Still don't understand why the N64 wasn't the #1 console of that gen?

[shams]

Sullla said:

For all those people who (still) want to insist that cartridges were the big downfall of the N64, please answer this question for me (which no one has touched so far):

Why did the N64 (which used cartridges) sell more than three times better than Sega's Saturn (which used CDs)?

While you're at it, you may also want to explain why the DS, which continues to use those horribly outdated cartridges, manages to dominate against the PSP, which uses an optical-based media (UMDs). Or why it is that earlier CD based systems (CDi, 3D0, etc.) failed so badly against the cartridge-based SNES and Genesis/Megadrive. If we were plotting the relationship between cartridges and CDs on a graph, there wouldn't be an obvious correlation showing CDs = success and cartridges = failure. Trying to simplify the fifth generation consoles into one factor just leads to false conclusions.

The reason why so many third parties focused on FMV cinematics with their Playstation games is because that's what the system was good at doing. They catered their product to the hardware they were working on, not vice versa. Most of the people posting in this thread have it backwards. If the N64 had come out years before the Playstation and become the dominant platform, all of the third parties would have happily made games on cartridges and cinematics would not have been a major selling feature. You know, kind of like what's going on with DS right now?

Anyway, I'm not trying to defend Nintendo. They obviously made the wrong decision, and the N64's development cycle was one of the most torturous ones of all time. I do wish people would think a little bit more about this issue and stop confusing cause (third party development) and effect (storage medium).

The cartridge argument no longer holds. If the DS was using (small) N64 carts, and the PSP was using UMD - the DS would be a complete failure.

CDs allowed games to be much cheaper (media was much cheaper), and this drove 3rd-parties to the PSX.

These days the cost difference between a UMD & DS cart isn't significant - not enough to shift developers away from the DS. Plus the fact that the DS & PSP are actually *very* different machines.

...

re: N64 vrs PSX graphics: I'm not arguing that PSX games *looked* better - in general I think N64 titles looked heaps better, apart from the low-res/blurriness. Just saying that the additional "raw power" of the PSX gave it another edge over the N64: it was actually quite hard to port PSX games to the N64, and they tended to look worse and run worse.

I still think Spyro looks fantastic, given its a PS1 game - looks a lot better than a lot of N64 & PS2 titles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFGnf4DP3KU