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The N64 (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am probably going to get hate for this, but I don't think too highly of this console.

Sure, some of the games at the time were astonishing and well regarded classics, but man oh man do I dislike the controller, it just feels so... alien to hold you know?

Another thing too, the cartridge format whilst snappy, suffered from making too many cutbacks compared to the disc format of PS1 and Saturn which gave you pretty much the full scoop.

I am sure Nintnedo had their reasons at the time, but to me it was almost like it was a death by a thousand cuts scenario, a really powerful machine let down by not using what is literally the next gen medium at the time.

Let me know your thoughts, it is fine to disagree as the console is well respected with both nostalgia and entertainment, I'm just an outlier here.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The controller was so you could use it as a d-pad or as a joystick controller

Our current format has the assumption you will use both at the same time

Cartridges were faster but held less data, currently there is no reason to use cds/dvds/blurays over sd cards

[–] mindbleach 3 points 6 months ago

currently there is no reason to use cds/dvds/blurays over sd cards

Cost. The main driver was always cost.

The PS1 succeeded for a wide variety of reasons, but arguably the most crucial one was that games cost $1 to put on shelves. That's the whole thing: box, manual, disc, and all underlying processes and shipping. N64 cartridges cost about $10 for just the cartridge, and that's before negotiating for larger ROM chips or battery-backed SRAM.

The only expensive part of CD mastering is the mold. The features are so small they cause diffraction in the visible light spectrum. But Sony had been cranking out music and software for a decade, after co-inventing the format, so... not a big deal for them. They didn't even pay licensing, when they squished a couple cents of glass into the shape of a $60 game. They could turn a CD-R into ten thousand units in like two weeks. Nintendo's lead time was three months.

Even if a modern game took six Blu-Ray disks, it'd probably be cheaper than an appropriate SD Card, or even that quantity of mask ROM. The real reason we moved away from optical media is that these prick developers kept shipping 100 GB game on glass, and then still required a 100 GB day-one patch that just overwrites everything. Even though half the reason games got so fat is content duplication, to prevent slow loading from disc!