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Soundwave said:
curl-6 said:

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. 

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. 

The indie scene definitely helps, though it's definitely more than just that, there are also plenty of AA and AAA games on Switch as well, since the hardware's capable of handling ports from PS4 and Xbone.

It helped the Switch a lot to be able to offer stuff like Witcher 3, Doom 2016/Eternal, Skyrim, Wolfenstein, Dying Light, It Takes Two, Nier Automata, Dragon Quest 11, Dark Souls, etc in addition to Nintendo games and indies.