As someone who hates cutscenes, that was fine by me. Cutscenes rip you out of the game to present a story in a different mode, and often it could be completely done by using the game mechanics directly. Not to mention until quite recently they would also take large loading times.

Even if you take cutscenes out of it, there's simply almost 90% less space for a game - and cartridges were more expensive for the publisher to boot.

There's no denying that there's great N64 games, but Nintendo crippled the console outside of first and second (Rare) party development. The same trend continued with the Gamecube (despite it being more powerful than the PS2, the Gamecube disc held 25% of the capacity of a PS2 DVD).

If their portables hadn't dominated the market, the mid 90s to mid 00s would've been a terrible time for the company.

Of course Nintendo is doing great now, so you could say it's all a moot point.

I know that there’s been activity in the emulation scene around “extending” the SNES emulators with features the SNES never had during its lifetime, like CD-quality audio aka the PSX, or hi-res texture packs, or faster + higher-resolution poly rendering for games using the SuperFX chip; and there have been ROMhacks and home brew that take advantage of these extensions.

Has anyone tried doing the same for the N64? Seeing what would be possible for an N64 game given an emulator tweaked to allow an unlimited ROM and VRAM size budget and (effectively) zero DSP DMA delay?