Yeah, I was in my teens and by the time the N64 came out I had a gaming PC with a proper GPU in it. Between that and the N64 launching quite late over here (and doing pretty terribly) I definitely had a different experience than all the “Nintendo SixtyFoaaaar!” kids out there.
But there are levels to it. Coming at it dispassionately in those circumstances I still played through all of Mario 64 and OoT and thought they were great and good, respectively. GoldenEye, Turok and the Banjo games not so much.
Of course that opinion also has to do with controller support on PC being utter garbage until the Xbox 360 came out. For a long time the best playing 3D games on PC that weren’t shooters or RPGs were emulated console games with a PS2 controller adaptor.
Oof, sounds like you missed the whole space sim genre then. Took extra hardware for the best experience, but even with a cheap joystick it could be amazing stuff. I enjoyed first-person shooters and the like, but TIE Fighter and Freespace were 3D to me back then. I loved my Sidewinder gamepad in that era, too.
That may or may not be why fifth-gen console 3D does next to nothing for me. Until the Dreamcast came out, it all looked way behind PC, and almost no one was doing the amazing spritework that they excelled at anymore.
Well, yeah, OK, flight sims. We had flight sims, too.
And yeah, visually PC games were way ahead of the curve, but that was part of the frustration, right? You had all these super polished, advanced graphics and you were stuck on mouse and keyboard or trying to make do with a joystick or a remedial gamepad. Even when PC pads started including some form of analog stick they were so flimsy. I was on a PS2 pad for a good long while, both for native and emulated games.
Yeah, I was in my teens and by the time the N64 came out I had a gaming PC with a proper GPU in it. Between that and the N64 launching quite late over here (and doing pretty terribly) I definitely had a different experience than all the “Nintendo SixtyFoaaaar!” kids out there.
But there are levels to it. Coming at it dispassionately in those circumstances I still played through all of Mario 64 and OoT and thought they were great and good, respectively. GoldenEye, Turok and the Banjo games not so much.
Of course that opinion also has to do with controller support on PC being utter garbage until the Xbox 360 came out. For a long time the best playing 3D games on PC that weren’t shooters or RPGs were emulated console games with a PS2 controller adaptor.
Oof, sounds like you missed the whole space sim genre then. Took extra hardware for the best experience, but even with a cheap joystick it could be amazing stuff. I enjoyed first-person shooters and the like, but TIE Fighter and Freespace were 3D to me back then. I loved my Sidewinder gamepad in that era, too.
That may or may not be why fifth-gen console 3D does next to nothing for me. Until the Dreamcast came out, it all looked way behind PC, and almost no one was doing the amazing spritework that they excelled at anymore.
Well, yeah, OK, flight sims. We had flight sims, too.
And yeah, visually PC games were way ahead of the curve, but that was part of the frustration, right? You had all these super polished, advanced graphics and you were stuck on mouse and keyboard or trying to make do with a joystick or a remedial gamepad. Even when PC pads started including some form of analog stick they were so flimsy. I was on a PS2 pad for a good long while, both for native and emulated games.