Atari Pogostick
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Posts posted by Atari Pogostick
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I dont really have the knowledge to answer such a question, but rather than get into a tech debate: what game title would be the pinnacle of NES graphical capability without the help from the MM chips?
Any guesses? I would think Life Force would be in there.
It's likely SMB if not some other game around the same time.
Looking at that list of early titles, Nintendo would have been in big, big trouble if they hadn't used mappers in their later games. The technological gap between something like Clu Clu Land and a more substantial NES title like Castlevania III is pretty vast. It's almost as if they were released during two different console generations.
7800 was equal to second generation of NES chips with native hardware so that List of games where there was no chips would make the famicom vastly weaker than the 7800. So imagine how the SMS would look. (or in japan the TG16.)
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Tough topic to talk about as not a lot of people have had real, genuine experience with the platform and its library.
From my perspective, Nokia had a great idea, but the execution was quite poor and they ended up shooting themselves in the foot with the original model. Having to hold it sideways while talking into it made it one of the largest targets of memes at the time, and having to remove the battery to change games was highly illogical as well. It also didn't help that the marketing wasn't great, it wasn't always clear what was required to use it ("Does it have to have cell service? Can it only be used as a games machine?"), the price was high (assuming you didn't need a cell phone) and its initial launch lineup was pretty lackluster despite having some great licenses (games like Virtua Tennis, Puzzle Bobble, and Moto GP running at a handful of frames a second; Releases like Pandemonium and Tomb Raider missing music and FMV).
Nokia fixed most of the problems with the release of the second model (the QD) in 2004. The screen was slightly larger and brighter, you didn't have to rotate it on its side to listen to phone calls, an external cart slot was added, and the price was more competitive. The unit also felt solid and it even reviewed well with critics, whereas the original model did not. It was pretty much too late by this point though, the damage was done and sales never really picked up. I am of the mindset that had they started with this model, things would have turned out much differently.
As far as games are concerned, the N-Gage has a decent library. I wouldn't call it top-tier, but it's a lot better than most people give it credit for. Some of my personal favorites are Sonic N, Super Monkey Ball, Ashen, Colin McRae 2004, Mile High Pinball, Snakes, Asphalt: Urban GT, Requiem of Hell, among a bunch of others.
One of the other neat things about it is it was the first handheld I had where I could add my own software downloaded from the internet, including emulators. Game Boy compatibility was solid enough and so that was a nice bonus to have. You could also download Java games and apps, most of which weren't very good, but it was something else (a nice bonus if you had a QD, as they stripped the built-in MP3 player software on that model, but you could get around it by downloading a MP3 player app).
I'm a little wary of that supposed "3 Million sold" stat. I was working at Electronic's Boutique when the system launched up through the couple years after and I probably could have counted the amount of units we sold on one hand (and two of those were me). At one of the neighboring stores I shopped at when not on the job, I was the only one to actually pre-order new releases. That's only anecdotal experience no doubt, but I think it's worth something. If it did indeed sell that many, North America wasn't likely a huge part of that and I think you would see a lot more available on the secondhand market.
There seems to be a decent amount on Ebay, but you have to look for it across two different categories as some N-gages are sold as phones instead of video games.
I do believe the 3 million is likely world wide.
Games weren't the problem. Nokia was the problem along with time of release entirely.
Had they not had to juggle around to get to the game in the thing, that would have helped. Had the device come out a couple years later and used a more common core to run games (like Android) that was easily adopted with room to grow that would have been huge too. A very solid marketplace like googleplay/apple store would have been massive as well. You basically had this expensive clumsy rubiks cube mess of a phone you had to remove the battery from to pop in SD like cards to play games of varying quality. The screen was ok but nothing awesome about it and the odd size/resolution were probably an issue for some too. When you had to compare this to a slim folded up GBA Sp original, and shortly after into the DS and PSP realm, the thing was just screwed entirely. It was just out there from within later 2003 into some point of 2005, the far better executed and equally crappily marketed Neo Geo Pocket Color lasted more than twice as long and did far better just before it came about. The device by design, timing, and garbage execution was dead on arrival except to technophiles hoping to jump onto the next big thing, and once it imploded about a year into it, rats dove off that ship fast.
Don't think the NGP sold 3 million units.
As for your other points, I can see where your coming from. I do have to disagree on common core though, the Nokia N-gage ran Symbian and a lt of phones were using Symbian at the time, in fact, Symbian was the biggest OStat the time the N-gage came out. I don't think Nokia could have done anything better than that in 2003.
Hey, I played the N-Gage. I owned it, even. It wasn't great but it really was the best gaming you were going to get out of a cell phone before the rise of the smartphone. I also had a Kyocera Slider Sonic around that time, and the games on that were utterly dismal... it had a port of Mega Man 2 that was so clunky and unresponsive it prompted me to hurl my phone across the room in an impotent rage.
The N-Gage was closer to a legitimate game device than its contemporaries. It could handle polygons better than the Game Boy Advance and its 2D was respectable... I recall a couple of Atari collections that seemed like they were using emulation, and felt like the actual arcade games.
Having said that, I have some big beefs with the device. The screen is vertically oriented and painfully small. There were two N-Gage ports of GBA games (King of Fighters 2 and Sonic Advance) that didn't hold up on the system due to the awkward aspect ratio. The button layout was, uh, less than optimal, although the numeric keys were useful for Worms World Party. Although technically impressive, the Playstation ports felt much too cramped. Games that were allegedly "killer apps" didn't excite me much, like Mile High Pinball.
I'd say the N-Gage holds even with the Gizmondo. The hardware isn't as good but the software was better. Neither had a chance of finding an audience, though. Why bother when the GBA was less expensive and the soon to arrive PSP offered a far better experience without the hassle of a phone contract?
So before anything else, please keep in mind that Smartphones existed at this time. Primarily led by Blackberry followed by Windows and palm pda clones, however you are correct in that the N-gage was not considered a smartphone at the time.. for some reason.
With that said, you are right, looking at the Specs of the N-gage as well as other portable multi-media devices, the N-gage was likely the best you were going to get when it came out in terms of portable gaming. Yeah I think the QD model should have released first and the original N-gage had some issues, but if you were an ethusiast that was your only option unfortunately.
Now as for the Gizmondo, i wouldn't really compare the two as the N-gage actually sold to people, had features people used everyday (Mp3 etc.) and had software. I'd say the Nuon maybe.
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If GameCube had a "mascot," which it doesn't, it would not be Mario, because Sunshine kinda stunk out loud. It would be Link, as in Legend of Zelda guy. Link was in these GameCube games:
Ocarina of Time Master Quest
Zelda Collector's Edition
The Wind Waker
Four Swords Adventures
Twilight Princess
Soul Calibur II
Super Smash Brothers Melee
Also, per this:
But it doesn't matter, because Link is not a f&cking "mascot."
Gamecubes Mascot is Nintendos mascot, so yeah Mario is the mascot. As a Mascot game Sunshine wasn't reallty that good to many people. So in this case you would choose one of the other three options.
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i disagree on the PS2 one- i think Ratchet/Clank or Kratos from God of War were more well-known.
Jak sold 6 million copies.
He's about as anti-"mascot" as it gets. Even Cortana. I see the OP is trying hard to find one per system but it just made me cringe a bit, should have gone with "Which system selling game...". Sony & MS simply did not have any mascots.
Sunshine was a classic, Jak quite awesome, but Halo was undeniably the most innovative (and fun for a FPS fan like me) game in a long time. If you've played it on Legendary that is, since that mode cranked the AI up to 11 and transformed the whole game into an incredible SP survival sandbox. It was ahead of its time, a truly next-gen title - well worthy the coveted 10/10 from teh Edge. In fact I don't think it has been matched to this day in the SP FPS realm (STALKER coming the closest) since the devs found out it's so much easier and profitable to substitute designing complex AI-centered gameplay with multiplayer..
Master Chief was the mascot of Xbox and still is why are you guys changing the definition of mascot? Mascot doesn't always mean furry animal at the soccer game.
No Ratchet and Clank? To me that's the Playstation's mascot. This poll is invalid.
Also a great point.
Jak was advertised as a mascot for part of the PS2's life, Ratchet never was, also Jak 1 sold over 4-5 million copies. R&C didn't take off until the third game in: Up your arsenal.
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The "zooming" games are a different beast in my book. Yes they do use the scaling capabilities of the HW but I believe (but maybe I am wrong) that when "superscaler" is mentioned the thought goes to Outrun, AfterBurner etc... basically fast paced "seen from behind" racers/shooters that attempt to simulate 3D-ish experiences (feel free to correct me) ... that's the list I'd like to get wrt the OP stated period.
I'm sure there are some, I am not sure how many and what those actually are.
SNK games couldn't zoom out, they could shrink and grow the same picture. So what they usually did was start with the sprites pre-shrunk half-way so that the camera can create an illusion of sprites zooming in and out. Scaling games were more taxing and harder to make because when that space ship got closer you had to add significantly more detail. When that ship got close up in view you had to see the crew on the ship, the weapons, the windows, etc, and then they would shrink and grow those sprites.
SNK used a cheaper short-cut of doing something a bit similar but no where near the same thing. Art of Fighting is a great example of an SNK game using the "zoom" trick. but SNk didn't have the tech or resources for actual scaling on the Neo-geo.
Even if you had hardware that supported rotation and scaling (like the SNES), you didn't have enough memory to make anything that resembled the game. By the time a system that could make those ports arcade perfect shipped (The 3DO in late 1993), 3D polygons (quads, triangles, whatever...nobody cares) were already in arcades and the next big thing.
This is a myth. The Lynx has better scaling than the SNES so the tech was there. I think the real reasons home consoles had limited to zero scaling ability was because they wanted to cut costs. The SNES was cheap hardware with a lot of cut corners, and was designed to make that up with cartridge enhancements. The Genesis was released 3(?) years before the SNES in NA and 2 years before in Japan so there was no way that nor the TG16 were going to have the tech in them even if they wanted to.
The Neo-Geo and the SNES were the only consoles that could have pulled scaling off, however everybody else was so far away that the SNES mode-7 was seen as a wow factor so Nintendo had no reason to spend money on that. Neo-Geo was already a money sink and it was not an open platform, it was one of the most restrictive, so uou could only use what SNK had in their architecture. The Neo-Geo had hardware for mode-7 like games and the "Zoom trick" I mentioned above but not much in hardware scaling. The Neo-Geo had powerful processors but scaling or 3D was completely out of the question due to how the hardware was built.
As for 3D, 3D was already in arcades way before 93. 2D games just generally were easier to produce and had more success in general until the mid 90's. Saturn and jaguar were the first pieces of tech where it was possible to have scaling games at Home, why Sega never brought more over (theres or third parties) to pad out its library even before they reacted to Sony, i have no idea. Atari did kind of have an excuse, they were flat broke and the Jaguar's 2D tools were garbage. I'm surprised we even got Super Burn-out. While Super Burn-out was more than one the SNES could do it still wasn't anywhere near the arcade motorycle games. It doesn't even touch A.B. cop and that was an 80's game.
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Ngage was a monument to "do all devices" before that became a thing. It does a bit of everything, and none of it well. Console wise, it's equal or better than game boy advance (some games were far better, while it choked for mystery reasons on others)
The form factor simply sucked. I know I always harp on controller as opposed to touch screens, but there's a little "it needs to be good" in there too, and it's buttons sucked. Vertical format screen is unfriendly to most game types.sucked
It's a cellphone, which sounds good, now. Back then though, cellphones were a lot less friendly. If you wanted a game, you likely got the cheaper gba, or even psp was released in 05, and did a good music and video player too. Just minus the have to have a plan cellphone service.
As to saving it? Release it as a standalone good form factor handheld. Either alone, or side by side with the cellphone variant. Until psp came out, it was a capable device, but the cell was an insurmountable saddle bag that simply killed it as a games device. And the games machine held it back as a cellphone due to price of added hw and funky form factor.
What did you think of the QD model? You think if it launched with that one it may have made a difference?
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https://www.nintendo.com/nes-classic/super-mario-bros-and-super-mario-bros-3-developer-interview
It's not exactly what I said, but here he uses the term "grand culmination" with regards to the cartridge development on the Famicom. I'll have to dig deeper but he seems to imply that Super mario Bros was it with regards to "stock" hardware.
Say what?
Anyway while not that amazing SMB is still a good accomplishment with stock hardware.
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So what it at one point was a brand new chip people had to learn about what it can and cant do
Maybe you are some one who can pick up a paint brush for the first time and paint Mona lisa but most are not
Whats nintendo going to do spend a pile of money and not release games until the hardware is pushed to its max
Devshad nearly 3 years with the system and produced the same results.
The user above says SMB was around the best the machine could do. If true that would explain why that happened.
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Miyamoto is on record saying that Super Mario Bros was the Famicom being pushed to its limit without the use of extra addons and chips. The FDS was Nintendos first attempt at making use of the Famicoms modular capabilities.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Oh really? Can you post a link to that interview when you can?
If that's true that SMB is around the peak of what the hardware can do, then that means it's more powerful than an CV/MSX, but only slightly, with stock hardware.
That would imply those chips really made a HUGE difference to that systems longetivity.
Quite interesting.
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No it's cause humons did not take full advantage of a chip they never had used before as their skill progressed so did the quality
Huh?
The Famicom basically produced similar with stock hardware until they made chip add-ons more frequent.
If the stock NES with ppu was as capable as it says on paper there would have to be a reason why developers didn't push it more and instead went with the short cut of adding extended hardware.
Look at Antartic Adventure and Battle City, those games came out later in 1985, the CV can run both those games, in fact AA is on the CV!
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PSP was March 2005, $250. I remember because I was there on the first day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable
No one likes selling phones without a service plan, that's the definition of losing money.
Service plan and data plan are not the same thing. Most parents were not buying their kids data plans back then, it was usually for themself.
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- 2 kB of external RAM to store tile layout and auxiliary color information for background graphics (commonly referred to as nametables)
- 288 (256+32) bytes of internal DRAM for sprite attribute storage. This is measured in the amount of address space consumed; not every bit of every byte exists in the PPU.
- 32 bytes of internal SRAM for palette storage. As for sprite attribute storage, not all bits exist in the PPU.
- 8 × 8 or 8 × 16 (selectable) sized sprites
- Two external 4 kB tile sets with space for 256 tiles each, usually stored in either RAM or ROM on the game cartridge
- Up to 64 sprites (movable objects) on screen simultaneously (only 8 visible per scan line)
- 25 colors simultaneously (although more colors are possible using programming tricks) from a hardware color palette of 54 colors
- Picture resolution of 256 × 240 pixels (fully visible on PAL, but cropped to 256 × 224 on most NTSC television sets)
there, saved the bother, that's what a stock ppu can do</p>
On paper this looks like it would produce more than what we got with the early famicom releases. I wonder if there's a bottleneck that was only circumvented after chips were added?
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Didnt someone start this exact same discussion like, two years ago, that descended into a pedantic argument over what "stock" meant?
I don't see the confusion. Stock just means the hardware that was released in 1983.
The first few years of games released on the famicom mostly only used the stock hardware for the most part.
I'm wondering how capable that hardware was. Was it slightly more powerful than the early 80's consoles or was that around the extent of it's power without enhancements?
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The N-Gage didn't have very many games. Perhaps more games and more developers would have helped. I love my N-Gage and have a nearly complete collection.
It had a decent amount earlier but they dropped the bar hard in the later half of it's run I agree.
They had good packaging to, all the GBA game boxes were cheap cardboard. Yuck.
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For me , the N-gage came at least 2 years too early. Ironically, it was retired the year it could have been released and get some success.
I don't remember really well, but phones from teenagers and young adults here became common around 2007. Before that date, GSM suscriptions were mostly targeted toward professionnals, with expensive monghtly fee and even more expensive data costs.
So teenagers wouldn't get the N-gage because parents were worried about the potential massive phone bill.
Teenagers would prefer the PSP anyway.
Young adults would get a phone from their work so wouldn't use the N-gage as a personal phone, as it's a generation that grew without it so they didn't jumped all on it right on.
Of course it's really just my opinion, but for me, the N-gage is one of those concept that was awesome, but came at the wrong time, and when the time came, it was perceived as old and outdted.
Psp was late 2004.
I get your other points but data plans were not packaged back then so all the parents would have to do is not buy a data package. This would prevent the bill, and razrs had subs so I'm sure if Nokia got more carriers selling it for $99, or free with contract it may have done a bit better. Maybe.
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I remember buying 4 Dreamcasts due to issues and all of them broke by either the drive failing or power issues.
Oddly the 5Th DC I got, the black sports one, works to this day, and that's with years of bootleg discs too. Since then I got 5 more white DCs between 2004-2009, all of those broke by 2014. My friend got two black ones and two white ones at the same time and one of his blacks ones is the only one of the 4 still workimg. Today.
Curious.
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By Stock I mean without any additional graphical chips in the cartridges.
I'm curious because this is a topic seldom discussed, people bring up games like SMB3 or Startropics as NES graphical achievements even though the system can't run those games without out the box.
Now, surely the original NES is still a capable machine. It is clearly able to stand with other early 80's machines like the ColecoVision, but not quite as powerful as a 7800.
What I'm curious about is, is the stock famicom still slightly more capable than the pre-crash consoles or are games like antartic adventure among the best it can produce with stock hardware?
I know the Ppu the Famicom uses helps with the chips, but does it make much of a difference with stock hardware for drawing graphics?
Also did the stock famicom have the Yamaha audio at launch or was that later added-in?
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Plus, N64 was even worse. It had cleaner polygons, but ran them at 12fps.
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Some of this isn't *quite* accurate. In a way Sega was right about 5th gen consoles not touching their Model 2 or Model 3 boards in technical terms; nothing on those systems had the visual fidelity of arcade Daytona or Virtua Fighter 3, and most general accounts are that 5th gen 3D games have aged "poorly" (which I only agree with in terms of their visuals on technical terms, b/c artistically a lot of those games are still great and a lot of them still play great too).
Also regarding quads, well a large chunk of the industry was using triangles, but it was ubiquitous as it is today. And at that time the use of quads had advantages particularly given the speed of typical processors at the time. Moreover Sega's 3D arcade teams were very used to quads and even Nvidia's first 3D card was quad-based, so it could've panned out either way honestly if Saturn was managed better. After all, systems like PS2 were also pretty esoteric and hard to work with, but they also had the market behind them to make the pain worth putting up with to developers.
That kind of also leads into another point; I get the perception by many that Saturn was primarily a 2D machine, but it was always designed with 3D in mind from the get-go. However, getting good 3D was always going to be a challenge for any system that generation. Sega simply misread the market's hunger for 3D at the time and thought 2D would have another gen as the big driver in the home, while if people wanted really good 3D, they'd go to the arcades. So the initial Saturn specs seemed closer to something like Model 1 in terms of 3D but with support for a few things like texture-mapping I'm assuming, seeing as how 32X supported texture-mapping, only in Saturn's case via custom graphics chips instead of brute-force w/ a SH2.
So no I wouldn't say Sega was arrogant regarding 3D in home consoles around the time; they always planned for Saturn to support 3D, but they underestimated the market's thirst for 3D in the home. Ironically a lot of that thirst was built up from Sega's own 3D games, plus Namco's stuff like Ace Driver and Ridge Racer, so in hindsight it's easy to say "they should've know better", but remember Sega (and Nintendo) didn't have the production facilities of someone like Sony, nor the assembly processes etc.
Sony could eat the costs of pushing high-fidelity 3D in a home console by leveraging profits from their other divisions; Sega and Nintendo didn't enjoy that luxury to quite the same level (sure, Nintendo had handhelds and Sega had arcades, but we know what started happening with arcades in the late '90s), so home 3D for them would've needed to operate in a financial space that didn't bleed them too hard and that meant being more modest. on that note, Nintendo caught a lucky break w/ Silicon Graphics for N64, it's an opportunity Sega should've maybe capitalized on but it's evident their home teams were adapting to Saturn's design philosophy and, like Nintendo, Sega always prioritized in-house needs above 3rd parties.
I guess there's also the idea Sega intentionally limited Saturn 3D in order to keep their arcade efforts as the clear marquee ones. While it's fun to entertain the idea, I don't think '90s Sega, even a utterly idiotic as things got w/ SoJ on the business level, would have intentionally shot themselves so bad in the foot so as to purposely cripple momentum in an expanding home console market just to keep their arcade stuff looking strong. Especially considering such a Saturn would've made it an even better proposition in Japan where Nintendo was still dominating.
Honestly I can't blame Sega, even after launch of the Saturn. High-fidelity 3D wasn't really available for consoles in 94 unless you wanted a $600 console. But Sega likely thought Sony got some secret tech to get the "textures" in their games. Which ended up being false.
If you look at 3DO games from 94-96 and psx/sat games from 94-96 the games mostly seem like they were from the same machine.
In hindsight, I think Segas reaction to Sony was silly. Yeah, PSX had demoed games with textures. But those games ended up running like shit. They really had nothing to worry about ironically.
In the end the only significant hardware advantage Sony had over the 3DO was memory for textures. I always felt the first part of that gen was in stasis because you barely saw improvements until 1998 and by then the DC was out.
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The N-Gage was a mistake we'd all like to forget. It's like that godawful haircut you got freshman year of college. The less said, the better.
But what was so bad about it to make you say this though? I had one and the only issues I could think of was the taco and the way you inserted games. The games played well, at least the ones I had.
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I actually believe they should have went for broke and released the promised 7800 in 1984. They could have took out a corporate loan if they really needed to. The original 7800 was a beast of a machine that was upgradable. Would have sailed through the crash with ease.
I'd agree with op if the 5200 was alone, but the ColecoVision was huge and more powerful. It's was also the reason we got the NES, 7800, and SMS in the first place.
Also the ColecoVision got the licenses like B.C., Flintstones, and Dukes of Hazzard.
I would also like to stress that the 5200 also made the CV controllers seem "good" by comparison, which is quite the feat given how bad the CV controllers are.
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PC and Atari got all the devs that would end up big successes and would end up on consoles years later when the Xbox original launched. Most the developers that made C64 or Amiga games went bankrupt or were brought out because they didn't produce many games with lasting appeal. They may get a head start on the SNES but people didn't mind paying $100 for N64 games when Saturn games were $40, so just assuming that cheaper games would help Commodore compete against the Mega Drive and the SNES is silly.
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Remember when DOOM had an engine so advanced that even "polygonal" game consoles could barely run it despite it being 2D? That should tell you we were not even close to ready for real 3D at the time. Old 3D arcade games still gave N64 a run for its money and that was the best we could do?
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Of the major consoles released during the "6th gen", which would include: XBox, PS2, Gacmeube, and DC, which console mascot had the best game? This isn't about whether you like the system itself more than the other, just which mascot game was the best to play in your honest opinion. Poll Included
Here are our contenders:
1. Sonic Adventure
2. Halo: Combat Evolved
3. Super Mario Sunshine
4: Jak and Daxter: PL
For me it's a tough one between Jak and Halo, but Halo is a lot more fun for me. It's a great fast-paced game that had some superb graphics and atmosphere for the time. Jak shared some of these traits as well, but it was a little too slow for me. Not only that, Jak had some stages that dragged on a bit too long, and the game is based on a tired concept. Sure Jaks is probably the best traditional 3D platformer of all, and the only "collectathon" to have much jumping in the first place, but we've played this game before multiple-times.
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What are the graphic capabilities of a Stock Famicom/NES?
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
Not saying it's not impressive but "blows away" might be a bit much. NES color advantage is the strength in screenshots but homebrew MSX/CV versions of SMB exist and shows the game can run on those consoles.
In japan however SMB was clearly better than the competition over there by miles. Which is funny considering the SG-1000 was basically a Sega branded Colecovision (minus the bios).