But overall I think they continue to show real innovation in gaming. They're the only company who puts so much effort into maximizing their software with the uniqueness of their hardware.
The Wii was basically just a higher-clocked (~2x CPU and GPU) Gamecube—much more like the XBO S or the PS4 Pro are for this generation, than like the architectural reinventions Nintendo usually gets up to. The fact that it seemed like a whole new console with new capabilities for games, is more than anything a statement of how much untapped potential there still was in the Gamecube's architecture at the end of its life, that Wii developers went on to find.
The NES was a phenomenal breakthrough, a paradigm shift.
Which is not to discredit Game & Watch, which brought Nintendo forward from an era of making playing cards. I had several clones as a kid.
Interestingly, if you think of the PSX as descending from the SNES architecturally, it's nearly identical to the end-state of "SNES + SuperFX GSU-1", but with the one added feature of DMA-streamed block IO from the CD device. (Thus why the FF7 demo on the N64 used polygonal backgrounds, while on the PSX you get pre-rendered backgrounds. Each version plays to its console's strength. Makes you wonder what would have been possible in an alternate world where the N64 had a CD drive as well as its better polygon-pushing abilities.)
This also means that the PSX->PS2 likely represents the largest single-generation leap in power of any console: it was a catch-up from "basically a SNES" to modern-for-the-time hardware, representing a literal 10x jump in CPU and GPU power.
Now, given that the SuperFX's lifetime was short and its capabilities were likely never fully explored/exploited in that lifetime; and given that the SNES's on-cart coprocessors could completely override the console processor and just bang bits onto the video-output lines themselves (like the Super Gameboy does!); and given that the only thing stopping devs from sticking even more powerful chips into carts was cost (and even then, some producers just didn't care, and stuck ridiculous ARM7 cores into games like Megaman X3 for no useful reason at all...), I really do believe you would have seen something very much like Mario 64 for the SNES if it had lived just one more year.
(Heck, I bet that we know enough about the hardware today that someone from the demoscene could pull off a Mario-64-alike on a cycle-accurate SNES (with SuperFX) emulator. That'd be a fun competition.)
The SNES was a 3.5 MHz 16 bitter. The n64 was a 3d-capable machine with a 100ish MHz R4k, the RCP, an analog controller, etc, in the box. The advance just seems enormous (matching similar advances in personal computers in the same timeframe). If I'm understanding you right, you're making a case the advance was maybe not as discontinuous. But the scale of it still seems qualitatively greater than any of the subsequent ones, to me.
You can't compare clock speeds in that way and get an accurate picture on performance. If you could, then a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 would be faster than a 2.8 GHz Kaby Lake Core i7.
To give a better (but still not completely accurate) idea of how far apart the SNES and N64 were in power, look at the difference in MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) in just their CPUs:
SNES CPU (Ricoh 5A22): 1.5 MIPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricoh_5A22
N64 CPU (NEC VR4300): 125 MIPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...
And how could it not be? The two systems were released 6 years apart (if you count SNES in Japan 1990), back when Moore's law was in full effect.
We played Zelda a few minutes, but then switched to the PSX. We tried all games in a row less than 5 minutes each, they were disgusting in comparison. And these were mature sequels not launch lineup. When Zelda 64 was on screen we realized how much better everything was on the N64.
However the massive size of disc based PSX games vs N64 carts yielded visual variety that we just didn't get on the N64.
Not to mention the music, although N64 Tetrisphere's amazing music by Neil Voss was actually implemented as an interpreted mod track composed in FastTracker complete with samples. Such a good game.
[0]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tric...
Also, Tetrisphere! There is a game I had forgotten about. It was so good!
I've never hear the term "affine swim" before. Is it an artifact in rasterization (leaving gaps between triangles) or texturing (the term "affine" suggests that)?
For the rasterization, I've heard the term "watertight rasterization" (or airtight?) being used for a gapless rasterizer. It's not necessarily a software vs. hardware render issue, you can implement a watertight software rasterizer (of course) but I guess in the 1990s this was a performance vs. fidelity issue. And even with early 3d accelerators, the vertex processing was still done in the CPU.
Affine swim refers to the unique results this kind of texturing results in (it looks like textures are swimming)
PS1 has nothing in common hardware wise with the "Nintendo Playstation" add-on other than in name alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg
He is probably too young to have grown up with a PS1. I believe reading at the time that Sony poured close to $1bn into developing the PS1 hardware. This made sense-- the Sony brand then was what Apple is now, and this was their first full foray into the games industry.
If you compare Star Fox running at 15fps on a SuperFX chip w/ untextured polys to Gran Turismo 2 running at 30fps, you will see why OP is spewing clueless garbage. The PS1 was a monster for its time. It blew away the hardware of Saturn and 3DO, when it came to 3D at least. 3D acceleration was new, and even PC gamers were jealous of what the PS1 had to offer at launch. And arguably it was not even dethroned by the N64 a year later.
Get off my lawn.
vs
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~dherring/cgt141/project1/comparis...
http://www.giantbomb.com/super-fx-chip/3015-7544/
Take a look for yourself. They are nothing at all alike.
"I kind of had a suspicion that things weren’t going too well for the 64 at that point, because … one of my responsibilities … was to write performance applications that compared how well the 64 fared against the prototype [PlayStation]. And we’d be running parallel comparisons between the [PlayStation] where you’d have a bunch of 2D sprites bouncing off the screen and see how many polygons you could get within a 60th of a second. And even without any kind of texturing or any kind of lighting, it was less than 50% of what you would be able to get out of the [PlayStation]. Of course, the drawback of the [PlayStation] is it didn’t really have a z-buffer, so you’d have these overlapping polygons that you’d have to work around so that you wouldn’t get the shimmering [look]. But on the other hand, there was no way you’d be able to get anything close to what FF7 was doing [on PlayStation] on the 64 at that time."
So, at least according to the square programmers the PSX was more powerful when it came to raw polygon processing power. Of course N64 was doing much more with it's hardware, and also having a Z-buffer for real depth information, so these numbers are not really directly comparable.
Hard to think of any real bombs in that entire library TBH.
I have sold my Gamecube but hold the Wind Waker in my heart as a game I could play and play. I simply loved sailing around in that little boat in a happy cartoon land. It's the one game my wife would happily watch me play for hours on end.
Wario World was also very good but I never completed it - kept getting stuck on the magical mirror level
Also of course the two excellent Zelda games. What a fab console.
I also bought a PS3, but more as a DVD/BluRay player. Other than Little Big Planet and Skyrim I never liked any of the other games for it.
Well, now you don't really get it on Nintendo consoles either. Out of the series you named only one has had a remotely recent installment, and the metroid IP had only been used for taking down fan projects since Other M. That's why, as of now at least, there's no way I'm buying one of these. I can play all the best games from Nintendo's library in Dolphin, on the same PC I run Skyrim on. I don't really see how that game is still supposed to be a selling point.
It seems embarrassing for Nintendo:
"We finally have the game you've been playing on every other console for literally 6 years!"
But it's a huge boost for Bethesda:
"Skyrim's so goddamned popular that Nintendo approached us about putting it on their new console 6 years after it came out!"
(It's playable on the older Wii models with gamecube ports if anyone is intrigued by the description)
I'd love to be able to get a few people over and just bust out the SSB for a few hours - so many great memories from uni. A seconnd hand GC + the game is ridic expensive though so my options are pretty much limited to homebrew
Sure, Melee was fun, but I played all the time at my friends' apartments. I didn't need to play it at home: multiplayer was where the fun was at. Usually after a class (I was in college during the GameCube's heyday), a classmate and I would go over to his apartment and play Melee for a few hours.
I might have bought a GameCube if it had a decent Mario platformer (and I felt burned by the N64 too... Super Mario 64 was a huge disappointment to me... the Galaxy games were the first 3D platformers I could stand, and I didn't really get the 3D platformer I wanted until 3D World).
Difficult control and the "battle mode" multiplayer is garbage, also lacks the character of F-Zero series but a very pretty and enjoyable game with lots of variety in the tracks.
Where it fails in comparison to other controllers is button-feel, IMO. The shoulder buttons for example, compared to those on the DS4, feel very clicky/hollow (actually I think this is true of everything other than the face buttons) and can be distractingly loud. The DS4 buttons manage to feel soft/gentle while still being precise (and quiet).
My uses tend to be almost entirely centered around pointing/aiming, so I absolutely love the SC and use it heavily, but I'm really looking forward to a second revision.
EDIT: Oh also, the Wavebird controller was the first wireless first-party controller.
I think they also introduced the "click" if you pushed all the way down. Such a satisfying, IBM Model M-esque feeling.
And here we are, in a console wasteland far in the future. The Switch is the only home system I am mildly excited about. For innovative games, I will stick with PC.
BTW, Sony actually had their own clone of the VMU dubbed the "Pocketstation" that they were planning, but ultimately scrapped the peripheral.
You can hardly say that for the WiiU...