My head has been killing me for the last... *glances at the clock* For a long time now. But I'm bored, so I figured what else could I do aside from stare at my computer screen and make it worse. Yay for technology. Or something.

I've started playing with Nintendo 64 emulators. I had no idea I could even run one on my machine. My favorite so far is called Corn, and seems to run things at a playable speed on my slow-ass computer, thanks to my Voodoo2. I downloaded Mario 64 and GoldenEye, both of which I have for my real N64, and they look so much crisper on the computer screen. GoldenEye didn't work on Corn though. I had to use UltraHLE, which runs slower. That, combined with the fact that GoldenEye is a more graphically intensive game than Mario, meant that it pretty much ran like crap. So I'll stick to the actual game system to play that one.

The thing that really caught my attention though, was that even though it was being emulated, a game like Mario 64 ran good and looked beautiful on my computer. That's the kind of game I want to make. I'm tired of all these dreary and dark games, where you're going through caves, old houses, or whatever. I enjoy bright and colorful stuff once in a while. And even more, Mario succeeded in looking great by just using colored models in a lot of cases, without a lot of textures slapped on. A lot of games these days just take outrageous system requirements, because I think a lot of programmers are trying to do everything "perfectly". They make a sphere that takes up tons of polygons, when in a lot of cases you might get the same effect by just using a 2d plane and slapping a pre-rendered texture of a sphere on it. Mario 64 did this with those big black balls that roll down the hill in the first level. Until today, I never even realized they were 2d... which goes to show you, what the player doesn't know, won't hurt them. Unless it rolls over'em...

posted at 9:17 PM