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Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:

Not quite permanently; Switch has plenty of AAA third party titles, thanks to utilising modern hardware with enough oomph to run the games and standardized, off the shelf chips instead of semi-custom or outdated architecture.

And it's for the best really. 

You get good tech for a good price, even know I bet Nintendo's hardware engineers are kinda miffed to be cut out of the process a bit, you're not going to out engineer Nvidia or AMD anyway. 

The GameCube was a seriously impressive chip for 2000 though, I remember at the time people falling over themselves declaring PS2 a super computer and how Nintendo and Sega could not even come close to competing, but Nintendo sure enough learned from every mistake on the N64 and made a genuinely very nice piece of kit for an affordable price. PS2 was the worse hardware for sure. 

The other thing is even though GCN was easier to program for, it didn't seem to shorten development times at all, lol, Nintendo seemed to always be behind the ball development wise, they really should have just the N64 a bit short or repositioned the N64 as more of a kids console from 1999 onwards with things like the Pikachu N64 and Pokemon games and moved Zelda: MM and Perfect Dark to the GameCube. 

Mario 64 team in particular really needed a kick in the ass. How does 5 years pass from Mario 64 and you still don't have a Mario game ready for N64 launch? Just unacceptable. 

Yeah, the age of consoles being highly custom machines is pretty much over, and while it was cool to see what could be done with specialized designs, it is overall for the best.

Gamecube was indeed an impressive piece of hardware that outclassed the PS2; it just shows that graphics alone aren't a ticket to victory.

And yeah Nintendo makes great games but they can be painfully slow at doing so. That's why the Switch is such a winner; using standardized hardware that is easy to develop for allowed it to coax back enough third party support to pick up the slack between big first party releases and avoid droughts.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 01 December 2022