Nintendo 64



"The fun machine."

The Nintendo 64 was famous for bringing the astonishing 3D power of a Silicon Graphics workstation to vidya. It has a respectable library, especially in the 3D platformer / "collectathon" genre. Also, its built-in 4 controller slots helped spawn some epic multiplayer party games and racers. However, it is sorely lacking in genres like RPG, fighting, or shmups. It was quite successful in the USA, but did poorly in Japan, a distant third place after the PlayStation and the Saturn.

An essential add-on is the Expansion Pak, which doubles the console's RAM, allowing many games to run with better framerate, higher resolution, and extra effects. It is even obligatory for a number of games to run at all.

The controller slot offered 3 important features: the memory card, the rumble pak, and the transfer pak (which allowed connectivity with some GBC games).

There was a China-only variant, the iQue Player (or Shén Yóu Ji), which could load games from the internet or special kiosks - similarly to the Famicom Disk System or Super Famicom's Nintendo Power cartridges. But China being China, only 14 games were released before the system was abandoned due to rampant piracy.

The Nintendo 64 also had a short-lived disk add on called the 64DD, only released in Japan.

Videos
Hz8mW7DrOxY