The Liminality of the N64
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- Опубликовано: 14 июн 2024
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My n64 emulator was acting wacky, so some footage is from the awesome world of longplays channel, by rickyc and retro games:
/ @worldoflongplays
Most images were sourced from the liminal spaces subreddit!
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I think this perspective is a bit biased by age. I can say, as someone who played Mario 64 when it came out when I was 13, none of this seemed that creepy in 1996. The blurry disconnect between players and backgrounds wasnt as prominent on a small crt tv. And it was the brightest, most visually impressive thing that many of us had ever seen in a video game. Not that I disagree with anything in the video, I definitely see it. It was just a different experience playing it back then, then it is now with 30 more years of hardware and technology since.
That's why it's stated in the video that NOSTALGIA is the driving force of whether or not you get that feeling of unease. It's based on what's familiar to YOU. It also depends on what part of the world you live in. I was watching some other video about liminal spaces and russian internet-goers didn't get much unease looking at empty shopping malls or other images that are part of American culture, their ideas of liminal spaces is much different.
I'm Mexican American, looking at empty housing projects in Mexico like Casas Infonavit scare the living hell out of me because of my familiarity of driving past them.
@@giselletorres4156 exactly, thank you
exploring strange geometric spaces with uncanny vertex lighting and blurry stretched textures that all don't-quite-add-up... you have to fill in a lot of the gaps with your own imagination... that kind of thing really shaped my brain as a child
Omggg i was hoping you’d make one on the N64!! So glad im not the only one who felt how empty and kind of melancholy the games felt, even as a kid.
YES! So many N64 games had such a creepyness to them that Sega Saturn and PS1 games just lacked because of the large open 3D worlds it could render (save for SH1 and RE2)
The graphics of the N64 always made my imagination run wild, but in a positive and thought provoking way. I rarely felt a negative energy or eeriness from them. As funny as it may sound, they always felt futuristic to me and now they just feel like what the future used to be. It's hard not to hear a '90s Jungle/Drum and Bass track playing in my head when I see them.
I've been thinking about this video a lot since I watched it yesterday, because I feel like there's something that separates physical spaces from digital media in terms of liminality, but something important I just remembered is that CRT and LED screens are really different in ways that mutate our experience with these old games.
I was thinking about how dead malls are uncanny and surreal, and a big piece of that is that they aren't operating as intended. They were designed with the assumption of motion and noise from shoppers and mallrats, with additional light and open space from stores. All of those things are long gone, so what we see today is a corruption of the original design. (Actually, what we usually see are photos and videos, which are transformative works, but whatever.)
And I was comparing that to old video games, which theoretically should be the same today as they were then, but I realized that isn't actually true. The crispness of LED screens changes how games look in ways that can be pretty subtle for games using 2D pixel art, but for early full 3D games like the ones on the N64, it means things like sharper polygons, harsher edges to textures, and much more conspicuous fog. The developers were expecting TVs to smear these things out, but that doesn't happen anymore, and the atmosphere can shift because of it.
So, these games have also been corrupted, but in a way that's much more subtle. The thing itself is the same, but we can't access it the way used to. It actually feels kind of insidious, since it not only changes how we experience the thing today but warps our memories of what it was originally supposed to be. At least with the mall, we know exactly what happened.
I don't know how important this actually is, since it only affects one aspect of a game and the whole era was so wildly experimental (I'm actually curious what things look like when one wanders away from the Marios and Zeldas and into the "you tried" and trash tiers), but there's definitely some kind of distortion that's hard to measure. When uncanniness comes from not the old technology we're interested in but the modern technology we're using to view it, is that still liminality, or is it something else?
Anyway, I really loved this video and I love your channel, which I discovered about 36 hours ago and is now one of my favorites. Have a great day!!
Oh my gosssssh, you know Amandafiles! I was just thinking how alike you sounded the other day. One of you definitely influenced the other's voice cadence lol
I was just gifted a jungle green n64 for my birthday, you made this just in time 😄💚 great video!
Can we talk about the beta maps in Wind Waker though? Everyone I always talked to thought of them as cool quirky unfinished areas but they were always like existential liminal hell to me.
Great video! This is such a fascinating pocket of gaming history that I don’t think can ever truly be replicated. I can’t imagine in 30 years looking back at like Switch and PS5 games the way we look at the N64 today.
Although not a N64 game,I recall an arcade shooter game that gave me this feeling (I don't recall the name, but i recall something in it called kiss of death syndrome) and it scared me honestly back then but i was still intrigued by it and would always look at the gameclipswgen no one was playing it
Awesome video!!! I've actually recently been thinking about making a game that's a tribute to old N64 and PS1 games and one of the things I knew I wanted to include was this sort of liminal, cozy and uncomfortable feeling. Of course I haven't started development or something, but It's just an idea.
I just subbed to you and looky that, new upload! This is my lucky day 💜
Same. I just found the channel like 24 hours ago and it's 100% a new favorite.
I love this :D!! I always found mario 64 sorta liminal and just... empty. One of my favorite mario 64 fangames is b3313 which really plays into the eerie sorta endless creepy style that makes you feel like something isnt right
Was telling my gf about this video and she was like "wait, is this the build-a-behold-a-bear person" 🤣😂 Ur an icon in this house xx Also, you should give yourself more credit babes! You're genuinely very good at explaining things in a way that isn't confusing or overwhelming.
Awesome! 😊
Too young to ever have played the console, but I remember a video I watched ages ago about the eerie feel of some of the earlier 3D games - in particular wet-dry world, with how out of place it is and the whole empty skyline with a city partially flooded with water and big empty buildings. Glad to see someone else touch on the subject in a more wide range.
You're literally not too young to play the console, you can go online right now and easily emulate it (and be pretty accurate to console)
Lol donkey Kong is just like that
Hold up, so im guessing the word "limbo" is derived from liminality? Or vice versa?