I was 12 years old at the time, I grew up with the FPS scenes from SNES Jurassic Park and I am not ashamed to say that I still like dinos a lot.
Since Doom, Duke 3D and Quake weren't accessible for minors were I live, the first time I played through them was in 2002. I liked them. And even after getting exposed to modern FPS stuff, I think Turok 1 stood the test of time better than some other home console FPS games (think of all the bad aged Goldeneye rip-offs) and even some PC FPS of its time. So to me, Turok 1 has the same old school appeal as Quake and Duke 3D: Run, kill, explore.
I could talk about Turok Dinosaur Hunter all day without feeling embarrassed, but I understand that this game isn't everybodies taste, which is of course all right. I guess Zeta is still mad at me that I didn't dig Grave of the Fireflies?
What was your favorite movie when you were 12? Your favorite album? What was your idea of great sex when you were 12? What was your idea of the perfect day back then?
I don't want the answers to any of those questions. (Nobody does.) My point was that...
hopefully none of that stuff is still your favorite because even if you haven't matured one iota, one would hope to god that in roughy 20 years since then, more than half a lifetime ago, you would have seen and experienced so many more cool things that you would hopefully not even remember WTF "Turok Dinosaur Hunter" even was.
We all know the game was popular and everyone bought it (even I did, there wasn't shit to play on N64 so I had to try everything). Just looking at period magazine covers will tell us that. It isn't a good game. It isn't even an OK game. It's terrible. It also cost $80.
Just because you like something when you were 12 doesn't mean you have to defend it to everyone forever. You can actually allow yourself to use your adult brain to judge the quality of the game. You can allow yourself to not like it. Just because there were FPS that were even shittier than Turok doesn't make Turok good. That's not now shit works. There are a million pachinko games out there, many much better than others, but all of them suck.
And please, none of this straw man horseshit. Liking dinosaurs is fine. Everyone loves dinosaurs. There are thousands of scientists all over the world that have devoted their lives to the study of dinosaurs and nobody disparages them for it (unless they also like Turok, but that's highly unlikely). Dinosaurs are not the issue. Turok: Amway Salesman: Rage Wars would have been just as shitty. The issue is that YOU AREN'T 12 ANYMORE MOTHERf*ckER.
When I was 12 I liked the band Van Halen. Now I don't because I've evolved to not like shitty things and Van Halen is a very shitty thing.
Btw, as to the original question, I think this is good topic. Should the "corrected" version of a game be valued differently than the original? I think yes, but it depends on what's being corrected. Is the game more or less fun in its fixed version or its original? The game in general matters more than anything of course. If the grey Rage Wars is worth 100 times what a regular one is, then that's fine...as long as the grey one is $10 and the original is a dime.
As for the N64. Well, you know how the PC Engine was f*cking awesome and the PC-FX was not only bad but it was bad at something completely different? That's pretty much the transition from SNES to N64. Everything that was good about the SNES was thrown in the trash so we could have foggy polygonal bullshit. What's nice is that Nintendo has since realized that sometimes we like 2D and sometimes we like 3D. Now they feel free to go whichever direction works best for the game itself instead of trying to figure out how to shove something with Yoshi in it into a foggy hellscape and still make it fun.
