My friends all had SM64, but for some reason I never actually played it until it came out on the Switch. I can get why people like it nostalgically, but it plays awfully. The camera is basically impossible to control so you spend most of the game guessing what’s going on around you
That seems to be a theme with 90s 3D games: the camera has a mind of its own and can make navigation really annoying.
I frequently compare Elden ring’s camera to Mario 64. It’s just good enough until you’re in an enclosed space. Plenty of romhacks have solved the issue with fixed camera angles or fully outdoor level design.
I think the camera is amazing for being one of the first 3D action platformers, but you’re absolutely right to say that it’s frustrating as hell when compared to modern games.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
Honestly I don’t think it’s even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I’ve played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
To be fair, now I can’t unsee it anymore, after seeing it in that light.
I think this is exactly what’s happening.
I thought every new generation of games looked “photorealistic” on release. Every time I thought it couldn’t get more realistic, they got more realistic.
B3313 comes to mind when you want liminal space vibes. It literally feels like dreams a ROM-hacker would have. I’ve had similar dreams when I was ROM-Hacking Luigi’s Mansion.
Anyway, I am as old as Mario 64 and I do agree on the spook vibes. Mainly the graphics at that era have this horrifying vibe to them. Mainly Super Mario RPG comes to mind for horrifying graphics.
I’m guessing the ‘LSD: Dream Emulator’ PS1 game might evoke some familiar feelings.
I love this romhack, but it gets really creepy a lot of the time.
Also no N64 emulators on Android can play the current version which is… fun. Would’ve loved to just pull the game out at any time of the day.
I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
In general it wasn’t too bad but there were some times playing late at night, deep underground when the ambient noise that plays when you’re near caves or whatever would spook me.
Luanti player here, have similar feelings when mining.
Youre not supposed to dig straight down
My grandma fucking loved Super Mario 64. Silent generation. She didn’t play, but loved watching us play.
Zoomers actually like mario64
Well… Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier are all millenials and they’re the ones that pioneered such reactions to the most mundane shit in videogames.
Zoomers didn’t start talking like that in isolation.
funny anon mentions it, i found ancient DOS games creepy as fuck in my day too.
Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
early minecraft had that vibe to me, especially the free to play creative mode they had on their website.
Name one creepy thing about Zork?
Wait a minute, I’m being told there’s a Grue at the door that needs to speak to me
Museum Madness had that effect on me.
I kept expecting something to… catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.
I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.
damn, just remembered there was this horror game that is supposed to emulate that feeling with old games with spirits and stuff, it may have released and it might be good and i can’t remember what it’s called.
i got to play pirated xwing vs tie fighter with a proper joystick back in the day. good times.
Logitech 3D Pro.
TIE Fighter, G Police, Sim Copter… all the way through the Battlefields up to 4, Arma 1-3, various flight sims.
I genuinely have no idea how that thing has lasted an actual 20 years with minimal drift.
they definitely aren’t building anything like they used to anymore. planned obsolescence and stuff. mine probably still works if i could find it and get that old game port thing working.
i spent what felt like 1000s of hours on sim copter and sim city 2000. it was so cool being able to build the city and fly it too back then.
I have an old-ass “Trust” joystick from the game port era that just sucks. All axes have different issues, yet all of them have issues. The throttle slider is long gone, the hat mini-joystick never worked (or, if you got it to work, you lost most of the actual buttons), and the stick center is in different places on different days.
While yes, planned obsolescence is a thing, there is also lots of survivorship bias.
I still kind of can’t believe no one else has done that.
Its legitimately baffling to me.
Oh, yeah, our one game just is a level editor for our other game.
… I can’t think of another example of anybody ever doing that.
They’d work in Streets of Sim City as well.
This is the same generation that brough the nazis back, no wonder they are stupid.
Don’t blame us. Blame the horrendous state of the US education system and indoctrination.
Luckily I am not in the US and zoomers here at least don’t seem as right leaning.
Why not both?
Nazis were gone?
Yes your generation did so much better at making the world a better place a list including. Raising and educating the generation who brought nazi back. At least you can vacation at buc ees!
Uh, you don’t know which generation I’m from, Don Quixote…
My generation is I would throw you off the plateau faster than a tiny blue penguin.
Nobody wants to here you whining about a videogame
Aye, penguin alright
Big mad?
Nah all n64 games are spooky
Tell me a single spooky thing in the Pokemon games. Stadium or Snap either one.
You 2 having this conversation
An especially haunted copy of Hey You Pikachu
‘Pikachu! Speak’
‘Pika, your mother sucks cocks in hell, piii.’
Conkers bad fur day seemed alright to.me
Conker’s Bad Fur Day was fire. Played the remaster (Live & Reloaded) on Xbox, still one of my favorite games of all time.
I’ve never seen zoomers get scared of this game
They aren’t wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
Ok zoomer
I don’t think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There’s a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It’s low tech, but the environments don’t feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
Doesn’t liminal specifically mean a transitory space that you are intended to move through and not linger in, like a hallway? OoT (and Mario 64) have those, but obviously not exclusively. I guess were referring to a sort of sparse aesthetic. I wish we had a better word for that.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn’t in Mario 64 is that they couldn’t afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It’s not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Luigi isn’t, but Yoshi is =P
Also the reason why everything on N64 were just shaded polygons (to save space) and in the PlayStation it was all texture mapped
Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.
There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.
Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.
Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.
As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!
As a gen z-er… can’t say I ever felt like mario64 was liminal or heard it describes that way lol
Some of the bits in the castle feel kinda weird from what I can remember as a kid
I think that probably has something to do with the castle being mostly empty. There’s the ghost of Toad(?), but not much else.
What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.
limen was the Latin term for “threshold”
It came from a 4chan creepypasta about noclipping out of reality
My personal guess was the writer was a philosophy of mind student or psychiatry student - the most likely place a young person would encounter the term.
by definition it’s a between space, like going from one place to another. in practice it’s a space that should have people in it but doesn’t. think an empty mall or indoor swimming pool.
the backrooms are probably the most popular example of a liminal space
I think it also has to be a bit off. Like an empty mall, but evety store is a Gap, or an empty swimming pool, but there are no ladders, or exit doors.
Something like that.
No, not really: a liminal space is a space that is in between spaces that we want to use.
Quote Wikipedia:
In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as “the physical spaces between one destination and the next.” Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets.
But it appears that current speak has changed the word to give it this meaning of eerieness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space/_(aesthetic)
What you’re describing is the new popular and also wrong use of this great and useful and specific word which fills a legitimate lexical gap. I’m not hating on you. I’m just very passionate about this. Liminality is a great concept, great term, very useful. Turning it into “le creepy empty room with le slenderman” as is popularly becoming is very irritating to me because we already have words to more or less accurately describe that.
In your case its that empty space within your brain that should be filled with thoughts and imagination but is just a long gray hallway with a few abandoned preshool desks and offsetting green fluorescent lighting flickering.
https://lemmy.world/c/liminalspace
You watched Severance? Many of the areas in the show are liminal spaces. Always a bit creepy and odd and something just feels off when you’re in them. You can’t put your finger on what it is but it’s not quite right.
I think I just don’t have the liminal space gene. I’ve watched Severance and have seen a ton of other spaces people call liminal but I’ve never felt anything creepy or unsettling about them at all.
It’s a space that has no purpose except transit. Therefore there is no thought of comfort in its design. When you see these spaces your brain has a reaction of “getting through it as soon as possible”. There is probably also something in our ancient survival instinct that lingering in open space like that could be fatal.
I know what they are. They still don’t work on me.
Have you frequently moved house, moved to new homes, apartments, lived in a car, anything like that? Hiked a long ways, for a long while?
I was homeless for some years… and yeah… almost everywhere you are is a liminal space, and eventually… it all becomes just another space, it loses that kind of strangeness, as you spend more and more time in places you’re not really meant to be in, and the places you think you can stay in, well, they turn out to be hostile and temporary too.
This should help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp-2M_3HwFU
A liminal space is some sort of locale that we usually only experience in states of transience, where staying is strange. Something that represents a border or state that you simply pass through between two more permanent states. Waiting for the bus at night. Your residence just before dawn. An empty mall or office building where there are only remanent signs of human presence. The in-dev version of a video game where characters are either absent or just placeholders.
gm_bigcity. All the Kane Pixels shit. A place where reality feels slightly altered, and your subconscious is ringing all of the alarm bells because existing there is just wrong.The subway station in the Matrix 3.
The ultimate liminal space that only exists to represent a place that is transitted through, yet is also infinite in space and time if you do not essentially possess the key to actually leave.
I guess arguably, any repeated timeloop type of movie essentially turns most of the world into a defacto liminal space.
But yeah, most literally, a liminal space is a space designed to be moved through, not inhabited.
A doorway or hallway vs a room.
A waiting room at a doctor’s office, a queue at an airport.
A highway, bridge, or train tracks, vs wherever they are leading you to.
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
And the PTSD thing is just stupid, sorry.
