"PlayStation is the little system that could. Nintendo 64 is the big system that couldn't."

During the final months before the N64's release, hype was just dripping from the thing. The system had been delayed for nearly two years, so it caught the interest of a lot of people. People also thought that it would be a worthy successor to the popular Super NES. And one of the most common thoughts was that N64 would bring a premature death to the Sony PlayStation.

Unfortunately, everyone was wrong. The system did not live up to the hype, as it was not as successful as the SNES and it eventually got maimed by the PlayStation. This was mostly due to the N64's prehistoric cartridge format, which was expensive and made some 3rd party cautious.

Nintendo obviously wasn't prepared for this, which is why I like to call the N64 ''Nintendo 2nd biggest flop ever''.

Graphical Capabilities: 8/10
It is true that at launch, N64 was quickly touted as having the best graphics of any system, ever. And why wouldn't they? The first N64 title, Super Mario 64, was a huge step up in graphics for its time. But slowly, people began realizing what N64 COULDN'T do. It couldn't do FMV (full-motion video) in high quality. In fact, only four N64 game actually have FMV. Take the N64 version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, for example. On the CD platforms, (PlayStation, Dreamcast, PC) the game had awesome FMV of real skaters. When the game came to N64, it had to be removed.

Also, because cartridges cannot store very much, the texture palette in early games such as Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was extremely limited.

N64 also boasts a lot of ''extra'' graphical features, such as anti-aliasing (Removing jagged edges by blurring them). However, the only thing this did was make almost all of the N64 games extremely blurry. This, combined with the cartridge problems, made the N64 limitations visable from the beginning.

In 1999, Nintendo released a RAM pak which increased N64's MBs of RAM from 4 to 8. This was a great idea, as N64 now had as much RAM as the brand-new Sega Dreamcast, and far more than PlayStation's pathetic 1 MB. Best of all, developers could use the pak to store extra textures and sharpen the graphics. Unfortunately, developers only did the latter.

Audio Capabilities: 2/10
The systems biggest flaw! With the cartridges, they couldn't put CD quality sound in, even though Nintendo said that it was possible at launch. Not a lot of audio was put on the games, and it was rarely ever good. Take Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, again. On the CD versions of the game, there was a lot of real music from real bands. When the game came to N64, several bits of the music had to be taken out to make room, and the overall sound quality took a dip.

Of course, the 4 MB Expansion Pak mentioned above could have fixed many of these problems...

Controller: 5/10
It's alright. It was labeled revolutionary from the start for having three grips, as well as a 360º control stick AND a D-Pad together. However, the control stick is really tight, and you'll kill your thumbs after doing lots of power slides in Mario Kart 64. Also, the control stick always gets white powder around if, due to the stick scraping against plastic. Sony fixed this problem with the dual-shock controller for their PlayStation.

Also, I dislike how it's impossible to touch all of the buttons/d-pad/control stick at once, which is something you need to do to in some games like Shadows of the Empire. In SOTE's case, doing something with all the buttons opens a cheat menu.

Game Library: 7/10
Everyone knows that software, not hardware, determines if a system is worth it or not. In this category, N64 falls short of expectations. The library mostly consists of 30-40% quality titles and 60-70% crap. This is mostly due to the cartridge scaring 3rd parties away.

Also, a lot of hyped games failed to deliver what was expected. The main problem was the game length. Star Fox 64, Yoshi's Story, and Paper Mario (the lattest game being my least favorite game of all time) were all very short.

Another problem was the fact that a lot of games were baby-ish. Most of the games involved cute, furry animals fighting an evil person to restore happiness. This turned off a lot of teens, who flocked to PlayStation because it had a mix of kiddy AND mature. And lets not forget, only PlayStation was the only console to have mature games such as Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid.

What was probably the biggest problem of all was the two of the most popular genres, fighting and RPG, never got through on N64. In the system's six-year life, there was never a good RPG (although the millions of Paper Mario fans would have you believe otherwise) and only fighter that was above-average (Super Smash Bros.) If Nintendo would have gotten Square and Capcom (Final Fantasy and Street Fighter developers) to put there most popular titles into N64, this problem would have been fixed.

It's not all bad, however. Super Mario 64 is still one of the best 3D platformers ever, and GoldenEye 007 is one of the greatest First-Person Shooters ever. And don't forger about the awesome four-player games, which use N64's revolutionary four controller ports. If you stick to N64's first/second party games only, you will have a lot of gems and few bad apples in your video gaming barrel.

Pros
Pretty good graphical capabilities
Revolutionized a lot of things
Almost all 1st/2nd party games are good
Best platform games on ANY console

Cons
Cartridge medium
Horrible audio capabilities
No extremely good fighters/RPGs
I don't like the controller
The games cost a lot
Most games are kiddy
The fact that Paper Mario exists

Bottom Line
The cartridges doomed this one from the start.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/20/01, Updated 10/06/02