^THiiiiis! N64 was a watershed moment for 3D gaming and helped out a lot of genres on consoles, NES helped save the industry, SNES was amazing, without Wii we wouldn't be poised for VR and motion controls, and Wii U has proven that Nintendo has the best polish in the biz. Only Nintendo console I can think of as disappointing is the Virtual Boy. But, if we're taking VB off the table, then is definitely GC.

Egh, this is thread necromancy of the worst kind -- reviving a thread whose purpose seems to just be to shit on a great console -- but alas, I can't resist weighing in again.

@jadegl:trying to correct others' interpretation of the word "disappointment", as though no dissenting view is possible unless there's been a semantic misunderstanding, comes across as a disingenuous attempt to rope people into taking your view by denying their experiences. I can only speak for myself, mind: I think the N64 was the greatest console ever made, so it follows that it isn't disappointing compared to anything in my view. Further, I think testament to the N64's greatness is the fact that a lot of people bounced hard off of gaming entirely when the N64 "pantheon" disintegrated in later generations, but I'll get into that later.

I also think the SNES was only really decent -- not amazing -- but that view might be born of a pretty atypical experience. With that, I think it's worth giving my gaming life story, because why not.

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See, my first console was an Atari 2600, but it was given to my family by a friend of my mother in ~1993 when I was 5 years old, which meant I came pretty late to the party -- so late that the SNES was already a thing by then, unbeknownst to me, apparently. I played games like River Raid on that machine, and loved it. Maybe a year later I received a Master System via similar happenstance, on which I played Alex Kidd, Sonic 2 (I honestly think this might be a better game than the Genesis version), some weird Donald Duck game...there's going to be a pattern here: I didn't have access to the critical game press, so I picked up a lot of weird, often unremarkable games.

That was especially the case when my parents bought me a Mega Drive II (non US name for some version of the Genesis), probably in '95 (I'm really not certain on years, but that's unimportant), for which my first game was Bubsy. Now, I eventually finished Bubsy (if memory serves, it's a long, difficult game), and I think it has a little more going for it that Jeff would have to grit his teeth and bear through the jank to maybe appreciate, but I'm not going to defend it as a truly good game. It's just some weird game my mother heard was good from a friend, and I did enjoy it as a kid who didn't know better.
Other games I stumbled upon included Mazin Wars (apparently another weird localization name change...?), Disney's Lion King and Aladdin games, Desert Strike, Sonic 3 (I'm one of those people who considers S3&K the best Sonic game)...I don't think I played the same beat-em-ups as other people, aside from Mazin Wars I also played a weird game called Two Crude Dudes that I thought was cool. This sorts brings up the reason why I mentioned this stuff: someone's probably going to explain to me that I missed the truly great games of the SNES/Genesis generation, and list them so that I can shrug and say, "okay," before deciding that the N64 represented the more compelling genre experiences for me anyway.

My Mega Drive broke after maybe a year or two, which lead to a painful period of consoleless-ness during which I noticed Killer Instinct on my uncle's SNES, and fell in love with it. (We can have the debate about whether KI was a good game later if you want. Incidentally, KI '13 is the reason I'm back into gaming at all.) So a few months down the road, I went out with my parents to pick out a SNES and KI for my birthday present. Now, the N64 and PS1 had already well and truly launched by then, but for some reason, I was convinced that the SNES was where it was at, and that I'd never need to get one of those stupid 3D consoles that I wasn't even convinced were any good anyway. So when my parents suggested they could just get me a N64, I doubled down on the SNES. Shortly after that, I started buying gaming magazines, and went over a friend's place who had a N64, immediately regretted my decision, and spent a year wanting a N64 before finally getting one.
That's not to say I didn't play a number of great SNES games. I had a friend at the time who was also in the SNES camp, and we got into things like Super Mario World, the Donkey Kong Country games, Tetris Attack, Super Mario Kart, Star Wing (Star Fox in the US...again, localization?!?)...this is the point where I acknowledge that there were plenty of highly regarded SNES games I didn't touch, and that my SNES time was overshadowed by the generationally superior N64, so of course I didn't come away with the same fondness for the SNES as others here.

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One note I want to make, though, which is going to make somebody's blood boil, but since that's been my experience reading this thread, I think they can take it.

I only got around to playing Zelda:ALTTP a few months ago, and man, as someone who still places Zelda games above other games entirely, I can't put myself into the shoes of someone who actually liked this game at all. The combat, praised by some as being better-integrated than OoT's combat, is painful, joyless and janky (hit the dude from some obscure angle so he doesn't block?!?), and I only endured it spitefully so I could say I got the full, legit ALTTP experience. The dungeons are all bad, the only memorable part being that ice one later in the game where you need to follow some obscure route through it to redo the block puzzle to reattempt the boss when you die. Every boss is either average or terrible, that slug thing in the third dungeon especially. There are very few actual puzzles, the first three dungeons lack puzzles entirely and a favourite puzzle of the game is "find the key under the rock lying around." Instead, you get stumped on things like "push the only pushable block to escape the castle at the start of the game" and "find the dark world portal hiding under a random bush in the woods to progress the game." There isn't a single good NPC (most don't even have names, or have shitty names) or side-quest in the entire game -- there are some decent side-items which reward exploration to some extent, but otherwise it is a far more linear game than its predecessor. The story is noticeably bad, even to someone like me who isn't generally looking for a story in games. I can see the genealogy of OoT in this game, but OoT seems like such a stark, revolutionary improvement over ALTTP as to make me wonder why people still think this game hangs in the "greatest Zelda" conversation.

Of course, I get that people talk about games being great in their own time and context, and how it's unfair to assess a game from back then by today's criteria. I also happen to disagree with that rationale to a large extent. See, I can appreciate good graphical work, but I think graphics are superficial and don't usually matter, and I quickly acclimatize to the look of a game and forget how good/bad it looks. (To the detriment of modern graphical marvels, even, since their graphical prowess is quickly forgotten.) In fact, many N64 games are clearer than modern favourites like Shadow of Mordor and The Witcher 3 which have too many visual details, and function well without annoying (but sadly necessary) wraith vision/witcher senses/whatever highlighting the important bits from all the pretty-looking cruft they litter their environments with. A similar thing could be said for controls: sure a lot of modern action adventures have refined movement controls from where something like OoT started, but the difference is imperceptible after an hour to me. That tends to boil things down to mechanical content, world-building, etc, things I think have enough timelessness that it seems feasible to put myself into the shoes of someone of the time and understand what was so compelling. Unfortunately, the only way I can understand the fondness for ALTTP is to imagine that fondness came about at a time when people didn't have OoT to compare it to.

Also of note: Golden Sun, whilst a GBA game and hence many generations later to the party (but on comparable hardware), and also technically of a different genre (JRPG) where combat and character progression are concerned, has similar stuff going on wrt dungeons, puzzles, items/abilities which unlock parts of the world, etc, to the point where the substance of the game -- top-down 2D dungeons -- is basically of the same genre of material as that of ALTTP. Golden Sun's dungeons embarrass ALTTP's ones, they're so much better. There's no reason to believe that the basic ideas involved were creatively out of reach at the time of ALTTP, either. I just don't think good dungeons were an idea that had developed in the Zelda lineage at the time.

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On-track, as I alluded to before, I feel that the N64 had a "pantheon" of games which basically defined gaming at the time. Titles I might include on the (not exhaustive) list:

Platformers: Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie/Tooie
Shooters: Goldeneye, Turok 1/2/Rage Wars, Perfect Dark
Action-adventure: Zelda OoT/MM, Shadow ManFlight shooters: Star Fox 64, Rogue Squadron
Kart racing: Mario Kart 64, Diddy Kong Racing
Futuristic racing: F-Zero X
The only accessible fighting game of its time: Smash Bros 64

I still hold Christmas '98 (OoT + Turok 2) as the best Christmas in gaming. But I don't just bring this list up to reminisce, or to argue that a platform with this lineup of games could have nothing else but Superman 64 and still be the greatest console of all time, either. (Although I do believe that a console is as good as its ~10 best games, so there's that.) I bring up this "pantheon" as a prelude to a "where are they now?" special, to explain what I think is the most disappointing console of all time:

The GameCube.

:(

It hurts to say it, too. I think the Cube was a pinnacle of technical console design. Also, I could probably make a strong list of more than 10 games for it, which probably means someone like me but 5-10 years younger thinks the Cube was the greatest console and the Wii was the disappointment. >_>

However, look at the developers/publishers behind the "pantheon": Nintendo of course, Rare, Acclaim, Factor 5.

Rare in particular has been heralded as "the best game studio in the world" for a period during the N64 generation. They had games lined up for the Cube, too: Star Fox Adventures, Kameo. Obviously this is digging up old bones, but the Microsoft buyout ended with Rare stubbing off a lot of content in SFA to get it out the door, and Kameo spending a time in development hell -- but more importantly, the Nintendo/Rare powerhouse that defined a generation being dismantled before the GameCube even arrived. I think it also spelt the death knell for the 3D platformer: with Rare out of action and the few other studios capable of making good platformers shifting focus, the genre atrophied and died, with only sporadic (but great) Mario releases to sustain it.

If you've heard much about Acclaim as a company than you'd suspect they honestly had it coming, but they went multi-platform with the next generation and couldn't stick either Turok: Evolution or the eventual Shadow Man sequel. I think Evolution had heart (unlike Disney's reboot), and some redeemable qualities, but it's an undeniable disappointment and a pretty mediocre game. I might be mistaken, but I think the "Doom" shooter (which, loosely, Turok descends from) in general kinda started to die off not long after, as well: Halo and CoD took off in a big way, and people kinda forgot about Unreal and whatnot.
Acclaim put out a surprise with Aggressive Inline, which blew open the skate genre and for my money was better than any Tony Hawk game, but they went bankrupt in this generation, which is unsurprising because their output simply wasn't holding up anymore. At least a number of them ended up over at Retro, and (after a lot of storied instability there too) we got the Metroid Prime games out of them.

Factor 5 came out of the gate in the new generation strong: Rogue Leader remains the best looking game of the entire generation, bar none, and it's a great game, too. Unfortunately it was downhill from there, with a worse sequel, then the terrible Lair which was basically Sony hanging them out to dry.

Nintendo went kinda loopy with their internally developed GCN-era games, with things like Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart: Double Dash which were divisive, experimental entries to their respective genres. I won't deny, though, that they iterated well on Smash, even though I happen to personally detest Melee.
Wind Waker is obviously going to be the most controversial thing to weigh in on here, so I'll tread lightly: 14-year-old me was pissed off. About all things in life, really, but about hearing that Zelda was going "kiddy" especially. 14-year-old me then developed a slightly open mind and thought, "hey, maybe this is an attempt to genuinely evolve the Zelda formula, like MM did!" only to discover that no, it's still Ganon and the Triforce and the same old game structure. Later I picked up the game and found an average, if pretty Zelda experience, with some decent NPCs and side-stuff, but unspectacular dungeons and content arranged in islands on a regimented grid -- enough to generally make it better than non-Zelda games, but far from another Ocarina. And that's what Nintendo needed, in anticipation and acclaim, especially to offset the decline of the "pantheon": another Ocarina. I don't think WW's biggest fans are going to stand up and say that WW was another Ocarina. Even putting aside whether you enjoyed the aesthetic or thought the content of the game was particularly strong, or whether you think the subsequent push behind Twilight Princess was misguided or overwrought, it was a tone-deaf move from Nintendo to not try to make the "greatest game of all time" again.

I think with the "pantheon" being slowly dismantled, a lot of the N64 generation (or certainly myself, at least) became estranged from gaming. Whereas I picked up a launch GameCube, I eventually got a Wii because my mother suggested it one Christmas and I said "eh, yeah, that could be cool." (I got 5 or so great games out of it, so yeah, I guess it was cool.) I think it's telling that, during my college years, when people apparently start gaming a lot, I went off of games entirely.

Anyway, this is a long post, so I'll end it here. I want to make a curmudgeony post at some point about what it's been like to return to the madness that is gaming after a decade of dramatic changes and amalgamations and escalations of bullshit that I missed, but that's waaay off topic.

As someone who's first console was the N64, I... agree the it was pretty disappointing, was nowhere in the same league as the NES and SNES. Nothing like scrounging up $80 for Donkey Kong 64 only to find it meh.

Personally the Gamecube was the most disappointing to me, even if it has a more well-rounded library. Nothing besides RE4 blew me away. Of course I never bought a Wii.

If you were in college and someone had goldeneye + 4 controllers. That was the only thing you needed. I would pass on 100% of the other videogame experiences I had during the N64 era. Which means I'd take that over every playstation game released. Playstation is probably my favorite console with all games considered. The goldeneye experience is the most superior of all gaming experiences.

Most disappointing console (that I owned, which goes back to Atari and i had most of them) would probably be the PS3 or the PS Vita. Obvious and boring answers are 3DO, Jaguar, and Ooya.

Christ, I made this thread 6 years ago? Time is a real mother f-er

I can see myself going back to the N64 library in one way or another.

I can't say the same for my PlayStation 4.

Brad has weird opinions on games. N64 was anything but disappointing. It's actually my favorite console to this day. I mean who wasn't blown away by Mario 64? Arguably the greatest launch game of all time.

@liquiddragon:

And someone remarked that this was thread necromancy at its worst six years ago.

Don't think about how long ago the N64 launch was. :)

From EU perspective I would say it absolutely is most disappointing considering how Nintendo at that time seemed unbeatable and everybody expected the Playstation to become just a failed curiosity just like the CD-i and Jaguar were. While at that time EU was the last region to get major game releases, the N64 was a whole year behind the US release and at that time, at that price, it was just too late, too expensive, and not good enough. Final Fantasy VII was already out when the N64 was released in EU and it made the N64 just look antiquated. No CGI, no CD-quality audio, small environments (filled with fog of course), and games would cost more. It found some popularity of course with Nintendo die-hards and obviously was home to a few amazing games, but for me it was just not anywhere near good enough. If you were a young kid at that time and it was the only console you had, of course you have nostalgia for it. That doesn't make it a good console.

I'm reviving this dead horse so that I can get my hits in. Completely disregarding Brad's original (and by now ancient) take, there is legitimate reason to hold the N64 as the most disappointing console. I'm saying this as someone who was raised on the N64 and cherish it greatly.

Taking a step back and trying to look at the totality of things, Nintendo went from leading in international market share, having the most advanced base console, and cultivating the strongest library with the SNES to getting wrecked in sales, falling behind technologically, and shedding it's third-party support all within a year or so of the N64 launch. It was a debacle, and anyone expecting Nintendo to keep their position of strength in the switch to 3D would have been severely embittered. That's not to say that there haven't been bigger debacles, even at that time. When everything but the Playstation was a disaster, the N64 was the least catastrophic of those disasters. But even still, it's easy to see how expectations for the N64 would have been the highest of all of those, and it's failure thus the most disappointing.

There are plenty of other candidates for "most disappointing console": everything Atari did after the 2600 seems like a bad time, the WiiU was another incredible Nintendo debacle after the runaway success of the Wii, and the PS3 and Xbox One launched as hubris-fueled wet farts. Personally, the Wii was my most disappointing console because of the extreme dearth of worthwhile games, I can only think of less than 10 games on that thing that are worth a damn. Even still, the gulf in inter-generational performance across all categories might be the greatest going from the SNES to the N64, which could technically make it the most disappointing. Remember, being technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Compared to the generation we had between 2013 and 2020? Not a fucking chance.

The Gamecube/Xbox were rubbish

I always laugh when N64 fanboys have a meltdown whenever someone says something "negative" about that system. Nostalgic gamers should not be taken seriously.

The console was dog shit, it had about 12 good games, the pads were hideous, the third party was atrocious in every aspect, fighting games on that system were shit, you couldn't even play some of the games without that expansion pack like wtf?

It's clearly obvious many of you were born in the late 80s and 90s. You guys missed out on the early 90s era of gaming the Pinnacle SNES Vs mega drive era.

@sombre:

Just like the n64

Man, I don't know about creating an account with the express purpose of necroing a 5 month dead thread just to troll Nintendo 64 lovers. It's kinda sad.

@sethmode:

Ah yes I forgot stating an opinion equates to "troll" now... Almost forgot how sensitive you millennials are.

I think Fourthline's back, folks.

@jckombat123123 said:

I was born in 1992 and the SNES was my first console. The Nintendo 64 was definitely disappointing after that.

@broshmosh: na, fourthline was batshit but I don’t remember them being so quick to insult ppl. I kinda miss that guy. Haha

Of course stating an opinion isn't trolling, but you stated your opinion and then elected to repeat yourself directly to a user for some reason...again, all on a 5 month old thread. Maybe you weren't trying to troll, but your post certainly felt weirdly self-righteous for a video game topic like this.

@sethmode: If only this was a 5 month old thread.

Also, I find it funny that N64 not being as good as SNES or Mega Drive makes it the most disappointing console. Almost as dumb as Brad's takes on consoles (dude's still doing it on Nextlander years later). Dude's always been blind that his subjective takes might not be objective truth and he's dug himself even more in that hole year by year. He's always had big Seymour Skinner energy.

As for the actual case and not just me trashing Brad: there's a saying in Civ circles that your favourite Civilization game is the one you started with and the most disappointing is the one that came after that. It's also true with a lot of things, in this case Brad's love for SNES and disdain for N64 or Gerst's thoughts on Mario 3 and Mario World. It's the "I used to like Band X until album Y", but with video games. Nostalgy towards your formative years will always make what comes after seem disappointing in comparison.

IIRC this discussion was about what console was generally thought to be disappointing and while N64 failed in comparison to PSX, it was never treated as a gigantic blunder like PS3 or Xbox one were.

Also, props to @hatkingfor predicting low-poly 3D aesthetics becoming a retro gaming thing 7 years ago.

I think it's fair to say the N64 was a big disappointment, while also thinking it was good. People always bought Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, but this was the first one where you absolutely had to like Nintendo game to get anything out of it. On the NES, SNES, and GB you could totally have good library strictly made up of 3rd party software between Capcom, Squaresoft, Namco, EA, Konami etc. Not so easy to do on the N64.