I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I’d try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there’s a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon’s later entries since there’s more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm doesn’t seem as big, you don’t have a way to know that you’re tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn’t seem as characteristic. It’s a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
Goldeneye. Revolutionized the FPS genre at the time. Nigh unplayable now. Tried recently using both NSO and on an original N64, it just hasn’t aged well when compared to something modern.
Perfect Dark, on the other hand, totally still holds up today in my opinion, and there’s a decompilation project that works great on PC and Steam Deck.
Perfect dark holds up even better if you use two n64 controllers. Basically modern FPS style controls! I think Golden Eye had the same option?
I tried that with a friend once and we were confused about the purpose. Now it makes sense!
I love love love perfect dark. But it’s uhhh it does not hold up. The campaign starts fairly strong and craters pretty quick. It really feels like they just weren’t able to really… Finish the game when it came out.
Also, like GoldenEye, a huge component of Perfect Dark was multiplayer.
Yeah, I felt that way about GoldenEye after getting used to PD. GoldenEye was one of the GOATs in its day, but that day passed pretty quickly. Halo then further improved on the controls and CoD improved on the multiplayer mechanics.
When that GoldenEye for PC project released some years ago, I was excited to download and install it (because PC port meant it would get PC controls, which have always been superior to console controls, even after Halo fixed them) but I think I only played one game before remembering that you start with nothing and have to find guns and the port was more crowded than the 2-4 player games back in the day where you could at least spawn away from the action and get a chance to arm up before others made their way to where you were.
With the N64, it helps if you can hook it up to a TV from around that era too. Games like Goldeneye look terrible on a modern LCD. I had that experience myself - “Man, I know I’m used to modern games now, but I don’t remember these games looking this shitty”. Then I dragged out my old CRT and hooked it up, and instantly it was “Now this is how I remember these games looking like”.
I played Goldeneye at an arcade recently that had an N64 set up and actually had a great time. But people who hadn’t grown up with it and tried to join in found it pretty frustrating. So I can see that going either way tbh.
Yeah it already had inferior controls at the time if you were familiar with FPS gaming on computers. But it was still a ton of fun and when I went back to it some years ago I fell back into the n64 controller muscle memory no problem
The key is to change the layout, then the only problem is really replacing a mouse with the joystick.
Yeah you can use two controllers to mimic the more modern twin stick ones that have become standard, but I don’t think too many people figured that out back then. Still though, controller will never be as good as mouse + keyboard for FPS games.
Plug in a second controller and switch the control option to 2.4.
Ah yes, “co-op mode”
I played a port to the modern system recently. WASD, mouse… Was rather fun.
Hell yeah man
No, I don’t believe it was this. It looked exactly like an original. Just the input layout was more modern.
Play the xbla version via Xenia with mouse support and you’ll love it more than you ever did.
You can actually play it with modern controls on NSO if you do a fair amount of tweaking. Makes it MUCH better.