Fox5 said:
Somehow, I knew that Perfect Dark would be on that list. But it is incredibly blurry and has tons of display artifacts, even in hi res.
Blurry? Display artefacts? What are you talking about?! PD had amongst the best IQ of any game on the N64, even using multitexturing in places.
Unfortunately the framerate sucked monkey-bum; I found the game pretty much impossible to play on the higher difficulty levels because with the almost non-existent autoaim I couldn't hit anything when the screen updated at less than 10fps. The difficulty level was clearly PD's biggest flaw, it's not that enemies got more health or aimed better or did more damage in higher difficulties, they did ALL of that, plus the player gets less ammo, no body armor and the autoaim circle gets smaller too. I got so pissed at that game because enemies have no reaction time. As soon as I duck out around a corner, they nail me one in the chest. They shoot *immediately*, which is terribly unrealistic.
PD could have been a great game, but the stupidly high difficulty, the idiotic over-use of lens flares (which annoys the player and makes the framerate dive down the toilet), Elvis the Alien and those silly badguy aliens that looked like... Well, I don't know what they looked like, something stupid I guess... These factors all worked together to prevent PD from being anything really great, which is why I don't lament Rare's defection over to MS. They deserve each other, hehehehe!
but I think Turok had a draw distance of only about a few feet.
Few feet? No way, though draw distance actually varied in different places of the game, it was easily 10-15 meters in most places and even more in some areas. Turok 2 had generally even longer draw distances, but that game chugged really bad, especially in hires.
It was also terribly buggy. For example, in my copy it wasn't possible to pick up tranquilizer ammo.
If you found a tranq gun, you had 10 shots or something like that, and that was it.
I don't recall "crawling ants" as a problem in any game
Maybe because you didn't look? Most N64 games have this problem, look at distant surfaces, particulary textures with even, regular patterns. See how parts of the pattern wink in and out of existence as you move.
at least no more so than perfect dark.
There aren't much in the way of crawling ants in PD, since it uses mipmapping + trilinear. Scrolling text on monitor screens and decal textures on walls aren't mipmapped, but that's the sole exceptions in that game. Most other N64 games aren't mipmapping anything.
BTW, how come in goldeneye and perfect dark if you looked straight down the ground textures looked really wierd sometimes?
I never saw this happen, and I looked around quite a lot in those games, studying everything.
Anyhow, wasn't halflife a 200 MB game? And they could use compression of some sort, though most PC games already do.
Hm, PK3 files are just ordinary ZIP archives with a different extension. Not sure about Quake PAK files though; they might just be a lump of a file which contains all the other smaller files in one big container. Then again, maybe half-life didn't use the PAK format? I can't remember; too long ago!
seem to indicate that they just babelfished the japanese quote which is never a good idea...