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Soundwave on 01 December 2022
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curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

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.

I think the N64 caused some kind of burn out internally at Nintendo. I remember reading one of the Mario 64 programmers quit programming after the game was finished because it just took such a toll. 

Or just bad luck I dunno. It sucks because N64 was really hard to develop for but Nintendo and Rare stepped up to do a superhuman job practically, then when they finally get a really great designed piece of kit in the GameCube, the software side lets them down. 

GameCube is accounting for time/price/power/ease of programming the finest hardware Nintendo has made though. The XBox was a bit more powerful but it also cost like double the amount to make. 

The big difference also I think today is there's an actual indie game scene. That didn't exist really for the N64 or Gamecube. The Switch has always had a flow of tons of indie games, that's just a benefit of the time era it exists in. It really has become like a third pillar of software, like the NES and SNES, the Switch always feels like there's new content coming constantly even when Nintendo isn't releasing much of anything. 

When the N64 had a drought ... lol it was reaaaaaaally a drought, like you'd be thinking "maybe I should rent War Gods from Blockbuster just to turn my N64 on" lol. Such a shame how Nintendo grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory with the N64, EAD and Rare were brilliant. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 01 December 2022