selnor said:
I remember when Nintendo were top in power. Nes, Snes and N64. For me Nintendos best years. Mario 64, OOT, DKC, Perfect Dark, Super Metroid, Starfox, Starfox 64, 1080 Snowboarding, Waverace 64 all blew me away. And still imo not beaten by Ninty themselves to this day. I loved Nintendo then. |
The NES was not the top in power, the SNES was also not top in power due to the NeoGeo, and given it released 2 years after the Megadrive it's quite easy for it to top that. The N64 was the top dog at least but similar to SNES release it launched 1.5 years after the other two major competitors (1 year late could be a delayed machine, but 1.5 probably indicates the console development started later than competitors... though we don't need to make that assumption with N64 as we know a little of the history in that Nintendo was working with Sony to make a SNES CD, the origins of the PSX date well back before the N64, although it was slow to develop due to being a new project a lot of work was done before the N64 even started development).
Nintendo have never strived to be "bleeding edge" like Sony have... they haven't made a leap as deliberately small as with the Wii before but the doesn't mean the opposite is true for their earlier consoles, it's more the staggered nature of the generation leap as well as Nintendo's own success that caused them to be at the graphical high end for SNES to GC (meaning competitors were releasing consoles considered as part of the new gen while Nintendo was still able to sell NES and SNES)
Even if Nintendo went bleeding edge with the Wii U, with it releasing a good year before Nextbox/PS4 the best it could be is equal in graphical capability to the other two (and that's assuming that Sony/MS didn't push any boundaries)