... the N64 came out two years after the PS1, which came out three years after the Super Nintendo. We're talking about 64-bit with a GPU vs. 32-bit with a math coprocessor vs. 16bit with nothing. We're talking about 125 MIPS vs 60 MIPS vs 1.5 MIPS. Why were they different? The Nintendo 64 was a direct response to Sony, who decided that what was necessary to crush Nintendo as a gaming company was a video game console legit built around a Silicon Graphics workstation. PS1 and N64 games were different because Sony sold the PS1 at a loss for $300 while Nintendo sold the SNES at a profit for $199. I mean, yeah, N64s were snappy but by the time they'd come out anyone spending their own money was buying a Playstation. N64 was what your uncle bought his kids and it was kinda fun but that was the real dividing line: games for kids vs. games for angsty teenagers and boys who didn't date. If you really wanna see the differences, it's SNES: PS1: N64:
I had both and my games for both were quite different. Definitely loved the N64 for games like Zelda, Goemon, Jetforce Gemini, etc., and I think the only true RPG I had for it was Hybrid Heaven, which I loved for the combat system and not much else. Oh yeah, Goldeneye and Turok were legit amazing on there too, can't forget those. Of the vast PS1 library, the majority of the games I had were more "last generation" or "arcade" in spirit, like shooters like Einhander and Thunderforce or games like SNK's Metal Slug and King of Fighters '99 and that was about it. So I don't have a lot of experience with PS1 games. However, some of this does make sense a bit, because the PS1 just could not keep up with arcade ports for some reason, in snapiness, frame smoothness, and annoying load screens abound. King of Fighters '99 is a great example, it felt nowhere near as smooth and you'd spend just as much time watching load screens as you did playing. But I know a lot of arcade boards, besides being chip based, also had the appropriate amount of RAM to help them out, plus I've been told the PS1 wasn't designed with sprites in mind, so that probably didn't help. While I never owned one, I've heard The Saturn handled sprites much better. It's a shame it wad so hard to program for though. Edit: Speaking of gameplay, the PS1 controllers felt much more appropriate for platform type games while the N64 controller, weird as it was, was better for 3d games. This was especially noticeable in games like 1080 or Road Rash where a slight difference in tilt made all the difference in the world between success or failure. Coincidentally, next gen I had a PS2 and a Gamecube, so I was continuing the trend of double dipping and I loved both for different reasons, but the two felt much more similar than previous generations. That said, Gamecube graphics felt cleaner than PS2, but the PS2 had the better controller and a lot of the games felt snappier (and there were A LOT more games overall too).
Yeah I dunno, man. The argument of the video is that the architecture drove the games when it's the games that drove the architecture. Yeah - playstations didn't handle sprites as well as Nintendos because sprites weren't something you used in CGI and Sony decided that a baby CGI workstation was where they wanted to go with gaming: Meanwhile Nintendo was a company whose fame grew out of pinball and platformers. Their entire culture was about 2D games. That was very much why Sony drove hard in a direction Nintendo had never bothered, and doing it changed the gaming industry. 3D had belonged entirely to the PC universe up to that point. The principle crime of this video, though, is putting two consoles side-by-side when one was a response to the other. The N64 was deliberately designed to do everything the PS1 did only better while the PS1 was designed to do all the stuff Nintendo didn't think video games needed to do. That culture hasn't changed in 25 years, either: you buy a Switch so you can play Smash Bros. You buy a PS4 so you can play Death Stranding.
No, you're good. I'm not arguing for or against anything, just talking about my personal experiences with the systems. If you asked me though, I wish those some of those arcade games were ported to the N64, cause while I don't have any technical knowledge to back up my assumption, the system just felt more responsive all around. If I had to guess though, the reason most ports went to the PS1 was because A) optical discs were cheaper to manufacture and B) Nintendo took pretty big cuts out of each game sold on their platform.
There's a major economic undercurrent not mentioned: Sony sold the PS1 at a loss to get the gaming infrastructure built. Nintendo sold at a profit because they were a company that sold games for a living. It's a testament to Nintendo that they still exist 20 years after Sony and Microsoft launched a war of mutual destruction. The original XBox cost $200 more to make than it was sold for; the first-edition PS3 cost $1100 to build and sold for $499. Meanwhile Nintendo spent $40 on the Wii and sold it for $150 and ended up carving out a niche that they still hold. If you look at it, the N64 was where Nintendo decided that they couldn't fight the console wars because they simply lacked the resources so they doubled down on a winning formula of doing more with less to create games that were fun instead of games that were Warcraft. The reason most ports went to the PS1 is that Sony will throw money at anyone who will give them an exclusive. Microsoft will, too. Both companies love to buy up the firms that make their content and ruin them - while Nintendo does their level best to come up with fresh ways to enjoy their intellectual property. It's a fundamentally different approach to gaming and commerce and looking at it as spec-driven misses the point. If Sony wanted sprites, they would have had sprites. If Nintendo wanted polygons, they would have had polygons. Fundamentally? there was no internet video. If you were trying to impress people who hadn't played your games, a static image of a Playstation game looks much more impressive than a static image of a Nintendo game. But if you're in the living room of a friend, the Nintendo game is a lot more dynamic. Even now, Nintendo games are the ones that emphasize group play in the same room while Sony/M$ are much more about lone gamers separated by time and space who meet in a virtual universe that costs $80 a year to subscribe to. There are very real psychological and marketing choices that drove those specs. That those specs emphasize one style of gameplay over another is by design, not by accident... and comparing two systems from different generations doesn't illuminate that choice. Hell yeah the N64 was more responsive. There was a time when every succeeding generation of chips was radically faster than the one that came before and those two consoles are from the golden age of Moore's Law.