[...]I know it's hard to admit that your favorite system was a miserable mistake that was horriblely schooled by a far superior one, but you must make the effort.
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Indeed. So when will you own up and admit that the N64, by any measure that actually COUNTS, not by personal opinion, was a failure? The Playstation was not only the far more popular system of the two, it also sold far better. So much, in fact, that Nintendo had to save themselves from bankruptcy by shamelessly whoring the Pokemon franchise, something that they pulled off with great success. In fact, hadn't it been for "Gotta Catch 'em All!" in one million variants (and remember, you gotta catch all variants!), Nintendo would've either disappeared or been bought out.
In the age and day of increasing filesizes, Nintendo persisted in using the dated cartridge system. Cartridges, while allowing for blindingly fast/non-existant loading times and internal saving, were far more expensive to produce than CDs and had woefully little capacity. Especially the latter one severely hampered developers as they constantly fought against the 256 Mbit size limit (that's a meager 32 megabytes, folks. Compare that to a CD). Case example: FFVII. With I-don't-how-much-time of FMV, not to mention a very long game in full 3D, it would have been not only impossible, but unthinkable to fit it on a single 32 megabyte cartridge. It came on four CDs. You could've split it among several cartridges, but the manufacturing cost of all those cartridges (each far more expensive and substantially smaller than a CD) would have boosted the price of the game to astronomic heights. Try splitting four CDs among 32 MB cartridges. How big were CDs back then? 620 MB? 630 MB? Let's say 600 MB, for the benefit of a doubt. And furthermore, the fourth CD was probably not full. So let's say just three CDs. So, 600 x 3 / 32 = 56.25
Yep. FFVII for the N64 would have come on 56 cartridges. No wonder it was never ported.
The great games of the Playstation, off the top of my head, were definitely FFVII, VIII and IX. A franchise that nintendo, to their everlasting regret, allowed to slip out of their hands, if only for a while. But a few blockbusters a great system do not make, another shortcoming of the N64: It had a few great titles, but that's it. With the literally THOUSANDS of titles that the Playstation had, you were bound to find something that satisfied.
I know a few console enthusiasts myself, although I am not one. Even they agree that the N64 was not a very good system, although they of course all own one. In its time, the Playstation was quite simply the better investment for those that could only afford one console, just like the PS2 today (although it's beginning to show its age).
As a finishing note, I'll briefly touch the Dreamcast, a system that should have schooled both Playstation and N64. It was, quite simply, the next console generation. It was a more powerful system. Chalk it up to bad marketing and the fact that it was the ONLY console of its generation, with the PS2 being one generation above, and severely outperforming it. The Dreamcast, unlike the N64, lost because of bad marketing (something that Sega has never been good at, a game they have ROUTINELY lost against their old arch-nemesis Nintendy), not because the opposition was better.
