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In hindsight, do you think that Nintendo were wrong to opt for the cartridge format, considering all the subsequent trouble with developers over the cost and memory restrictions, which then led to a lack of games compared to the PlayStation? If they had used a CD Rom, would it have made a difference to the machines retail position? On the other hand, was the cartridge medium essential for games like Mario and Zelda which required instant memory access to create believable worlds without the hinderance of loading screens? Could the above mentioned games have been done on the PS or were Miyamoto's assertions that he needed carts a smokescreen to hide Yamauchi's desire to keep the status quo regarding Nintendo's stranglehold over the manifacture and distribution of games to developers.
I never had any desire to see thirty minute FMV sequences on my Nintendo 64. Nintendo made absolutely the right decision in my opinion. Of course, nowadays, cartridges are pointless and stupid, but back in the day...oh ho ho. Carts are the work of god. No guff - everything has to be pure - no loading, no movies, just gameplay. Nintendo made the correct decision in terms of gameplay - in terms of cost, no. The cartridge based format in 64bit was amazing - Zelda OoT could never be done on a CD rom in the 90's. I love everything about carts, the feeling, the weight, every single bit about them just feels so right. CD's just feel like a crummy shiny disk - there is no wrapping, no cardboard - it is depressing opening a game that is on a CD/DVD - but a cart makes your heart feel warm.
I find it difficult to find fault with any system which produced such great games. Sure, the cartridge format did not suit all developers (ie Square) but it certainly had it's benefits. The format is just DIFFERENT, with advantages and disadvantages over CDs. Neither is better per se, but some developers will prefer one over the other for their own reasons. Plus I personally prefer to own a big sturdy hunk of plastic to a more fragile CD. Read whatever Freudian symbolism into that which you want. On the other hand, if a handheld could be developed that used the minidisc format...But, in terms of retail viability, in going for carts, Nintendo did not do themselves any favours did they? Surely the lack of games was an issue or was it the case that Nintendo produced the N64 entirely as a vehicle for their own superb games and didn't really care whether or not it out sold the PS. We see a similar attitude from them with the GC today but back in the '95-96 they were still number one so they had no reason to believe that they would lose the hardware war to Sony.
I don't care if Nintendo lost the opportunity to aquire bags of 3rd party shovelware and a bigger user base - Mario 64 and Zelda were woth the sacrifice by a large margin IMO. Forget all the the stuff about prices/capacity/loading times, the best feature of carts is that they a completely silent. No unerring sounds as you load a game up at 3am. The Playstation was originally just a CD-based expansion unit for Nintendo's SNES, anyway. Also, Playstation was the NAME of the SonyNintendo CD add-on. The ACTUAL Playstation that came out was a different piece of hardware. Carts are better, but they are just more expensive. Having a mechanical drive in a console is not ideal. Having games on cartridge is like having music on vinyl. It's just better. I seriously doubt that carts will make a return (forget GBA for a moment). As we have seen with the GC loading times, if done correctly they are almost non existent. In an ideal world they would still rule the roost but we have to be realistic and say that the optical route is king, unless carts can magically reduce in price to about 50p.
I'm mourning the loss of carts myself now - especially since attempting to rent PS2 games from Blockbuster, and finding that they won't work after the torment of a hundred mindless imbeciles scratching, dropping, touching, licking the disk etc. Christ, don't these people have minds? Don't they care? NO, they are NOT frisbees for your dog, you MINDLESS TWITS! Blockbuster aren't making things any better either - I keep taking them back, and the disks I rent are still scratched to high heaven. It's the same with DVD movies too. Honestly, just because you don't own something dosen't mean you don't have to look after it. They are rather lovely to the touch and the heavier the better. Is it me or do Rare's games always seem like house bricks in comparision to others?
A friend of a friend has got a device that plays CDs through the N64 and apparently one disc holds a bunch of games, I think it's called a Z64 or Doctor V64. I haven't seen the machine in question and obviously it is some kind of pirate deal. Does anyone know about this and are they reliable, not that I want to spoil the splendour of carts, though. I also loved the surety of cartridges but if I could find one of those machines with, say, a disc with Rare's back catalogue I'd probably consider investing. They just felt like you were getting your moneys worth. Good news is that there's a minute possibility that some form of cart based technology maybe coming back sometime in the future. Some Cambridge bods managed to create a chip that not only was cheap to make but could store a whopping 10 Terabytes (10,000 Gigabytes) of info. The chips are about 20 quid to manufacture. Imagine instant access and HUGE texture capacity. The texture capacity would be massive, you'd just need 10 terabytes of RAM to load it! Silly me!
I can't imagine Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on a PlayStation-like configuration - given the latter's CD access times, limited processing power and the low amount of RAM it's simply not possible, despite what people might've said. As for whether cartridges were beneficial - from a development point of view, only Nintendo's games benefited from it - they knew how to push the hardware and they had all the proper documentation of the hardware to accomplish whatever they wanted. For the developers, it was not so good, seeing as they were expensive to manufacture and only allowed for a limited amount of storage space (so no fancy FMV cutscenes to dress it up). Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are perfect examples of why cartridges were a good thing for the N64 - zero access times, pretty much seamless environments that a PlayStation wouldn't have allowed and no irrelevant FMV window dressing to make up for the lack of content on a developer's behalf. If you were to downsize every PSone game to the point where they would no longer have any FMV cutscenes or CD audio tracks, then I would wager that a sizeable proportion of them would fit into 64MB of memory (after all, first-gen games like Ridge Racer and Tekken weighed in at little over 10Mb). It was just that they couldn't be bothered to do so.
Carts do rock. CDs are easier to store, though. Carts are big and chunky, and big and chunky is very, very cool. They're also nice and solid, and they make a satisfying chunking sound when you put them into your SNES/N64. I like the soundless playing. In fact that's the one problem I have with PS2, the noise from the machine, though it isn't as bad as the PSone. As for OoT being done on a PS, as I said, can't see it, personally. I'm not entirely sure that the PS or PS2 is actually capable of running those kinds of graphics in the same way, just like MGS probably wouldn't look as good on an N64. They're different consoles and so produce different games. Also, Final Fantasy rules with CGI, I agree totally with Square going with PS for that reason. Some of the stuff they've produced is gorgeous. Actually, no, all of it is. I loved The Spirits Within, too. Thought it was quite badly done though. No-one even gave it a chance.
I have no doubt that my N64 will be working in 10 years time. My Dreamcast has already decided to stop playing some discs. I doubt my PS or PS2, once they have been superceded by the next generation and have started collecting dust, will remain trouble free forever. THAT is another reason why I prefer carts. - so much less to go wrong when you don't have the fiddley components of a CD drive. Cartridges are the way to go for protable gaming. I can't see minidiscs on a Game Boy, because the anti-shock would eat batteries like nothing. I think perhaps rather than actual cartridges the future will be "card based", like Compact Flash sort of things. In a few years they'll have capacities as big as DVD's and have the advantage that you can save on them, which would also allow for a lot of the advantages of hard drives (such as being able to save terrain damage, bullet holes in walls and so on).
Another great thing about carts; when you dig out an ancient cart-based console of yours that you haven't seen for years, you can plug the old games straight in and carry on playing from where you left it (provided the battery back-up hasn't died). In the future, though, you'll dig out a dusty copy of Final Fantasy XII and realise that the memory card holding your save file was eaten by the dog five years ago. Oh, and the weight thing is true too - it's why GBA cartridges just aren't as satisfying as others. They do have an intensely gratifying clunk when you push them in. It's rather loud, much louder than the GBC carts, and is successful in letting everyone in the car know that I'm about to smack Saturos and Menardi yet again, but it doesn't have the same appeal as the N64 or SNES. You can't knacker a cart either. CD's, and particularly DVD's are very easy to scratch and I tend to find myself obsessing over whether the bottom of the disc is absolutely perfect, wheras I can chuck a cart into my N64 and get playing instantly. The flip side is that a cart costs a lot more than a DVD or CD. I hate scratches on discs, so I wish the cart was still king!
Bring back cartridges!
Any thoughts?
LF.
I never had any desire to see thirty minute FMV sequences on my Nintendo 64. Nintendo made absolutely the right decision in my opinion. Of course, nowadays, cartridges are pointless and stupid, but back in the day...oh ho ho. Carts are the work of god. No guff - everything has to be pure - no loading, no movies, just gameplay. Nintendo made the correct decision in terms of gameplay - in terms of cost, no. The cartridge based format in 64bit was amazing - Zelda OoT could never be done on a CD rom in the 90's. I love everything about carts, the feeling, the weight, every single bit about them just feels so right. CD's just feel like a crummy shiny disk - there is no wrapping, no cardboard - it is depressing opening a game that is on a CD/DVD - but a cart makes your heart feel warm.
I find it difficult to find fault with any system which produced such great games. Sure, the cartridge format did not suit all developers (ie Square) but it certainly had it's benefits. The format is just DIFFERENT, with advantages and disadvantages over CDs. Neither is better per se, but some developers will prefer one over the other for their own reasons. Plus I personally prefer to own a big sturdy hunk of plastic to a more fragile CD. Read whatever Freudian symbolism into that which you want. On the other hand, if a handheld could be developed that used the minidisc format...But, in terms of retail viability, in going for carts, Nintendo did not do themselves any favours did they? Surely the lack of games was an issue or was it the case that Nintendo produced the N64 entirely as a vehicle for their own superb games and didn't really care whether or not it out sold the PS. We see a similar attitude from them with the GC today but back in the '95-96 they were still number one so they had no reason to believe that they would lose the hardware war to Sony.
I don't care if Nintendo lost the opportunity to aquire bags of 3rd party shovelware and a bigger user base - Mario 64 and Zelda were woth the sacrifice by a large margin IMO. Forget all the the stuff about prices/capacity/loading times, the best feature of carts is that they a completely silent. No unerring sounds as you load a game up at 3am. The Playstation was originally just a CD-based expansion unit for Nintendo's SNES, anyway. Also, Playstation was the NAME of the SonyNintendo CD add-on. The ACTUAL Playstation that came out was a different piece of hardware. Carts are better, but they are just more expensive. Having a mechanical drive in a console is not ideal. Having games on cartridge is like having music on vinyl. It's just better. I seriously doubt that carts will make a return (forget GBA for a moment). As we have seen with the GC loading times, if done correctly they are almost non existent. In an ideal world they would still rule the roost but we have to be realistic and say that the optical route is king, unless carts can magically reduce in price to about 50p.
I'm mourning the loss of carts myself now - especially since attempting to rent PS2 games from Blockbuster, and finding that they won't work after the torment of a hundred mindless imbeciles scratching, dropping, touching, licking the disk etc. Christ, don't these people have minds? Don't they care? NO, they are NOT frisbees for your dog, you MINDLESS TWITS! Blockbuster aren't making things any better either - I keep taking them back, and the disks I rent are still scratched to high heaven. It's the same with DVD movies too. Honestly, just because you don't own something dosen't mean you don't have to look after it. They are rather lovely to the touch and the heavier the better. Is it me or do Rare's games always seem like house bricks in comparision to others?
A friend of a friend has got a device that plays CDs through the N64 and apparently one disc holds a bunch of games, I think it's called a Z64 or Doctor V64. I haven't seen the machine in question and obviously it is some kind of pirate deal. Does anyone know about this and are they reliable, not that I want to spoil the splendour of carts, though. I also loved the surety of cartridges but if I could find one of those machines with, say, a disc with Rare's back catalogue I'd probably consider investing. They just felt like you were getting your moneys worth. Good news is that there's a minute possibility that some form of cart based technology maybe coming back sometime in the future. Some Cambridge bods managed to create a chip that not only was cheap to make but could store a whopping 10 Terabytes (10,000 Gigabytes) of info. The chips are about 20 quid to manufacture. Imagine instant access and HUGE texture capacity. The texture capacity would be massive, you'd just need 10 terabytes of RAM to load it! Silly me!
I can't imagine Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on a PlayStation-like configuration - given the latter's CD access times, limited processing power and the low amount of RAM it's simply not possible, despite what people might've said. As for whether cartridges were beneficial - from a development point of view, only Nintendo's games benefited from it - they knew how to push the hardware and they had all the proper documentation of the hardware to accomplish whatever they wanted. For the developers, it was not so good, seeing as they were expensive to manufacture and only allowed for a limited amount of storage space (so no fancy FMV cutscenes to dress it up). Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are perfect examples of why cartridges were a good thing for the N64 - zero access times, pretty much seamless environments that a PlayStation wouldn't have allowed and no irrelevant FMV window dressing to make up for the lack of content on a developer's behalf. If you were to downsize every PSone game to the point where they would no longer have any FMV cutscenes or CD audio tracks, then I would wager that a sizeable proportion of them would fit into 64MB of memory (after all, first-gen games like Ridge Racer and Tekken weighed in at little over 10Mb). It was just that they couldn't be bothered to do so.
Carts do rock. CDs are easier to store, though. Carts are big and chunky, and big and chunky is very, very cool. They're also nice and solid, and they make a satisfying chunking sound when you put them into your SNES/N64. I like the soundless playing. In fact that's the one problem I have with PS2, the noise from the machine, though it isn't as bad as the PSone. As for OoT being done on a PS, as I said, can't see it, personally. I'm not entirely sure that the PS or PS2 is actually capable of running those kinds of graphics in the same way, just like MGS probably wouldn't look as good on an N64. They're different consoles and so produce different games. Also, Final Fantasy rules with CGI, I agree totally with Square going with PS for that reason. Some of the stuff they've produced is gorgeous. Actually, no, all of it is. I loved The Spirits Within, too. Thought it was quite badly done though. No-one even gave it a chance.
I have no doubt that my N64 will be working in 10 years time. My Dreamcast has already decided to stop playing some discs. I doubt my PS or PS2, once they have been superceded by the next generation and have started collecting dust, will remain trouble free forever. THAT is another reason why I prefer carts. - so much less to go wrong when you don't have the fiddley components of a CD drive. Cartridges are the way to go for protable gaming. I can't see minidiscs on a Game Boy, because the anti-shock would eat batteries like nothing. I think perhaps rather than actual cartridges the future will be "card based", like Compact Flash sort of things. In a few years they'll have capacities as big as DVD's and have the advantage that you can save on them, which would also allow for a lot of the advantages of hard drives (such as being able to save terrain damage, bullet holes in walls and so on).
Another great thing about carts; when you dig out an ancient cart-based console of yours that you haven't seen for years, you can plug the old games straight in and carry on playing from where you left it (provided the battery back-up hasn't died). In the future, though, you'll dig out a dusty copy of Final Fantasy XII and realise that the memory card holding your save file was eaten by the dog five years ago. Oh, and the weight thing is true too - it's why GBA cartridges just aren't as satisfying as others. They do have an intensely gratifying clunk when you push them in. It's rather loud, much louder than the GBC carts, and is successful in letting everyone in the car know that I'm about to smack Saturos and Menardi yet again, but it doesn't have the same appeal as the N64 or SNES. You can't knacker a cart either. CD's, and particularly DVD's are very easy to scratch and I tend to find myself obsessing over whether the bottom of the disc is absolutely perfect, wheras I can chuck a cart into my N64 and get playing instantly. The flip side is that a cart costs a lot more than a DVD or CD. I hate scratches on discs, so I wish the cart was still king!
Bring back cartridges!
Any thoughts?
LF.
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In hindsight, do you think that Nintendo were wrong to opt for the cartridge format, considering all the subsequent trouble with developers over the cost and memory restrictions, which then led to a lack of games compared to the PlayStation? If they had used a CD Rom, would it have made a difference to the machines retail position? On the other hand, was the cartridge medium essential for games like Mario and Zelda which required instant memory access to create believable worlds without the hinderance of loading screens? Could the above mentioned games have been done on the PS or were Miyamoto's assertions that he needed carts a smokescreen to hide Yamauchi's desire to keep the status quo regarding Nintendo's stranglehold over the manifacture and distribution of games to developers.
I never had any desire to see thirty minute FMV sequences on my Nintendo 64. Nintendo made absolutely the right decision in my opinion. Of course, nowadays, cartridges are pointless and stupid, but back in the day...oh ho ho. Carts are the work of god. No guff - everything has to be pure - no loading, no movies, just gameplay. Nintendo made the correct decision in terms of gameplay - in terms of cost, no. The cartridge based format in 64bit was amazing - Zelda OoT could never be done on a CD rom in the 90's. I love everything about carts, the feeling, the weight, every single bit about them just feels so right. CD's just feel like a crummy shiny disk - there is no wrapping, no cardboard - it is depressing opening a game that is on a CD/DVD - but a cart makes your heart feel warm.
I find it difficult to find fault with any system which produced such great games. Sure, the cartridge format did not suit all developers (ie Square) but it certainly had it's benefits. The format is just DIFFERENT, with advantages and disadvantages over CDs. Neither is better per se, but some developers will prefer one over the other for their own reasons. Plus I personally prefer to own a big sturdy hunk of plastic to a more fragile CD. Read whatever Freudian symbolism into that which you want. On the other hand, if a handheld could be developed that used the minidisc format...But, in terms of retail viability, in going for carts, Nintendo did not do themselves any favours did they? Surely the lack of games was an issue or was it the case that Nintendo produced the N64 entirely as a vehicle for their own superb games and didn't really care whether or not it out sold the PS. We see a similar attitude from them with the GC today but back in the '95-96 they were still number one so they had no reason to believe that they would lose the hardware war to Sony.
I don't care if Nintendo lost the opportunity to aquire bags of 3rd party shovelware and a bigger user base - Mario 64 and Zelda were woth the sacrifice by a large margin IMO. Forget all the the stuff about prices/capacity/loading times, the best feature of carts is that they a completely silent. No unerring sounds as you load a game up at 3am. The Playstation was originally just a CD-based expansion unit for Nintendo's SNES, anyway. Also, Playstation was the NAME of the SonyNintendo CD add-on. The ACTUAL Playstation that came out was a different piece of hardware. Carts are better, but they are just more expensive. Having a mechanical drive in a console is not ideal. Having games on cartridge is like having music on vinyl. It's just better. I seriously doubt that carts will make a return (forget GBA for a moment). As we have seen with the GC loading times, if done correctly they are almost non existent. In an ideal world they would still rule the roost but we have to be realistic and say that the optical route is king, unless carts can magically reduce in price to about 50p.
I'm mourning the loss of carts myself now - especially since attempting to rent PS2 games from Blockbuster, and finding that they won't work after the torment of a hundred mindless imbeciles scratching, dropping, touching, licking the disk etc. Christ, don't these people have minds? Don't they care? NO, they are NOT frisbees for your dog, you MINDLESS TWITS! Blockbuster aren't making things any better either - I keep taking them back, and the disks I rent are still scratched to high heaven. It's the same with DVD movies too. Honestly, just because you don't own something dosen't mean you don't have to look after it. They are rather lovely to the touch and the heavier the better. Is it me or do Rare's games always seem like house bricks in comparision to others?
A friend of a friend has got a device that plays CDs through the N64 and apparently one disc holds a bunch of games, I think it's called a Z64 or Doctor V64. I haven't seen the machine in question and obviously it is some kind of pirate deal. Does anyone know about this and are they reliable, not that I want to spoil the splendour of carts, though. I also loved the surety of cartridges but if I could find one of those machines with, say, a disc with Rare's back catalogue I'd probably consider investing. They just felt like you were getting your moneys worth. Good news is that there's a minute possibility that some form of cart based technology maybe coming back sometime in the future. Some Cambridge bods managed to create a chip that not only was cheap to make but could store a whopping 10 Terabytes (10,000 Gigabytes) of info. The chips are about 20 quid to manufacture. Imagine instant access and HUGE texture capacity. The texture capacity would be massive, you'd just need 10 terabytes of RAM to load it! Silly me!
I can't imagine Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on a PlayStation-like configuration - given the latter's CD access times, limited processing power and the low amount of RAM it's simply not possible, despite what people might've said. As for whether cartridges were beneficial - from a development point of view, only Nintendo's games benefited from it - they knew how to push the hardware and they had all the proper documentation of the hardware to accomplish whatever they wanted. For the developers, it was not so good, seeing as they were expensive to manufacture and only allowed for a limited amount of storage space (so no fancy FMV cutscenes to dress it up). Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are perfect examples of why cartridges were a good thing for the N64 - zero access times, pretty much seamless environments that a PlayStation wouldn't have allowed and no irrelevant FMV window dressing to make up for the lack of content on a developer's behalf. If you were to downsize every PSone game to the point where they would no longer have any FMV cutscenes or CD audio tracks, then I would wager that a sizeable proportion of them would fit into 64MB of memory (after all, first-gen games like Ridge Racer and Tekken weighed in at little over 10Mb). It was just that they couldn't be bothered to do so.
Carts do rock. CDs are easier to store, though. Carts are big and chunky, and big and chunky is very, very cool. They're also nice and solid, and they make a satisfying chunking sound when you put them into your SNES/N64. I like the soundless playing. In fact that's the one problem I have with PS2, the noise from the machine, though it isn't as bad as the PSone. As for OoT being done on a PS, as I said, can't see it, personally. I'm not entirely sure that the PS or PS2 is actually capable of running those kinds of graphics in the same way, just like MGS probably wouldn't look as good on an N64. They're different consoles and so produce different games. Also, Final Fantasy rules with CGI, I agree totally with Square going with PS for that reason. Some of the stuff they've produced is gorgeous. Actually, no, all of it is. I loved The Spirits Within, too. Thought it was quite badly done though. No-one even gave it a chance.
I have no doubt that my N64 will be working in 10 years time. My Dreamcast has already decided to stop playing some discs. I doubt my PS or PS2, once they have been superceded by the next generation and have started collecting dust, will remain trouble free forever. THAT is another reason why I prefer carts. - so much less to go wrong when you don't have the fiddley components of a CD drive. Cartridges are the way to go for protable gaming. I can't see minidiscs on a Game Boy, because the anti-shock would eat batteries like nothing. I think perhaps rather than actual cartridges the future will be "card based", like Compact Flash sort of things. In a few years they'll have capacities as big as DVD's and have the advantage that you can save on them, which would also allow for a lot of the advantages of hard drives (such as being able to save terrain damage, bullet holes in walls and so on).
Another great thing about carts; when you dig out an ancient cart-based console of yours that you haven't seen for years, you can plug the old games straight in and carry on playing from where you left it (provided the battery back-up hasn't died). In the future, though, you'll dig out a dusty copy of Final Fantasy XII and realise that the memory card holding your save file was eaten by the dog five years ago. Oh, and the weight thing is true too - it's why GBA cartridges just aren't as satisfying as others. They do have an intensely gratifying clunk when you push them in. It's rather loud, much louder than the GBC carts, and is successful in letting everyone in the car know that I'm about to smack Saturos and Menardi yet again, but it doesn't have the same appeal as the N64 or SNES. You can't knacker a cart either. CD's, and particularly DVD's are very easy to scratch and I tend to find myself obsessing over whether the bottom of the disc is absolutely perfect, wheras I can chuck a cart into my N64 and get playing instantly. The flip side is that a cart costs a lot more than a DVD or CD. I hate scratches on discs, so I wish the cart was still king!
Bring back cartridges!
Any thoughts?
LF.
I never had any desire to see thirty minute FMV sequences on my Nintendo 64. Nintendo made absolutely the right decision in my opinion. Of course, nowadays, cartridges are pointless and stupid, but back in the day...oh ho ho. Carts are the work of god. No guff - everything has to be pure - no loading, no movies, just gameplay. Nintendo made the correct decision in terms of gameplay - in terms of cost, no. The cartridge based format in 64bit was amazing - Zelda OoT could never be done on a CD rom in the 90's. I love everything about carts, the feeling, the weight, every single bit about them just feels so right. CD's just feel like a crummy shiny disk - there is no wrapping, no cardboard - it is depressing opening a game that is on a CD/DVD - but a cart makes your heart feel warm.
I find it difficult to find fault with any system which produced such great games. Sure, the cartridge format did not suit all developers (ie Square) but it certainly had it's benefits. The format is just DIFFERENT, with advantages and disadvantages over CDs. Neither is better per se, but some developers will prefer one over the other for their own reasons. Plus I personally prefer to own a big sturdy hunk of plastic to a more fragile CD. Read whatever Freudian symbolism into that which you want. On the other hand, if a handheld could be developed that used the minidisc format...But, in terms of retail viability, in going for carts, Nintendo did not do themselves any favours did they? Surely the lack of games was an issue or was it the case that Nintendo produced the N64 entirely as a vehicle for their own superb games and didn't really care whether or not it out sold the PS. We see a similar attitude from them with the GC today but back in the '95-96 they were still number one so they had no reason to believe that they would lose the hardware war to Sony.
I don't care if Nintendo lost the opportunity to aquire bags of 3rd party shovelware and a bigger user base - Mario 64 and Zelda were woth the sacrifice by a large margin IMO. Forget all the the stuff about prices/capacity/loading times, the best feature of carts is that they a completely silent. No unerring sounds as you load a game up at 3am. The Playstation was originally just a CD-based expansion unit for Nintendo's SNES, anyway. Also, Playstation was the NAME of the SonyNintendo CD add-on. The ACTUAL Playstation that came out was a different piece of hardware. Carts are better, but they are just more expensive. Having a mechanical drive in a console is not ideal. Having games on cartridge is like having music on vinyl. It's just better. I seriously doubt that carts will make a return (forget GBA for a moment). As we have seen with the GC loading times, if done correctly they are almost non existent. In an ideal world they would still rule the roost but we have to be realistic and say that the optical route is king, unless carts can magically reduce in price to about 50p.
I'm mourning the loss of carts myself now - especially since attempting to rent PS2 games from Blockbuster, and finding that they won't work after the torment of a hundred mindless imbeciles scratching, dropping, touching, licking the disk etc. Christ, don't these people have minds? Don't they care? NO, they are NOT frisbees for your dog, you MINDLESS TWITS! Blockbuster aren't making things any better either - I keep taking them back, and the disks I rent are still scratched to high heaven. It's the same with DVD movies too. Honestly, just because you don't own something dosen't mean you don't have to look after it. They are rather lovely to the touch and the heavier the better. Is it me or do Rare's games always seem like house bricks in comparision to others?
A friend of a friend has got a device that plays CDs through the N64 and apparently one disc holds a bunch of games, I think it's called a Z64 or Doctor V64. I haven't seen the machine in question and obviously it is some kind of pirate deal. Does anyone know about this and are they reliable, not that I want to spoil the splendour of carts, though. I also loved the surety of cartridges but if I could find one of those machines with, say, a disc with Rare's back catalogue I'd probably consider investing. They just felt like you were getting your moneys worth. Good news is that there's a minute possibility that some form of cart based technology maybe coming back sometime in the future. Some Cambridge bods managed to create a chip that not only was cheap to make but could store a whopping 10 Terabytes (10,000 Gigabytes) of info. The chips are about 20 quid to manufacture. Imagine instant access and HUGE texture capacity. The texture capacity would be massive, you'd just need 10 terabytes of RAM to load it! Silly me!
I can't imagine Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time running on a PlayStation-like configuration - given the latter's CD access times, limited processing power and the low amount of RAM it's simply not possible, despite what people might've said. As for whether cartridges were beneficial - from a development point of view, only Nintendo's games benefited from it - they knew how to push the hardware and they had all the proper documentation of the hardware to accomplish whatever they wanted. For the developers, it was not so good, seeing as they were expensive to manufacture and only allowed for a limited amount of storage space (so no fancy FMV cutscenes to dress it up). Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are perfect examples of why cartridges were a good thing for the N64 - zero access times, pretty much seamless environments that a PlayStation wouldn't have allowed and no irrelevant FMV window dressing to make up for the lack of content on a developer's behalf. If you were to downsize every PSone game to the point where they would no longer have any FMV cutscenes or CD audio tracks, then I would wager that a sizeable proportion of them would fit into 64MB of memory (after all, first-gen games like Ridge Racer and Tekken weighed in at little over 10Mb). It was just that they couldn't be bothered to do so.
Carts do rock. CDs are easier to store, though. Carts are big and chunky, and big and chunky is very, very cool. They're also nice and solid, and they make a satisfying chunking sound when you put them into your SNES/N64. I like the soundless playing. In fact that's the one problem I have with PS2, the noise from the machine, though it isn't as bad as the PSone. As for OoT being done on a PS, as I said, can't see it, personally. I'm not entirely sure that the PS or PS2 is actually capable of running those kinds of graphics in the same way, just like MGS probably wouldn't look as good on an N64. They're different consoles and so produce different games. Also, Final Fantasy rules with CGI, I agree totally with Square going with PS for that reason. Some of the stuff they've produced is gorgeous. Actually, no, all of it is. I loved The Spirits Within, too. Thought it was quite badly done though. No-one even gave it a chance.
I have no doubt that my N64 will be working in 10 years time. My Dreamcast has already decided to stop playing some discs. I doubt my PS or PS2, once they have been superceded by the next generation and have started collecting dust, will remain trouble free forever. THAT is another reason why I prefer carts. - so much less to go wrong when you don't have the fiddley components of a CD drive. Cartridges are the way to go for protable gaming. I can't see minidiscs on a Game Boy, because the anti-shock would eat batteries like nothing. I think perhaps rather than actual cartridges the future will be "card based", like Compact Flash sort of things. In a few years they'll have capacities as big as DVD's and have the advantage that you can save on them, which would also allow for a lot of the advantages of hard drives (such as being able to save terrain damage, bullet holes in walls and so on).
Another great thing about carts; when you dig out an ancient cart-based console of yours that you haven't seen for years, you can plug the old games straight in and carry on playing from where you left it (provided the battery back-up hasn't died). In the future, though, you'll dig out a dusty copy of Final Fantasy XII and realise that the memory card holding your save file was eaten by the dog five years ago. Oh, and the weight thing is true too - it's why GBA cartridges just aren't as satisfying as others. They do have an intensely gratifying clunk when you push them in. It's rather loud, much louder than the GBC carts, and is successful in letting everyone in the car know that I'm about to smack Saturos and Menardi yet again, but it doesn't have the same appeal as the N64 or SNES. You can't knacker a cart either. CD's, and particularly DVD's are very easy to scratch and I tend to find myself obsessing over whether the bottom of the disc is absolutely perfect, wheras I can chuck a cart into my N64 and get playing instantly. The flip side is that a cart costs a lot more than a DVD or CD. I hate scratches on discs, so I wish the cart was still king!
Bring back cartridges!
Any thoughts?
LF.
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