As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)
How many third-party games were any good?
We referred to Rare as a “second-party” developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.
To answer your question on third-party games, some of my favourites were…
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Vigilante 8
Extreme-G
Snowboard Kids
Turok
Bomberman 64
Resident Evil 2
San Francisco Rush
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
But I don’t see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it’s legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.
Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.
I don’t get the hype for Castlevania. I’ve never liked any of them. I also haven’t played one since the SNES.
Well, they took a pretty dramatic turn after that point. Still, Castlevania 1 and 3 are beloved for other reasons.