calibrator{at}freenet.de wrote in news:

> Ack. And when they finally stopped support for the Saturn they
> angered their most loyal fans. The Dreamcast had to suffer from that.

Despite being more powerful than all it's competitors, the Dreamcast was 
again done in by bad marketing and the wrong kinds of games.

> With Europe it has exactly been the same and that's why FF7 was so
> important. It paved the way for many gamers to love RPGs (regardless
> how different they can be). FF7 was also one

RPGs (as I pointed out earlier) have always been vital to a console's 
success in Japan, but in the US, until FF7, they were a niche genre that 
appealed to only a small number of people. The two biggest RPG series, FF 
and Dragon Quest, long suffered from Nintendo of America's censorship 
policies, and from the larger (and more expensive) cartridge ROMs needed 
for English-language dialogue.
 
> A 64 MB cart is not so small - after all they compressed Resident Evil
> 2 into it. This game needs two CD-ROMs in the original PS1 version
> and the N64 offers practically the same experience. It's regarded a
> technical miracle of some sorts, though ;-)

The smallest N64 games (such as SMB 64) were 8 MB, but it didn't take long 
to hit the 64 MB ceiling. Meanwhile, a standard CD gives you 650 MB. I 
believe the largest PSX game was X-Files, which used four disks.
  
> But, as you already pointed out, these carts were expensive.
> The real technical consequence, however, was that the games often
> had low resolution textures which either lead to ugly, blurry visuals
> or games that looked like cartoon strips (Mario 64 being a prime
> example) with their Gouraud-shaded polygons.

See for example the beautiful, shimmering water in Crash Bandicoot: Warped. 
The N64 could never have done that.
 
> True and another blunder of Nintendo at the time. They actually
> gave only a handful of parties full access to the hardware, i.e.
> "the groups able to make good use of it" like themselves, Rare
> and Factor 5. These really make the hardware shine, especially
> Factor 5 with their use of custom microcode.

IIRC, the only use of 64-bit code on the N64 was in a few things like the 
64DD's OS routines.
 
> Imagine having bought a system with three games available for it
> and the situation not changing for more than half year!
> Nintendo marketed the N64 mostly as a hype system: First they
> hyped it iself ("Ultra 64", "Project Reality" and
whatsnot), then the
> games (which didn't came) and then peripherals like the strange
> disk drive "64DD". Read videogame magazines of the time and
> how they dream of endless possibilities...

It's ironic that Nintendo's saviour, Pokemon, arrived that same year (it 
also breathed some new life into the aging Gameboy).
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32