I had a love-hate relationship with my 64 and Nintendo in general. On the one hand, I was a smallish child and that controller was all sorts of torture after 3-4 hours of gaming. It was a never ending source of aggravation just to control the camera in most games. I remember renting some fighter, a Virtua Fighter clone of some kind, I couldn't get my character to move beyond a drunken sway and the whole thing was monstrously slow just...watching them attack made me rue the day I bought this thing.
Then... well - there are the Nintendo IPs, and just as awesome, Rare. Or it was once upon a blue moon.
Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, Golden Eye, Banjo Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding, Super Smash Brothers, Perfect Dark, Pokemon Arena, Conker's Bad Fur Day, X-Wing Fighter and even Tony Hawk Pro Skater -- games that made me squee~ with delight. Even if they were all the system had to offer, amid what would be a rather limited selection of total crap, the amount of sheer enjoyment condensed into those hours of game play -- of playing an splitscreen deathmatch with friends at a party for the first time, or looking up at the sky and seeing that gott damn moon menacing me, or being attacked by a singing pile of excrement -- these are among my fondest memories. On the other hand, there's Superman 64.
The Gamecube was a doorstop pretty quickly, and while I have some affection for my Wii... it's nearly as limited as the 64 in terms of outside content. Buying the Wii version of any multi-platform game just seems masochistic. 90% of game designers had no idea how to incorporate motion into what they were doing. Nintendo was doubling down on a concept which is still low-functional and awkward most of the time.
Still better than Kinect, which is definitely designed for masochists.
At the same time -- I was and am deeply heartened by the content available on the DS, it's the closest thing they've produced to recapturing that SNES luv.
So it's up and down with Nintendo since SNES. Sony may have weaker launch titles and a touch of megalomania, but they produce a machine that is the least imposing for game designers to deal with. You're guaranteed a good time if only by the law of averages.