this game is magical, i’ve said for years that as a sega kid growing up i was super sour grapes about the saturn with its launch price - went back & finally dove into the library in the early 2010’s and i now love so much of what was considered bad decisions at the time (focusing on arcade stuff/some 2D, sonic team doing their weird thing here instead of what the market wanted etc)
i have a xmas ritual of playing through christmas NiGHTS every year, the acapella mix of the theme is so good and i’m still bummed the recent vinyl didn’t bring it
i am only now finally trying to play through the game proper, it’s such a refreshing summer game i love this so
haha i am so very bad at this how do you get good scores, i keep getting a D in level 1 and signs that say “DO NOT MIND” and i totally don’t but like, should i have the gas on the whole time, just keep looping without going back for stuff? does time matter more than getting blue jewels and loops and stuff, what am i doing wrong here
okok it’s like halfway through this vid but this helped, gonna try to avoid the palaces and run down the clock while getting points, i’ve definitely not tried that yet
i used to know of a video by a youtube channel called “saturn memories” with sone really exemplary NiGHTS playing, but i can’t find it. here’s this though:
the main thing is get BIG LINKS and use every second (without going over on time)
right then, think ill wrap up for the night at stick canyon - haven’t figured out how to get better than a D here, riding the automatic mover thing is way too long to do twice, and i usually fail on the last cycle anyway (boss was cool & not hard though)
so, i lied - stayed up late last night and finished stick canyon, couldn’t put the game down. i’m now on the last level of both elliot & claris but i run out of gas early on with what i hope is the last wave with both of em…guess i gotta learn the level better, unless i’m missing something
In another universe, I begged my parents to buy a Saturn instead of an N64 and this became my childhood score obsession rather than Star Fox 64. (Funnily enough, we DID rent a Saturn more than once, but the only game I remember us ever getting was NASCAR '98 and that was entirely my dad’s jam.)
I finally played this game properly in the last two years and it’s wild just how much I felt like I had no idea what was going on. Very fitting for a dream world, I suppose. But it was very hard to put down because it’s just so fun being NiGHTS.
Thank you all. I try NiGHTS once every few years and always feel like I’m just missing it. Reading this thread throughout the week pushed me to buy it again today on 360 and try again. I beat the first boss too! I had no idea there were bosses before this week.
i’m about to play nights for a project i’m working on and i’ve been getting generally super invested in the saturn due to this, discovering all its got for the first time has been a lot of fun
I’ve been largely absent from these forums ever since the software change, but I got an email telling me there was a Nights thread and I have to post in it!
I love Nights into Dreams. Probably my #1 favorite Sonic Team game.
When I was a kid, I was drawn in by the wonderful and evocative visual designs and appreciated the story even if it was told in a somewhat minimalist fashion. I remember learning how to get “A” rank in every stage but didn’t push too much beyond that.
Many years later, when I was in college, I found the fan-site nightsintodreams.com and started posting on their forums and learning the game more deeply than ever before. There was someone who ran another website dedicated entirely to high scores which encouraged me to push myself further. I was never one of the top players but I loved seeing how high a score I could get.
I love how Nights is simultaneously very simple (rush through stages collecting chips, then fights a boss) and VERY complex (A-Life is nuts). I’ve played through the game countless times and have never once seen a “King Pian” IRL. There are secret strategies like flying to Gilwing’s tail and paralooping the end to beat him fast enough to get a 2.0 multiplier but it’s real tough to pull off and I usually mess that up.
But if I could change one thing about the game, I wish boss times were separate from final level scores because it feels bad to get a new record on the main level and then fumble the boss to end up with a lousy score.
But yeah, I can ramble on about Nights at a moment’s notice! I’ve had a Nights wallpaper on my desktop since ~2010 and have a Nights wallpaper I made for my car’s display screen.
It’s a real shame that Journey of Dreams pretty much abandoned the arcade/high-score aspects of the game.
Heck yeah, love me some NiGHTS! I too, have bi-yearly traditions with that game… Base NiGHTS is definitely a summer-time game for sure, and then when November rolls around I get my Winter NiGHTS fill. I usually start up Christmas NiGHTS proper in December and try to get all the presents before Christmas Day.
When I was younger and obsessed with Sonic (like I’m still not loooool), I would try to play every Sonic and Sonic Team related thing available at the time. Back then, Saturn emulation wasn’t yet figured out to its fullest, so emulating NiGHTS was out of the question. So I go ahold of the ROM of the GBA NiGHTS minigame from PSO or Super Monkey Ball or something and played the heck out of that. I didn’t actually play NiGHTS for real on a real Saturn until I was gifted one around 2008 or so.
I’d like to say I’ve gotten pretty good at it too! I can A rank most levels these days. I love how much there is to master in this game. It’s confusing as heck when you first start playing, but once you get the hang of the loop it’s so enthralling. Does anyone else find themself leaning towards the right when you’re flying along through a level, getting combos and stuff?? When I finally cash in and hit the Ideya Palace it’s like slamming the brakes on a car haha.
I also love that when people who aren’t in the know watch me play, they’re just like “whaaaaa??” If you’re not familiar I guess it’s hard to parse what the heck you’re actually supposed to do.
one thing I appreciate about the game is that (at least for me) even if you don’t know what you’re doing, and don’t know how scoring works, you can still beat the game and have fun with it. Losing Nights powers and walking around the world was kind of revelatory to me, because I found areas with objects in them that I wouldn’t have seen as Nights - I had to walk around in a failure state to find these. I thought that was really amazing as a youth and I think that opened up some doors for me as far as what I like about games, discovery, etc.
Nights to me is an absolutely brilliant game and there’s nothing else quite like it, and I think it would be regarded more highly by the general public instead of seen as this odd failure if it weren’t marketed as a competitor to Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot when it is very much not a 3D platformer.
