Yes, like now, console peasants, and PC gamers ;p
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
91 points (97.9% liked)
90s Memes
376 readers
191 users here now
The Memiverse:
!y2k_memes@quokk.au
!philosophymemes@quokk.au
!sigh_fi@quokk.au
founded 2 months ago
MODERATORS
The South shall rise again!
And there's me, never owning either, just continuing to use my Genesis
One side needs more texture warping
I chose neither. PC games were getting good at that time. Sorry, but far superior to both those consoles.
I had both. Parents got my siblings and I the 64 to share, and I mowed lawns and stuff to buy a used PS1. It was the first game related thing I ever bought myself, with my own money.
same except i bought myself both...
You can still get a new PS1 clone btw. Disc drive and all
I still have a slim PS2. 😁
I got my PS1 in late 1998, I loved it, but being a kid, of course I also wanted a N64. The problem is that said console was much more expensive and the games even more so. It certainly didn't help Nintendo that this was 90s Brazil, where piracy was still incredibly strong and every PS1 console was smuggled, thus evading taxes.
What happened to all the Sega kids?
Our dreams were cast and shattered, we became refugees in our own homes.
In 1996, your dreams were far away. They might as well have been on Saturn.
easy Shakespeare, it's too early for me to cry
One day I forgot the the Dreamcast was the last Sega console.
There was a placeholder between it and the absence of Sega consoles. The ellipsis in the set.
Then I remembered and was sad.
PS1, you could chip them and burn all the games your local video rental stores had.
Binders full of ~~women~~ burnt games
I had draws full of games in hard cases, some had custom covers as well, we didn't fuck around when it came to piracy in my family.
Pretty sure now you can do it without the chip, unless I'm thinking of PS2. And N64 flash carts have gotten cheap and are easy to install
An owner of a 586 class machine: I can do more and better.
It's all about the Pentiums, baby
“Now! What you wanna be? Wanna be a hacker? Code cracker? Slacker?”
What's that BLEEM noise?
Before Mario 64's round and colorful style I actively disliked 3D games because they were so angular and unpleasant. Pixel art games from the SNES/PS1 era are still some of the most beautiful graphics today, even without the CRT effect. It wasn't until the PS2 that I began to truly enjoy 3D graphics, but even today I prefer low-power stylized designs to high-poly photorealistic efforts. You can do amazing things by color-shading a flat texture the right way.
Spyro might have sold me a PS1, but by that point I already had the 64 and was old enough that I was expected to buy my own toys, on top of the economy slowly boiling us all to death. We (in my house) had a lot more luxury electronics in the 80's.
Some of us have a split personality, I guess.
And some of us have none
Some of us didn't have either.
If you were a kid by the time, the consequences of the choice were:
-
Having a less powerful machine but with tons of games to buy cheap (not to mention the free demos) and potentially a huge library of pirated games
-
Having "great graphics" but maybe one or two games a year if you were lucky enough because each game cost a fortune (with a really small library too).
As someone who had both, I always find it odd when people say the N64 had an advantage in graphics.
Like, yes if you do a breakdown of the technical specs and theoretical capabilities then the N64 wins in a lot of ways. Especially in terms of handling more 3D objects at once while maintaining a higher frame rate. But in practice when I think of games from that era, all of the best-looking ones (imo) were on PlayStation.
For example, just searching for articles about the best-looking games on the N64 I see Resident Evil 2 cited a lot. Which is fair, but Resident Evil 2 is also famous for being much better on the PlayStation and Saturn than it was on the N64. Some thing with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.
I see collect-a-thons like DK64, Conker, and Banjo Kazooie cited. Those games all look pretty good, but I would compare them to games like Tomb Raider and Gex and New Jersey Devil. I don't see anything on the N64 that looks as good as any of the Spyro games, or Crash Bandicoot 2 or 3. And if we include Dreamcast games then I would say Sonic Adventure looks better.
I like racing games for graphical comparisons. They're often relatively simple in terms of gameplay and physics and allow developers to really show off their graphical skills. Nothing on the N64 compares to Gran Turismo 2 at all. The best-looking N64 racing game is probably Wave Race 64. I'll grant that it looks better than games like Jet Moto and Wipeout, but not be a huge margin.
I'm not as familiar with the Saturn. I could try to compare 2.5d games like Nights against games like Klonoa or Kirby 64, but I don't see a whole lot of differentiation there. I do think the whole Panzer Dragoon series looks better than Star Fox 64.
Nintendo particularly relied heavily on art style. Which is... Fine. Games like Paper Mario look great, but I don't come away from those games thinking "wow the PlayStation could never do this!". In fact, I would say that Parappa the Rapper did the same thing 4 years earlier.
I mean... You might not like the art style of nintendo games, that's fair. But to say that psx was superior is simply untrue.
Things like the turok series, jet force gemini, goldeneye, perfect dark, ocarina of time, and even mario 64 were impossible to run for a psx. Sure, psx used some loss cartoonish style for many of their games, but in terms of polygon count, or graphical quality, n64 was far superior even if the graphic style was more cartoonish.
I mean... Ocarina of Time??? It's a great game with great gameplay and Nintendo deserves a ton of credit for it, but it absolutely could have run on the PlayStation. There would be load times of course, but that's a different conversation (I would also expect the audio of a theoretical PlayStation version to be way better). Maybe they would need to put some fog in Hyrule field to account for worse draw distance. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver came out in-between Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask and I would say it looks better than either. I would say Majora's Mask is still, far and away, the best game of those but not because of its graphics.
It's not that I don't like the art styles of Nintendo, it's just that I consider art style and graphics to be seperate. Paper Mario looks great, but not in a technically impressive way. I could bring up games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night which is still one of the best-looking 2D, sprite-based games of all time. It still looks great, but I call that an artistic achievement, not a technical one. I could also bring up Silent Hill, which famously uses the PS1's lower draw distance brilliantly. Once again, that's an artistic achievement, not a technical one.
Medal of Honor is a boring game with a dull art style, but from a technical perspective comes pretty close to those other shooters. I also mentioned Resident Evil 2 where the PS1 version competes with those other shooters quite well, and the contrast against the N64 is quite noticeable.
The arguments for the N64 are all theoretical. Like, if only developers were willing to put in the effort and publishers were willing to have larger, more expensive cartridges then of course it would produce better results. But it didn't. Maybe if the 64DD had taken off they would have used that space for better textures, but it didn't and the few games that did come out for that peripheral didn't take advantage of it.
Technically the Saturn was more powerful than the PS1 as well but barely anyone even remembers that console existed. The graphical results were marginal differences at best going both directions.
Oh you big fancy city people with your access to 'modchips' and people who knew how to install them. That would have been amazing to experience though.
Hah... TIL a town with less than 30k people is now called a city...
Weird tho, when I think about it. I lived in a rather small and rural town but everyone had their psx pirated and you could find people selling pirated cds everywhere.
Might be a density thing? I grew up in rural Australia, so it was pretty sparse.
I started with Nintendo 64 (between these two — I also had Pong, the 2600, the NES, and the Super NES) but I didn't like what Nintendo was doing with its 3D. It was all backwards and you couldn't change it, and the graphics looked like smeared diarrhea. And yes, I had Ocarina of Time. I also had GoldenEye, and kept thinking "this would be a great game if I could play with keyboard/mouse."
Gave it to my younger brother and bought a PlayStation. Wish I'd gone PS3 over 360 and PS4 over XB1, but I was married then and my wife wanted Xbox because she knew people on Xbox, who she proceeded to never play with online, thus defeating the purpose. Series X and GamePass, especially with All Access, was a better deal (when it was available) than PS5, but I'm not sure, in the long run, it's the better console. So yeah, shoulda stuck with PlayStation.
Edit: I got a PS3 later. I like it more than the 360, which is its generation, and the XB1, which is PS4 gen. Still haven't gotten a PS4 or PS5.
I followed the PS path and had an amazing time. I did secretly yern to be able to listen to my own music while playing a game (OG Xbox had its own pluses), but Playstation was backwards compatible so I could just keep building my library of games. Sadly backwards compatibility didn't even make it through the whole run of the PS3, I did get a PS4 when Destiny came out, but that's where my consoles just stopped.