Nintendo's DS / 3DS ports of Nintendo 64 games were some of the best, and they're forgotten.

Submitted by twovests in games

"Animal Crossing" for the Gamecube was an oddity. It was a straightforward port of the Japanese-only Nintendo 64 game, adding features, etc. Something neat is the whole game fit into the ~43 MiB of RAM the GameCube had. So, once the game was loaded, you could take the disc out of the GameCube.

"Animal Crossing" was a port that defined the series. But it's just a port, with little in the way of new content. Nintendo is known for porting games from old platforms, they've been doing it for years, but they've really dropped the quality. Nintendo's ports used to make for the definitive versions of games, and the DS era was best emblematic of that.

For some reason, for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS platforms, Nintendo pulled out all the stops. Maybe they were worried we'd get tired of buying remakes and wanted us to feel like we were getting our moneys worth? Maybe they thought the old versions were hunks of shit which needed improvement?

I can't speculate too much. I'm here to talk about just four games.

Super Mario 64 DS was a huge expansion pack of the original game and, despite using a D-pad for movement, is IMO the very best way to play the game. It adds three new characters and a ton of new content, and it came with a bonus series of multiplayer table games you could play with people who didn't even own the game.

Nintendo had since rereleased Super Mario 64 again on the Wii U Virtual Console, then again in 2020 for the time-limited "Super Mario 3D All-Stars Classics", and then again in 2021 for the new "virtual console" thing, featuring none of these improvements.

Starfox 64 3D got the same treatment. In addition to everything the game is a graphical delight in 3D, with the stars in the far distance being fun to focus on. Being able to pause the game to go to the home menu is also a serious improvement for a game with no save functionality.

Ocarina of Time 3D was a faithful adaptation of the original with serious quality-of-life features, a nice graphical bump, and nice motion controls. Ocarina of Time crawls to a halt when you need to fiddle with a lengthy menu to put on boots, especially when you remember how good it was in the 3DS version.

It's noteworthy how faithful this port is, with the developers even painstakingly porting glitches.

Majora's Mask 3D has a fun story. It was released after the worlds only effective change.org style petition. Majora's Mask had (and has!) a strong cult following, and the fans acknowledged the clearly vastly superior Ocarina of Time 3DS port. According to Nintendo, the "Operation Moonfall" had nothing to do with it.

Like Ocarina of Time 3D, the Majora's Mask remake is a vast improvement over the original. OoT 3D's quality-of-life changes mostly addressed menu jank, and added some subtle color coding to the notorious Water Temple.

But Majora's Mask strayed a bit further from the original, to great effect, polishing a lot of the jank from the original game.

It's hard to understate this about the Zelda games. That's what this post is mostly about. OoT and MM are two important games for the evolution of the art, but OoT3D and MM3D are by far the best ways to play them...

... And you can only play them if you have a Nintendo 3DS, a console that hasn't been produced in years. There are no good emulation alternatives. Nintendo doesn't have hardware that can make for a faithful port of these remakes.

Also, Luigi's Mansion 3D,

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Caribou wrote

I spent hours on the roof in the yoshi loves me loves me not minigame in 64ds as a sensitive gayass little child

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twovests OP wrote

this is really sweet ;-; i appreciate you sharing this

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I_got_killed_one_time wrote (edited )

i just downloaded ocarina of time and started playing just fine in a 3ds emulator ? the big tree was there, and navi too. I bumped his head into the wall a few times and turned it off, he was working fine

i have played several games via the 3ds emulator " Citra " , most notably Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. its a bit finicky to use the touchscreen with a mouse in the middle of playing sometimes, but its well doable. However citra is now no longer being worked on, so it sucks to be any of the games that didnt manage to get good compatibility

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twovests OP wrote

Ah yeah I was excluding emulation. Emulation is good

But for emulation, the big thing (other than 3D) is that capacitive touchscreens haven't caught up to resistive touchscreens in terms of response time and stylus accuracy on a properly calibrated screen. (They've actually been getting worse!) And AFAIK there is nothing on the SBC market in the DS form factor with a resistive touchscreen like the one on the DS

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I_got_killed_one_time wrote

u said at the bottom of the post " There are no good emulation alternatives. " ....

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twovests OP wrote

Oopes, you're right. That's my bad, sorry. I forgot about the post I had written only an hour prior teehee

I would stand by emulating for the DS being a suboptimal experience compared to most single-screen emulation scenarios. But the most perplexing thing to me is Nintendo's porting philosophy.

I also got another thing wrong - Nintendo did indeed re-release 64 DS on the WiiU!

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Ruby wrote

There's a fork of Citra called Lime3DS that's still being worked on, so there's still hope for the games that don't emulate well

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Dogmantra wrote

I enjoyed bob-omb sorting and luigi poker more than the actual game of mario 64 ds.

But it wasn't just D-Pad movement though! you could use the touch screen for analogue movement, I think the intent was that you used the little thumb strap thingy so it acted a bit like an analogue stick but I read one of the writers in my nintendo magazine actually used the stylus to move, and after trying that it did feel the best despite being very unusual.

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hollyhoppet wrote

i haven't forgotten

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twovests OP wrote

emulating the game in your brain is illegal;

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hollyhoppet wrote

getting a cease and desist letter from nintendo because i'm remembering ocarina of time 3d

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missingno wrote

I wasn't a fan of 64DS trying to mess with perfection, they changed too much. Levels were not designed around the other characters, especially Luigi's jump height. And it was just bizarre that you don't even start with Mario.

Minigames were cool, but that's like a standalone thing.

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twovests OP wrote

I might have spoken too soon in calling these definitive. I assumed everyone felt the same I did in loving Yoshi and preferring him over Mario, and I didn't actually realize that they changed the levels :0

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missingno wrote

I mean that the original levels are (mostly) the same, but they were designed around Mario. I just feel like the stuff they bolted on doesn't naturally fit into the original game.

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Caoimhe wrote

I did have some annoyances with the 3DS version of Majora’s Mask to be honest. The constant popups about information being recorded in the journal were very aggravating and I am not fond of some of the controls for the mask transformations were changed and I feel like the redone boss fights are more railroaded than the originals.

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twovests OP wrote

I might have spoken too soon in calling them 'definitive'. I didn't actually get past the Deku mask in the N64 version, let alone to the bosses

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