N64 Port

[Francisè von Spitroast]

The N64 port of Hexen got a 3/10 or something like that by IGN back in the day, but I can't tell if that's because it seemed so out of date at the time or because it's actually a bad port. Gameplay of it looks fine. Anyone got an opinion on it and how it compares to the PC?

[PickleRick]

Seems the same iirc.

[Defective Dopamine Pez Dispenser]

As someone who played several Hexen versions not too far from one another back in the day, but played it on the N64 before on PC, my admittedly biased take (as a big N64 fan lol) is that it was a competent but imperfect port. Yet paradoxically my favorite version of Hexen. (Again, I'm biased.)

It has my favorite soundtrack of all the Hexen versions personally (even if it's technically lower fidelity than both the Red Book CD audio version on PC, and the MIDI version on PC, having lower polyphony and at times struggling to even reproduce all of the tones in certain songs - still, I love it. It's just personal preference due to it being what I played first,) and since I didn't have a PC at the time, it was the first game of its sort I had played and the strengths of the game (it's still Hexen at the end of the day) shone through and made me love it. My experience didn't suffer from having played it on the N64.

That said, it had less than ideal controls and UI owing to the controller (that never bugged me personally, though) and the necessity to make the item bar accessible at all times (no hot keys.) It had the usual "blurriness" all N64 games had thanks to its distinctive three point texture filtering and AA. Personally I always preferred that to overly pixelated unfiltered textures, though. YMMV. It has a low and high detail setting for at least some degree of adjustment.

The PSX and Saturn ports had FMVs that the N64 version lacked and better audio than the N64 version, but they had lower resolution, less detail, reduced geometry in places, and certain other changes to accommodate the hardware. The N64 version also had a better framerate than the other console ports.

The main reasons for its poor reception were simply that it was effectively a straight port of the existing game with no substantial changes (other than splitscreen,) with poorer visual and audio quality, and no compelling reason to pick it up on the console if you already had it on PC (especially if you had the CD version and adequate hardware.)

Quake 64 also suffered from similar critiques, due to it essentially being a visually inferior version of what already existed on PC (although, it did add prerendered colored light maps and a new soundtrack, both of which actually make me prefer Quake on the N64 believe it or not.)

These more straightforward ports were in contrast to games like Doom 64 and Quake II on the N64, which were entirely new games designed to exploit the platform's strengths even if they were still on the simple side.

To say nothing of games like Turok and Goldeneye which were visually and mechanically leaps and bounds ahead of Hexen. For better or worse, those were the games this aging, much simpler, much uglier FPS was being compared to on the system when it launched, and it just didn't hold up. Unless, like me, it was your first time playing it and you had no other way to do so.

I hope to someday see a Hexen remaster along the lines of what Quake just got across platforms, and that it will include a dedicated Hexen 64 version just like Quake does. Playing thorugh that brought back so many memories, even though it's technically inferior to the PC version.

[srfrogg23]

I played the N64 version of Hexen and it seemed fine. They applied some sort of anti-aliasing filter and smoothed out the textures a lot so, if I remember right, the main complaint was that it "looked smeared". The controls were ok, but I don't think the controls translated well to the N64 controller and that garnered a few complaints as well. All in all, the N64 port was basically the same as the PC version with few exceptions.

The biggest complaint, though, was about Hexen itself. This game is pretty rough in the whole "find another switch to open a random door somewhere else" department. I think that's why the reviewers really disliked it.

[Dumia]

It's good port, played with my brother splitscreen and it works great! You have to remember that good pcs to run these kind of games was hard to come by back in the day, so a good consolized option was great. Still miss the level transition with text from bits from the manual (not sure if its from the manual, don't quote me on that) overall felt like neatier package with some weird choices on the controll scheme (jump and action on th same button by default but you can change that). Again, for a hardware acelatered version of hexen, this rocked! On the pc you only had software mode and that ment somethings like dithering reduced color pallete and other stuff, so the n64 version was a unique in its own way, but its a great translation the reports from the time were hating the swarm of FPS games with sprites (DOOM clones was it was said) so don't follow the score too strictly they have some weird negativity toward these kind of games.