"Flawed But Not Awful"

The Nintendo 64 is perhaps the most maligned piece of hardware ever created. Come out roughly a year after the Sony Playstation, it still easily sold out at Christmas time, and was the second most popular item next to Tickle Me Elmo.

However, the Nintendo 64 could not sustain this success over time. When you glance over the chooses of software for the system, there is an extreme lack of titles in some genres. Until Ogre Battle 64 was recently released, there was only one RPG for a system that was THREE years old. The Nintendo 64 is a first-class lesson in learning how to alienate an audience.

The Nintendo 64 initially sold out due to the strong marketing campaign and the inclusion of a Mario game at launch (Mario 64). It featured a revolutionary analog controller (at the time) and no load times compared to its competitors. It was also the first TRUE 64-bit processor (the Jaguar was actually four 16-bit).

It also used a cart format. This allowed the lightning fast load times. A cart can only hold up to 256 megabytes of data, while the CD's the Sony Playstation and Saturn used were 650 megabytes. CD's also cost around 50 cents each to produce, while a cart is around 10 dollars, more if it includes a special chip. Developers favored the cheaper costs and the larger space available.

Also not helping Nintendo's cause was it's long upheld isolation techniques. It was very difficult to get the Nintendo stamp of approval to develop. There was often a guarantee of producing at least 500,000 units, which would mean at least 5 million dollars in production costs. This didn't count hiring the actual programmers and coders. Nintendo alienated many developers with this policy, and some small time publishers avoided them completely. It was much easier to sell $40 Playstation games then $65 Nintendo 64 games.

As a result of size limitations, there is almost no full motion video on Nintendo 64 games. Graphics on the whole are usually much cleaner and clearer then the Playstation though. Slowdown and disk-loading for action games is not a problem.

Once again because of size limitations, music and sound effects are generally nicer on the Playstation. The Nintendo 64 has little or no games with full music songs. Almost all of the music is original symphony or machine made sounds.

The Nintendo 64 has a large amount of high quality games, but they are released few and far between. Months can go by without a good game being released. Nintendo did not help matters, as many big name games (Zelda 64, Donkey Kong 64, Blast Corps, Conker's Quest) were delayed months past their original release dates. Third-party support is almost non-existent. Around 75 percent of the high-selling games are made by Nintendo and/or Rare.

There's a little bit of everything for everyone on the Nintendo 64. ''Little'' being the keyword. There's almost no real time strategy games (Starcraft 64 being the only choice) and the lone RPG selection (Quest 64) was badly panned. Nintendo's mantra was ''Quality over Quantity'', but it was taken to the extreme and used as more of an excuse.

Overall, it's a decent system. Is it worth the 100 to 150 dollars you'd pay in a store for it? Probably not. For that price you can purchase a Playstation and several games, a much better investment. A Super Nintendo would even be a much better selection. However, if you got some cash to burn, it's not a bad choice.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/00, Updated 10/14/00