[chrisco255]

StarCraft 64 came very late in the N64's lifespan.

It was pretty awful as a console game (as most RTSes would be). It also lacked significant features like online gameplay, voice over cinematics, and significant changes were introduced to make it easier to play with a controller, although none of it worked well enough to make up for the clunkiness of the port itself.

The exception does not disprove the rule. The PS1 had almost 4x more games than N64. If it was trivial to port games then, it would have happened. But of all the generations of consoles past the 16 bit era, that generation in particular probably has the smallest venn diagram overlap of ports available on multiple systems.

Nowadays even indie devs creating experimental games can cheaply port their games to all consoles using a cross-platform engine like Unity or Unreal. Those tools weren't around for that console generation

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

That it wasn't great doesn't matter, the claim is refuted by its existence.

[chongli]

How does StarCraft 64, a game almost no one plays (despite the original PC version being an absolute classic), refute my claim that ports to the N64 were hobbled by severe compromises? Seems to me that it provides overwhelming support for my claim. The game is absolute trash and not worth playing whereas the PC version holds up extremely well.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

The original claim is that exclusives somehow decided the quality of the console rather than the overall quality of the games available for the console.

The conversation then derailed into whether or not multi-platform was a thing back then. The answer is that it was, SC64 is a counter-example to the claim that it wasn't a thing.

There are lots of other games that can be brought up as well, such as Tony Hawks pro skater, as another counter-example.

That generation was the first generation where multi-platform started becoming common. It happened in the earlier generation as well (Street Fighter and Kirby are two easy examples), but that generation is where it started becoming common. It only got more common as time went on.

The mistake people are making is confusing "not as common as it is today" with "not common at all". You can literally find listicles of cross platform games for that generation.

[anthk]

I was there, I was born in 1987, so I lived thru it. And most of the time the "ports" were just new games up to the point of shifthing the genre because of some really limited platforms.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

My first console was the Atari, what you're referring to are some of the games based upon movies that happened.

There were some games like that, but not nearly all.

[anthk]

Mine a NES, so yes, there were huge differences on game implementations between consoles and its games.

Even between a C64 and a NES you can' make cloneish ports without sacrifing performance because the NES' PPU it's far better than the C64 counterpart.