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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[–] takeheart@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It surely has its technical flaws but that's not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn't have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn't so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn't just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 10 points 5 months ago

Any older disk based console also required a memory card.
Pretty sure the controller was the first to have an analogue joystick.
I think a lot of the quirks of the N64 were because they were essentially first drafts. A lot of first, a lot of ground breaking tech.
Nobody knew what they were doing, at that time: nothing was wrong

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn't just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.

I never had many n64 games but I only remember one actually needing the external memory pak. Most first-party games could just save to the cartridge, it's only a few third parties that cheaped out and didn't implement that. Meanwhile the PS1 was memory cards only.

Also I don't think any console had internal storage until the Xbox which introduced a hard disk while the GameCube and PS2 were still using memory cards!

[–] takeheart@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn't use up all the data).

In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn't go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?