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by Narann
2226 days ago
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Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply very slow loading. N64 fall was mostly due to: * Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures. * (Very) bad developer API (actually ABI). Having being in N64 emulation, you truly see they have no idea how 3D rendering was supposed to be exposed. * Cost heavy support (cartridge). But even without fixing the last one, the both firsts killed the third party dev investment. |
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>Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures.
So what? The PSOne hardware also had its own set of constraints that made their games pixelated and ugly. In fact, I would argue N64 games were generally better looking than PSOne games.
>(Very) bad developer API (actually ABI).
Again, who cares? If the system sold as well as the PSOne did, developers and publishers would deal with it.
>Cost heavy support (cartridge).
This is the big one. The fact that N64 was not a CD-based system, however, really hurt it with consumers, who wanted a CD-based system, because CDs were new and exciting. Third-parties also hated paying Nintendo for a license AND for cartridges because it cut into their profit margins. The fact that N64 was a cartridge-based system also shut them out from a bunch of AAA titles that used large amount of textures, voice/video and FMV cutscenes because it made straight ports impossible. It may seem silly these days, but FMV in video games was really exciting back then.
I also think it hurt them that the PSOne was released almost two years before the N64 did.