The Nintendo 64 was given its name because of its 64-bit CPU, this was 4 times greater than the Super Nintendo which resulted in one of the biggest graphical boosts in the history of the game industry with the jump from 2D to 3D. One limitation of the 64-bit processor was the fact that Nintendo had to continue to use cartridges as opposed to CDs which were being used by the PS1 and Sega Saturn, the advantage of this was the lack of loading times but meant the games were more expensive to manufacture and could only store a maximum of 64MB by the end of its lifespan as opposed to the 700MB found on a CD and meant that 3rd party developers moved towards the PlayStation. After a decade of strong 3rd party support Nintendo was mostly reliant on the sale of 1st and 2nd party games, these included many revolutionary games like Super Mario 64 which greatly changed the format of Mario platformers with open worlds and an emphasis on completing missions to obtain stars rather than just getting to the end of the level and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time which is regarded by many publications as the greatest game of all time. Some 3rd party developers took on the challenge of porting their PS1 games to the N64 and succeeded, the most famous example of this was Resident Evil 2 where Capcom managed to cram the contents of 2 CDs into a 64 megabyte cartridge including the full motion video, which was rare for the N64 but common for the PS1. Due to the console's limitations Nintendo decided made 2 expansions to the console in its lifetime, the first was the expansion pack which allowed users to remove the 4MB RAM cartridge the console came with and replace it with an 8MB RAM cartridge, this is incredibly rare for consoles. Only 2 games required it but many more were improved by it, ranging from graphical upgrades to new game modes. The other one was the Japan exclusive Nintendo 64 DD which used magnetic disks for games and was a commercial failure with only 14 games made. |
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