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Did the Nintendo 64 have a single 2D Sprite based game?
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Waylon Drums
Member
It was insane how quickly 2D became "old and outdated" when that generation rolled around. People forget that even Mario abandoned 2D for quite awhile.
DonMigs85
Member
I was actually pleased with 2D games of that era since the higher 320x240 resolution looked a bit sharper and more detailed, coupled with their higher color bit depth. Lunar SSC for example looked richer than any SNES JRPG.
Kataploom
Gold Member
Wasn't the prohibition of sprite-based games by Nintendo one of the reasons for third-parties to jump out their ship and look for potential opportunities in PlayStation due to the exaggerately raised cost of production and so? I don't remember where did I read it though, but it goes in line with Yamauchi's ego and mentality at that time...
Actually, everything aside from Sub-Zero and the bad guys in that game is made of polygons.
Agent Unknown
Member
Yeah, I'd like to read actual proof of this.
what
I love every N64 Bomberman game. I have a moral obligation to play this now.
what
I love every N64 Bomberman game. I have a moral obligation to play this now.
You would probably like Bomberman Fight!! on the Sega Saturn more.
Theanine3D
Member
That was my first thought as well, it uses 2D prerendered sprites for almost everything except for some very rudimentary 3D models for buildings and such. I guess since it's not 100% 2D it isn't being counted
Don't you bring good sense into this.
As an aside, this thread just reminds me of the days where crap like Battle Arena Toshinden got rave reviews because 3D. What a horrible time that was.
Hello? This is Hailun!
Member
That's apparently why the Saturn version was crap.
neostapler
Member
yeah
It was a 3D game, but Mega Man Battle & Chase didn't come out in America because Sony didn't think it looked good enough. At least that's the story I heard.
How About No
Member
I think you have your terminology messed up.
The OP doesn't mention art style at all. It just asks for examples of "sprite-based games." In this case, Mischief Makers is a perfect example of a sprite-based game.
If the OP would have asked for examples of "pixel art style games" or "sprite art style games" you would be correct, though.
Hazelhurst
Member
Yeah, polygonal graphics were the craze at the time. It's crazy to think that 2D sprite based games have aged infinitely better than the early polygonal games. I remember being blown away by N64 graphics, but now a majority of them look awful. I still think Waverace's water looks amazing though.
Battle & Chase did fail the approval process for North America (so did MMX4, apparently), but the reasoning is apparently they didn't want too many mascot racers on the Playstation which were popular at the time.
The original executive vice president of SCEA didn't want to localize 2D games because he didn't believe it showed off the power of the system. I believe that also affected games in development from western studios.
ReyVGM
Member
Uhh what? Nintendo never banned sprite based games, they themselves were making them for the N64.
The only company that tried to ban 2D sprite games was Sony of America for the PS1. But that was short-lived.
You posted in the wrong Nintendo thread.
Romars202129
Member
MulderYuffie
Member
Mischief Makers tho
PdotMichael
Banned
The N64 with the ram pack was quite the powerful 2D machine.
Too bad that Nintendo was stuck with cartridges.
Too bad that Nintendo was stuck with cartridges.
TheMoon
Member
Most definitely.
Dem are some sprite-ass sprites!
That would be funny considering Nintendo themselves put out a bunch of 2D games, no?
Yea no... you read that on some fanboy forum or are having fever dream right now
Oh yea! I'm very familiar with the Puyo Puyo series. I thought I recognized the artwork but didn't realize there was an N64 version.
SpiceMelange
Member
The whole point of the Yoshi's Story project was to show the industry at the time that 2D sprite games could still be made on the N64. Also I'm not sure why that poster is harping on pre-rendered vs hand drawn sprites. They are exactly the same. The method you used to put the pixels on your bitmap file doesn't change anything.
Akihiko Mori <3
RIP
Captain Europe
Member
It's a shame it didn't have more, cos Yoshi's Story is one of the best looking games on the system.
MrCunningham
Member
That would be funny considering Nintendo themselves put out a bunch of 2D games, no?
They didn't put out a lot of 2D games on the N64 though. There were a few token 2D games like Yoshi's Story, but they were firmly focused on delivering 3D titles on the N64. That didn't mean they weren't against making 2D games, you also have to remember that they still had the SNES on the market during the same period and focused their 2D efforts of the final years of the SNES. They also were still actively making games for the Game Boy and the later Game Boy Color which was released in 1998. But on the N64, they really wanted to separate it from the SNES and push it as a "next gen" system to the mass market. And 2D titles were not games that the general public were craving for on the new 32bit and 64bit machines. People didn't want to buy a PS1/ Saturn or N64 to play the type of games that they could get on the older 16bit machines but with a shinier coat of paint.
I think Sony pushed the 3D agenda harder than any other company in the Western territories. They really wanted to solidify the PSX as the de facto next-gen console by delivering games that couldn't be done on previous generation machines.
Sega of Japan on the other hand was OK with 2D games on their machine, but Sega of America really was reluctant to push the Saturn as a 2D machine in the US (I don't know about Europe). From Sega of America's point of view, 2D was not something that was going to make Saturns fly off the shelves in the US market, and they tried to push 3D too. SOA did try to get Sonic into 3D and wanted it to be released the same year as Mario 64 so they could compete with Nintendo again. That was a disaster for them. Sega of America totally passed on the 1-4 MEG RAM carts and all the 2D games that were attached to it.
The dude is right. It is pre rendered sprites, but there is depth and 3D shit at play with the environments and shit. 2D pre rendered sprites and backgrounds all thrown together in 3D
Correctomundo
Member
What makes you think it would have been better?
Wasn't the world made up of polygons? All the characters definitely were sprites though.
edit: oh wow this thread is actually two pages
MrCunningham
Member
Mischief Makers was a mixture of 2D and 3D for the environments. But the sprites were all 2D. Take a look at the first level: https://youtu.be/UIS0t0fHC6A?t=184, which was mostly made up of 2D sprites and 2D background objects. But later levels did use polygon environments. Though I think the 2D was done with 2D bitmaps on billboarded polygons.
Again, I believe this is how all sprites were handled on the PSX and N64. E.g. see this document:
Though according to the document the GPU does distinguish between flat rectangular polygons (referred to as "rectangles" in the document) and the typical polygons used to render 3D objects.
petran79
Banned
Doom N64 version was re-designed to use polygons.
Though Duke Nukem looks as if it uses the original sprite based 2.5D engine.
soxinthebox
Member
Overwhelming feelings to play some StarCraft 64 right nowMost definitely.
Dem are some sprite-ass sprites!
That would be funny considering Nintendo themselves put out a bunch of 2D games, no?
Yea no... you read that on some fanboy forum or are having fever dream right now
MrCunningham
Member
That's a PS1 documentation, but looking around for N64 documents, I came up with this: http://level42.ca/projects/ultra64/Documentation/man/pro-man/pro14/index.html
I guess the N64 can do hardware sprites (known as rectangles). But the rectangles have no Z data and can only be manipulated on the X and Y axis. So they can't be rotated on the Z-axis but still can have some limited sorting in the Z-buffer. That's interesting, but I guess not too surprising. The Saturn could do this too with its quads but has full z data, so sprites could be rotated on any axis. Which made the Saturn a strong machine for sprite manipulation.
No, the N64 version of Duke Nukem 3D uses a fully polygon 3D engine. You can look up and down from the Z axis without having the camera do a fake camera pan stretch effect like Duke 3D on the PC. Both the Saturn and the N64 versions of Duke 3D use fully 3D engines, the only home port that didn't was the Playstation 1 game, which did use a port of the Build engine. The Playstation version of Duke 3D was the most accurate home port of the game from that generation, but it suffered from bad frame rates.
jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
No, it was more b/c the Saturn version was completely unoptimized for the hardware. It could handle a game like SOTN no problem if it was tailored for the system's quad poly rendering capabilities.
I'm still not sure how true this is b/c every generation after has shown that people are perfectly okay with doing that for 3D games. Hell, just look at the PS4K/XBO.5 threads
You must be referring to me, and I've already clarified why I made the distinction. It's kind of important, b/c just like how not all 3D games look the same, not all 2D games look the same either. There are different 3D rendering techniques, and the same goes for 2D. Hardware has to be built differently to handle 2D rendering in the way a CPS2 board would do it vs. how say the N64 or PS1 did.
There's evident proof of that in the gen. Why do you think PS1 ports of Capcom games had so many cut frames of animation? There are compression techniques you can do w/ 3D models transformed into 2D sprites that you can't do with pixel-accurate 2D art natively without causing problems. That's why (in addition to memory setups) those games had cuts on PS1, usually. There were real reasons why people questioned if N64 could do 2D sprite games in "that way" because "that way" was and still is seen as the more technically demanding 2D rendering style.
None of the 2D games present on N64 (aside from maybe Bangai-O) were able to prove that the system could run something like Marvel vs Capcom, Darkstalkers 3 or KoF '97 at adequate smoothness and speed. The system was built w/ 3D in mind but its 2D setup was even less efficient than PS1, let alone Saturn, and I don't see why this is debatable all of the sudden when it's been commonly accepted as truth for over a decade.
MrCunningham
Member
I'm still not sure how true this is b/c every generation after has shown that people are perfectly okay with doing that for 3D games. Hell, just look at the PS4K/XBO.5 threads
I think it was much truer back then than now though. Especially since the market was flooded with three generations worth of 2D games and people were interested in looking for something new to justify the purchases of those next generation machines.
I even have to question Sony's strategy for the PS4K. Will the general public notice the difference between it and the PS4? Most people that I know, can't even tell the difference between a Xbox One and PS4 game even if they are told one machine is better.
jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
Diminishing returns is real. That's why these companies are trying to push VR so hard. It's also why I'm conflicted Sony would want to try and push PSVR and PS4K so close to each other. Would it not have been better to just consolidate the two into a singular device and just focus on pushing PSVR's virtual reality ability to those interested in that, but the performance increase to those interested in somewhat better graphics and framerates?
Now their resources and marketing will be split between the two and their potential for market confusion's gone up exponentially :/
SpiceMelange
Member
No, it was more b/c the Saturn version was completely unoptimized for the hardware. It could handle a game like SOTN no problem if it was tailored for the system's quad poly rendering capabilities.
I'm still not sure how true this is b/c every generation after has shown that people are perfectly okay with doing that for 3D games. Hell, just look at the PS4K/XBO.5 threads
You must be referring to me, and I've already clarified why I made the distinction. It's kind of important, b/c just like how not all 3D games look the same, not all 2D games look the same either. There are different 3D rendering techniques, and the same goes for 2D. Hardware has to be built differently to handle 2D rendering in the way a CPS2 board would do it vs. how say the N64 or PS1 did.
There's evident proof of that in the gen. Why do you think PS1 ports of Capcom games had so many cut frames of animation? There are compression techniques you can do w/ 3D models transformed into 2D sprites that you can't do with pixel-accurate 2D art natively without causing problems. That's why (in addition to memory setups) those games had cuts on PS1, usually. There were real reasons why people questioned if N64 could do 2D sprite games in "that way" because "that way" was and still is seen as the more technically demanding 2D rendering style.
None of the 2D games present on N64 (aside from maybe Bangai-O) were able to prove that the system could run something like Marvel vs Capcom, Darkstalkers 3 or KoF '97 at adequate smoothness and speed. The system was built w/ 3D in mind but its 2D setup was even less efficient than PS1, let alone Saturn, and I don't see why this is debatable all of the sudden when it's been commonly accepted as truth for over a decade.
Just so I understand you, say a console (ie: SNES) can handle a sprite of 30 pixel per 30 pixels with 16bit colors (I'm just throwing random constraints here). You say there's a rendering difference for the console to render that sprite if I place each pixels per hand on the 30x30 grid or simply take a picture of a 3d model and that picture is 30x30 with 16bit colors? Your examples seems to allude more about the memory limit (numbers of frames on the sheet x color depth x resolution) from porting games from a console to another than pre-rendered sprites vs handdrawn.
jhmtehgamr20xx
Banned
In that example? Yes. I'm not completely in-the-know of how different file types re-sample their color depths, but supposing we're working with a file format around JPEG quality for that time, you'd have to account for information loss. JPEG style file formats suck with retaining color depth information the further you compress (not to mention the artifacts). A 3D model can still have its color profile influenced by lighting; unless the lighting is flat, the bitmap render is going to process what you assume as a single color in the 3D render as many different colors, even if they're simply different tones of the same hue.
AFAIK, both SNES and Genesis saw devs utilize tricks to simulate the appearance of more colors, usually by mixing tints of black with a given color. It's something that started becoming a thing on the NES, actually. I'm not sure how much of an impact that had on the memory constraints of the hardware but I'm assuming it was negligible and not taxing. Even so, in those instances it's still just a small handful of hues, just at different tonal levels.
When assigning colors to a 3D model you can't be pixel-accurate, by the nature it's a 3D model. Then you have other things to consider such as scaling of the sprite, which is where pixel accuracy becomes even more important. It's going to be more taxing on the hardware to do that w/ prerendered 3D models as sprites vs. hand-drawn sprites b/c, for the most part, 3D models in games like DKC, SMRPG, Vectorman etc. used 3D models that weren't flat-shaded, and the more shading layers added to a model, the more color information you're inevitably going to pile on once you render it to a 2D bitmap.
I guess I can understand why you see what I'm saying as alluding to the latter, b/c in a way it does. But it also concerns the former. Both of them kind of work hand in hand, particularly with consoles prior to 6th gen, because things like memory amount and CPU speed were way more finite and placed tighter restrictions on devs.
Correct me if erong but every 2D games on PS1 and N64 used flat polygons on which sprites were drawn as they were textures.
Saturn was the last sprite based console.
I'm not sure that Sony Japan during the PS1 & 2 eras were totally fine with 2D but rather more pragmatic given it's popularity in Japan. I could be wrong as I'm only basing this on the PS3 era with the rumour floating about Sony Japan snubbing Akira who wanted to carry on porting 2D CAVE shmups for the PS3 like they did for the PS2. Also that weird rule about PS3 games taking up the whole of the screen that helped push arcade shmups especially vert 3:4 resolution ones to the 360. (That explains why G.rev added widescreen "vertizontal" modes of their 2 PS3 ports of arcade/360 vert shmups)
That wasn't on N64.
That's pretty much all bullshit. A sprite is a sprite regardless of whether it's handpainted, prerendered or pixel art. Pixel art also takes way less memory because you can use a 4bit texture with a palette LUT, while you'll want more color depth with other types of art.
The reason PS1 ports cut frames was because it's a disc based system with limited memory. Sure, it wasn't as efficient at 2D graphics as some of the arcade machines, but number of animation frames is solely about RAM and transfer speed.
I'm not saying N64 could match PS1 on 2D, there's not many examples and it's pretty well known for having lots of bottlenecks and slow memory, but discounting games with prerendered sprites is silly.
Killer Instinct Gold has a decent frame count and higher color depth than most 2D fighters. Sure the backgrounds are 3D so I guess the question is if it would still work with a high res 2D background, or if you'd run out of memory or bandwidth. (also technically the OP asked for sprite based games, saying nothing about 2D backgrounds)
technically wasn't the problem rather that it did use the systems quad rendering, instead of using the VDP2 tile layers
Or read any issue of Next Generation. Every single chance they could get they'd rag on 2D for being stale and dated. In a nice bit of schaudenfraude, Next Gen kicked the bucket as print mags become rapidily obsolete, and thanks to indie gaming 2D is at its best since the 16 bit era.
Anyways, there was also Wonder Project J2. Always wished this got a US release, it looks charming as hell.
