Begging the question, aren't we?! Of the examples displayed, I much prefer Star Fox's fx to Silent Bomber's. They fit the game's style well, and the explosions when killing an enemy are just the right amount of rewarding, while not being so ostentatious as to be distracting. SF64 nailed the game feel of destroying enemies, those small little intangibles that make the game satisfying on a visceral level, as Nintendo is so good at doing.

So the 'good explosions' were possible on N64 if you did the blending+clamp by hand?

  > Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_arithmetic