The N64 was also the most powerful console in its generation, so really it’s the next most powerful before the Dreamcast. It only looked like crap in its era

The N64 was also the most powerful console in its generation, so really it’s the next most powerful before the Dreamcast. It only looked like crap in its era because carts were expensive compared to CDs. Which is less of an issue now. Also the hardware antialiasing and overuse of fog didn’t help its case. Thankfully the former can be fixed either via hardware mods or emulation. I’d be still be interested to see if those demos you saw were full games or not. I’ve seen a lot of cool effects in games get abandoned because they didn’t scale well to a fully fleshed out game.