happydolphin said:
But Nintendo wasn't competing with the Playstation! They wanted to be the best, without argument, no matter the worms that challenged them. And that's what they were (graphically speaking) with the N64. It was the best. Their mistakes in architecture are just as bad as Sony's overkill with the cell. Your blame of Nintendo is horribly one-sided. Did you see MS sell their 360 at 600$? I didn't! The Playstation was 500$ in Canada when it released, the N64 was 350$. For a much better graphically capable console, I had a better price. The Playstation was not Nintendo's enemy, Nintendo was (Of course it was an enemy, an enemy Nintendo under-estimated and shot themselves in the foot against. Nintendo were their own enemy, which is what I've said too). They made aweful decisions I won't argue that, but none of them had to do with them wanting to be the more graphically capable console. Are you telling me that they would have had less graphical capability had they gone optical? Their choice for cartridges goes way beyond graphics, and is a much much more complex matter. I would never say, never did say, and didn't even imply that Nintendo are the only company guilty of designing flawed hardware or of pushing technology that isn't developer friendly. I was not commenting on other hardware or exempting other hardware manufacturers from criticism by focusing on Nintendo; I was simply focusing on Nintendo because that's the company whose hardware we were talking about. I find the decision processes behind both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to be absurd and not in line with what I want from new hardware, but that isn't what we're discussing. You're too eager to to see me as being critical of Nintendo and no-one else. The decision to go graphically capable in the way they did, with the machine they did, and the limitations of 3D technology of the time, DID lead to problems that hampered the N64. The early cartridges themselves compounded these problems with hardware, though they did improve over time. I'm not saying they would have pushed a less graphically capable machine with CDs, but they may have held onto more third party support. That's pure speculation, of course.
The limited texture cache as I said had lots of workarounds, there are articles in Wikipedia on that, it wasn't a show-stopper. The difficulty of developing for the N64 was an N64 issue, not a Nintendo issue. They worked with a 3rd party called Silicon Graphics and I'm not sure that worked so well in the end result in terms of developer-friendliness. Yes, but those were the exception, not the rule, and outside of Rogue Squadron, these work-arounds mainly came on late on in the N64's lifespan. Conker's Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark and Banjo-Tooie did a great job of working around the limitations of the N64. But who Nintendo chose to work with and how the machine was designed WERE Nintendo's mistakes. At the end of the day, it was Nintendo that signed off on and backed that machine on the market. They made mistakes. Every company does. Look at the Cube, still good old Nintendo, all issues resolved. It was (so they say) easy to develop for, moreso than the PS2 with the emotion engine. You're gonna tell me I'm using the improvement argument and it doesn't count, but Sony entered the market in that same generation, so starting from there on out is fair game. Yes--and they made the Cube developer friendly after the mistakes they made with the N64 lost them developer support. Nintendo has played the pure graphics game for many years, and yes, they marketed the SNES as a "16-bit" machine. It mattered to them. They called their consoles Super and Ultra for a reason, they were competing in a market where capability mattered. Your view on Nintendo is revisionism and desperately at that. Emphasis on graphics is not the same as technological sophistication or capability. The wider point I was making is that Nintendo made an ever increasing focus on technology, which they did with SNES. They focused on larger game worlds and longer game experiences. They got involved in a marketing battle with Sega around graphics, that's absolutely true. But was the SNES designed to produce graphics that blew Genesis out of the water? No, it wasn't. It was designed to create great games, and they sure as hell managed that.
Yes, it was more graphically capable than it's predecessor, but was it cutting edge graphically? Graphically relevant, is the phrase you say. Nintendo stuck with the original GB for what, 12 years? And only with minor revisions. No where did I talk about the Game Boy Advance--the Game Boy was the epitome of the design mantra Nintendo have returned to in recent years. Lateral thinking with withered technology. HD, multi-core consoles are not new or cutting edge any more. Nintendo will take the existing technology, improve upon it, and do new things with it through the tablet pad. There's no avoiding what I was saying earlier; Nintendo's most commercially successful systems have been the ones that (relative to their competition) where less technologically capable. DS, Wii, NES and GameBoy. That's true. No where have I said they DIDN'T pursue technologically capable systems; in fact I pointed out that they pursued ever more technologically capable systems, from SNES to GameCube. I'm not sure why you seem to disagree with me so vehemently, other than my perhaps poorly worded statements about the N64's graphical capability. Rather than clog this thread up, message me if you want to continue the discussion. I'll get round to replying, I'm sure.
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