Plugged in a N64 a year or so ago. Then spent a good 10mins fiddling with and cleaning the plugs while a friend commented on my progress. At that point it dawned on us that it wasn't broken. Golden Eye and Super Mario Cart really did have graphics that were that bad - and we loved it just as much.
The N64 had a lot of texturing issues that dramatically reduced the quality from what it "should've been". The PlayStation on the other hand was great, except for the fact that textured polygons were just ridiculously slow, so most games used a lot of shaded polys, e.g. the characters in Final Fantasy 7.
Looking back, nearly all of my favorites from that generation (Tales of Destiny, Symphony of the Night, etc) were really just 2d games with higher quality sprites than the SNES. Funny how that works out.
If I'm remembering this correctly, the Playstation had another large problem in that it used integer coordinates for everything, making it very difficult to avoid the infamous "wavy textures" with textured polys. I think a decent portion of the time, shaded polys were chosen because they ended up looking better, not just because they were faster. If you haven't already, check out the fascinating (and long) developer retrospective on Crash Bandicoot, where (amongst other, more interesting things) they mention their rationale for using flat shading on Crash:
I'm really fond of the PlayStation's brand of 3D as well: There is something really charming about low-res, low-poly 3D, with nearest neighbor texture scaling and 2D "sprites" everywhere. I have some degree of nostalgia for the N64, but that combination of little texture memory and gratuitous bilinear texture scaling is not nearly as appealing.
I think that a lot of gamers feel that way. In retrospective it’s funny to look at those times, see how 2D games were much better, but nonetheless pushed away by their 3D equivalents.
Today we probably take 3D for granted, but we forget that back then it was jaw-dropping to see Mario in 3D and jump in something that looked like an endless world.
These days I just prefer good games over games that use a specific art style or technology. The 2D/3D worlds got also mixed together and I don’t think that it has that much meaning compared to the 3D defining times, i.e. there are a lot of 2D side scrollers that use gorgeous 3D backgrounds and the marketing hype is long gone.
What was the advantage of using a 64-bit processor in a consumer electronics device like the N64? Presumably addressing more than 4GB of memory was not an issue back then.
Well, you could utilize more precise operations but, according to Wikipedia, games rarely took advantage of it:
"The Nintendo 64's central processing unit (CPU) is the NEC VR4300, a cost-reduced derivative of the 64-bit MIPS Technologies R4300i. Built by NEC on a 0.35 µm process, the VR4300 is a RISC 5-stage scalar in-order execution processor, with integrated floating point unit, internal 24 KB direct-mapped L1 cache (16KB for instructions, 8KB for data). The 4.6 million transistor CPU is cooled passively by an aluminum heatspreader that makes contact with a steel heat sink above.
Clocked at 93.75 MHz, the N64's VR4300 was the most powerful console CPU of its generation. Except for its narrower 32-bit system bus, the VR4300 retained the computational abilities of the more powerful 64-bit MIPS R4300i, though software rarely took advantage of 64-bit data precision operations. N64 game-titles generally used faster (and more compact) 32-bit data-operations, as these were sufficient to generate 3D-scene data for the console's RSP (Reality Signal Processor; see below) unit. In addition, 32-bit code executed faster and required less storage space (which was at a premium on the N64's cartridges) Though powerful, the CPU was hindered by a 250 MB/s bus to the system memory; not only that, but in order to access the RAM, the CPU had to go through the RCP (Reality Co-Processor), and could not use DMA to do so (the RCP could). This problem is further compounded by the RDRAM's very high access latency.
Emulators—such as UltraHLE and Project64—benefit from the scarcity of 64-bit operations in the game's executable-code, especially when running with a 32-bit machine architecture as a host. These emulators perform most calculations at 32-bit precision and trap the few subroutines that actually made use of 64-bit instructions."
