RolStoppable said:
The space of CDs was used for FMVs (full motion video) to impress with graphics that the CD consoles actually weren't capable of; these FMVs were very space-demanding, so a CD could hold at most 70 minutes of such videos, but in that extreme case there would be no game at all on the CD. That's why FMVs were ultimately sparsely used and were mainly reserved for intros, endings and key events in the story of a game, because it wasn't feasible to do an entire story that way. You've played Final Fantasy IX, so you've seen how infrequent those videos were and that game shipped on four CDs when it was originally released. The space limitations of cartridges meant that FMVs on the N64 were either extremely short and low quality, or usually non-existent. This led many gamers to believe that the PS1 was capable of better graphics, even though the console merely played videos from disc. The last major console to use cartridges was the GBA. Later consoles that avoided optical media (that's CDs, DVDs, UMDs and Blu-rays) make use of cards which is flash storage. Differences between cartridges and cards are: 1. Cartridges load data significantly faster. In general, cards hit the middleground between cartridges and optical media, so they provide a lot of advantages with very few drawbacks. Considering that any portable console has to deal with the challenges of size of the device, heat dissipation and battery life, cards are way superior to optical media solutions. |
This whole post is so good.
Another thing to point out is flash storage used to be really expensive. Discs are still cheaper but a Switch Game Card is different from an N64 cartridge. Game Cards are just SD cards that are read-only.
