sony't what nintendo

One side needs more texture warping

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?

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

What happened to all the Sega kids?

Our dreams were cast and shattered, we became refugees in our own homes.
- easy Shakespeare, it's too early for me to cry
- In 1996, your dreams were far away. They might as well have been on Saturn.
- 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.

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.

And there's me, never owning either, just continuing to use my Genesis

I chose neither. PC games were getting good at that time. Sorry, but far superior to both those consoles.

Some of us have a split personality, I guess.

Some of us didn't have either.
And some of us have none

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.

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.
- You're not entirely wrong, https://youtu.be/DCt7UZkS-w4
  This 20 minute video is worth the watch. On paper, N64 had more power but there were a lot of weird limitations in how it could be utilized that affected the overall visual quality. Something I definitely noticed even when I was younger was how it seemed to rely on larger polygons with stretched textures and a smeared anti-aliasing a lot. Also just severely limited by cartridge space.
- 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.
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.

Yes, like now, console peasants, and PC gamers ;p

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.