SvennoJ said:
And yet, I finished TR1 to TR3, Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Grim Fandango without any issues, but never managed to finished Mario 64 at the time, getting too frustrated with the controls and camera in the ice world. Never got past that... OoT was great, but Mario 64 I couldn't get along with. |
No, TR was not originally a PC game. The first TR appeared first in Sega Saturn, and then PSX. PC versions were always launched at the same time of PSX. BUT, PC versions of TR 1, 2 and 3 got some expansions one year later of its release, never seen on PSX, so the "complete" experiences of those games, were only in PC (some guy did an amazing job porting the TR1 expansion to the Sega Saturn, 1 or 2 years ago, btw).
Are you trying to tell me OoT had better camera than SM64?? I doubt that XDDD
Ocarina of time had no camera controls at all, you only could use the Z button to instantly and abruptly fix it at the back of Link. It usually does the job when you play (NOT always), but it's lame and a poor gameplay decision. In fact, I remember that, as the lowest point in the gameplay for Ocarina, and I will tell more: in its day, 1998, harmed the beauty of its world, cause you always have the camera trying to relocate to your back, at the same distance and at the same fucking height, don't know why. That was... horrible, compared to the huge freedom you had in Mario 64, when you could "explore the surroundings" without moving. Obviously they did the same for Majora's, cause they had no time to redo any of the basic gameplay parts if they wanted to make a second Zelda for N64.
But Wind Waker some years later, fixed that, giving you the camera controls again, with a very nice and well-made easy camera, using now the 2nd stick of the GC controller. A very similar camera to the one you can find now in GTAV, for example.
Mario 64 camera is just, for 1996, out of this world, and have suffered a smear campaign since PSX days... Yes, camera can fool you in some angles if you are a newbie in the game and you are trying to make some difficult jump, and in a very narrow and specific places it can be impossible to manage well (the inside of the igloo in the second ice world, basically) because it collides with many walls to be able to turn it.
But if you pretend, in 1996, SM64 camera had to have the brilliance to approuch to the character when you are near to a wall, instead of collinding it, man... ok. but, it's not fair XD. You could simply change the camera to the "mario"mode with just a single trigger input and made that camera being pegged to Mario's back.
The rest of the 3d games with camera controls, by then, were PURE SHIT compared to SM64 camera. Many 3D games of the late 90s are now unplayable cause that. Instead, SM64 is now the king of the speedrunners videos. They are beautiful. I can assure you, camera is not bad, and game plays GOOD by actual standards
Camera controls were in fact one of the reasons some developers preferred to use fixed cameras, like Square or Capcom did in its 3D games in the 90s. It was the easy solution: they put a lot of fixed cameras, and they just put some nice prerredered images as backgrounds, being the games basically empty places with beautiful photos. Others developers just preferred to make First person games: This last solution also saved the polygons from the character model, to use them in the near 3D surroundings.
But let me tell you something about Ocarina and why it have that bare camera controls:
Ocarina, originally was planned as a First Person Game, and that was confirmed by Miyamoto itself and other people who worked in it, some years ago. It was just because the polygonal model of Link they created for cinematic scenes was so cool... they decided to use it in the actual gameplay of the game. So... they fucked changed the game to a third person adventure... because the guy who did the Link's model exceeded the expectations the team put in their task. Literally.
That is C-R-A-Z-Y, because this means 3D Zeldas were VERY near to be some sort of a Nintendo "King's Field" or "Elder Scrolls" series.
Zelda 64 was very hyped during all its YEARS in development, and had a colossal importance in the future of the series: It was just the 5th official game in the series and the very first one in 3D. When you dig in all the INSANE changes in development Ocarina had, in all its aspecs: story, gameplay, location of the game... even the media they pretended to use (first magnetic disks, then carts... and boy that means a LOT of changes in the game and the gameplay), EVERYTHING... that... is just nuts. Lots and lots of unused material and discarted ideas in the very last stages of development, were found by players even inside the roms of their commercial carts, using just gamesharks, 25 years ago. That was Bananas. It almost seems that game was just a colossal ball of pure luck made by continuos random changes and decisions, some of them made in a very trivial manner, during ALL its development stages, ending somewhat, in a succesful way... to be acclaimed by the media and the public at the end.
FFVII also suffered some sort of crazy development, including the Zack character as a VERY late creation.
What happened to TR6, Angel of Darkness, was just the opposite situation. Everything went wrong: they tried to innovate too much, using the same old controls because I suppose they though people wanted them. The result was a mess, as they stopped to use the "grid" idea for the stages, so... the result was a game with horrible controls even for those who prefered the old style, cause they do not adapt well to the new constructed world. That game flopped very hard, and some in the press pretended it was great. The damage was catastrophic for the series.
Last edited by JohnVG - on 10 February 2025
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