The Nintendo 64 is where my loyalty to the Big N ended. As a devoted consumer of the NES and SNES, I ultimately followed my beloved Final Fantasy series onto the Playstation and Playstation 2. I wasn’t the only one; Nintendo saw itself slip quite a bit in that generation thanks to their reliance on cartridges that couldn’t hold as much as a CD. That meant no ports from the Playstation like there had been from the Genesis, no games with bulky video cutscenes, and more often than not obnoxiously tinny music as limited resources were pilfered for admittedly decent 3D graphics.
This N64 appeared to have been kept in someone’s barn. It was utterly, utterly filthy, inside and outside, and came with a power cord but nothing else: no controllers, no TV cable no games. But it was also priced at $5, which given the $25-40 price tag of a used N64 these days was essentially free. Not sure if the Salvation Army knew or cared what it was or if they just thought it was broken or untestable. Crucually, it also had an expansion pak installed–itself a $10-20 value–meaning it was ready out of the box for some of the more advanced games like Majora’s Mask.
I wound up doing my first-ever open-and-clean on the thing in order to get it working, since the A/V cable from my SNES was actually compatible and I had a few $1 controllers lying around. One of the benefits of the cartridge-based architecture–hell, the only benefit–was that the N64 had no moving parts. No CD drive, no fan, just two switches and a door to keep junk out of the cartridge bay. So I went in there with a screwdriver, q-tips, and a little rubbing alcohol and cleaned out a farm’s worth of dust, grit, grime, and animal hair.
It worked beatifully, aside from some resitual stickiness in the on/off switch. The thing does not want to power off when you want it to, which I suppose is a psychological reaction to its long neglect. I intend to keep it forever to play and test whatever 64 games I find in my travels.
Nintendo 64 console
Store: Salvation Army, Oxford, MS.
Asking Price: $5
Bought?: Yes
Value: $25-50
Fate: Kept
Of course, a $5 N64 is a $5 paperweight without any games; it’s the old razon-and-blades model, and I guarantee that just about every console was sold at a loss for that very reason. As fate would have it, though, about three months earlier I found a bunch of very reasonably priced N64 games. I had a feeling a 64 would show up sooner or later, so I kept them. Sadly, I did not do the same with 64 games that had cropped up earlier: I had and sold Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Killer Instinct. My rationale at the time was that I had no 64 and too much junk in the house and I’d rather have the money; the end result was that I wound up spending that money to re-buy the carts further down the way.
Still, even though the folks at Goodwill gave the bundle a higher price, it was a great deal. Goldeneye is a classic FPS, one of the first for home consoles, and its spiritual descendents now dominate that ecosystem. And of course Mario Kart is great fun, especially when the powers that be deign to let you use a real controller (even an awful one like the 64’s) instead of making you waggle a pack of gum at a motion sensor.
Lot of N64 Games: Wipeout 64, Nascar 99, Goldeneye 64, Mario Kart 64
Store: Goodwill, Oxford, MS.
Asking Price: $12.99
Bought?: Yes
Value: $60 (all 4 games)
Fate: Wipeout 64 and Nascar 99 sold, Goldeneye 64 and Mario Kart 64 kept
One of the reasons I went to the Salvation Army was that a week or so earlier a couple of N64 controllers popped up there and I was sure that a system couldn’t be far behind. I had thought of selling them, since N64 controllers are God’s punishment on a sinful world, but it’s a good thing I hung onto them.
The trident design makes absolutely no sense; you need three hands to use it properly, and a bizarre sideways grip that renders 50% of the controller’s real estate unusable is the only way to make it work. One could argue in favor of cutting the Big N some slack, as it was a very early design, but the Playstation controller–a contemporary–was a much better evolution of the fine SNES controller than these monstrosities. My hope of hope is to one day find a Hori Mini Pad so that I can play the few decent 64 games on something designed for human hands rather than Larry Niven’s Moties.
Still, if nothing else, I now have a better grasp (hur hur) of what I missed out on by defecting to the PS1 along with Squaresoft. It’s also highly interesting that the middle fork of the trident is almost identical to a Wii Nunchuk attachment, right down to the awful design of the analog stick that makes for easy breakage and the Z-button trigger. I suppose the Wiimote is the inaccurate, wrist-wagglin’ fruit of the 64 Trident’s loins after the brief sanity of the Gamecube controller, after all.
N64 Controllers
Store: Salvation Army, Oxford, MS.
Asking Price: $2 each
Bought?: Yes
Value $15-17 each
Fate: Kept
Geekfully Thrifting with Alexp01 