leileilol wrote on 2022-06-13, 19:02:
The N64 port is the only port that could even get to honor the term "port". The other consoles lacked in the FPU and depth precision required to make quake's technological hallmarks, they'd have to be wobbly rewrites with extremely butchered levels. It's kind of a wonder that the Saturn version was bothered to be made at all. Executive meddling rules over Carmack for the sake of the scant Saturn library, i'm assuming.
that gba 'port' prototype is not a cancelled release as being widely reported either.
The N64 version of Quake is OK, but not great. It did look better (ish...) at times than the PC version (I mean of course the original DOS PC version, running at a low resolution on a typical Pentium PC), with the N64 version's coloured lighting, and I *think* there were some slight changes to some levels that might have improved the look of the game (but I can't recall even one, so I might well be conflating it with a different game, I'm not a Quake fanatic and I haven't played Quake 64 in a very long time). It did lack the PC version's opening select-your-skill-level-and-which-episode-you-want-to-play-through-section, for some strange reason, so you have to choose the skill level via a menu when starting the game, and you could only start at the game's first level (though that gave you the advantage that you carried your weapons through the levels even when playing the levels that would have been the first levels of the other episodes).
I'm pretty sure it was missing a few of the PC version's levels too.
You also couldn't save mid-level in Quake 64, in common with console games first person shooters of the time, so we didn't mind that change so much (we N64 fans were used to it), but to someone coming from the PC to the N64, I'd imagine many of them would hate that limitation.
But I think the worst change was that the multiplayer was so cut-down. It was two player only, I think it only had six levels, and the splitscreen (again, it was a console game) didn't use all of either half of the screen, presumably to get the game to run fast enough. Even though other N64 first person shooters managed to take up the entire screen with either two or even four player views, and still run at full speed. No online, no LAN, and no fan-made mods and maps, and of course those were three of the things that made the PC version so massively popular.
I assume the N64 port was either slightly rushed, or the publishers didn't insist on maximum quality. It was OK to play, especially if you didn't have access to a gaming PC, but other than splitscreen (which was playable but not great) there was no reason for a PC gamer to want to play Quake 64.
An interesting fact about Quake 64 is that it's the only game that offers the option to turn off the hardware anti-aliasing. As a result, hackers were able to find out how to turn the AA off for any N64 game or program, so now (using a flash cartridge with your N64) you can play most games with 'jaggies' (jagged diagonal areas of pixels) instead of the smoother but slightly blurry luck you usually get with the N64.
