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Soundwave on 14 September 2014
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globalisateur said:
the2real4mafol said:
Who's saying that Nintendo's next console was as powerful as the next Xbox/ Playstation it would get proper support?

Nintendo 64 was extremely powerful for its time but lost most of the 3rd party support to the Playstation

It needs to appeal to the range of different people though so get decent support, be fairly simple to develop on, standardised specs etc. Not put a gimmick on people like gamepad/ kinect, make it an option.

A lot of why Nintendo is in it's current situation is probably cause of their attitude

Being powerful doesn't necessarilly make it popular. PS4 is a rare case. the most powerful consoles of previous generations didn't do so well to start with.

I think it's more complicated and subtle than that.

- Nintendo 64 had great modern graphic features (textures, effects) but had only expensive and small cartdriges and also a rather low polygon count (lower than PS1, yes).

- Gamecube had a powerfull CPU and GPU but it had only 24MB of main ram compared to the 32MB of PS2 and it was designed as a kid product when PS2 had 32MB of main ram, a DVD player and designed for adult living rooms.

PS4 is the most powerfull but most importantly it's a great looking console designed for modern living rooms (Have you seen the success of the Destiny white PS4 bundle?), better ecosystem (Trophies, PSN etc), "mature" Sony exclusive (TLOU, Gran turismo) and super dev friendly.

Also PS4 and Xb1 have all multiplaform big AAA guaranteed on their really comparable hardware: GTA, Far Cry, Watch_dogs etc.

PS2 already had GTA, gamecube never had. Watch_dogs is maybe going to be released on Wii U, but too late, people who really wanted to play the game already bought it on Sony or Microsoft consoles. And as the Wii U game will probably be barely on par with the PS360 version... People who have a Wii U probably have one of the Sony or Microsoft consoles and won't need a "on par" Wii U port.


Yeah I'd say its fair to point out there are exteniating circumstances in both the N64 and GCN cases, the N64 decision to use only cartridges was the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot before a race and wondering why you lost. GameCube had less single egregious errors but several smaller ones in unison that doomed the console. 

The Super NES was the last time they made a proper console relatively on par or better than the modern technology of the day without any real controversial or bizarre design decisions.