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Another example would be Banjo Kazooie. I've seen a lot of people comment that it had better graphics for the N64 than say OoT or SM64, but I think from a legacy perspective this works against it. Rareware tried to get every last ounce of detail out of the art. While at the time it seemed to be a technical feat, I think today it's very easy to look at the graphics and see what they were trying to be as opposed to what they actually were. From that angle, I would say that OoT and SM64 actually have better graphics as I play them today since it's easy to respect them for a complete work in themselves. It's harder for me to appreciate BK's graphics because they're trying to do something that was out of their reach, and it shows now that we have games that have done what Rareware tried so desperately to achieve.
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To be honest, the N64 is not a good console to make comparisons with, specifically because it uses a rendering method which often stretched out textures to fit polygons, making those textures very blurry in the process. Every game from Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie to Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark had to suffer because of it. If any games out there were 'going out of their reach,' it would probably be the majority of N64 games.
To a great extent, it didn't matter how detailed developers made their game because the hardware limitations got in the way. Games that were simplistic, like SM64 and Diddy Kong Racing tended to look better because they either used no textures at all, or smaller textures meant to be repeated. Whereas if you look at games like Goldeneye 007 or Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter, there are a lot of textures that got very distorted. Game developers certainly wanted to make their games look very good, but the constraints they had to work within made it hard to do that.
People look at the N64 through rose-tinted glasses a lot of the time, and it really wasn't that great of a console. A lot of Nintendo's sales during that time came from the release of Gameboy Color titles, and not from the N64. (32.93 million N64 units sold, vs. 118.69 million GBC units sold.) The number of titles available on it were very limited, and developers working with it often ran into trouble with RAM issues, which is why they had to release the Expansion Pak in the first place. And even then, it didn't fix any issues with how the console renders things.
It definitely lost a lot of sales to Playstation, which used far better rendering methods and sold about 102.49 million units. And if you look at games on that system, the ones released later on definitely outshine the ones released near launch. (For example, compare games like Jumping Flash and Bubsy 3D to Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy IX)
However, this kind of thing doesn't really apply to 2D consoles, because everything was drawn by the hardware in pretty much the same fashion. There are games on 2D systems which are
objectively more detailed than others, and picking a game with simpler graphics over a game with more detailed ones is a matter of taste, not talent.