indiarubber

i don't really know where to put this, or whether anyone from giant bomb's editorial staff would ever see it, but i've been looking for decent quality copies of these trailers for years and i've come up empty every time. i figure they have to be on those tapes somewhere and the quality bump would be significant compared to what's out there

@egg: you're right. and realistically i shouldn't expect it to happen any other way, even in this hypothetical. but the idea would be to offset the risk of remastering niche titles by bundling their cost into a "collection" featuring better known titles. i guess that doesn't make sense without covering for that risk in pricing said collection at something of a premium, which isn't ideal next to just releasing these niche titles at modest price points on the their own. and assuming they sell at all, there could be more money in that in the end. here's hoping that will ever happen

@extomar: that's a good point of course. this and the specialized and non-public nature of the 64's architecture itself is largely why n64 emulation remains a sad state of affairs. but that's why these wouldn't be running from emulation. i mean i realize that would be the cheapest way to do it, but i can dream

@corruptedevil: n64 emulation (outside of nintendo themselves) is barely there next to psx emulation. yeah the big first party titles work for the most part, but 90% of the catalog is more or less broken in one way or the other.

let's get away from the topic of emulation or even the n64's catalog. take a game like soul reaver. even on pc and dreamcast that game is fogged to 30 feet in front of you. this wasn't by design, but by necessity to keep the framerate reasonable on the psx, especially with their streaming tech running in the background. it just happened to carry over to the pc and dreamcast ports, unfortunately. there's nothing you can do with epsxe or your given psx emulator to fix this. but in the process of porting the game to a modern system it can be fixed. game also has really lousy camera control, another thing pretty easily tweaked and fixed for a modern gamepad. thus a modern port is a worthwhile pursuit if you've ever cared/still care about this game.

and if you do care about these games, chances are you can forgive the crude 3d. chances are you may even enjoy it. symphony of the night's sprites are never gonna be higher res than they already are. they can never be without a proper remake. but if you like those sprites as they are, chances are you appreciated the greater clarity of their presentation in the xbla re-release. the same goes for early 3d.

i've mentioned a few already

it isn't in this case, though, because where a game like god of war or jak and daxter was perfectly playable on original hardware, a game like banjo tooie or perfect dark wasn't thanks to framerate. and there are outliers like space station silicon valley where the framerate is decent enough, but the game is buggy. and the state of n64 emulation is sadly nowhere on par with psx emulation for the majority of its catalog.

there are enough logical reasons to want ports from this era, but of course it's easy to want things. the question isn't will they sell like the god of war or metal gear HD collections, it's could there be enough interest to make it a worthwhile endeavor anyway? the financial investment here is less than those sixth gen ports, so sales ceiling necessary to turn a profit is lowered by default. and porting fifth gen games to modern hardware gives you so much overhead that the porting/optimization itself isn't the bear it likely was for those jak and daxter ports, for example. in those terms, with the right collection of games, it makes financial sense. whether it'll ever happen is another story.

in what way would upping frame rate and tweaking controls turn complete and released games into bloated messes? as for frame rate induced speed up and glitches: that's why they would be ports. you correct for that in the process. if you don't have the time or resources to tweak the engine to compensate, you go with the next best thing and lock the game to its originally intended framerate.

they didn't, though. plenty did but plenty do now. the idea here is to preserve the ones that didn't. and i'm not interested in hinging this conversation on graphics, because that's really only a fraction of the conversation. sure, people find it hard to take early 3d now, in general. but that isn't a hard fast rule. and its graphical roughness and simplicity isn't keeping that many people from playing or enjoying something like super mario bros to this day. the same applies to something like space station silicon valley, which was rough as hell even in its time but a blast to play (mirroring gta3 in many ways, which is appropriate as they're both from the same team)

i get that, but you've set up kind of a false dichotomy there. these games won't benefit visually as much as sixth gen games do, but they will benefit more mechanically. the banjos xbla are nearly straight up ports, for example. there's no graphical makeover going on there except in UI textures. but they're worthy and appreciated ports because they make otherwise sluggish n64 titles playable at locked framerates on a modern gamepad. that's the goal here. besides, not as many people hate early 3d as you might think, so the resolution and widescreen upgrade is just an added bonus

i recognize the wii u's virtual console as the best hope - if it's any hope - for anything n64 and third party. so that sucks and there's not much i can do about that, but yeah