| Blue3 said: you seriously need to think before you post. If not for Sony entering and expending the market, gaming would still be looked on as something kids only do theres no way games would be as big and mature as they are now. There would be no Halo or Gran Turismo, maybe on a PC but not on a console. With out Sonys hardware the technological leaps between generation would not be as big as they are now so we would have "weak pathetic hardware". And with out sony expending the market beyond kids we would mostly have kiddy games sinve the market would only be KIDS. Its this simple. If not for MS online gaming would prpbably be non existant, NIn sure as hell would not be pushing online gaming. hell without Sony, we would still be playing games on cartridges. (aka weak pathetic hardware)
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Why do you think there would be no Halo or Gran Turismo? The N64 had the first real FPS on a console (Turok) and one of the most successful console FPS games of all time (Goldeneye 007), so I'm sure if the Gamecube had instead been an "N128", it would have had great FPS games. And again, Polyphony made GT for the Playstation because they are a Sony division -- if Sony wanted to get into video games without making their own console, Gran Turismo would've been an N64 game.
I'm just going to ignore the kiddie argument since people refuse to let it go.
Without MS, online gaming wouldn't be nonexistant, but I'll give you some credit, it would not be as good as it is now. Nintendo did experiment with modems on the Super Famicom, and I believe they would have revisited online again in this generation with the widespread adoption of broadband internet.
Market pressure and the availability of fast optical drives would have eliminated cartridges by 2001, Sony or no Sony. People didn't enjoy spending $70 on N64 games, and the reason Nintendo stuck with carts in 1996 is because CDs were ridiculously slow. I never want to deal with PS1/Saturn load times ever again, but look how games like Metroid Prime on the Gamecube managed to keep things fast on an optical format 5 years later. Nintendo likes to wait until technology has matured before incorporating it. In the 2001 generation it was optical formats, in the 2006 generation it's broadband. In the next generation, it will be HDTV.
Anyway, this is all kind of missing the point. If Nintendo had managed to cash in more on the N64 hype, I'm not sure Gamecube or Wii would have been the same. The Gamecube was designed to be easy to develop for -- low-latency memory, on-die texture and framebuffer caches, a well-known PPC architecture, and a straightforward GPU made performance easy for devs to estimate, whereas the N64 used a custom 64-bit MIPS architecture, high-latency RAMBUS memory, an extremely small texture space, and a GPU/sound co-processor that had to be programmed at the microcode level. It was powerful hardware, but difficult to use. The Gamecube's design was a reaction to this, which may not have happened if the N64 had been dominant. Who knows, the "N128" might have had something similar to the Emotion Engine (with trilinear filtering, of course ;))!
