With the blog initiative I have been compelled to do some more blogs, I know that i already do update type blogs but It is about time I put some proper effort in to making blogs. So I came up with the idea of letting you guys know why the N64 is the best console ever made, in Part I I am going to start with is one of the best things about the N64, the carts.

Nintendo had done well with cartridges previously with there Nintendo Entertainment System and there Super Nintendo Entertainment System so they decided to see if they could get lucky three times and go for cartridges again with the Nintendo 64. This was a risky move seeing as Sony launched there Playstation two years earlier with a disc format. Nintendo stuck with it and went with the cart, now I'm here to tell you why this is awesome.

Crazy Load Times!

Pop in Ridge Racer, one of the Playstations launch games, go on do it, I'll wait until you do, ok done, great. Now go and pop in Super Mario 64 one of the N64 launch games, go on go do it, I'll wait...I don't need to finish this sentence because you've already loaded it up. The N64 had crazy fast load times where as the Playstations load times are crazy long, which is not the Playstations fault, but the format that it uses. Games running on carts run faster than games on discs, FACT! Just to prove my point, what game can you get into quicker, Gears of War 3 or Mario Party 3?

Yeah I thought so..

Carts Are Men!

While popping in Ridge Racer you probably noticed all of the scratches on the disc, because lets face it, scratches seem to be on all Playstation discs and nobody knows how they get there, they just do. The smallest scratch to the disc can also mean that you may have broken the game, well thats cause the Playstation is such a girl. Now N64 Carts, there what you call proper men, they drink beer, watch football and eat meat, true men! The N64 carts are very well protected from any physical abuse you choose to bring to your cart, want to throw that copy of Conkers Bad Fur Day out the window? Well you can and it will be unfazed by this. Feel like etching your name on that copy of Doom 64 with a knife so people know its yours, well you can do that too. And look at the first picture in the blog, could you do that with Playstation discs, fuck no!

Memory cards are for jerks!

Ok so grab that old copy you have of The Simpsons Wrestling (A Playstation "Classic") and play on the Itchy and Scratchy arena, what, you don't have the memory card anymore? Ok go and grab Banjo-Tooie and load up Witchy world for me, thats right good sir you do not need a memory card, the memory is built into the cart! About 85% of N64 games had memory cards built into the cart itself, this was one of the best features of the cart format I enjoyed so much as a child. Because I don't know if you knew this but Playstation memory cards were pretty expensive, and they were easy to fill up. So I had about 5 Playstation memory cards and it was such a pain having to find the right card for the right game. The N64 being the man that it is does not need a handbag to store its data like the Playstation, no it caries that shit in it's pocket!

Thank you for reading, stay tuned for Part II, but before I go let me remind you of one thing...

I just played through Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask again last summer. They say the PS1 won the generation, but the N64 won my heart.

I'm willing to wait for a Gears 3 load, fuck your comparison!

I was expecting a mention of Banjo in here. Part 2 I guess.

yep to bad all 3rd party devs realized that carts were stupid as hell because there expensive to produce and don't hold enough data so MGS, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider etc all were on playstation instead outside of Rare and first party games there really is not much of a reason to own an N64 though to be fair you can say that about any nintendo console post SNES

Also I love the N64 it being in the top 5 of my top 10 consoles list

Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. 'nuff said.

FInally got my N64 back from storage.

Looking forward to part two! I still dream of owning a gold copy of Ocarina of Time.

Ah. Wonderful blog. I completely agree. Carts are superior.

Yeah Nintendo 64 was pretty great, used to love me some smash bros.

Too bad the controller was fucking retarded

Colored carts! I remember being blown away back in the day every time I saw a cartridge that wasn't gray.

@coakroach said:

Yeah Nintendo 64 was pretty great, used to love me some smash bros.

Too bad the controller was before its fucking time

We all live to learn. Fixed.

@Claude said:

@coakroach said:

Yeah Nintendo 64 was pretty great, used to love me some smash bros.

Too bad the controller was before its fucking time

We all live to learn. Fixed.

Well done, Claude. Well done.

If you say in part 2 that the N64 is the best console ever made, I'm totally cool with that.

N64 was the first console I ever bought myself and I have a shit load of nostalgia tied to it. However, I think it's extremely overrated by a particular age group. I mean it has what, like twenty games tops worth checking out? The library is pathetic in size, only rivaled by the Gamecube and later Sega consoles =/

I loved Nintendo 64. I also played Playstation a lot at friend but multiplayer on Nintendo 64 was awesome and most of my sweetest game memories come from the Nintendo 64 era. It was also that period of time in my life when I had summer jobs and getting more money and therefore could afford more games. I think I bought almost everything worth buying from the fall of 98. Great console, I really dont get why it get's quite a bit of hate these days.

@Claude: @TheGreatGuero: You couldn't reach all of the buttons without moving the position of one of your hands... how is that good?

agree 100%

@coakroach: I really like the controller...

While I don't think any console is the absolute best--and it's pretty ballsy to start off your blog saying one is--I do agree that the cartridges, which were seen as a negative by a lot of jerks, are one of the reasons I love the N64 as well. What proves their worth is that the cartridges benefits are even more noticeable now days, so long after the death of the system. I recently spent a month trying to track down a reasonably priced Japanese PS1 memory card, to use on my Japanese PS2 (being that memory cards are not backwards compatible), because there is literally no way to play the game I bought without one; I wouldn't even be able to beat the game in one sitting, because the game spans multiple discs. What a fucking bummer of a situation caused by the awesome technology of discs and memory cards.

Whereas with the N64, well I just hooked mine up--after 2 years on the shelf--to play Banjo Kazooie last night, and it was literally the simplest process I've experienced in regards to loading up game in a long time, and all because everything is saved on that big ol' fuckin' cartridge. It doesn't require any updating, no spinning up the disc (or god forbid cleaning the disc if it were scratched), and, I feel you on this one, no blowing apart my room to search for memory cards. So yeah, you are correct sir, cartridges are suhweet.

Also one smaller thing I liked: buying a used cartridge and seeing another persons save data. I usually wouldn't use their file, but it was cool to look into another persons experience.

Cartridges were the downfall of the N64. The popularization of 3D graphics lead to a dramatic increase in game sizes, and the maximum size of an N64 cart was 64MB. When you think that some big name PS1 games (e.g. the Final Fantasy games) were spread over four 700MB disks, you begin to see why that's a big ass problem. Those games just couldn't be done on the N64. It would be impossible unless you want a game to be spread out over 40+ carts (which would have been prohibitively expensive). Load times are a valid complaint about CD based systems, but when a hardware limitation flat out makes games impossible on your system, that's a far bigger complaint than load times.

@MattyFTM: That argument does not work that well, because sure the Playstation had Final Fantasty, but Nintendo had Paper Mario. I know what game I would rather play!

@Hizang: Yeah and Paper Mario even had better graphics, so the jokes on them.

Yeah, only a shame that enough games still made use of a memory card anyway.
I really never got it moving on from the snes and gameboy...I need a memory pack? Why? sigh...
 
Good times when I had to do a complete runthrough of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon everyday before I got my little hands on enough allowance to be able to buy one.
 
Also: Banjo Kazooie <3.

@Hizang said:

@MattyFTM: That argument does not work that well, because sure the Playstation had Final Fantasty, but Nintendo had Paper Mario. I know what game I would rather play!

You've totally missed the point of my argument. I very specifically didn't talk about specific games in any detail. I'm not arguing about the quality of any of the games. That's a totally different debate (and one that I'm sure will occur in another part of your "why the N64 is so great" blog series). Right now we're talking about hardware, and more specifically cartridges. If, for some bizarre and impossible reason Nintendo decided that they wanted to put Paper Mario on the PlayStation, they could have done. It would have totally worked on that platform. However some of the large PlayStation games could have never been on N64 without dramatic changes to the content. It is a huge hardware limitation. It also makes you wonder, if the N64 was a disk based system, could Paper Mario have been even better? With that extra space to work with, could Ninty have made it more awesome than it already was?

@MattyFTM: May I direct you to the part where I talk about Crazy fast load times and cartridges are men?

^_^

@Hizang: Fast load times are nice. Having the potential for bigger and more improved games on the system is nicer.

@MattyFTM: Gold carts...

@Hizang: Black Disks!!!

@MattyFTM: Did you not hear me, let me repeat.

GOLD CARTS!

@Hizang:

*Note that the gold cartridge will simply be gold in color and will not contain any actual precious metals. Sorry.

I did like that the memory was built into the carts and I like quite a few N64 games but I've always been a PlayStation man myself. Mainly because I'm a huge fan of Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.

SNES games aged better than the mostly fugly first generation 3d console games. On the other hand, 2d games from that era (i.e., SOTN) or games that mixed 2d sprites and 3d (i.e., FF Tactics) aged fairly well.

@GuyIncognito: Thats a bad example, there are way better looking games than this on the N64.

@Hizang said:

@GuyIncognito: Thats a bad example, there are way better looking games than this on the N64.

Yeah, although it may be low on polygons, Mario 64 looks pretty nice in motion.

N64 sucks.

Do people really say the the ps1 won the generation?

I was always really bummed out by the Ps1. They only kicked it in wit hthe PS2 for me.

N64 load times were great, being able to create a 4 player game in Goldeneye and have the level load pretty much instantly was cool. Am I remembering it wrong, or was one of Iwata's main selling points for the Wii it's lack of load time in games? Because if it was, he lied!

I'll give you five reasons why the N64 was great:

• Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• Super Mario Bros 64
• Super Smash Bros
• Conker's Bad Fur Day

Not enough? Here's five more:

• Donkey Kong 64
• Mario Kart 64
• Banjo & Kazooie
• Pokemon Snap
• Diddy fucking Kong racing.

@Sanj said:

• Diddy fucking Kong racing.

I really dislike Diddy Kong Racing, in fact no that is not strong enough a word, I HATE Diddy Kong Racing!

@Hizang said:

@Sanj said:

• Diddy fucking Kong racing.

I really dislike Diddy Kong Racing, in fact no that is not strong enough a word, I HATE Diddy Kong Racing!

But...it had a giant blue elephant genie...thing!

Alright, here's another 5 games that spring to mind:

• Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
• Goldeneye 007
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
• Rayman 2
• Mario Golf

The quality of a system shouldn't be derived from the media it's games are delivered in, but rather the content on whichever format they chose. ALWAYS THE CONTENT.

Looking forward to part II; I like seeing N64 threads here.

@coakroach said:

@Claude: @TheGreatGuero: You couldn't reach all of the buttons without moving the position of one of your hands... how is that good?

Yeah, but you didn't have to. If you used the thumbstick, you had Z. If you used the D-pad, you had L to work as the alternate to Z. As far as I know, there wasn't a single game that required you to move your hand from the middle to the left to play properly.

@TheGreatGuero: True, It was perfectly functional, but having a big chunk of your controller not being used is pretty goddam stupid.

I only had an N64 during that generation. At the time I just like Kart racing and platformers and some simple RPG's. If I was 15 or 16 around the time I'd probably be a bit more informed, and I probably would have gotten a PS1. I would have liked to play MGS or the FF games when they were originally released but I would not be able to comprehend Metal gears plot or controls when I was 8. I think the N64 has some great games, they just are either 1st party games which is kind of a cliche for nintendo consoles or games that haven't held up that well. Ps1 had cool cutscenes, but N64 had more innovation when it comes to control.

honestly, if i ignore the nostalgia, the N64 was probably the worst console ive ever owned. i had zelda OoT, rogue squadron, golden eye, and like 2 other good games, the rest was utter crap. the controller was awkward and bulky. it was a mess.

i had and hell still have, dozens of fantastic PS1 games. i had TONS of SNES games that were great. but the N64 had a handful of good ones and the rest was crap, and my god was that a bad controller.

@Nottle: Conkers Bad Fur day...

@Hizang: What about it? I never played it.

@Nottle: Oh sorry, CBFD had voice acting and great cutscenes

@Hizang: Ahh yes. Ok. I'm just saying that PS1 is known for those FF cinematics and the voice acting in Metal Gear Solid. come to think of it I can't think of another PS1 game that has used voice acting to any memorable degree. Legacy of Kain perhaps? Maybe the PS1 and N64 are more equal when it comes to that factor than I thought.