Cartridges are better than disks. Disks (and the hardware that uses them) are more prone to being destroyed, and they decay a lot quicker. Any N64 game is going to survive a lot longer than any PS1 game preserved under the same conditions. It's hilariously ironic that, despite reluctantly moving to disks for the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U, that Nintendo kept improving the cartridge tech they used for their handhelds and used it for the Switch. With the death of physical disk media from Sony (which became glorified key codes anyways), cartridges are all that remain of physical media for future games. Cartridges are the video game equivalent of vinyl.
>>748944281No GBA game in the pic? Fake ass fan.
>>748944281>kept improving the cartridge tech>switch 1/2 cartridges have load times now just like discs
>>748944281But now the cartridges are just keys to download links locked to consoles that can blacklist your console
They’re more expensive to make and it’s the biggest reason why every Switch 2 game is a game key card for the physical edition
>>748944281>Nintendo kept improving the cartridge techlolwut. Nintendo had nothing to do with that. Flash storage just improved significantly during those 20 years.
>>7489444401st party Nintendo games have the full game on the cartridge.
>>748944281>no virtual boy cartridgeFaggot
>>748944281I just like physical
>>748944485There are hefty licensing fees and manufacturing costs compared to disks too.
>>748944526Kek
>>748944526GBA cartridge feels like the bigger omission
>>748944713I don't own any GBA carts :(
>>748944713Also Game Boy Color cartridges.
>>748944780>that'll be $200 sir
>>748944751Well, you should. GBA is comfy.
>>748944803Well, I guess you can buy some random shovelware GBC game.
>>748944780>>748944920>GBCnot its own console, doesn't count sorry
>>748944980It is, GBC games don't work on GB consoles.
>>748945046can't play new 3ds games on old 3ds either.
>>748945134Yes, it's its own console, just like DSi.
>>748944557Do you. Is that why you buy second hand N64 boxes off Ebay.
>>748944281The late ones are just custom SD cards, not cartridges.
PS1 derangement syndromeThe butthurt will be eternal. 30 years of hurt and counting
>>748944281>No GBC or GBAFucking fake ass fake Nintendo fan
>>748944508Hell, you could even argue new cartridges are worse due to them suffering from bitrotSelect 3DS games are already dyingIn about 10 years you'll have to assume that any older Switch release that is still sealed contains a dead cartridge
>>748944367lol, lmao.16x BluRay data transfer rate is 576 MBit/s, which translates to 90 Mbyte/s and that is under ideal conditions of no data fragmentation for loading and a complete sequential read. Most likely in practice it will be half that.Switch 1 cartridges have a read speed of 90 MByte/s, and they have that constantly since electronic storage is not subject to data fragmentation.Switch 2 cartridges have a read speed of 400 MByte/s.
>>748948206>Switch 2 cartridges have a read speed of 400 MByte/s.And yet they're still slightly slower than the console's built in memoryPS5 players must have been fooled into thinking discs are faster when all they do is install the game on the console
>>748944485>every150 games with physical versions are a game key cards out of 307 listed games total (although that list includes digital only games), most of them are games with file sizes well above what a cartridge can handle or would require the biggest capacity one which would bump up the price by like 20 bucks.Pretty much every 1st party game is a proper physical release with all data on the cartridge (IIRC the only exception is Pokopia, which is technically a 2nd party game as it's a game made by an outsourced company of an IP Nintendo doesn't fully own). I think the magic threshold is the 32GB mark. If your game is bigger than that chances are it will be on a Game Key Card. If it's less than that it will more likely contain the full game data.Granted the math is different for third party by virtue of having to give Nintendo 30% of their earnings, which makes the price impact of cartridges more severe, so for them the "magic threshold" may even be the 16GB mark.The current NAND crisis does not make things better, if it wasn't for that prices would have likely dropped enough for cartridges to make putting the full game on them more worth it.
>>748948312>And yet they're still slightly slower than the console's built in memoryProof?
>>748944281white of the game store worker to put the price tag sticker somewhere other than the fucking label.
>>748948312Cuz the built in Memory is an SSD/NVME storage, which is the fastest one there is currently.Any mobile media always has the big bottleneck of the interface connecting it with the rest of the system, while NVME sits directly on the motherboard and has no real bottleneck to speak of. NVME can become so fast that it needs it's own heatsink.It's essentially the same type of technology but completely unbound by bottlenecks.Even physical spinny HDDs are faster than 16x Blu Rays... it's why the latter games in the PS3 lifecycle all required you to install them at least partially and installation became a requirement with the PS4 on. Even the PS1 was infamously slow, only that back in the day RAM held all the data after loading it, but this is why PS1 games in particular were often based around small rooms and such, while the N64 was the one that had the "open area" games. IIRC Spyro was pretty much the game with the biggest levels on PS1. Maybe also Driver (which had a super simplistic world and short field of vision)... if you managed to get past the Tutorial that is. Many games on PS1 also used prerendered backgrounds because 1. easy way to cheat "better graphics" especially on a CRT TV, 2. since it's just a single PNG file they are loaded fast compared to a 3d environment and 3. they could afford it due to 600MB of disc space compared to N64's 8MB.N64 meanwhile had SM64, Banjo (and Conker), DK64 Zelda OoT and MM, etc. all games that sported "massive" worlds for the standards of the time, all because the N64 had no problem streaming the data as you played seamlessly from the cartridge.
>>748948437It’s going to be more soon. Publishers are pushing it. Danganrompa 2x2 had to cancel its Switch 2 preorders because they were forced into the key card. Same with Persona 4. They’re realizing now it’s much cheaper and slowly it will take over outside Nintendo mainline titles.
>>748944349not to mention virtual boy
>>748948684Damn, didn't realize PS1 and N64 worked so differently because of disc/cartridgesThat's neat to know, thanks
>>748948684>>748949594I appreciate this era of console gaming where the limitations of the system informed what games were made for it. Consoles have no personality now.
