enought to make it the game of choice. Yet they had average scores.
SkylineRKR
Member
A lot of those 2d games were sold at a reduced price. Sony did allow them at first but they were sold for less. Especially in the latter part of its Life cycle.
Another N64 game that was well done and 2d was NBA Hangtime.
Another N64 game that was well done and 2d was NBA Hangtime.
CertifiedFP
Member
Eh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Konami threaten to Sony that Metal Gear Solid (Or was it some other highly anticipated game? Pretty sure it was MGS though.) would go to the Saturn if Sony blocked Symphony of the Night's localization?
Andyliini
Member
I have heard the same story, but it was Capcom, who treatened Sony with Resident Evil 2, if Megaman X4 was cancelled for NA release, as I stated before. I have no idea if these stories are true, but it really looked like Sony was not fond of 2D games in late 90's.
Honestly, it wasn't just that first 3D generation where 2D games were neglected. The resurgence of 2D games is a fairly recent phenomenon, happening mostly over the last decade, spurred by indie developers and the "retro gaming" movement. Before that, outside of specific circumstances(traditional fighting games, handhelds) 2D games were just seen as old-fashioned in an industry focused on ever-increasing graphical power.
Sadly, the popular sentiment in America in that era was that 3D was the new hotness and 2D was old and dated. Look at Next Generation mag for the prevailing zeitgeist of the time, who would rip apart new 2D games any chance they could get (this is why, in spite of their interesting interviews, I never particularly cared for the magazine).
Of course, in hindsight, the 2D titles of that generation held up much much better.
Of course, in hindsight, the 2D titles of that generation held up much much better.
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