Nintendo arrived late into the 32-bit war and as such arrived with the console that had the most impressive specs. Or rather they should have, but they stuffed it. The Nintendo 64 had two major disadvantages, the first being a lack of storage space in its primary media format, and the second being a lack of polygon pushing power. Storage space is an incredibly important factor for games developers, and the advent of the CDROM provided them with all the space they could possibly need. But Nintendo, worried more about preventing piracy then developing an efficient gaming system, decided that the N64 would use a cartridge instead.

Now a cartridge is okay if the games made for it look cool, but Nintendo had a very interesting idea. They said to themselves, let's have some really cool special effects like tri linear filtering, anti aliasing and a built in z buffer. Unfortunately they forgot to think about the issue which is usually the rate limiting step in terms of FPS rates in games, the number of polygons that can be drawn per second. The Playstation, and Saturn, can draw over twice the number of polygons per second that the N64 can. That is why you never see any highly detailed 3d fighting games on the N64. The N64 is good at drawing moderate amounts of very large polygons, like in Super Mario 64, but not at drawing heaps of very small polygons.