I wonder if they had to reduce/save polygons in other places just to make these happen…
They didn’t have to with a smooth normals shader. It’s basically free on the GPU. You can even try this on Blender, and any particularly blocky model will look unusually smooth at certain angles.
We are talking about the N64… Was a ‘smooth normals shader’ a thing it could do?
I know the N64 was a very unusual machine that took developers a little while to learn to manipulate to its full extent; but I’m not all that versed in the details.
ModernVintageGamer has some decent videos on it if I remember right. (it’s been a while)
Yes, I found that they used a technique called Gourard shading that uses smooth normals under the hood.

I recommend watching some Kaze Emanuar videos as well to see what the N64 hardware is capable of
Pretty sure that was RARE’s doing, but Nintendo did greenlight it.
It just so happens that game was Rare’s last doing under Nintendo.
But without Nintendo holding them back they went BIGGER!

What about Starfox Adventures?
She’s an ape, not a monkey, have some respect.
Ook!
All apes are monkeys, but not all monkeys are apes.
Apes and monkeys are separate from each other. Apes are not a kind of monkey.
Both apes and monkeys are primates.
The distinction between apes and monkeys is complicated by the traditional paraphyly of monkeys: Apes emerged as a sister group of Old World Monkeys in the catarrhines, which are a sister group of New World Monkeys. Therefore, cladistically, apes, catarrhines and related contemporary extinct groups such as Parapithecidae are monkeys as well, for any consistent definition of “monkey”. “Old World monkey” may also legitimately be taken to be meant to include all the catarrhines, including apes and extinct species such as Aegyptopithecus,[12][13][14][15] in which case the apes, Cercopithecoidea and Aegyptopithecus emerged within the Old World monkeys.
Perhaps, but that page you linked seems pretty clear that apes are related closer to old world monkeys than new world moneys, but are still not monkeys?
I don’t really intend to argue semantics, but before my original reply to you I akimmed a good dozen links incluthat Wikipedia page and they all say apes and monkeys are related but different.
If it doesn’t have a tail it’s not a monkey.
Even if it has a monkey kind-of shape.
If it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey,
If it doesn’t have a tail, it’s an ape!







