Raise the flame shield: Your "controversial" gaming opinion.

[Salnax]

DevilRising said:

Salnax said:
Cartridges made the N64 a better console, not a worse one.

Technically speaking, CDs would have helped the console greatly, as they have considerably more space and are much cheaper to make. I have always believed that if N64 had been a CD based console, that it would have retained many of the big games/franchises that migrated over to PSX that generation.

 

However, on a personal level, I tend to agree with you. It was nice/neat in a way, that N64 was the last cartridge based home console. The space limitations were no fun, but the good developers did still manage to do some great things within that.

I also think that gaming simply wasn't entirely ready for optical media by the mid 90's. Remember how long load times were for PS1 games? That didn't exist on the N64. Plus, cartridges are infinitely more resilient than the dainty little G5 CD-ROMs. Plus, I like the fact that cartridges can include extra hardware tailored for individual games, and how saves are on the cartridges.

The space limitations sucked, but are overstated IMO. N64 cartridges had a capacity of 64 MB, compared to the PlayStation's 800 MB CDs. The thing is, I don't think most games didn't really need 900 MB of space. Games like COnker's Bad Fur Day fit comfortably in 64 MB despite the full voice acting. Even Resident Evil 2, which was originally 800 MB, and it was squeezed onto the "tiny" N64 cartridges with bonus content! Much of the space was devoted to poorly compressed video and voice acting, not to mention data repeated to compensate for the PSOne's atrocious load times.