Nintendo 64

As a professional video game developer, I pretty much have all video game systems: Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, N64, Playstation 2, XBox, and GameCube. Timmer was looking to acquire one, and I was surprised to find that the one I recommend is the antiquated N64.

I bought him one for about $40 on ebay , and it came with 4 controllers and 4 good games.

Even without the price, though, cartridge systems are in many ways more fun. One of my pet peeves about CD based games (like XBox, PS2, and GameCube) is that it takes a lot of time to load those beautiful graphics and movies. A substantial part of the playtime is spent in those joyous, "Loading... Please wait" screens. The cartridge-based games don't have that. Level changes and game launches are instant. Also, since they didn't have memory for fancy movies, they spent a lot more of their development effort making the game fun than many modern games do. And, as a third plus, the cartridges feel much sturdier than the CDs. I don't mind my children changing the carts, but I'm always afraid they'll scuff, scratch, or drop the CDs.

And Shigeru Miyamoto rocks. All the games he developed for N64 (Mario World, Mario Kart, Zelda) are classics. And the girls love Paper Mario and Yoshi's Story.

With how cheap and huge RAM is nowadays, a cart system could probably be made a lot better and cheaper than the DVD systems. It's not like the game developers have passed the savings of lower manufacturing costs of games on to the users.

Filed Sat - January 22, 2005, 10:47 AM in

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