Nintendo 64 Figting Games

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There isn't any Capcom or SNK fighting game on the N64.

But there's KI Gold, Rakuga Kids, Flying Dragon, Super Robot Spirits, War Gods, MACE, Dark Rift, G.A.S.P, Fighter's Destiny, Clayfighter 63 1/2, and a few others.

Most of them are mediocre 3D fighters that don't come close to Virtua Fighter or Tekken, but Flying Dragon has a SD mode with RPG elements that's actually really fun, better than the main game.

The more traditional 2D games you'll find are KI and Rakuga Kids (which is actually a hilarious underrated game).

Oh yeah, there's also Mortal kombat Trilogy and MK4.

>>2907275
Where can you even buy Rakuga Kids besides ebay?

>>2907280
I'm sorry, but are you being serious? Is this some sort of troll?

Think of where you might buy a Nintendo 64 game that isn't on ebay normally.

Mortal Kombat 4 isn't that great, but it's so much fun to play with a friend.

KI Gold is usually considered the best fighter on the system

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>>2907293
Hmmmm you think maybe this vast network of information that we are communicating on has the answer?

I will never understand why it's so hard for people to go to google and type something like buy "game" to find information. It's like they fail at the most rudimentary concept of squiring knowledge through research. They have to have their hand held through life.

>>2907275
I have the Fighter's Destiny games, but was never really too impressed with them. Will definitely have to check out Flying Dragon and Rakuga Kids.

desu I expected this thread to go straight to Smash Bros.

>>2907396
no idea why desu auto corrected to desu

>>2907413

wordfilters so people would stop talking like teenagers from social media

>>2907414
What is the normal word senpai?

>>2907420
I don't know senpai

>>2907420
Oh! I remember, it's desu!

>>2907414
At least they gave us cuck back

>>2907420
I don't know bae

>>2907260
Mortal Kombat Trilogy

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>>2907275
Although we already know the N64 wasn't exactly a 2D powerhouse, it's still disappointing to see no attempts from either Capcom or SNK were made to develop a fighting game for it. And I'm not even talking about Street Fighter or King of Fighters either. There were plenty of good (2D) fighting games from both companies during the N64 life cycle.

Ok, we know Rival Schools, for instance, was originally developed for arcades, but the system board was essentially a beefed-up Playstation and SNK already had their share of expensive cartridges with Neo Geo. Was Nintendo's policy so strict (and retarded) as to deny a pure 2D fighter like Street Fighter Zero 2 (which got a SNES version!), but allow horrible stuff like Clayfighter 63 1/3, Dual Heroes and a subpar version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy? Was N64 so counter-intuitive to develop for that not even the RAM expansion would make a port (or even a retooled version) of, say, Fatal Fury Wild Ambition or Samurai Shodown 64 possible?

>>2908512
>Although we already know the N64 wasn't exactly a 2D powerhouse…
Where can I read an explanation for this? As someone not versed in retro tech, I don't understand why a machine that can handle 3D would struggle with 2D.

>>2908550
N64 has less than a few 2d games. Developers focused mainly on 3d, as it was the hot new shit.

>>2907260
6/8 button is nice but the controller is shit for fighting games for a number of reasons:

a) button orientation is shit
b) buttons aren't a uniform size
c) the d-pad is shit, which is the most important part

If you aren't going to play fighters with an arcade stick, the only good alternative is a genesis 6-button or saturn controller which still suffers from b)

>>2907260
Funny you mention this OP, just bought killer instinct gold the other day and played it this morning and was surprised to find that you is the c buttons as attack controls

>>2908569
What are you banging on about? The D-Pad works just fine.

>>2908550
I'd wager the 4kb texture cache limit hampered development quite a bit, but then again the N64 could run KI Gold and Mortal Kombat Trilogy just fine so that at least proves it was possible.
Really though, the actual reason was market.

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Deadly Arts is a bad game with bad controls that likes to eat your inputs a lot, but I kinda liked it. It featured interactive environments that don't quite work a la VF3 and a create your custom character mode.

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Fighter's Destiny and Flying Dragon/SD Hyriu no Ken 2 are kind of awful games that are so unique and charming you can't help but love them. Funnily I actually ended up putting more time into Flying Dragon than most actual good fighters on the PS1.

>>2908641
It's mushy

>>2908676

It's basically a SNES d-pad, the reason it seems stiff is that, well, you barely use it in most games. if you ever come across a brand-new SNES pad, the d-pad would also feel stiff or weird.

Give it some use with games that use it like mischief makers or KI Gold and it will feel just like SNES.

I agree the Saturn (model 2) d-pad is much better for fighting games though.

>>2907302
I know Mortal Kombat is technically a six button game, but really it's 4 face buttons with block and run buttons that should be on the shoulder. So in other words, it's not really a "6 button fighter" that implies low-medium-high or light-medium-strong layouts.

>>2907681
that's not any better

>>2908761
The Snes pad is also bad for fighting games. The only good dpads for fighting games are the Mega drive and Saturn pads.

>>2908997
AES too

>>2908997

It's functional, there's even some people that like playing fighting games with the PS1 d-pad, so to each their own, but yeah I like Saturn and Genesis (both model 2) the most for fighting.

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>>2908550
N64 was specialized/designed for 3D graphics, although it wasn't about just pushing polygons. So, many of its features like perspective-correct texture mapping (which prevents textures being drawn incorrectly at odd angles, bilinear/trilinear filtering (which prevented the pixelated look on low resolution textures) weren't exactly useful for 2D games. Combine this with a few design oversights, like the 4 KB texture cache mentioned by >>2908649, storage price (N64's were expensive to manufacture) and a system known to be difficult to develop for.

forum.beyond3d.com/threads/a-couple-ps1-n64-gen-questions.38182/#post-1024216
The moderator (ERP) developed for both N64 and PSX and shared a few interesting bits about both systems. It may be quite a good reading to follow this topic.

>>2908660
Oh wow I played this at new year's eve at a local nitendo geek's place. Holy shit this awful

>>2909528
>4 KB texture cache

It's not really a limitation since you can load the texture cache as many times as fill rate or memory rate will allow. The N64's RDP chip has an insanely fast blitting mode (250 Mpixels fill rate) that can put all of the bitmaps you could ever want into RAM.

The RSP chip with an appropriate microcode could be a sprite scaling super power.

None of this stuff was ever really used, but in theory, the N64 can totally destroy the PS1 AND Saturn at 2D.

>>2909528

None of this really answers the question. So it has features that aren't useful for 2D. That really means nothing. Let's come up with a hypothetical scenario: the SNES is released, but with those features added. You can still play the existing games and new games are made for it. Would the existing games suffer just because a few useless features were added? Would the new games be less of a technical achievement? No, the added features would just be irrelevant. I'm not sure where the texture cache comes into play, either.

I'm not trying to be mean or an asshole, I just don't understand.

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>>2907260
When I was a kiddo I though this was the best fighting game since sliced bread

>>2908569
>the d-pad is shit, which is the most important part

What the hell? It has one of the best d-pads I've ever felt in my life.

>>2908676

What exactly does this mean?

>>2909528
>>2909574
Just more to add...

>bilinear/trilinear filtering
>weren't exactly useful for 2D games

Actually, the whole reason the N64 can theoretically blit so fast is because the texture filtering units can be re-appropriated for blitting purposes (bilinear filtering normally requires several pixels to be simultaneously read from a bitmap buffer/texture cache and then averaged, instead of averaging all those pixel color values write them all to memory for super speed blitting).

>a few design oversights, like the 4 KB texture cache
The texture cache thing wasn't a design oversight but the result of an overzealous attempt to reduce pin-count and die size to lower manufacturing costs.

>>2909626
*by pixels I meant texels, sorry tired as fuck

>>2909574
>>2909626
That's some interesting info - even more if you consider it would mean there was a lot of unexplored possibilties. Now I'm really curious, which games repurpose those texture filtering units for blitting like that?
It's known that an optimized μcode would get the best from RDP's fill rate, but at the same time, Nintendo only made microcode tools available for developers very late into N64's life cycle. In the end, for most developers, it was still very difficult to fully explore the console's potential, even more because the hardware architecture was unusual at that time.

>The texture cache thing wasn't a design oversight but the result of an overzealous attempt to reduce pin-count and die size to lower manufacturing costs.
I understand and agree to some extent with you on this. Nintendo had to make some concessions to lower costs, but that's often cited as one of the most remembered issues when dealing with N64 - adding to that there's even some people who defend the 4 KB texture cache was enough because Playstation developers had to deal with only 2 KB, but at the same time, they had 1MB of VRAM and get whatever they could from framebuffer to make up for it. It may not be good practice, but it was accessible enough for a lot of devs to come up with solutions around this issue. On the other hand, Nintendo 64 had all the superior specs on paper, yet some decisions hampered its actual potential. It could play 48KHz 16-bit uncompressed audio, but cartridge storage space was expensive. It could play as many as a hundred PCM channels, but eating away RSP resources shared with graphics (or even CPU). It had high bandwidth, high clock speed RDRAM, but slow access latency.It could load as many textures as you could even want into RAM, but always had them to pass through the 4 KB cache. So many powerful features at first sight that took several years for studios to figure them out.

>>2909887
>which games repurpose those texture filtering units for blitting like that?
Not sure of which ones use it since it would be easier to use one of the 2D microcodes, but it's a documented feature.

Basically the RDP had three macro modes, 1-Cycle, 2-Cycle and Copy (Blit). 1 Cycle means 1 pixel per 1 cycle, and as the RDP had a speed of 62.5.Mhz that's a maximum of 62.5 Mpixels/s, however in this mode you couldn't have mipmaps and you couldn't have depth-tested alpha blending (e.g. decent looking fog). 2 Cycle means 1 pixel per 2 cycles, so that's 31.25 Mpixels/s. Copy (Blit) mode was basically 4 pixels per 1 cycle (250 Mpixel/s) because the texture filtering unit is designed to read 4 texels - the active texel and 3 surrounding texels and the RDP pipeline is capable of writing pixels at least 4 times to RAM per cycle. The alpha compare part of the pipeline still works.

IIRC the PS1's fill rate was 66 Mpixel/s for blit-like operations and 33 Mpixel/s for everything else.

>So many powerful features at first sight that took several years for studios to figure them out.
N64's hardware was a bit of a paradox. It was incredibly flexible in some areas (basically, anything involving RCP or even RDP) and incredibly inflexible in others (anything involving RAM / cache), but not in the areas developers wanted.

A studio with modern resources would easily be able to maximize the console's potential, but back then, the dawn of true 3D API programming, it was a bit rough.

>>2909528
>It has features that weren't useful for 2D
Unless those features actively degraded 2D performance, I don't see the relevance.

>>2909579
As the guy who asked the question to begin with, you took the words out of my mouth.

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Yeah I don't buy the whole "N64 sucks at 2D" either.

Wonder Project J2 is one of the best-looking 2D games of 5th gen with huge animated, colorful sprites and it was also an early N64 game from 1996.

>>2910093
Wonder Project J2 looks better than Wonder Project J
But:
Yoshi's Story looks worse than Yoshi's Island
Mischief Makers looks worse than Gunstar Heroes
So considering the better hardware it's fair to say the N64 sucks at 2D.

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>>2910207

You're comparing games with heavily different art-styles, anon.

Both Yoshi's Story and Mischief Makers have smooth as fuck sprite animations at 60fps and Yoshi's Story especially has beaatiful backgrounds and scenery. Mischief Makers also has some nice backgrounds but it's more minimalistic, however the big bosses and enemies on MM take the cake in that regard.

>>2909579
Nintendo 64 could probably pull 2D games on par with Super NES with ease, but that alone probably wouldn't win many new players with just that.
The standards for 2D games got higher too. As arcade ports had to be compromised in various ways to properly work on 16-bit consoles, people expected newer hardware to be powerful enough to deliver near-perfect ports.

Back to the thread topic, if we analyse how Nintendo designed N64, companies would rather create brand new fighting games and avoid unnecessary comparison to other versions (like the aformentioned MK Trilogy) than try to port games originally written for CPS2, Namco arcade boards or whatever (which would be rewriting them from scratch anyway).

tl;dr: You need to see what's going on under the hood.

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KI can be problematic.

Anyway, I hate to be that guy but I don't see the point of longing for arcade to console ports when MAME and Fightcade have become as accessible as it ever got.
Just my 1cc.

>>2907260

I know this is going to get many people mad here, but the N64 didnt helped either to play nothing that wasnt 3D, unlike the dualshock or the sega controller who allowed you to do both. I cant imagine someone playing KOF with that monstrosity

>>2910602
>KOF
BRown detected

>>2910602

Why not? You'll use the dpad to control, not the analog stick. It's not the best dpad for fighting games but it's perfectly playable.

>>2910607

>c button are like 3mm from each other and are small as shit.
>A-B buttons are different size from c buttons
>expects me to play a proper SF or MK game like that

>>2910606

>every single that likes KOF rather than SF is a spic so i must laugh at him

Is like saying only murrifats defends the N64 because it was the only country were it sold as good as the PS1, so stop with your stupid bullshit. This aint /int/ faggot.

>>2910638

Stop being a faggot, even though isn't the most suitable joystick for this kind of game it's still playable, probably only not in COMPETITIVE LOL level. It's not like you're trying to play a fightan with a VCS controller or a steering wheel.

The button layout is just fine and the dpad is actually better than the ones in recent gens, you guys may stop memeing now.

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>>2910638
>> with block and run buttons that should be on the shoulder.

>>2908835
>> expects me to play a proper SF or MK game like that

Did you guys even play MK at arcades? You sound like people who have to remap buttons every time because you "can't get used to pull a Dragon Punch using the L button"

>>2910685
MK was terrible at home and arcades. :(

>>2910207
>Yoshi's Story looks worse than Yoshi's Island

This is true stylistically, but that's just an art direction problem. Yoshi's Story is more complex with regards to what the system is trying to push out. It's simply that it's objectively poorly designed compared to Yoshi's Island.

>>2910685
Yeah, and to this day I still don't understand why they'd come up with such a shitty panel layout.

>>2910685
Yeah too bad you can't, or shouldn't rather, claw and smack a N64 controller like you would on an arcade layout. Those C buttons are tiny. MK on N64 might as well stay as a 4 button fighter with block and run.

>>2912178
>Those C buttons are tiny

Is this really a problem for some people?
The y x z buttons on Saturn are also tiny, but I don't have problem with either controller for having smaller buttons.

>>2912405
C buttons, as designed, were tiny auxiliary buttons mostly used for stuff like camera control or inventory hotkeys. They're not meant to be treated as primary buttons especially the delicate and reflexive nature of fighting games. Ever wonder why A and B are particularly large? You would never, ever see a racing game having a controller preset where C right is accelerate in attempt to imitate a SNES layout.

>>2912405
It's not the size that's the issue, it's the consistency of the size.

You wouldn't be able to type as effectively on a keyboard if I suddenly reduced it to, say, the size of the shift key, and offset it to one side.

>>2912684
If that's the issue, they could have released a custom controller via madcatz or something with the buttons the same size, the 6 button nature of the game would be a good selling point to get the controller, similar to the genesis 6 button controller.

>>2912628
In reality, when you look at it, it's like a secondary d-pad. Games like jet force gemini used it as such if you set the controls to Expert, and you use all 4 c buttons to move in all directions while aiming.
But you can still use them as what they are: 4 extra buttons, despite the size or color.

>>2912684

I have no problem playing fighting games with the Genesis or Saturn controller where x y z are small and A B C are bigger. I also don't have any issue playing KI Gold on the N64.

It's a matter of getting used to it, some people play fighting games with the keyboard and they're really good at it with it.

I think the N64 controller is not a better option than the Saturn controller, but if I had to choose N64 controller or PS1 controller to play something like SF, I'd choose the N64 because of the 6 buttons, and yet there's that one Street Fighter IV pro player who won a tournament with an old PS1 pad. There's no set rules to what's better or worse. Purists will also tell you that the only way to play is with an arcade stick.

>>2912728
For whatever reason C buttons worked for strafing in first person shooters and such. Going back to fighting games, I would rather prefer developers to let people remap their buttons however they want. It only makes even more sense for the N64 due to the nature of how many different ways you can use that controller.

>>2912684
this is bullcrap since zelda used three of the four buttons along with a and b and it never proved to be a problem