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Soundwave on 10 October 2012
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NightDragon83 said:
Kenology said:
noname2200 said:
spurgeonryan said:


Bull! When has it ever been about having better graphics with Nintendo.

The N64.

I thought they eventually learned their lesson on that one, though.

True, but N64 came out over a year (and a half [Japan]) after the PS1 so it was bound to have better specs - although I'm unsure if it was underpowered compared to how it was hyped during the Ultra 64 vaporware days or if the cart format really held it back. 

Sticking with carts certainly cost them the gen and is the reason the PS1 took off like it did.

It wasn't so much the carts as it was part of the gimped / bottlenecked hardware that Nintendo put in their system to save a few dollars and launch at $199 to undercut the competition while making a profit on the hardware at the same time.  The average game had low quality textures compared to many PS1 or even Saturn games games because of this, but the expansion pack allowed for better visuals in games like Rogue Squadron and Perfect Dark, both of which look better than any PlayStation game that doesn't feature pre-rendered backgrounds or CGI cutscenes.

The storage limitations of the cartridges weren't as big as everyone made them out to be at the time.  The N64 version of RE2 for example contains all the content that the PS1 version had on 2 discs, with the only difference being the highly compressed cut scenes.  The only thing PS1 had over the N64 was uncompressed audio and CG cutscenes.

RE2 came out very late in the N64 life cycle when much larger cartridge sizes and more efficient compression codecs were available.

The N64 would've smoked the Playstation if they had compromised with third parties and included a CD-drive (Saturn had both cartridge and CD capability too). It was definitely more powerful and had extremely strong games from Nintendo and Rare. With the CD format it would've gotten 10x more third party support. Resident Evil for sure, perhaps Metal Gear Solid and even Final Fantasy as well.