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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

Why is this downvoted?

For using the omniscient voice. Many people don't think Nintendo hardware is a letdown.

Then they aren't comparing Nintendo consoles to any other console of the same generation.

The thing is, Nintendo consoles are so unique in the experience and quality they provide, nobody really cares that they don't have ALL THE GIGS. They're just a lot more fun.

That's their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. It shows that great games don't have to have top of the line graphics horsepower behind them but it also means pretty much every graphically intensive third party game will never be ported to the system (which only hurts the console in the long run).

I don't blame them for not chasing the top end but I just wish they'd come just a little closer to it.

Or they realize that comparing console hardware isn't a useful exercise. The upgrade cycle hasn't done anything to make games better in years; the Wii came closest, but required a marketing pivot that third parties didn't want to make.

I mean at that rate all consoles are a letdown because a gaming PC will always be better.

Just guessing, but probably because Nintendo's magic is regarded to be mostly in the software - the gameplay experience, stories/characters, etc - and not contained in the power or cutting edge of the hardware almost at all.

Nintendo's hardware had never failed to be slightly disappointing to anybody expecting something anywhere near the cutting edge.

The Ninty magic has always been in their playful treatment of their handful of IPs, with their bizarre ability to randomly drop something truly genre defining.

Nintendo stopped being a hardware company when they knocked the playing cards on the head.

Everything they made up until the Wii was far from disappointing. The NES was way ahead of anything near that price, the SNES was competitive, the N64 chose different tradeoffs than the competition but was probably more powerful, and the GameCube was better than the PS2.

> Nintendo's hardware had never failed to be slightly disappointing to anybody expecting something anywhere near the cutting edge.

I'd argue the N64 was cutting edge when it was released.

I think you're letting the immediate past (Wii and WiiU) unfairly color your perceptions of Nintendo. Even as recently as Gamecube, Nintendo released a "cutting edge" (from a console gamer's perspective) system. It offered performance near to XBox and certainly more powerful than the PS2. I say this even though I had a PS2 that generation because I found the extreme parallelism in the architecture really interesting. I even had one of the PS2 Linux kits, though I didn't do all that much with it.

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