C3PX said:As for it being rare to see an N64 game that was long and involved? What do you mean? Maybe I am not quite understanding what you mean by "long and involved". In fact, I cannot think of too many of the games I owned that were not pretty long and pretty involved.
I mean "long and involved" to be a game that has a lot of unique gameplay, aural, and visual content from start to finish. The N64 showed that it could do that with Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and quite a few other games, yes, but by and large those games were fewer and didn't have the same breadth or detail that PSX games easily had by comparison. Ocarina of Time was fun and long in terms of gameplay, but it relied upon a lot of recycled content, low-resolution content, other space saving tricks. It's just a fact that there weren't as many N64 games that were "involved" in the sense I'm trying to speak of here (levels/locations, enemies/challenges, music, voice acting, sound effects, textures, animation and the like).
The PSX, on the other hand, (just looking at the titles I own) had FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, the various Final Fantasy Anthology releases, Metal Gear Solid, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Symphony of the Night, and Vagrant story, all of which were amazing in terms of their content (yes, even movies and music is nice). Do you really, truly believe those games could have been done just as well for the N64 for the same costs? You believe that the CD format and the ease of translating content to the PSX had nothing to do with many game companies choosing it over the N64?
You're right in pointing out that the PSX had more games than the N64, and I suppose the ratio of short, simple games to long and involved games isn't that far off bewteen the two consoles. However, the more popular a system is, the more likely you are to get crap games being made for that system, so I don't really find a similar ratio of this kind to be anything important. The better question we should be asking in this respect is why one system got more games than another in general. In that sense, let's not forget that the N64 started out strong and didn't fail for the fact that it didn't have people who wanted good games. I'm convinced that the lower number of games being made for the N64 was due to the higher costs involved. A CD format allowed gaming companies' products to be created and copied in ways that were less time or money intensive.
C3PX said:
The PS2 outsold The GameCube, and I think even the Xbox (though I could be wrong), sales is not always an indicator of which console packs the most power or looks the best.
Where did I say the PSX packed more power or looked better than the N64?
I said the PSX's success over the N64 was no fluke and I outlined specific reasons. I know you focused on one of my reasons (quite frankly the weakest: "long and involved games"), but are you now saying that you didn't read my other, more substantial reasons?
The PS2, since you're bringing it up, was no fluke either. It came out long before the Gamecube or Xbox, offerred people DVD playback (which was a huge draw at the time), offerred backwards compatibility to PSX/PS1 games, had a lot of game-company support, and a lot of interest from people who were already fans of Sony's original playstation. Due to those reasons, the PS2 was a very successful system. It's all pretty simple. Do you think the world is just a stupid place and the free market is stupid? Sony made good decisions that paid off for them.