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I adored the Saturn and N64. I got the N64 at launch and a few years later the Saturn and it was then I sold my Playstation which I had also enjoyed but needed the money

Great topic love hearing about games exploring how to do 3d platforming before we knew how to handle 3d space in game design!

While it’s true that PSP and DS had games designed to be played on the go, the same couldn’t be said about their software sales which was infested with piracy. Nintendo, unlike Sony had first party million seller titles despite all and that’s essentially the effort Nintendo needed to put up with to have success with DS and 3DS. Even if Wipeout on Vita maintained its exclusivity it still wouldn’t drive sales, an exclusive The Last of Us wouldn’t help Vita either, neither would a multiport of third party games like GTA. Sony simply don’t have any first party handheld titles that sells millions (which is their fault) and what we got with Vita was a device that essentially is a PSP2 with all new modern “smartphone” features (minus being a phone), because that was a lot of the appeal from PSP in its pre-smartphone era. However there were alot of dumb half azz work implemented to Vita like certain big game titles being developed by new game studios in super short time and Sony still being ultra paranoid from 2011 PSN hack is what led us to these secured but expensive memory cards for the device. Vita was never gonna succeed, but it’s still my favorite console of all time because I loved everything I bought and played for the thing. Monster Hunter was popular in Japan for PSP and when Capcom switched over to develop MH sequels to Nintendo instead, Sony went and made their own awesome MH-ish games like Soul Sacrifice and Freedom Wars (neither titles sold well though).

I love that you used Rigor Motor

Any console can be cool, all you have to do as a developer is put time and money into making good games. That's what its all about. Sure the more capable the system the more the system can do, however people are still making cool games for the NES out of all consoles. This means all you need for entertainment is knowledge of the system and the ability to make cool games. I can right now, make an awesome PS1 game and N64 game. I just need like a few dozen developers and a million dollars. But that Pikachu themed N64 console looks like a child's toy and could easily blend in with one of those Leap Frog learning machines. That particular design of the console makes me think the N64 was a kids thing.

The hugh open worlds of Super Mario 64 were insane in 1996.

idk if I would call it the "Wii 2" when it no longer has anything in common with the Wii, which could possibly mislead consumers' expectations, especially considering the backwards compatibility being removed.

Loading, the N64 version loaded games and zones in games faster than the PS1. This is because cartridges used what we know as a "Solid State Memory Format", meaning it's all there and easy to access. The PS1 relied on discs, which needed to be scanned. The same games on both platforms, South Park. The N64 version, everything loaded just fine. You were nearly instantly in each level. The PS1 however you were waiting on the loading screen! You mention the storage size of the N64 cartridge, and the PS1 disc, yet when it came to multiplatform titles, these games fit entirely on the singular N64 cartridge, HOWEVER, it'd take 2-4 discs for the PS1 for the same game! South Park once again is the example I'll use. The N64 version had the full campaign from the PC version, plus a high res visual mode if you have the Expansion pak! The N64 version had a multiplayer mode that supported up to 4 players, 20 characters to pick from (4 less than the PC version), and 17 multiplayer stages (4 less than the PC version). The PS1 version however had only a 1V1 splitscreen "Head to Head" mode, 20 characters (on par with the N64 version), and only 6 multiplayer levels (A whopping 13 fewer stages than the N64 version). Care to explain how a disc-format was somehow bigger, but the same exact game has a sharp quality drop, and a staggeringly smaller number of multiplayer stages? The claim that the discs had more storage feels more like a falsehood at this point. Resident Evil 2 is another example I'll bring up. The PS1 version needed 2 discs.A "Side A", and a "Side B" disc, yet the content from BOTH DISCS FIT ON THE SINGULAR N64 CARTRIDGE! The N64 version of Resident Evil 2 was called "The impossible port", but the N64 version was clearly packing enough storage to fit the entire game, FROM TWO DISCS! The N64 version didn't have the FMVs, but a trick to make it viable. Instead of FMVs, the N64 version used screenshots and snapshots from the FMVs run in sequence to play like how a lot of animation was done. The reason why the N64 version's audio seems compressed is because the PS1 has compressed audio artifacts too. The PS1 versions of these multiplatform games either are put on a single disc, and have substantially reduced audio quality, or they have bloat from FMVs on multiple discs. So, "Ps1 hAz MoAr StOrAgE sPaCe" is a fucking LIE! ESPECIALLY since we know a game like Resident Evil 2, released by Capcom, WHICH REQUIRES TWO DISKS FOR THE FULL STORE, PLUS HUNK THE 4TH SURVIVOR MODE AND TOFU MODE, can fit into a SINGULAR N64 CARTIDGE! If anything, the N64 has the better storage capacity than the PS1! The use of multi-disc games was more a detriment for the PS1 since discs were a lot more fragile than the cartridge. When it came to the multiplatform games, the PS1 versions lacked features, while the N64 version had MORE features. So NO, PS1 discs DIDN'T have more storage capacity! You can't claim the PS1 discs had more because it was a disc format! PS1 games were graphically inferior, in multiplatform games, the PS1 version has WORSE graphical fidelity, WORSE audio, FEWER features, and of course, FEWER players, and LOWER resolutions. PS1 games needed to be on multiple discs in order to give the illusion of being bigger.

The N64 console was leagues better than the PS1. Look at multiplatform games like South Park and Gauntlet Legends. you said that N64 games looked blurrier, I can say you're WRONG. The N64's polygons were sharper by far compared to the jagged pixelated triangles of the PS1. The PS1 was built with the hope of running 3d, but it relied on triangle sprites to warp and shift size for the sake of the game, which given the PS1 was a weaker system, the 3D polygonal stuff looked more jagged. The N64's graphics had sharper polygons, and was built to do 3D, hence why polygons were sharper. Also, Going back to South Park on N64 and PS1, the PS1 version of South Park had the most gutted from it, most multiplayer levels were gutted from the PS1 version, leaving players with only 6 multiplayer levels and it was stripped down to a 1V1 head to head mode. The N64 version had 17 multiplayer stages, and had multiplayer for up to 4 players. This means the N64 version was a MUCH BIGGER game than the PS1 version. Gauntlet Legends is another example I'm using. The PS1 version had FMVs, that much is true, but the N64 version compensated for that using in-engine models and animations instead of FMVs. This meant more of the cartridge was dedicated to gameplay. The PS1 version only allowed up to 2 players. The N64 version however rocked up to 4 players. I hear the argument that PS1 discs were so much bigger than N64 cartridges, yet I gave 2 major examples showing that PS1 discs were smaller than N64 carts in terms of storage. The examples I listed were evidence of this. Also in terms of storage and graphics, let's also look to Resident Evil 2. "The impossible port" on N64, legendary in how the entire game fit on ONE cartridge, when the PS1 version needed what? 2 discs? The N64 version even had the FMVs but they were basically the audio with a rapid-fire slideshow of screenshots from the FMVs to animated, a classic method of animation. Each cell/frame of animation of these FMVs now running like a reel of film, the N64 version fit the entire game into the cartridge. In terms of controllers, the PS1 version's D pad was WORSE by far from the SNES controller. The N64 controller was to be new, with a stick for 3D games, and the D-pad for 2D style games. Your opinion was that the N64 stick "absolutely sucks", but it persisted despite your claims, as the original N64 controller used an optical sensor for the stick, which means it would never have stick drift. This was revolutionary for the time, despite the fact that the controller would be plagued with the fact that the metal parts would wear out over time from hardcore use, so some people took special care of their N64 controllers to keep their sticks as close to new for longer. The optical sensors for the sticks were a bit more expensive, but aftermarket mods have defeated the limitation of the plastic parts wearing out. When the PS1 shifted to the dual shock controller, the PS1 controller ABSOLUTELY SUCKED! Because the sticks relied on potentiometers which were cheaper! The glaring issue with the potentiometers though is the same issue we've come to recognize now as "Stick drift". Hardcore play meant stick drift would become a problem soon enough. And given the PS1 potentiometers, their dual shock controllers didn't last long before they needed to be replaced. In terms of games quality, the N64 had the PS1 beat, and it shows with how many PS1 games were spanning multiple discs, where as similar games were on a single cartridge. then we have the survival and longevity of these formats! The PS1 relied on CDs as their format, cheaper to produce, and cheaper to churn out, and it also meant the discs could be scratched, snapped, etc. This meant that if your PS1 discs were loose (Without the required cases), you'd be at risk of your PS1 games getting broken, and have to spend money on replacing it. Much of the sales of PS1 games came from the fact that people were careless and their game discs broke from things like someone stepping on it, or sitting on it, or whatever. So they had to be sold at a lower price point for single disc games. This ALSO meant that if you had a game on multi-discs, you had to throw out the entire set if one disc was broken! You couldn't finish Final Fantasy 7 without all 4 discs. And it was HEAVY on the FMVs which back then, people thought was going to define the future of gaming, when it was just a fad. If ONE of your FF7 game discs was broken, you had to throw the other 3 out, or pray someone had the disc you were missing to finish the set! The N64 however invested in cartridges, which have a much longer survival period, and were a LOT tougher. You had to actively take the cartridge apart and intentionally destroy it to break it. This durability was a bit more costly, BUT, it meant your N64 games wouldn't need to be replaced so often. The N64 carts could be sat on, stepped on, and even nom-nom'd by a baby, and as long as you cleaned it off afterwards, it would still work! Let's not forget how the PS1 at launch was using motherboards that were still legally the property of Nintendo, and Sony had to recall them and ship out new PS1s with new internals which were made in-house at Sony with the whole thing redesigned to not be Nintendo property. Honestly, you got your money's worth with the N64. The PS1 was a ripoff.

Cartridges might've seemed like a bad idea early on, but as time progressed it turned out to have been a good fit for the hardware, and one of the biggest reasons is DMA. Streaming random access data in real-time on the CD based competitors was in 90% of cases unviable (Soul Reaver's world data streaming being a very rare exception). Couple that with the rather sparse amount of general purpose RAM they had (2MB), there was only so much code and non-sound/non-texture asset data that could be loaded at any one time. It's one of the reasons a PS1 port of Soul Calibur simply couldn't have happened without major compromises. Animation data alone takes up a good chunk of ROM space on the arcade version, and the vast majority of it is streamed, since the 4MB of system RAM (double that of the PS1) is almost entirely taken up by the game's code, animations with head-tracking, the currently loaded stage and fighters' geometry, normals and GPU command packets, and various pre-computed tables of data for faster performance (this even includes camera angles!). The N64 on the other hand can DMA a decent amount of data per frame. Many games stream animation data from ROM for the player object or even all objects to save on RAM usage. Tilt the cartridge of even the earliest of titles like Mario 64 and Goldeneye to see what happens when this process is interrupted. Likewise, nearly the entire set of games uses libultra's sound library, which streams samples for music and sound effects. One doesn't have to worry about managing audio RAM usage since there really isn't any.

I think crash is has to be regarded as less open than bug. If only because it's a road rather than a maze.

Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

I think Bubsy 3D has a good soundtrack, especially in Daze of Thunder

I appreciate these videos detailing this era of gaming, takes me back to growing up in the 90s with some of these games

Lol wat could possibly go wrong

The "try to turn around in a small platform" statement is where you show you didn't play the game on an original N64 controller.

I like your videos

The controller was one of the best ever made

Only reason I say Mario 64 is more important than Crash Bandicoot is because of Mario’s camera system and Mario 64’s legacy

I came to see if you know your stuff and talked about *Jumping Flash...* I'm happy!

I was a teenager during the 5th generation of gaming. I received a PSX for Christmas 1996, and purchased an N64 in the summer of 1997. Back then I played far more N64 than PSX because the games in the genres I liked most were stronger on Nintendo. I was a junkie for 3D Platformers, Action/Adventure, FPS, and Pro Wrestling games. The people that got really into JRPG’s loved the PS1, but I could never stand the grinding. Although there are a number of PS1 games I really liked, the N64 games I love are among my favorites of all time. PlayStation may have had more good games, but I feel that the N64 had more S-tier games.

if bubsy 3d was a pioneer than we'd make another Titanic situation.

Wow the Bubsy camera has a bit of a slow windup making its gameplay a bit unpleasant to watch for longer periods. I’m glad future 3D games fixed it

If you have an interest in this topic I strongly suggest checking out Star Fox 2. Technically released in 2017 and technically not a platformer, but it was completed in 1995 and it has a lot of 3D platforming sections. The on-foot sections of Star Fox 2 show a lot of Miyamoto’s early 3D experiments that led directly into Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time.

Saturn is still amazing.

Nice to look at Bubsy with an open mind as the terrible game it is that still managed to overclock ps1 graphics with its 3d playstyle

What people don't understand about Bug! is that it was a blast to play when it came out (I speak from experience of course, had the PC version on my Windows 95). It looked and felt like nothing else. The levels of this game felt huge, there were tons of exploration to do. I get that nowadays this game seems linear and unpolished (and perhaps it is), but when it came out, it blew our minds. And I still enjoy playing it today. Not to mention seeing Sonic in a different game. That was the first crossover I've seen in my life. That stuff was beyond mind blowing.

Love freaking jumping flash

Missed opportunity to bring up Croc since that started out as a Yoshi game that predated SM64.

I think it would have been better to replace Bug with Tomb Raider, I know the game is an action adventure but the 3D platforming is still a key aspect of the game.

Nice video my brother looking forward to your future products

great video

I wonder which game went into production first.

Why did you use 64ds footage without mentioning it? Kinda misleading tbh

This is a really well made and edited video! Keep up the good work :)

What does peak Saturn even look like? Because I had a Saturn, and there was never an RPG adventure game on Saturn that looked better than Vagrant Story on PS1, never a racing game that looked better than Gran Turismo or RType4. And plus, those dithered fake transparencies didn't look that great on CRTs either. I could see the difference between real transparencies as far back as on the SNES vs. Genesis. You had to be using some cheap RF connection to blur the screen enough that it was even passable as a transparency. And then Saturn came out and the Saturn dithering looked even worse than the Genesis, cause people were using higher quality CRTs by then and those fake transparencies just looked ugly, even back then on a CRT. That clip you were showing of the dithered looking waterfalls in Panzer Dragoon Saga looked bad man, and that game should be peak Saturn, right? You know how much better Panzer Dragoon Saga would have looked if it was built on PS1? It would have at least had true transparent waterfalls like the artists intended. It blows my mind how people praise the Saturn for having some hypothetical graphical power that it rarely if ever could achieve. I don't get it.

My guess is that forcing the camera down in Floating Runner helps preserve the framerate. Maybe they could have had it tilt up but the framerate would falter, and that's what they decided to prioritize.

I'll take off bug! since this game is a 2.5D. I'll replace it with PANDEMONIUM which came out in 96 for the ps1 and saturn in 1997. Which is a 3d platform game.

this is an extremely underrated game. i find myself replaying it every once in a while.

I think your overreacting to this, i love both the PS1 & N64, i love the 64 more though as my favorite console, i can admit the ps1 won the war, but i stilll love the n64 more. & i noticed it too watching this video by looking up the top 20 highest selling N64 & PS1 Games, how many i played of that were N64? 15 of them, & 7 of those 15 i like. Now for the PS1, only 4 of the top 20 i played & only one of them was good, just made the cut, the other 3 i didn't like or they were mid. my 3 favorite PS1 games didnt hit the top 124 on wikipedia lol. the N64 just appealed to me more. The last point on trying other consoles. most home consoles now dont have anything i want as the games i like are pc based & if they did have what i want, i can just play it on the pc & likely get a better experience. So to me it seemed kinda silly at the end to add that.

In 1996, they could've easily used 4X CD-Rom drive. Agree with using DRAM, but ditch the unified structure altogether and give 4MB to the CPU and 2MB SGRAM to the GPU. Increase the MSRP to $299 and pack in Mario 64. Scrap the controller design completely, and just add dual analog sticks and handles to the SNES pad. Side note: The biggest issue with the N64's architecture wasn't that the memory was unified, but that the CPU had to access the memory via the GPU and couldn't access it directly.

Let him cook

Nintendo's piracy paranoia is the only reason the Gamecube used those discs. The GC fixed the many of the issues I have with the N64. GC had a great library of diverse games. IMO, what tanked the system was simply momentum. Sony had all the momentum in the world coming off of the PS1. Nintendo's momentum slowed down with the N64 (tbf, the SNES also sold less than the NES) Even making huge exclusive deals like they did with Capcom didn't turn things around for it.

"It's really difficult to try to explain to someone why their favorite system isn't the best thing ever". Maybe, just maybe you don't need to force your opinions on other people. Tech specs and media formats do not change games that are already developed, way past their prime and at least in a business sense, a dead platform. People like what they like and most of them don't care about technicalities or the inner workings of console hardware, and they don't need to in order to enjoy the games. I had both an N64 and a PS1 during that generation and other than THPS, I played the N64 much more, because of the vast amount of 4 player games on it. My friends and I played the heck outta Golden Eye, WcW Revenge, Wrestlemania 2000 and No Mercy, as well as Bomberman 64, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, Smash Bros and Mario Party. I did play a bit of FF7 and Crash Bandicoot 2 on PS1, but not nearly as much as the aforementioned N64 games.

When it comes to consoles, especially retro consoles, I only rate them on their library. IN MY OPINION (caps for the rabid Nintendo fanboys) the N64 has one of the worst libraries of any mainstream console. This is based on the fact that jrpgs are my favourite kind of game, and I admit that makes me kind of biased. Also there are plenty of story-based games on the PS1 and even the Saturn, and story-based games can age well. N64 games are usually gameplay based and 90% of early 3D games play like trash when compared to modern games. Ask someone, even an older gamer who was around for the N64, who is used to playing modern fps games to play Golden Eye. Mario 64 aged like milk compared to a modern Mario game like Odyssey. Meanwhile the PS1 FF are better than any game in the series over the last 20 years. MGS is smarter and better acted than the majority of modern games.

It's clear from your video that you are not a professional hardware developer or have a strong education of electronics. First, all 2T/C RAM (i.e. RDRAM, DRAM, etc.) has huge latency compared to 6T/C RAM (i.e. SRAM). This is an initial delay, as the bus moves data at a very high speed when accessed. The solution is not to change the RAM type, but to increase the cache/buffer on die. The N64 hardware was designed with COST over performance. The biggest change in performance would have been to use a multilayer PCB. Nintendo designed the N64 with only a double-sided PCB, this resulted it making huge sacrifices, such as limiting how many high speed, impedance controlled, signals can be routed between ICs. Thus, the RDRAM bus was limited to a 9-bit bus. Ideally, you would want to use a 24-bit or 32-bit bus. Second: the N64 used a very high speed (circa '94) processor that was was only cooled with a non-fin aluminum heatsink. Had it have a proper copper block, and active cooling, the processor could have been clocked to 150MHz+, resulting in huge performance.

The Sega Saturn sold 9 million consoles but had 1,144 games. The N64 sold 33 million consoles but only had 388 games. That's pretty sad.

This video made me realize I'm a purist guy😅😅

Hi, at level 2-A can you tell what I press to hold the turtle with Mario Raccoon?

I think a more interesting take would be to actually make the hardware changes on a real N64 and then play the games to see if this did indeed address the issues.