| NightDragon83 said: 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. |
It was though. I believe the opposite of what you're saying... I think the hardware was fine, but the carts held it back.
For example, the N64 lost out on a ton of software due to the cart format. Probably the first ever betrayalton occurred due to this - Squaresoft moving Final Fantasy 7 from the N64 to the PS1. Some devs didn't even touch the system, like Capcpom (save for a Mickey Mouse tetris game a few other ports like Mega Man Legends), even though the system had a controller perfect for their fighting game. Even Resident Evil 2 got farmed out to Angel Studios.
And I'm not arguing that the PS1 was more powerful than the N64 because that's just not true. Even with CD-quality music and the use of Redbook audio in some games, the N64 held it's own in terms of sound quality when in the hands of capable devs (no one got the N64 to sing like Rare - just listen to Jet Force Gemini). And the N64's show pieces shit all over the PS1's - whether they're using pre-rendered CG backgrounds or not.
The limitations of the cart format, not so much the hardware, hindered games like Killer Instinct Gold. So many frames of animation cut, CG cut, voices cut. The N64 was powerful enough to handle a 1 for 1 port of that game. Same with Resident Evil 2. The game looked much better on the N64, but the voices were raspy and the CG scenes blurred due to heavy compression. None of that would've happened had it not been for the cart format. Resident Evil 2 only existed on the N64 (in form of a 512mb cart - twice the size of Zelda: OoT or Zelda: MM) because by the time it was released, Factor 5 had developed some seriously efficient compression tools.
