N64 had Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. That's already enough because those are my #1 and #3 favourite games of all time. Beyond that it had Majora's Mask, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart and more and if you count them as first party GoldenEye, Banjo and the other Rare classics. No console can beat that.

The SNES though is an easy second place, when it has Yoshi's Island and A Link to the Past among others.

That is a tough question. I voted for the SNES based on gut reaction. My gut also tells me Gamecube was the worst (although still pretty damn good).

I kind of want to take a closer look at this though. Would you include everything published by Nintnedo? Nintendo published a lot of Rare games, although not all of them. If you only include Nintendo developed games that probably changes the picture a bit.

Since I put so much stock in innovation, I voted NES. Nothing is harder than creating something out of nothing. And seeing as how a lot of people are still playing (and requesting) many of the its IPs, no Nintendo console did that better than the NES.

I feel I should talk this out with those who may know better than me, because this would affect my vote greatly; were Rare's games on SNES and N64 first or second party?

Wii and NES easily had the most powerful in house first party software lineup. Wii Sports and Super Mario Bros remain to this day the most successful killer apps in video game history. Both consoles also had robust lineups of compelling first party software that dominated the sales charts.

N64 is the next place. While not quite as powerful, Ocarina of Time brought back memories of the hype machine that was Super Mario Bros 3. First party software and Rare carried the console, as it otherwise had an anemic third party lineup.

SNES is winning, but people are conflating third party software. Forgetting that the first party software wasn’t all that spectacular. 

GameCube and Wii U failed as home consoles because of weak first party lineups and nothing particularly interesting in third party software either. The lack of compelling software translated into lack of interest in the consoles as a whole. But Wii U’s experience was worsened by the shoddy hardware, as games like Mario Kart were substantially more fun to play on Switch thanks to much more content and features on top of it being possible the biggest local multiplayer game in history. Mario Kart 8 is a great example of how a mediocre game on one hardware can be a killer app on another.

Super Nintendo.

- Yoshi's Island.
- Super Mario World. - My favorite 2D Mario.
- Zelda: A link to the past. - My second favorite top-down Zelda after Links Awakening.
- Super Metroid. - The best metroid game. Complete it yearly.
- Super Mario All-Stars. - Took the NES games and remastered them in a comprehensive package.
- Super Mario Kart. - First Mario Kart title in the franchise, showed us what mode 7 can do.

*******

StarFox - Although a first party game, developed by a 2nd/3rd party. Was amazing.
Donkey Kong Country 1, 2, 3. - Made by a 3rd party, Nintendo franchise, absolutely the absolute rave back in the 90's before the 3D era truly kicked off.

**********

The Super Nintendo still holds up visually today and thanks to the Sony audio, still sounds great too.

Was SNES, now it's the Switch.

If Rare games were considered 1st party I would say the N64 was my favorite generation partly because that was the generation I had the most time to play video games. I had a SNES and enjoyed it quite a bit but the N64 was my prime years. So many games on that system blew me away. Looking back at it now my answer is actually the SNES but at the time of playing them the N64 was the system I had the most fun with at the time they were out. But the N64 games haven't aged well and the SNES games still hold up.

Wow this is a tough one. The argument made for NES on the first page was very compelling. SNES and/or Wii was really great as well. I can't decide dammit!!!

I feel like the answer is pretty complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_developer#Second-party_developer

They would technically be considered a second party developer, but Nintendo also owned 49% of them.  That is as close as you can get to 1st party without being first party.  If you exclude Battletoads and the arcade version of Killer Instinct, they exclusively made games for Nintendo consoles from 1994 to 2002.  Developers like HAL Laboratory would also be second party. 

The more I look at it, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to exclude second party games published by Nintendo.  You would have to exclude the Donkey Kong Country games, Earthbound, all the Kirby games, Super Mario RPG, all the Fire Emblem games, and others on SNES.  On N64, there are the Banjo games, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong 64, Goldeneye, Kirby 64, Mario Golf, all the Mario Party games, Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, Pokemon Snap, Sin and Punishment, and Smash Bros, among others.  I didn't even look at any of the other consoles, but I bet it is the same there.

For me, I think it would just be easiest and best to just look at everything published by Nintendo for each console.