I do think before I post, now practice what you preach.  I am not bashing any of the consoles, and you doing so is what I'm taking issues with. 

As for what you just posted, I disagree completely.  If Sony hadn't come out with the playstation, someone else would have entered the market and done the same thing.  Nintendo's downfall was because of Nintendo, Sony just happened to be in the perfect position to pick up the pieces and run with it. 

Gaming has progressed from mainly kids (your assertion not mine) to adults not because of sony or any other company, but because those people who grew up playing games have gotten older...hmm, fancy that.  People like me who played the NES when we were kids are still playing games when we are adults.  Consoles and games are a REACTION to the core customers (aka gamers) rising age groups and preferences. 

The gaming market has increased simply because there are more people who start playing games young and grow up.  The only place you can rightly say any company has specifically grown the market is when they target groups who in general don't play video games.  Sony did indeed do that, pushing games out to markets that didn't exist.  Microsoft did as well, pushing online content.  Nintendo is currently doing this, targetting women in general (contrary to popular belief, women gamers DO and always have existed), targetting older people who didn't grow up playing games, and anyone else they can find.

 If you read my post, where exactly did I deny that Sony and Microsoft grew the market?  In fact, where in the heck did I say anything bad about the Playstation OR the xbox?  Oh, thats odd, I didn't.  All I said is that YOU need to grow up and stop insulting anyone who happens to like Nintendo.

edit: As for your assertions about cartridges, don't be absurd.  Sony didn't start using CD's for games, Sega did and it was an obvious move that only Nintendo couldn't see.  In fact, I'd place more responsibility for the move to CD as a media in growing the market than any one company.  Easily pirated software means market penetration sky-rocketed.

 Wow what ignorant crap are you spouting?  Sony's huge technological leaps?  Okay using CDs in the Playstation was a good idea but every generation prior to this one Sony has had what is undeniably the weakest console on the market both graphically and in processor power.  If you are going to be a fanboy at least have some facts.  Ignorance is not a good thing.   Why is it Sony fanboys suddenly think that we should all live and die by graphics when the PSone and PS2 were great without having the best graphics?

Yeah I know =(. Anyway, I apologize for turning this from a legitimate topic into a battle with Blue3. Can anyone tell me if its possible to block a user, because talking to him is seriously as frustrating as trying to convince a two year old...

Why do you think there would be no Halo or Gran Turismo? The N64 had the first real FPS on a console (Turok) and one of the most successful console FPS games of all time (Goldeneye 007), so I'm sure if the Gamecube had instead been an "N128", it would have had great FPS games. And again, Polyphony made GT for the Playstation because they are a Sony division -- if Sony wanted to get into video games without making their own console, Gran Turismo would've been an N64 game.

I'm just going to ignore the kiddie argument since people refuse to let it go.

Without MS, online gaming wouldn't be nonexistant, but I'll give you some credit, it would not be as good as it is now. Nintendo did experiment with modems on the Super Famicom, and I believe they would have revisited online again in this generation with the widespread adoption of broadband internet.

Market pressure and the availability of fast optical drives would have eliminated cartridges by 2001, Sony or no Sony. People didn't enjoy spending $70 on N64 games, and the reason Nintendo stuck with carts in 1996 is because CDs were ridiculously slow. I never want to deal with PS1/Saturn load times ever again, but look how games like Metroid Prime on the Gamecube managed to keep things fast on an optical format 5 years later. Nintendo likes to wait until technology has matured before incorporating it. In the 2001 generation it was optical formats, in the 2006 generation it's broadband. In the next generation, it will be HDTV.

Anyway, this is all kind of missing the point.  If Nintendo had managed to cash in more on the N64 hype, I'm not sure Gamecube or Wii would have been the same.  The Gamecube was designed to be easy to develop for -- low-latency memory, on-die texture and framebuffer caches, a well-known PPC architecture, and a straightforward GPU made performance easy for devs to estimate, whereas the N64 used a custom 64-bit MIPS architecture, high-latency RAMBUS memory, an extremely small texture space, and a GPU/sound co-processor that had to be programmed at the microcode level.  It was powerful hardware, but difficult to use.  The Gamecube's design was a reaction to this, which may not have happened if the N64 had been dominant.  Who knows, the "N128" might have had something similar to the Emotion Engine (with trilinear filtering, of course ;))!

There are a few diehard members on this board whom you cannot convince otherwise. They have their view, and they are sticking to it, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary. The important thing is not to be drawn into a circular argument with them, because you will be wasting your time. No ignore buttons exist.

Someone make an ignore button >_>. It would make it much easier to intelligently discuss games.

Thanks for the answer Dolla. I didn't think so but I thought I'd ask. In general I don't post much, and almost never in response to obviously close minded opinions, but I must be having a stressful day or something and it annoyed me extra today. I'd feel the same way about nintendo fans bashing the other consoles for no reason as well.

That's code for everyone praising Nintendo and bashing Sony.

 No, it's straightforward speach for people discussing the positives and negatives of games while refraining from constantly and ridiculously insulting the consoles they don't own with their own baseless statements and overzealous opinions.

This is code for "I wish MY console of choice were winning this generation so that I wouldn't have to listen to so many supporters of a competitor's console."

Come on people, get over it. I think I see more complaints about how this site is Nintendo-biased than I see posts that actually ARE Nintendo-biased. "This site is Wii-biased" "Only Sony bashers are welcome here, Wii bashers get banned" "Nintendo fanboys ruin all the good threads" If you really feel that there are too many Nintendo fanboys on this site, then quit whining about it and rise to the challenge. Tear their fanboy posts apart with logic and supported arguments.