will nintendo ever be a serious contender?

Take a read of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64#Programming_difficulties

 

I did say "Here's some stats, i know they don't mean much since the architecture and complexity of the tools can ease or worsen the development process for games but that is why I used the term "CAPABLE"."

 

If your console can output the above screen, with or without blur, then it's better than a nintendo 64.

Sorry Playstation fans, your console's lack of FPU, perspective correction,Z-buffer and anti-aliasing makes me think you lack the technical knowledge to appreciate good graphics when you see them

it might be that PSX-fans' eyes are adjusted to a world w/o antiliasing , because I have yet to see a PlayStation platform that actually gets it right. Poor Sony have been struggling with this matter for the past 15 years.

 

AA really never mattered then . at least to me. But even still, I think the 64 is graphically superior.

64 games to this day still look fantastic, Some PSX games on the other hand , not as much. But depending on the game.

 

For me AA is what ruined the N64, I hate the muddy blurred graphics. I don't care if it can push more poly's or do real time lighting or anything like that better. It's like playing games after half a bottle of tequila.

 

I haven't played much of the Wii. I think the controllers and the attitude that Nintendo doesn't need anyone but Nintendo held this system back and the ones before it. While the innovative Wii controller offered a new way to play developers clearly weren't ready for it. With no other controller option available you got a ton of shovelware and it really hurt the system.

The 1st party software is great. Without a doubt THE finest of any of the hardware devolpers perhaps even the best amoung the software companies BUT the only reason the PS1 is called the PS1 and not just "the Playstation" (meaning no PS2) is because of all the 3rd party support it had.

Sony locked up some great titles including GTAIII and it paid in spades. Xbox is now doing the same. I guess you could say Nintendo tried to lock up the Resident Evil series on Gamecube but got screwed over in a way. Still from the n64,gamecube and Wii you can say that Nintendo hasn't had the 3rd party support they had on the Super Nintendo.

Some people (based on system sales) already see the Wii at the top. Many of those systems went to 40+ 50+ 60+ year old adults who pull it out to play "the bowling game" when family stops over. Many are sold to parents looking for the child friendly game system. Some are also sold to gamers in the 20-30 year range but I agree that of the 20-30+ year old gamers and those that own just one system for the most part do not own the Wii. The majority in that age group that have the Wii also own the 360 or PS3 and the Wii is not the primary game system.

I think Nintendo is a smart company and they do make mistakes but they also learn from the mistakes that they make and they pay close attention to the market. No matter how you want to look at it the Wii just caught developers off guard and Nintendo would have been better off had the developers been better prepared. Nintendo makes great hardware and they make great software. They just have to learn to play nice and it will be hard to touch them.

 

Sony won with the PS1 and PS2 on 3rd party software support alone. Nintendo didn't need 3rd party support but if they would have had it they would have had one less system to compete with today.

 

N64 graphically better than Ps1? Ah!

find me something worth Wipeout3 and we'll talk again about it... Also it had weak, bad music/sound effects due to limited space in carts... and bluriness i'm still aching after my last play of f-zero x...

 

Maybe in still screen shots, What about the terrible frame rate most of the games ran at? If Pilotwings ran any slower they could have ported it to the Tiger Game.com

 

I'm 20 and I only own a Wii myself (aside from spades of retro stuff). I really can't be bothered with the extra cost of an Xbox or PS3, and I lack the time for a lot of gaming. I would need a better HDTV to take full advantage, and I don't even have the space to stow the console. The 360 would require the extortionate Wifi adapter and.. aaaw sod it that.

My Wii, for ages, was just a glorified Gamecube. I played literally only just Gamecube software on it, if it wasn't for that, it would have been unused. But my girlfriend loves sedate point and click style adventures, so its been invaluable recently. World of Goo, LostWinds, Zack and Wiki have been great, and the next purchase is lined up to be A Boy and His Blob. I've also loved the Bit Trip Series and she loves Super Mario RPG, which wasn't ever released here back in the day.

The Gamecube is a very underrated console. I have about 23 quality games on my shelf and I still have more that I want to purchase. The console itself didn't look any more 'kiddy' than the PS2. The handle came in very useful for transporting the machine. My PS2 broke after being transported, and I treated it like fucking glass during that process. Whatever were they thinking when they created with with just two controller ports?

Some N64 games do have sucky graphics, but it adds character. It is teeming with great games, and I've never really found the frame rate to hamper my gameplay. I run it through S-Video on my l19" HDTV and I've been pleased with it, even somewhat surprised at how sharp some games are.

Playstation on the other hand.. urgh. Many games on it have aged terribly. Anti-Aliasing didnt matter too much at the time as many people were playing through RF which hid up those edges anyway. One particualr thing I disliked about the Playstation was the way walls and solid structures would bend and 'pop' into a different shape occasionally. I rarely found the games impressively graphically, and even more rarely did I find them appealing.

 

I hooked up one of my 64s to S-video for the first time the other day, to play some Banjo Kazooie. I was quite dissapointed at how it didn't look amazingly better like when I first got S-video for my saturn.

I remember the horrible draw distance on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater when I rented it as a young'n. I didn't understand what the deal was.

That's all I've got.

 

The Wii looks like child's play to you because kids/families are it's target audience. Sony and Microsoft try to target this demographic here and there with random games or marketing but the two companies definitely appeal to older gamers.

I can pretty much guarantee that the top-selling games for the 360 and PS3 are almost all rated 'M'. Definitely not the case for the Wii...

EDIT: Grammar...

 

I might sound like a broken record, but the deal-breaker for any PlayStation platform for me is the controller, and I own them all actually.

I game more on my PS3 than my 360, mostly quick/arcade games, nothing too deep and committing, and I still don't feel that I am in control of the game.

The pad is a struggle to game with, especially when it comes to anything requiring analog precision on the left stick - it's utter shit for racing games - case in point, GT5. I can't play the game with a controller, but I can play Forza III just fine. Same for Dirt1/2 and all racing games really.

I believe that even WipeOut and Motorstorm would benefit from the X360 controller actually.


anyway, back to Nintendo.. What can I say, their games have defined gaming for me and they continue to do so in their own way.

They might not impress me with their online infrastructure, but that's OK, I still get more fun out of a Wii when friends are over than I do with my Ps3/360.

Actually when a couple of friends want to play on the 360 (halo 3 or Gears of War), I usually never join them, I find these kinda games boring and repetitive. I'd rather play tetris, honestly.

Best co-op game of the year for me: New Super Mario Bros Wii. That game is AMAZING

 

You want games/consoles you can take seriously? Good for you, I don't have fun when I'm being serious...I have fun when I'm playing fun games. Games like Zelda (Nintendo), Uncharted (Sony), and Dead Rising (Microsoft). Stop being a fanboy.

Also: old meme that's still funny.

 

One thing is that a lot of people do pull out N64 screenshots and say "Look how nice the graphics were" without thinking that most emulators make the N64 look better then it did in real life. The N64 for most people was in Composite video and it was muddy and blurry and even in S-Video the picture quality wasn't much better. The AA and gourad shading just made things look even more blurry. The PS did have good output and RGB as standard on all machines and games looked clear and colourful. Barc0de also fails to mention the CBFD also suffered from some horrid slow down too.

I can recognise the fact that the N64 did have some fantastic titles like Mario 64, Zelda - Ocarina of Time, Conkers Bad Fur day, Mario Kart 64, Smash Bros but lets be honest here, the N64 had a handful of titles where as the average PS owner had several thousands of titles to choose from with even more hit titles like Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3, Ridge Racer Type 4, Biohazard 3, Parappa the Rapper, R-Types, Gunners Heaven (a great 2D run and gun game that Saturn owners had to wait ages for one game in the genre...), Chrono Cross, Silent Hill, Ape Escape, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Tenchu, Vagrant Story, Harmful Park, Zanac x Zanac, I could go on all day....

For me the best Nintendo machine is a toss up between the Famicom and the Super Famicom, everything else after that kind of lost it's magic...

What self respecting GT player plays the game with a stick anyway? If you haven't got a decent Logitech steering wheel and pedals then you are wasting your own time.

 

I'd be mad to complete the game without my trusty G25

also, the games you mention I own now and many more too, but come on, they're not half as fun as a good n64 game. Especially FFVII/VIII, Chronocross, Vagrant Story and mostly any RPG. I ll give you RR4, but Ape Escape, Crash and Spyro didn't hold a candle to nintendo's platformers. I also remember how PS fanboys/ads would rave about Ape Escape being the first game "needing" a dual shock (what a shock, most PS gamers until then were used to the D-pad;p ).

For the record, Driver was a good game on the PS1, and so was destruction derby, hell even Vanishing Point dare I say -but GT1 and 2 were ball-busting. Realism without the proper hardware can be a let-down.


PS: The N64's strength were 3D games. Real 3D games. Like MGS1 was on the PS1..but how many games like that did you guys get back in the day except MGS1 and Dino Crisis 1 that were actually any good? Oh yeah, remember Armorines - Project Swarm.. or Vigilante 8.. those games looked and played better on better hardware, namely tha n64.

I could go on all day, I miss Nintendofending.

 

Truth is, the SNES was Nintendo's last "great" console, as in, the last console that had similar number of great titles compared to the competition, which admittedly was practically just the Mega Drive.

It was all downhill after the dumbass decision to stick with carts (and in retrospect, the other dumbass decision to use the mini DVDs), and to a lesser extent the decision to delay the release of the N64. The third party support was just never there for N64 and GC, which pretty much doomed them from the start against the PS1 and PS2: no way a console can survive on just the 2-3 good/great games per year which Nintendo first parties have made pretty consistently since the N64 era.

Now the Wii has gained third party support again, which has probably been a big factor in the sales advantage they've gotten, but it's completely halfassed. I bet the Wii has much more titles available than the N64 and GC had during their first three years, but probably 10%, and I'm being extremely generous here, is worth playing.

 

Nintendo has done a fine job keeping local multiplayer alive. Unless the game is a sports game, it's hard to find something (non-sports or non-retro) with local multiplayer support these days. Even harder to find something that supports 4 players at once. When the PS1 plays Perfect Dark (w/max bots), Conker's Bad Fur Day, Turok 2 (or Rage Wars) or Forsaken in 4-player split-screen, I think we can start talking about the PS1 being "better" than the N64.

I see someone (Karsten) mentioned Wip3out and F-Zero X relatively close to one another... Ignoring the fact that Wip3out came out roughly one and a half year after F-Zero X, and probably benefits from more or less being a refined version of a refined version of a refined version of the original Wipeout, Wip3out did not have 30 vehicles in action, does not as far as I can remember move as fast as F-Zero X and most certainly did not have a 4-player split-screen multiplayer mode (though, it had a 2 player + link support for 2 more, no?)

Another nice thing on the Nintendo front is that the exclusives on their platform and their first party titles are rarely "replaced" by new titles. Their games tend to have lasting appeal and oddly enough don't rely solely on hype and pretentious narratives to sell well to the public, and the weird part is; they keep on selling (often picking up additional sales, or constantly staying the same, for many many months, if not years, after release).


As for limited space vs "knock yourself out" - I feel that by using carts on the N64 we saved ourselves countless hours otherwise wasted on loading. Space is still what I consider a luxury problem. You will of course require more space every now and then, to catch up with all the other available system resources and expectations. But in general... by just expanding the available space and using it as your main selling point... you're just opening the doors to a cheap way out. The PlayStation is probably pretty much the console to blame for the existence of console shovelware. People knew back then that you could use the space of a CD as a selling point, and it's been attempted again now with the BR on the PS3 too. "More = Better" logic.

 

As someone who never owned either at release, but has built up a sizeable library on both since, I find it amazing that anyone would try and defend the N64 as having a broader and better selection of games than the PS1. There are maybe a dozen really decent N64 titles that kick the shit out of 99% of the PS1's library, but everything else is completely forgettable. By contrast there are plenty of really solid games in all genres on the PSX, it has a massively more varied library of games.

(EDIT: I was mostly talking to Barc0de, really.)

 

really? 99% of the playstation library is better than the n64 library? ...so...many...shovelware titles...