Every Expansion Pak Game for the N64
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 พ.ค. 2024
- Episode
354 - Ever wonder what difference the Expansion Pak makes in certain games? Well let's look at the changes it makes to each game that uses it.
0:00 - Intro
0:59 - #-0
2:42 - A
7:03 - B
7:37 - C
9:17 - D
12:07 - E
12:41 - F
14:09 - G
15:47 - H
17:21 - I
20:11 - J
21:31 - K
22:39 - L
23:39 - M
25:28 - N
28:33 - P
30:07 - Q
31:04 - R
35:17 - S
41:22 - T
47:45 - V
49:20 - X
51:11 - End Skit
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Great video, enjoyed watching it.
I was an engineer at Acclaim and you featured a number of games I worked on directly. The Expansion Pak was used in several different ways:
1. Video memory buffers, code buffers and workspace were all split to separate 1M banks - with 4M of RAM there wasn't enough banks to split it well enough without needing to share a bank in some manner. Splitting all of the video scanout, z buffer, render buffer, code buffers greatly helps with the RDP & CPU performance - there is much less contention on the RDRAM bus. Overall, this would give smoother frame rates at the same resolutions.
2. For a good number of the Acclaim games (especially the Iguana ones), we used virtual memory (which I implemented). If the Expansion Pak was present, then all the code & data in virtual memory was loaded & decompressed ahead of time - usually when the title screen was showing. Performance was improved quite a bit by doing this. Hence the few FPS improvement in performance. If no expansion pak was detected, code & data was swapped in and decompressed from cartridge as needed - which could cause some stalls but at least we could fit the game within 4M without needing to resort to overlays. If you pay attention to some of the "play select" and "in game" transitions for Quarterback Club & AllStar Baseball, you'll note the transition is much shorter with the expansion pak present.
3. As you mention, higher resolution modes could be made available. Game recording buffers could be increased in size (longer replays in Allstar Baseball & QBC). Larger cache buffers, etc.
You may have not personally thought that it made all that much difference, but we wanted to take advantage of anything that would improve a players experience. It didn't take much actual technical work to implement it; so why not?
The most difficult part of implementation was probably making the title screen that displays "Expansion Pak Detected" :)
I'm assuming the documentation and SDK/implementation code samples for the Expansion Pak must have been close no nonexistent knowing how Nintendo historically does things. Did you have to figure this out mostly by yourself?
@@asddw4998 it was pretty straight forward as far I recall. It just shows up in the memory map.
That's awesome, all of those games were a huge part of my childhood
Awesome. Thanks for sharing your personal experience. and great work!
That was a great episode; this is a topic that isn't very well documented online, so seeing it here was great and makes this a fantastic resource.
Indeed, there really isn't much out there and some are even wrong. Thats why i really enjoyed seing all of this :D
SSFF did a video on the Expansion Pak some years ago but I don't think he looked at every single game
Same, the only thing I think he could have added was that many 3rd party N64 expansion/RAM packs are not fully compatible with the console, and will cause some games to not run at all, or just have random freezes/glitches. So you must have an official Nintendo Expansion pak.
+1. This is true Public Service Broadcasting!
@@Tirgo69 That was a good video but he really only gave us info that was already well known online.
Awesome! You finally referenced a game that I worked on! "Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers" Thanks! :D
Quack it up!!!!!
Love that game, I've got it for ps1 and ps2
What did you do on the game if I am allowed to ask as I love that game to this very day so much 😁
@@jeroenboth167 I was one of the coders that ported the game from PS2 to the GameCube. One thing I remember was that we had lost the original files for Gyro’s 3d meshes and the only one we had was missing his left hand geometry. I had to reconstruct it from scratch manually in Notepad :)
Donald Duck: Goin’ Quackers is a fantastic game on both 5th gen and 6th gen systems, I love it.
In the Pokemon Stadium and Stadium 2 GB towers, the extra RAM allows the entire GB Pokemon game being played to be loaded into RAM thereby preventing extra loading during gameplay.
no more controller bumps 😍
no more controller bumps 😍
Also makes the game menus high Res 480i instead of 240p in Pokemon Stadium 2
This is far, far, far from nothing.
I was thinking that I remembered the text getting much clearer
This...must have taken a hideous amount of work. I have been following your work since Day 1 and sincerely appreciate the effort you put into every single video. Thanks!
There's also a few tidbits not mentioned here:
1. While you can only play Multiplayer in US/PAL Perfect Dark without the Expansion Pak, the Japanese version isn't so fortunate; you get your typical message screen instead if you don't have one.
2. The Banjo-Tooie demo actually requires the Expansion Pak to run with less restrictions. Starting up the demo without it will open with dialogue between Banjo and Kazooie regarding the lack of an Expansion Pak, then assures the player(s) that the Final Game will not require the Expansion Pak to run. After this, the demo runs as usual, but certain activities in the demo are locked out. Chances are that the demo is built off Donkey Kong 64's code.
19:45 I like that the expansion pak even helps the Hammer Throw go even further.
Best Comment !!! 😅😂
Should we consider using the expansion pak as a way of cheating? Like steroids?
Love the critically acclaimed spy series known as "Zero Zero Seven"
Everybody knows that it's called "zéro zéro sept".
In Brazil, it's actually called "zero zero seven". I'm sure it's like that in some other countries and languages, too.
@@PugLifeJM Some Asian countries also know 007 as "Zero Zero Seven".
It's literally "Zero Zero Seven", 3 Numbers. Not "oo7" or "Double-o 7". Aparently the english native speakers have difficulty discerning between numbers and letters.
Zero zero siete.....nueve dos nueve dos
Now I’m looking forward to a video of every Dreamcast game released that uses the VMU.
Even better: every VMU game.
They all do lol
@@badcommentbot8349 some more then others tho
Dreamcast > SNES > PS2 > Everything else
@@robertmanes9333 - Stop.
I only have youtube to watch and I go through phases where I like one thing or the other - Game Sack is the only channel that has never fallen from grace :)
Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64 are two of the top games on the N64 and they both require the Expansion Pack, so for that reason alone I'd say it's a pretty great add-on!
DK64 only requires it because a bug (bad coding) that cannot be fixed with just 4mb ram and it didn't happen with 8mb, there is nothing extra in that game.
@Wiegraf go watch any other in-depth video about the game, it was designed around the expansion pack because they couldn't fix the memory leak bug, you can find a patch that makes the game work without it.
The game actually was designed just to sell the game with the expansion pack XD
@@GeomancerHTThis "memory leak bug" is a myth that has debunked by Rare employees themselves as well as modders who have looked at the code. The expansion pak extends the RDRAM size from 0x400000 to 0x800000. If the expansion pak was a last-minute thought, then there would be no base-game functions in the last 4MB of RDRAM (0x400000 - 0x7FFFFF). However, this is not the case. A lot of base level stuff is in that slot, including texturing, game constants (such as what kong is going to be used for which boss fight), sound, flag data. DK64 was designed with the pak from the start and there is no "patch" that makes it run without it.
Crazy how the Saturn had expansion ram carts and those were amazing for 2d games.
In theory, the N64 wouldn’t need to expand its memory for a 2D game because it could load sprites directly from the cartridge ROM like a Neo Geo. In reality though, cartridge space was limited and a lot of games compressed their assets, resulting in load times (Quake 2 and the Tony Hawk games have load times on N64, for example). With the RAM expansion they could decompress more sprites into the additional memory. Hard to say though, the N64 doesn’t have many 2D games and none of them use as much memory as something like X-men vs. Street Fighter.
I can confirm that the final boss in Legacy of Darkness is absolutely unbeatable in high res mode. The frame rate dips into low single digits.
I beat it. With a Game Shark.
@@N64Gamer77 you beat your dingdong with a game shark? interessting...
The only way to beat that boss in hi-res mode is to become the game
I remember I asked for the expansion pack and perfect dark for Xmas one year and only got the expansion pack. Those were the days.
RIP
You didn't get it with DK64?
@@Marc_Araujo you could, but you could also buy it separately.
@@Diepzeevis Yeah, but if you got DK64 you'd get the expansion pak for free. Since DK64 needed it to run properly, they included it at no extra charge. Anyone who bought it later by itself def made a mistake.
@@Marc_Araujo true!
You are a rare breed of workhorse sir. This had to be an excruciating exercise... setting tedium tolerance to the maximum pain setting to produce this. You are are an American treasure Joe. Thank you so much for Game Sack. I don't comment much but watching this really compelled me to chime in for a sec to say thanks man.
Quake 2 isn't getting enough Love for what it does with the Expansion Pack and its good Graphics overall.
Hear hear!
In some moments the game even runs in 60 fps
I loved this episode...there were so many games you showed that I had no idea even supported the expansion pak (for better or worse). Thanks for all the hard work you put into your videos!
Resident Evil 2 on N64 didn't have a fixed resolution, it always changed depending on the camera angle, but I guess that without the Expansion Pak, it remained at lower resolutions most of the time to notice any difference.
Only ever had the expansion pack so I could play Majora's Mask. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that it did anything for games besides Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64. Pretty cool to find out that it had some effects here and there on other games, even if it was usually minor.
Super interesting episode!!
Road Rash 64: If I’m not mistaken, the expansion pak gave the possibility to face up to 10 AI opponents instead of being limited to 9. There was a setting in the select race track to choose between low med or highest amount of opponents. I remember preferring that because there was one more enemy to beat the hell up 😅
That's really interesting and no one on the Internet mentioned this difference. Thanks!
This was incredibly helpful. I’ve always been curious as to which games used the expansion pak. This video clearly took a lot of effort to make, so thank you for all of your hard work!!
DK64 is capable of being played without the expansion pack if you use a gameshark. So you'll be able to see what it looks like.
Excitebike 64, showing you why you should just put the jumper pack back in to play.
Goldeneye is in the right spot being its technical title is Goldeneye: 007
To my knowledge, Indiana Jones and the infernal machines level 13 requires the expansion pack due to the rate the level moves at, needing the extra memory to load the textures and geometry in on time
Majoras mask on top of everything you mentioned required the expansion pack specifically to keep track of every character in the game for the full 3 days as everything runs by time of day and all those quests are running wether they're active or not.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron while playable without the expansion pack, is really required because in some of the missions set at night you'll struggle spotting the tie fighters from the backhround at almost any distance.
Majora's Mask also needs the Expansion Pak to keep the high resolution and be able to have that many characters at the same time on the city moving.
So... what's the gameshark code for DK64? I have never seen that
@@MaxwelThuThu yknow..... I haven't seen it in a long time. The best way to find out would be to talk to someone who specialises in hacking n64 games. It's something to do with simply disabling the error screen.
That athlete's foot commercial was a blast from the past. I feel like they ran that thing for twenty years. I never got the expansion pack (the Dreamcast found its way to me) but I recall Perfect Dark being the hype game, or in so much as I could recognize a 'hype game' at 11.
Expansion Pak! A unique add-on. I think one of the rare graphics decelerators!
I honestly didn't know this many games supported the RAM expansion, color me impressed. Great video, Joe!!
Some games might have better frame rates with the Expansion Pak because the ROM may have compressed assets for which the decompressed contents can be cached if there is more RAM.
My favorite feature of the Expansion Pak came in clutch for Perfect Dark. In the combat simulator, it allowed you to have up to 12 bots over the base 4, provided you beat all the challenges in the game. Back then, it felt really special (and chaotic) to throw that many bots (with individual difficulty and personality settings) into the fray with 4 friends. It improved everything we loved about Goldeneye multiplayer, and then turned it up to 11 just for the hell of it.
I think it was 8 bots + 4 players for 12 at once. It was horribly laggy, and the quarter screen meant you saw barely anything, but it was still glorious!
@@ryersonfitzpatrick7955 You had to beat all challenges to unlock 12 bots. We ran 16 all the time. After reading a few forums, I never knew this was the stuff of legend. Apparently people had a lot of trouble unlocking the last bots!
I remember Turok 2 looking amazing with the pack. We have to remember that watching these captures on our HD / 4K screens looks far worse than on our old 14” bedroom televisions. Thanks for the hours you put into this one!
Thank you for the Saturday night vibes Joe
the sheer amount of research, recording and voice over work to make videos like these must be astounding. Thanks for what you do man.
Thanks for the detailed information about how each game is affected by the Expansion Pack! I knew the list of games, but not exactly which ones would became less/more crappy with the extra 4MB of RAM. Now I know.
Game Sack on Sunday. A bright spot to start the week on
Hello and welcome to Sack Game.
More N64 content please!
This is actually the 3rd episode dedicated to the N64.
@@GameSack - That’s about 3 more episodes than I would have dedicated to it, Joe. Lol. And I’m a Nintendo guy. On the other hand, your Saturn vs PlayStation episode is a masterpiece.
The N64 expansion pack is one of my favorite random add ons for any system... I was so excited to see GameSack covering it. Not many of the videos that cover it show the before and after footage.. well done GS.
Sega Mega CD still has it beat for me.
34:09 Single best highlight of the video. That clip is like seven years old now and it's still just as funny
Shadowman is one of my favorites from back then. That game has such incredible, eerie atmosphere.
Favorite part of sunday, a fresh pot of coffee, vitamins t, h and c and a new game sack video. Today is gonna be a good day.
I'd argue that Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine runs **better WITH** the Expansion Pak. Without it, you get some really noticeable stutters in levels like Tian Shan River or Aetherium where the screen goes entirely black for a couple of frames until it refreshes and continues moving. Also, the game is notoriously prone to crashing without the Expansion Pak. Playing with the Expansion Pak gets rid of most of these crashes/freezes resulting in a much more smoother and stabler experience.
This episode was a blast! Thank you for all your hard work Joe
Resident Evil 2 on the N64 is still one of the most impressive things in gaming from a technical standpoint
Most of the time spend porting the game was just developing the right compression algorithm to make all fit in the cartridge, it might have been a nightmare job for the developers that went in thinking we're going to make the port and then add content and make it better, instead they had to develop their own ZIP/ARC/PK code for almost a year.
@Wiegraf RE2 was never ported to the GBA, it's only a very bad tech demo that doesn't use any code from RE2.
@Wiegraf :D I'm sure that with modern SDK the game could be ported, maybe using 2 cartridges, you can even have the cutscenes done in GBA Video.
@@GeomancerHT There is a Tomb Raider port to GBA that at least has a demo. I haven't been keeping up with it, it could be further along now. They plan on doing the entire game, and having it compressed so it could fit on a GBA cart. It makes you think if they could use the technique to port other PS1 games 1:1 to the GBA.
@@bahamutbbob OpenLARA is great, if somebody did a disassembly or found a leak for the RE games source code that might be something worth trying.
Lol I absolutely love how you ran out of ammo in the beginning of the World Is Not Enough comparison. I could feel you going, "Oh shit!" after pulling the trigger and your guy starts punching.
Also, that is an underrated game! It obviously lives in the Goldeneye shadow.
Every Nintendo 64 shooter except for Perfect Dark lives in the shadow of Goldeneye
It was still a great shooter, all things considered. The devs at Eurocom were wizards with the N64 tech and were pulling off some neat effects in the game along with keeping at a better fps than GoldenEye.
@@thefroyukenfiles3641 It's shame that it will never see an official rerelease on the Switch like Goldeneye and escape its shadow
Been following your channel for years, love the little sense of humor here and there, love seeing the differences and your descriptions, amazing work!
Amazing episode, thank you so much for all the research and hard work! This is something I have always wondered and your video delivers and then some! Also: the makers of Quake 2 are one of the few who truly understood how to utilize the extra RAM. Great to see you point that out as well.
the Expansion Pak is required for searching GameShark codes. as you ran searches on values you were trying to edit, the addresses were saved in the extra RAM.
Another cool episode Joe, been waiting for this one
9:00 Also should be noted that Sega Saturn can benefit from expanded memory for 3D performance. Because standard Sega's graphics libraries are very memory inefficient for vertex storing in RAM. Additional memory in that case will benefit in more quads on screen and less artifacts and elements dropouts.
Wait what? So if I get you right, if I have a 1, or better yet 4 Meg cart in my Saturn it has the potential to increase performance in some 3D games? Or is this mostly a theoretical thing that a game would have been specifically designed for?
@@Soonjai It can't now. It must be implemented in source code.
And it is for Sega's graphics libraries, they ship with dev kits.
SGL - pretty easy and nice library that helps with notoriously difficult Saturn's architecture. But it very memory hungry. And it's closed source. And memory
expansions used almost only for 2D games.
Sega of that time is really nice example how to not to do anything.
But if they did it right~
Such waste of potential~
Agree. It WAS ok when SEGA did it.
Final Fight Revenge requires a 4 MB cart, so that’s at least one game with 3D graphics that uses extra memory. Not really sure how the game benefits from it, though.
25:50 That's an Australian copy of the game. We have Kmart here too!
I always wondered about these! I was a PS and Saturn fellow growing up so the N64 is the most mysterious to me. I only just bought one in 2020, mostly for Conkers and Sin&Punishment
The pak doesn’t actually fix the memory leak bug in DK, it just allows it to take so long to crash the console that the majority of players will never be affected by it.
Yeah, I remember seeing an interview with an ex-Rare dev who said the game development was handled by an inexperienced team, which is why it was such a mess technically.
Until the Virtual Console, and save states.
@@bahamutbbob Yeah. I remember the bug was encountered on the virtual release. I'm sure something the original devs never anticipated happening. Much like how many did 480i for high res and deinterlacing retro games in the future would be a pain with many of the 240p games looking better in retrospect.
For so many years i was waiting for this video !! Awesome Stuff !!
I was just watching the SSFF episode on the Expansion Pak recently and this is honestly the perfect companion video as I was looking to see this!
I think the ExPac was worth it for games that required it like Majora's Mask & Perfect Dark or for the texture upgrades, but for games where it just added higher resolution at the cost of FPS, not so much.
That's basically how I see it: A necessity if you want to play specific games like Perfect Dark, but a waste of money otherwise.
this one is a god tier episode
Finally somebody who shows you the difference instead of giving me Expansion Pak trivia and history!
Love when a 50 minute Game Sack video comes up
I guess they didn't really know what to do with the extra RAM. Except for the ones that added actual features like extra characters on screen, game modes or even graphical details.
Well, some did. Majora's Mask, for example, used the extra ram to store a boatload of persistent NPCs and all their data. The only problem is that once you start using the extra RAM to do actual important stuff in your game (not just graphical tweaks) you have to require the RAM pack - and that in turn limits the number of people you can sell to.
@xg223 I phrased it poorly xD. I meant it like the early DS games with the touch screen. They just stuck whatever in the touch screen. Sometimes duplicate stuff of what you see at the top like Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. Sometimes mechanics no one likes such as Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow's seals thing.
Developers were figuring it out, and to me at least adding extra resolution but dragging the FPS to half or less isn't worth it. Very few did much more with it, the ones that did being stuff that only required the extra RAM like details and game modes, and not pushing the graphics renderer beyond its limits. I think those kinds of things understood better where to put that extra memory.
@xg223 yeah that's fair.
@xg223 yeah that's fair. It's just nowadays me who says it's not great. But that also reminds me of back in the day playing Quake 2 at like less than 10fps on a PC that shouldn't be running it lol. I didn't care at all back then.
I guess that time was different. When I look back now, 240p and 480p are mostly the same to my eyes.
I always felt like the extra memory the expansion pack added is what the N64 should have had at launch. Unfortunately, RAMBUS memory was expensive at that time so what we ended up with on the stock console was "good enough" to get things going. While I really enjoyed the 32/64 bit 3D generation of games I do not miss having games running at less than 30 FPS be the norm!
RD RAM was ALWAYS stupidly expensive. My sister for some reason had a desktop that used it and it turned out that buying a whole new PC was cheaper than upgrading the RAM in that one.
@@hackerx7329 Yeah, the first Pentium 4 chipsets used RD RAM until Intel finally wised up and switched to DDR. Rambus essentially exists as a patent troll today thanks to the technology behind RD RAM.
@@rars0n They were a patent troll back then too. That's how the deal with Intel fell apart. I remember walking past their building on a trip to California in the mid-2000s. Took a lot of willpower to NOT throw a rock through the window.
I mean that’s always the case where you say just a little bit more, but the console was also $199 at launch and then $150 just 6 months later. I mean just watch this video and its clear the the expansion pack is largely going to waste; how many of these games had noticeable slow down when using the expansion pack? Nearly all of them. Why? Because the rest of the system couldn’t otherwise handle what it would take to utilize the extra ram. This is on top of the fact that the cartridge were basically used as pseudo ram to begin with. If you were going to add ram and make the 64 cost more you might as well then switch to disc or some sort of higher capacity format so that the extra ram would have actually been put to use.
@@Parker-- It's not really not really that system couldn't benefit from extra ram, the bigger problem is that the RDRAM they used had a stupidly high latency. One of the primary limitations of the N64 was a tiny texture cache, which could've been helped with faster ram. Later on developers would use extra cartridge space instead, because the ram was just that damn slow.
Awesome episode, it is true that the expansion pack wasn´t a great power up for the N64 technical capabilities....but it was require for 3 of the 10 best system games: Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark and Zelda Majora´s Mask....so it was and it is a MUST BUY peripheral for me
I disagree that DK64 and Majora's Mask were in the top 10 games for the system, but Perfect Dark was excellent.
@@sjake8308 Back in the day they were Top of the class, nowadays DK 64 has take too much hate in my opinion, it is an awesome 3D platformer (yeah, Banjo-Kazooie and Mario 64 are better) and well the case of Majora´s is different, for a lot of peolpe is even better than Ocarina of time....for me OOT is the best of the two, but I love MM a little more, it was my first Zelda and some things it did have never been do it again in the Zelda series, a unique game even among other Zeldas
@@theultimatepololo I bought DK64 on the day it was released and was really underwhelmed by it, not because it's a bad game, but more because Rare's earlier collectathons (and Mario 64) were better. I also thought Majora's Mask was perfectly fine, but the design of the game, while certainly interesting, made it more of a chore to play than Ocarina of Time.
I think they're both perfectly fine games (and two of the better games on the system), but I'm pretty sure I could easily find ten N64 games that I thought were better. Perfect Dark, on the other hand, is close to top tier.
woaw it's like an expansion pack for game sack itself, and that's why we all tune in
both Revolt, Shadowman, and Vigalente8 are on Dreamcast Joe, all definitely worth a play through.
I personally much prefer Rush 2049, ReVolt, V8, Hydro Thunder, Tony Hawk and Star Wars Pod Racer on Dreamcast as they are all vastly superior IMO.
Oh definitely, I just presumed Joe being a Sega nut would have mentioned the Dreamcast versions . So I just pointed out the ones he didn't just in case he didn't know somehow or maybe they were only pal releases?
I think the average take away from this is, only use the expansion pak for the games that absolutely require it lol
Thank you for such a detailed explanation for what it does to certain games along with a sample. So many just talk but never show the proof.
Thanks for the Sunday morning entertainment on this interesting subject, Mr. Sack! Always wondered what the capability was in other games with it, having only used one for Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark back when I had my N64 still. Not even 1 minute in and my Pak was already expanded! 😅
You DO need to play more of Shadowman sometime. It's a great game and the recent remaster is really cool too.
This is a great idea for a video. Well done! It would be cool to see something like this for the Saturn’s 4meg cart.
They did an episode on that some years back.
Another phenomenal episode. Amazing to see every N64 game covered here and briefly detailing how each game was affected (for better or worse) by the Expansion Pak.
It is true that Donkey Kong 64 needed the expansion pak to fix a bug, as one of the programmers confirmed that years ago. He also confirmed that the game will run perfectly without the expansion pak for a certain amount of time. it was never intended to have the expansion pack as a requirement, but since the bug floods the ram with unnecessary data and couldn't be fixed in time, they used the expansion pak as a pretty expensive band-aid.
You can still trigger the crash if you play long enough.
Wow! Never knew that Quake 2 could look so good with the improved textures. Too bad that other games didn't use the expansion pack for the same purpose.
The issue there was that the RDRAM had terrible latency. Having space to store textures is nice and all, but they also need to be streamed to the graphics chip at some point, and then you're in trouble. Many later N64 games would use a bigger cartridge instead, because it turns out it's actually faster to read from there.
Spacestation Silicon Valley is superb, a true "hidden gem". I played the entire game with the expansion Pak installed and had no issues...
Same and agree on gem status
There seems to be two rom versions and only one fucks up.
@@medes5597 wonder if it’s a revision I bought the game day 1
@@lukegto that's my thinking, my version also doesn't mess up with the expansion and I bought it the week it came out - just went and checked after I made that comment. I'm thinking a 1.1 revision broke comparability somehow and it didn't sell enough for a 1.2 - which is a shame, I love that game.
Damn, those Elway moves!
nice video as always.
im enjoying watching all the backlog of videos!
In Pokémon Stadium 2, the expansion pack only increases the resolution of the menus/intro, not the gameplay itself.
It doesn't even without the expansion pack the menus have an increased resoloution.
7:14 It sounded like you said, “you can actually tell if you look at the TURD on your tank”. 😂 Then you immediately followed that up with, “It’s a lot less mushy looking with the expansion pack inserted”. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I’m over here picturing Joe driving a tank whilst smushing expansion packs into fecal matter. Hahah
I know… I’m a 35 year old with a child’s sense of humor.
Hybrid Heaven is my favorite game of all time. It's definitely overlooked, and I highly suggest anyone checking it out. It's multiple genres in one. Fighting game, strategy game, RPG with leveling up elements and it's even a pretty good 3D platformer. I've yet to see any game like it since.
Was waiting for this tonight. thank you 🙏🏼
I reversed engineered Aidyn Chronicles a while back, this is some of what happens when there is no expansion pak:
"High resolution" mode disabled (a 32-bit color mode, like with 40 winks was planned, but left out of the final game)
Certain music tracks replaced with more simplistic tunes. This includes title screen, combat (not shown in comparison clip - that's still "expansion pak added" music), and a few other areas
map objects with a "No Expansion Pak" flag are rendered. Likewise vice versa. The latter includes a "lizard king" boss, I believe.
The Item/entity/shop/ect. databases are temporarily unloaded and then reloaded. (there seems to be an exploit associated with this.)
A temporary game save file is created and read/written at certain times - these use a lot of bit compression. (may be related to above exploit)
For certain data objects, it checks for specific thresholds of free space before loading them in.
Max particles (like from exploding trap chests and air elementals) are more limited based on the current game state.
Literally laughed out loud when Joe asked where the Nintendo 64 games from Jaguar and CD-I were. 😆
Really appreciate the effort you put in your video’s as well how informative you are , thanks for an awesome show
Been waiting my whole life for this analysis. I loved this time in videogame history... like holding a N64 controller in EACH HAND!
Turok 2 was an absolute slideshow at times with the high res mode (and normal res too).
First time I got annoyed at a game's framerate before I even understood what framerate was!
For me it was Perfect Dark. I still love the game though.
@@Filsantos86
Perfect Dark was the next one I noticed. Thankfully I have them both running at a smooth 60fps on my Series X now. Still great games!
Command and Conquer needs it as well, in the later missions it cuts down on the horrendous slowdown and 3fps but not by much
Really cool! Maybe the only video worth watching about this topic. Well done!
19:00
No expansion pak = no success
Expansion pak = success
Nice touch
Thats why I love emulation. Nice to be able to crank these games all the way up AND maintain max FPS.
An expansion pak that instead of improving, hits gameplay and performance, while increasing resolution on a few titles that on CRTs weren't even that noticeable, if at all. Sounds like a prototype released to the masses.
Joe's killing it with these double stuffed episodes!
Very neat idea for an episode, as someone not super familiar with the library I wasn't sure what it even did for most games save for a few I have that need it to play at all. Great information, and a good overview of a lot of games, thanks for the episode :)
The Saturn's ram expansion was done way better than the N64 expansion pack. The Saturn version added animation frames and a better fps. The N64 added higher resolutions with worse fps. Why would you buy something that makes your games play worse?
Same question can be asked for why you'd buy an N64
@@konradfun I was team PlayStation all the way during that generation. My best friend had the N64 and I had the PlayStation. Other than Goldeneye we never really played his N64 when we all hung out together.
@konradfun because it has a lot of good games
@@AnthonyRiddle I was on the Playstation team the year it was released because, like many people, I listened to gaming journos. I regretted selling my Snes for this because there was nothing great on Playstation at the time (Tekken 1, Wipeout, Battle Arena Toshinden, etc.). Then I bought a Sega Saturn and enjoyed it much more.
I then bought a Nintendo 64 for Nintendo and Rareware games which I played a lot with my family. I got a Playstation again towards the end of its life, and I mostly played 2D games on it such as Castlevania Symphony of the Night or Alundra because I didn't find the full-3D games of the time on this machine very interesting. To sum up, I preferred 3D exploration games and multiplayer games on N64 and arcade and 2D games on Sega Saturn.
I liked the Playstation, like many people, because there were plenty of games and you could get them for the price of a blank CD.
@@konradfun Best Mario and Zelda games.
Joe... please never stop. This was a great episode and you're still one of the best things about youtube. We love ya, man & thanks for making Sundays awesome. Also loved the skit at the end of this one. Never knew that rumble pack needed batteries, glad I didn't get one due to it being an embarrassment compared to the duel shock. Those skulltullas in Zelda can bugger themselves.
You deserve more Subs...this is the best gaming channel on TH-cam,and that doesn't even feel like an opinion.
I agree, why doesn't this channel have a million subscribers?
@@vizuz I'm just glad I know about it. Found this Channel after hearing Gaming Historian mention it.
Love this video! Great coverage on the games! Thank you.
Not that Joe is a youngster, we're about the same age, but I'll never understand the younger generation's obsession with framerate. And honestly, I don't want to.
As long as it doesn't drop into single digit territory, it typically presents as temporary slowdown. It's part of the charm of having too many enemies on screen! We used to say "the game is laggy sometimes" not that we knew what that meant, but we definitely had no idea what frame rate was.
It's like that since the 90's
What I wanna know is why so many games offered a hi-res mode that tanked the framerate? It'd make sense if the devs originally targeted 512×400 or 640×480 and made sure the game ran at a playable framerate at that resolution, but if you give me the choice between hi-res at 15 FPS or lo-res at 30, I'm picking the lo-res option unless we're talking an RPG or some other game where framerates don't affect the gameplay. Taking a hit on frames in a racing game or an FPS, you'd have to be a masochist!
Then there's the games that do nothing but tell you "EXPANSION PAK FOUND". Like... okay, thanks for telling me, but how are you going to use it, hm? There's no point in the game telling you it found a peripheral it doesn't use unless it's one that it _can't_ use, like how some SNES games would tell you to unplug the mouse if you left it in.
I feel like the only reason the Expansion Pak wasn't used so much, even if it became more common to have one installed in the N64's later years, was because a good number of these games where multi-platform and possibly had the PS1 as the base version and had to make sure the game ran fine there. Can't add anything else just for the N64? Uhhhh... bump up the resolution! Yeah, that's the ticket!
@randomguy9777 I wouldn't be surprised if that were true, much like how Sony discouraged 2D games being developed for the first few years of the original PlayStation.
this must be the most coolest gaming intro ive ever seen man, very nice :D
This is the 7th video that I've seen that mentions there only being two RPGs on the N64. Not sure why everyone seems to forget that Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber existed.
The time when around 20fps where even on the pc normal when playing. The brains of younger people explode when they imagine how some can play this 😅
20fps wasn't a thing on any of my PCs, in fact sometimes I got 90fps+. Not to mention all the consoles before the 3D generation ran at 60fps constant (with slowdown, but it was still running 60fps). I couldn't stand the low resolution blurry choppy graphics on the early generation 3D consoles then or now.
I remember playing Quake at 16fps... and being dumb enough to enable high resolutions.
My nephew is 12, and all he talks about are frame rates and resolution. I get it, but it starts to drive me nuts, since he obsesses over it. I think I should have him play some Hard Drivin' the next time he visits!
@@dschult3 I'm sure most of us were the same as teens ;). But yeah, I guess the newest gaming generation has it pretty good. I don't have any modern consoles but I've heard they're pretty good at giving either 1080p60 or 4k30 depending what you want. As for PCs it's not terribly hard to beat that performance.
@@BriBCG good for you 😅 Some of these games quake or unreal tournament, serious sam. I tweaked the settings up so everything from 20-30fps was very fine.
For revolt I don't remember. Played it in 1024x768 on a pc. I remember it was on a cd of a gaming magazine. No comparison with console graphics of that time.
I love Quake 2 on N64 so underrated in my opinion.
Agreed. Great multiplayer as well.
You're a good one Joe. Really appreciate the effort here.
What a cool topic to go over, got my popcorn now! Thanks Gamesack!