[EmilyHughes]

I disagree. I loved that there were no loading times. I always thought PS1 games felt cheap and slow compared to N64 games. Nobody really used the CD space for game content, they just filled it up with ugly prerendered cutscenes, which I didnt care about.

[PaulHoule]

It was a generation later but I remember going to my Cousin Tony's place where I'd play Metroid Prime on the GameCube (disc-based but short stroked) which did a great job of minimizing and hiding loading times and also Mafia on the PS2 where it would seem to take 10 minutes to load a level, then I'd take a long and boring drive across town to some Italian restaurant where I was supposed to shoot the people up but I'd get shot up myself and have to wait through the loading screen and repeat the drive. Maybe if I wasn't an adult with a driver's license it would have been more cool but the difference in loading time was striking.

[BramLovesYams]

I agree 100% on the loading times. This is an issue I still have and find myself often just playing something from an old cartridge (N64 or Gameboy) rather than waiting for a modern game to load up.

[scott_w]

That’s great for you and other N64 owners. However the sales figures don’t lie.

[Tiktaalik]

Developers filled the CD space with tons of textures and cd quality audio. This pushed the visual and audio fidelity beyond what developers were capable of on the N64.

This is why despite having lower polygon counts, Playstation games often look better than N64 games. The former having a variety of detailed textures, while the latter have one low res texture smeared over everywhere.

[ProfessorLayton]

The texture issue was due to the severely constrained texture cache on the N64, which was limited to 4KB, rather than storage space. Cost was another limiting factor that severely limited storage space. A lot of games released on the N64 were well below the console's maximum game cart limit.

Interestingly the same holds true for the Nintendo Switch: Sakurai mentions how closely he had to work with the development team to compress Smash Bros Ultimate's massive soundtrack. IIRC Smash is on a 16GB game cart despite the console supporting 64GB. Presumably this was done for cost reasons.

[bluedino]

I'd also take the blurry N64 graphics over the Playstation's pixelated, distorted, sparkly, jumpy textures.