Nintendo 64 Hurts my Eyes

[ReaXan]

A roomate of mine found his old 64 and had a few games with it including GoldenEye so I decided to try it out after 5 or so years of not playing it.

Man the textures were so blurry i actually had to take a tylenol because of it.Can someone explain to me why this is,I dont remember having that problem as a kid LOL

[CreamSoda]

I agree with you on the blurry textures thing, but having to take tylenol? Thats the most extreme thing I've heard.

Speaking of that, when I was a kid I used to get literally sick from playing SanFransico Rush(the original). on the N64. Hell of a game, but damn those fuzzy graphics passing by at high speeds. 8-)

[cyberfluxor]

Could be several possible factors:
His TV isn't sharper or clear than the one you use to play on.

Become so use to the higher end graphics your eyes haven't been use to the exposure of lower end graphics.

Your vision has decreased and due to the fuzzy 3D graphics you concentrate more on focusing cause strain in your eyes.

It's a figment of your imagination and now hate the N64. :P

Maybe you're playing in a place that's not well lit or the conditions aren't right for what you're playing. Would you play one of the Banjo games in pitch dark? You shouldn't.

[roxybaby]

The graphics don't bother me too much but I do get motion sick from so many of the games. Even GoldenEye gets to me now...must be getting old!

[SuperShark]

Yo, I am a ripe young age of 16, and I still say some of the grafx from the old Bond games on the N64 can get ya a bit dizzy and whatever. Even perfect dark multiplayer (especially when ya add a bunch of bots running around). Everything just gets so odd looking, jumpy, and blury, and in an FPS ya just dont expect that and it gets to ya a bit sometimes. But I also must say that as we grow more accustomed to the newer smoother grafx of the newer systems, we grow less used to those older grafx and they screw ya up more. Play them long enough and you do gradually grow used to them again (about 1.5 years back, me and some buds got gack into playing goldeneye and perfect dark again, at least half an hour every couple of days, and gradually ya get used to it again.)

Also, for me, games like San Fan Rush that get supper blurry and fuzzy, does not bother me at all, and this I think is because I am kinda used to it and like it, even prefer it in a racing game, when you get a great feeling of speed by having everything around ya blur and change looks, clearness, and shape. It helps to create that sense of a burst of speed for me.

Racing game with bluring and fuzziness when going fast - good
FPS game with bluring and fuzziness when waling very slowly - bad

[sayin999]

Only game on 64 that got me sick when playing it was probably extreme g when using the code that had unlimited boosters or somehting like that. The speed was so fast i would get a hedeach easily.

[mailman187666]

I think one of the reasons they made textures blurry was to eliminate pixelization when getting up close to them. Around that time, pixelization was one of the major graphical problems they were trying to do away with. With the memory expansion pack connected to the N64, I think it was supposed to slightly enhance the graphics and make it a little less hazy, but I could be completely wrong.

[Neil Koch]

A lot of the older 3D/FPS games tend to have a smiliar effect on me. I think it might be more of the slower frame rate that the less detalied graphics.

[smokehouse]

I will be corrected on this if I am wrong but I’m almost 100% sure it had to do with Nintendo’s over use of anti-aliasing when ti came to the N64. They teamed up with Silicon Graphics and came up with the engine that the N64 operates on. There are some games that are not as bad as others, like Paper Mario, some like Mario 64 are fuzzy as hell. I guess Nintendo though it was better to be blurry than jaggie…

[MegaDrive20XX]

Yeah, it's really sad to say, that the N64 didn't age that well. I can still play Goldeneye at times. Other N64 however never give me this problem at all.

[joshnickerson]

Yeah, sadly the N64 is pretty blurry by today's standards, but to be totally honest, it never really bothered me until I went back after playing current gen systems, and but even then, it didn't make my dizzy or anything (This run on sentence brought to you by ten hours of office work). That, and the frame rate was pretty bad by today's standards as well.

Is it true that the Virtual Console downloads will smooth out the frame rate? I was a bit disappointed when the frame rate wasn't improved for Ocarina of Time in Zelda Collection.

[KingCobra]

Yea, N64 suck'd it hard when it came to sharpness, heck, my SNES through S-Video is clean as a tack. Genesis was a washout fest also, great games but it's sure had to watch nodays.

[smokehouse]

I noticed immediately. I was playing the Playstation some time before the N64 launch. After buying a N64 launch console, it was apparent from the start, I thought something was wrong with my N64 until I started looking closer at gaming magazines and their captured screen shots.

I returned the N64 within a week and bought a Playstation. Funny enough, it would take Paper Mario coming out some 5 years later (early 2001 if I remember correctly) to drive me to get another N64. And I can honestly say I didn’t play one all of that time in between. Even with being a Nintendo fanboy, I still feel the PS1 was a better machine…

[Necrosaro420]

The N64 had games with decent graphics, but some of them were down right pathetic

[zektor]

You can actually clean up the N64's video output with a little less than half a bottle of Skyy Vodka.

[Push Upstairs]

Do you give that to the N64 or drink it yourself?

[NintenDk]

Do you give that to the N64 or drink it yourself?

hehe half to the n64 half to yourself LOL

[Pente]

Early 3D just doesn't age well. And the better it gets, the more you notice what you thought was good grahics then, just dont cut it now.

[ReaXan]

Early 3D just doesn't age well. And the better it gets, the more you notice what you thought was good grahics then, just dont cut it now.



Exactly,thats why I notice I can play the NES and not complain about the graphics because it was all about the fun factor,The N64 didnt have the fun factor that the NES or SNES carried

[Vectorman0]

Early 3D just doesn't age well. And the better it gets, the more you notice what you thought was good grahics then, just dont cut it now.

I disagree. I don't consider GoldenEye that "early" of a 3D game, considering 3D had been growing for a couple years.

And if you still consider it early because 3D was still somewhat new compared to now, which is understandable, just take a look at Super Mario 64. That game couldn't have aged any better, especially for a first generation game.

[ReaXan]

[quote=Pente] just take a look at Super Mario 64. That game couldn't have aged any better, especially for a first generation game.


I think because Mario Games arent that big to begin with compared to say GoldenEye where you can tell they spent weeks compressing and blurring textures,I guess Nintendo realized the downfalls of their system and tried to "blur" it up LOL,sometimes I will play an early N64 game and swear I am playing a Saturn Game graphic wise

[zektor]

Do you give that to the N64 or drink it yourself?

hehe half to the n64 half to yourself LOL

The N64 is already fuzzy...drink it ALL yourself :)

[zektor]

Do you give that to the N64 or drink it yourself?

hehe half to the n64 half to yourself LOL

The N64 is already blurry...drink it ALL yourself :)

[ubersaurus]

Early 3D just doesn't age well. And the better it gets, the more you notice what you thought was good grahics then, just dont cut it now.



Exactly,thats why I notice I can play the NES and not complain about the graphics because it was all about the fun factor,The N64 didnt have the fun factor that the NES or SNES carried

I think it more has to do with the fact that 2D games generally look sharp no matter what. 2600 games may not be very detailed, but at least they're not blurry, or so pixelled you can't tell whats what.

PS1, N64, and Saturn all look kind of crappy to me nowadays, but that's likely just from being spoiled on consistent framerates and higher resolutions.

[petewhitley]

I actually prefer the N64 anti-aliasing to the early PS1 jaggy pixelated mess. More distracting to me is the frame rate of a game like Goldeneye. The slowdown at times is unbearable, but I remember back then using it almost as a strategy in multiplayer games. :eek 2:

[InsaneDavid]

Do you give that to the N64 or drink it yourself?

You pour it in the expansion port.

The N64's graphics always looked blurry and fuzzy - from the start. And I will never understand why people cream their shorts over memories of GoldenEye. Yeah, the multiplayer was cool, but the framerate was so horrible and the detail level so low.. not to mention how SLOW everything was... At the same time you could have run something like Descent on a three year old computer and it would blow GoldenEye's multiplayer totally out of the water.

[d4s]

just fyi: rgb-modding your n64 and then playing on a small monitor such as the commodore 1084s makes the graphics look vibrant and very, very sharp.

[Push Upstairs]

That says a lot about the N64 when you actually have to modify the system for RGB just to get the graphics to look decent.

[YoshiM]

As an N64 lover I will have to agree the system's graphics haven't aged well, but then neither has many of the Playstation's or Saturn's. Look at Blaster Master Blasts Again on PS or even the highly praised Burning Rangers on the Saturn: jaggies so sharp you could shave and pixelated textures that could double as an ink-blot test.

But you know what? The games we remember fondly are the ones where gameplay and graphics were working on all cylinders. Metal Gear Solid is still fun to play, even though an 80's GI Joe figure is more realistic looking than Solid Snake. Zelda: OoT is still great because of its depth and challenges.

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

It's not the RGB mod that's improving the display anyway, it's the 13" monitor. RGB would only make the blurriness more pronounced since the textures are getting blurred at a low level mostly from the mip-mapping.

The Playstation and Saturn don't seem to have the blurriness problems of the N64, but they do seem to have problems presenting polygons in a coherent way. Way too often on those systems, what's supposed to be a three dimensional scene just ends up looking like a nonsensical pile of ragged squares and triangles. This never seemed to happen on the N64 (except when your camera got out of whack), either because it simply had better 3D hardware or even because of the very same mip-mapping that made things look so blurry.

But anyway, like someone else said, it all comes down to fun factor. If a game is fun, you won't even notice these kinds of visual defects. Take Panzer Dragoon as an example. Those games are some of the worst when it comes to the incoherent jumble of polygons phenomenon, but they're still such fun games that you only rarely notice that you can't tell what exactly is supposed to be going on around you. Same goes on the N64 with games like Zelda, Mario 64, 1080 Snowboarding or any of the great arcade racers.


...word is bondage...

[GameSlaveGaz]

Although it's been over a year since I played any N64, I'm pretty positive I've never had a vision problem playing N64 games, however this reminds me of a current dilemma I'm facing. I think playing the GameBoy Micro is fucking with my eyes. Like, from straining to see the tiny screen. I'll be playing Pokémon, and I'll admit I'm playing this for quite a long period of time and sometimes in the dark so the only light is the backlit screen, and my eyesight will get a little blurry or I feel like I'm going crosseyed trying to focus on the screen. And I don't have this problem when I switch back to my SP. However, I was playing Super Smash Bros Melee and sitting five feet away from the TV and the text for the list of bonuses at the end of a stage were slightly blurry. It's not to the point where I can't make out shapes or words at all, but it's like a discomfort. Like I can feel myself going crosseyed. I guess I'm just straining my eyes a little too much from playing on the Micro. I've cut back a lot, and only went back to playing it for a few days because I forgot to charge my SP. But does anyone else feel the same way when playing the Micro?

[spunibard]

I actually prefer the N64 anti-aliasing to the early PS1 jaggy pixelated mess.

i prefer anti aliased as well- makes me cringe to play FF12 and see the landscape 'sparkle' because of no anti aliasing, or to notice the pixilated characters.

and while the textures were blurry, the rendering of the models which used those textures and the lighting was not blurry.

[77punk]

you all are abunch of N64 haters! I love the N64, no problems with headaches with me..

[sabre2922]

Paper Mario,the two Zelda games,super Mario64, DOOM 64-yes doom and a few others are the only N64 games that I still enjoy today IF I still had a N64.

One thing that Nintendo did get right with the few AAA first party N64 games was the GAMEPLAY was great and still holds solid today as we all know many of todays shiny-bumpmapped- 3-Dgraphics-showcased arent nearly as playable as Mario64 and that was no minor feat considering the horrid N64 controller.

the N64 graphics =fuzzy,blurry and with most 3rd party games FOGFILLED fluff to cover popup.

Even "back in the day" it was criticized for the very same reasons that it is now especially the graphics.

Sure none of the first-gen 3-D home consoles aged very well but at least most of the AAA PSX 3-D games look OK especially when compared to 95% of the fully 3-D games that appeared on N64 and especially the 3-D challenged Saturn.

N64 controller=the HORRROR the HORROR

other than that the N64 was a decent system.

[CreamSoda]

you all are abunch of N64 haters! I love the N64, no problems with headaches with me..


"N64 Haters!" ?

Wgat are you talking about, I love the N64(it's my second favorite system next to Dreamcast. And I own a decent collection of almost 100, N64 games. But, even I have to admit that the graphics were laughably blurry at times.