Atari Pogostick
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Posts posted by Atari Pogostick
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I agree that the youtube scene has definitely changed and although I love guys like MJR, the social aspect of these youtube channels has diminished in favor of in video ads, patreon requests, superchats, and algorithm analysis to maximize views. It was a more intimate and friendly activity 8 or 10 years ago and I miss those times. I'm also not a fan of the e-begging and it seems everyone wants to open a video game museum and shills for donations. One of the few I don't mind doing this is the 8-bit Guy since he makes truly informative and entertaining videos with the equipment he gets in from viewers, and doesn't just show shit off and put it on a shelf.
I think YouTube monetization, at least in its current form since 2013, has killed off a lot of the channels I used to watch from Classic Game Room to Turbo Views. Same goes for patreon.
It ironically brings me a new appreciation for Irate gamer who did all the editing and special effects himself and basically almost never asked for money. He did it for fun and for his fans, who asked him if THEY COULD give him money. Now that's how it should be!
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Edit: NVM seems the mods will let regular go but only go after new guys.
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how's that vinegar working for you, @ataripogostick?
if you're genuinely curious about differences between 3DO and Jaguar, or discussing them, check out this LOCKED thread that's pretty much the same thing.
Weird it's almost like you didn't read the thread because it's not about the jagaur vs. 3DO, it's about the jaguar and it's 3D.
Maybe comprehension isn't your strong suit?
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*sidesteps the drama*
This is actually an interesting (and tough!) question to me.
I've always been more of a Game Boy guy, but having been recently reintroduced to the Game Gear (I also had one as a kid but it died at some point and I just forgot about it)--and simply introduced to the Lynx--it's a little murkier for me than I would have previously thought.
I still think I'd go with the Game Boy on the basis of its library--it just has more games that I really like. But I'd be lying if I said wasn't envious of the Lynx's and Game Gear's screen and graphics.
If it was cheaper to put in a back-lit screen back then and the GG and Lynx got lower prices things may have been a bit more competitive. I mean battery life would still be an issue though.
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Atari Pogostick: Please desist from name-calling, and from submitting a report every time you feel that someone is derailing a thread. That's not what the "Report" button is for.
Interesting the others don't get anything for name calling but when i do it later back to them it's fine. Nice modding there.
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The real answer is not technical. The real answer is that the 3DO sold around 2 million units, where the Jaguar sold "less than 250,000". No reason to put much effort into it if the console doesn't sell well.
Source: Archive.org preservation of the (lost) GamePro original article.
edit: I missed this gem earlier.
This is written by somebody who doesn't understand what they're saying. They're marketing terms in the context which they're being used. "It has image quality!"
I don't understand your post. Look at the gif above, WTR has good image quality, as in the image is more clean. Look at AT, that game clearly is better technically but its image clarity is bad. Do you not agree with that? Also it was a response to someone saying that a WTR2 could be better but not much better, and I gave my opinion on what a hypothetical WTR sequel could include.
As for sales, yeah the 3DO sold 2 million, but that was at the end of its life. During the time, some people though AVP sales would bring a second life to the Jaguar, of course looking back those thoughts were completely wrong, but AVP was no sloutch so I can see why some people did belief the Jaguar had a chance after AVP. For a short time.
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Nintendo eShop on 3DS is the best bet for that.
Well most of those are 80's but even then, I'm not the biggest fan of the low quality 3DS screens. Damn shame the Vita was a failure.
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At least we now know what became of
Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf...
Which is lovely.
it's amazing how you can't explain why all the other consoles didn't focus on 3D and why most of the big hits during that time period were not 3D, but say I'm wrong. and the Industry was all moving to 3D. You also psoted in the wrong thread because you're so angry. You posted your reply in the jaguar thread. try looking before leaping.
But we have that option!
Yes we do. Now. But we didn't then.
Actually you'd think some of these companies would put some of those old scaling games on XBL PSN or something.
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I like how the last three posts in this thread before this one are three morons who are responding to the wrong thread. Thsi thread is about the jaguar and the last post by me was agreeing with someone on how much more impressiveWTR could be with more time.. All three reported for thread derailing. Look before leaping.
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I like Warbirds, Turbo Sub, and plenty of others ... his point is that the arcade ports were great, but many (but not all) of the original games were NOT. And Asteroids/Missile Command, and Rampart were not originals.
I think you'd have a better time here if you didn't make a point to obnoxiously disagree with people who have different opinions from your own, especially when you're creating not-so-original question threads ASKING for those very same opinions. If you want to pontificate without the input of others, start a blog.
I think you'd have a better time here if you were not being a moron jumping in to treads specifically to derail them. I did not attack his opinion, I mentioned a different list of games that he did just to see if he liked any of those games or knew about them. Not everybody that had a Lynx know of all it's titles. I know what his point was.
If you have nothing to contribute you don't have to post. You can make these types of posts in the YouTube comments.
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Looking at the article again, it does specifically say american console market. If nintendo sold 3M consoles in 1987 that would mean 428k sms, 685k ataris, and 171k intellivisions. Sounds a little high for intellivision but the nes number might be rounded up as well. And the atari xegs should be part of the atari numbers as well.
No, that may actually be right. Because 7800 would sell 1 million by June 88, so 685k Ataris during this time in 87 makes some sense.
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Maybe so, but so but when I read some anti-N posts in this thread - yours included - I do not really feel that this is the real history. I'm sorry, but it just sounds like bunch of sour grapes, for whatever reason: be it longing for good old days when Atari was king or some perceived "Western gaming" (whatever that is) superiority complex. It's supported by a bunch of vague unsourced quotes, which remind me of anti-Sony or other x-ruined-x type arguments, or claims about strongarming, forceful marketing and so on - but do you guys really think that Atari (and other corps) always played fair or did not exploit chances when they got them? Lazy writing, something as old as the hills is nintendo's fault now? Jaysis
Sorry, but Big Bad Nintendo just does not add up.For the record, I do not have a horse in this race since I'm a microcomputer/PC fanboi, Sony on a console front. Even so, I don't see any grand conspiracy or significant foul play here, definitely not ruination of my favourite pastime.
The one big reason Nintendo is as big and respected as it is today is because they consistently release top quality games and solid or innovative hardware. They did it for decades. I don't even particularly like Mario (and platformers in general) but I can recognize why other people love it (hint: something to do with stellar gameplay) I thought Wii was ridiculous when I first saw it and yet it sold bazillions for a reason: it was fun to play. I say good luck to them. Videogaming has (or had) much bigger problems than the Big N.
Theres nothing anti-N in my post. Those are all real quotes many of which some are still said today, and me being upset they let that happen is completely logical.
Also a lot of weird nonsense by fans were ecoed in interviews or mentioned during the 80's and 90's so this whole thing of "it's not Nintendo's fault" is disingenuous at worse, and obtuse at best. They were well aware what was happening and sat on it for personal gain. i don't think any company should do that. Sega fans did that to. Ain't anything Anti-Nintendo about that.
I also never said anything about Atari being better or worse either, in fact I'd say Atari might have been just as much of an asshole in terms of what it let happen.. Seems you came in this thread to intentionally jump to conclusions with no basis, at least with my post anyway. Heck I think the only console manufacture, well major console manufacturer, that wasn't a complete moron relatively, is Microsoft.
I also find this fascination with Mario interesting as well. Mario has relied more on being bundled than any other franchise in the history of games, and it was already proven with the Wii U, and the Game Cube, and the N64, that if Mario is on a shelf most people won't by it in any significant number. I'm not saying Mario is bad, but it doesn't make sense that people(hardcore Nintendo fans) claim Mario is this amazing revolution in gaming BECAUSE of sales if the sales of the bigger games and even a good chunk of spin-offs are bundled.
otherwise I think SMB 2 and up are generally decent games. I generally don't care much about platforms (outside Jak 1) unless they are hybrid action games so eh.
I think it's better if games and companies have their fans but hardcore 'fanbois' likely are better off not existing because if you're favorite company does dumb stuff you should point it out. If they get worse, then its time to move. it's why i hate when people do the "I have a strong opinion on this object/company. Now wait a minute, I am neutral because I am a "fanboi" of the other object/company so for some reason this means my opinion is more valid and less bias" even though that's not how this works at all.
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Quote:
Martin Brennan
Throughout that period we did consultancy work - we did work for Amstrad (we designed a fax machine for them and a hard disk controller). At one point one of the guys from Sinclair joined Atari. He had worked for Perihelion - Richard Miller. He became a director of Atari in Sunnyvale and he had a project called Panther - It wasn't called Panther when I joined. Panther was the name of the car my wife had just bought, a Panther Kallista and the chip had no name and I wanted to give it a handle - so it was called Panther.
The design and specification had already been started, and they said "somebody's left - here's the concept" and it was only the video part of the chip - there was no sound.
It was a novel video architecture that allowed you to create windows of different sizes and different bit depths. Essentially you didn't have a frame store - it was a composite of frame stores - a kind of smart video frame store. It would have allowed a great deal of sprite style animation. Sprites in general in those days would have been of a fixed size e.g. 16x16. The games looked 'spritey' because of that, this would have been quite an interesting departure. I wasn't keen on it, but I designed it and the chip was built.
But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.
At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".
So the Jaguar project was born from the Panther project.
In essence Atari looked at the Panther and looked at what we were promising for the Atari project and said can the Panther project.
So, yes the industry was well aware 3D was the future and key players were pushing to make it the focus of new generations of console hardware.
Texture mapped 3D was still in early infancy when Jaguar chipset were designed.
It's own designers admit in hindsight that was the 1 area Jaguar fell short on.
Quote:
15) What are your biggest regrets about Jaguar (technology, games...)? If you can back to the past (with a time machine for example :-), will you change anything about Jaguar (and what) ?
It should have been able to run C, and do texture mapping. When we started all games were written in assembly, and Gouraud shading seemed enough. We were wrong on both those assumptions. I am not sure what we could have done differently, given the limitations of chips at the time, but there would have been a different emphasis.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The Industry was not fully aware and one dev related to Atari is not the "industry."
The Jaguar was designed like the original Saturn, a 3D capable machine with a heavy 2D focus. if they believed 3D was the future they would have added more 3D tools to their dev kits and architecture but they didn't because they believed the they needed to go both ways. Opposite of the 3DO which actually had tools for 3D games, with easy to understand dev kits and an easy developer environment while the jaguar(and Saturn) were hard to make games for when creating 3D software.
Every other console or computer hardware at the time was either a similar compromise (bt with lesser 3D capabilities than even the jaguar) all 2D, or going in on FMV. From 1992-1996 when you look at hit games o consoles and home computers it was 2D, Compromise, or FMV. period. This notion the industry was focusing on 3D and scaling games had no market in that time frame is nonsense and is indeed revisionist history. Individuals in interviews have indeed said 3D is the future, but other individuals, and whole companies went where they think the money was and many of them did not think it was 3D, at least at the time. in fact change "many" to "most".
Heck when 3D was where most the industry started quickly moving toward FMV still had a market and you saw FMV in a ton of 3D games.
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Saturn and 3DO were bit players compared to Playstation and its successors. Scaling games were a brief transitional style/fad/trend whose time came and went.
Another example of technology driving gameplay design was full-motion video in games. We don't see much of that anymore either.
Why wasn't Dragon's Lair on Sony Playstation or Sega Saturn? They could obviously run the game better than Sega CD or 3DO. The reason is because the game and its genre were played out, wouldn't sell well, looked old, and was not in demand.
Just like superscalar stuff. Much of it was released on Saturn in Japan, but never localized to North America, because it wouldn't sell.
Sony/Capcom literally spend a ridiculous amount of money on Fox Hunt on PSX because they thought FMV had a market along with 3D. Also tons of FMV games on PSX and Sat. Dragons lair is old and we already had older consoles running that game, the 90's scalling games had no hardware that could run it until that time frame. Scalling games were big in arcades during that time so this notion it wouldn't sell on consoles is literally revisionist/. Especially since a good chunk of hardware makers during that time frame did not make their consoles with 3D in mind yet people keep believing for some odd reason everyone was moving to 3D.
I give up.
You say it's revisionist history, yet you can go to any number of sites which have PDF and JPEG files of the UK and US press at the time and read for yourself how reviewers treated games that still used plain polygons or limited texture mapping, let alone how sprite based racers like Super Burnout were reviewed.
Read interviews with likes of ATD who will tell you Atari had seen Shockwave on the 3DO and wanted them to fully texture map Battlemorph so it could be seen to compete.
Or Martin Hooley from Imagitec Design explaining why Freelancer had been moved to the much more capable Playstation ...
Or Martin Brownlaw talking about Missile Command 3D.
The information is well documented.
People like myself who grew up with the Sinclair ZX81 and through the years moved from computers to consoles and vice versa...
Who bought a Mega CD on day 1 expecting Sega to use the hardware to bring better than MD versions of it's sprite based coin ops into the home..who went from that system to the Jaguar and then the Playstation, we were avid magazine buyers and readers.
We watched the trends as they unfolded.
You've come here asking for information, people have given honest answers with the reasoning behind them and now you say we are revising the very history we lived through?.
No those articles you were referring to were later, not the time frame I specified. The Crusin' USA example was on the N64 after it came out, back when Crusin' was new in arcade in 94 people gave it praise and were all over it and it did better then Daytona, which was actually a 3D game. Then you have games like Rayman in 95. Yes its revision.
The issue is you believe I'm saying 3D wasn't popular, 3D was popular during those times, however it was still establishing a foothold. It wouldn't be until late 95 into 96 where you started seeing the whole industry rapidly move to 3D instead of some hit titles here and there. Most of the console and computer manufactures again were either going more toward FMV or more toward 32-bit 2D graphics. This wouldn't make sense if 2D was dead around 1992-1996. In fact, as 3D was establishing themselves having scaling games like that would have been a great compromise until the industry moved all-in on 3D.
Around late 95, early 96 the tech was there, more templates were out, dev kits were more optimized for 3D, the industry quickly went into the driection of polygons, but in the time frame I specified, popular games were all over the place, it wasn't 3D and everything else is dead as you were implying. people had no clue where the industry was going but 3DO and later PSX. (and some PC developers).
The biggest revision to gaming history is "no one played FMV" next to "everyone was jumping in on 3D before 96."
I'd politely suggest you look up the work history of Ken Kutaragi and what he was doing on high end S.G.I workstations as he was well aware 3D was the future and it was his vision to bring advanced 3D into the home console market.
Sega was also very aware of it's importance but was arrogant enough to state no one other than Namco could touch it's arcade technology and Namco weren't planning a home console.
The original Saturn was designed to take on the 3DO and Jaguar.
When specs of the Playstation appeared, Sega panicked and rather than take the hardware back to the drawing board and take up Silicon Graphics offer of going for a new chipset from them, they added the second SH2 chip.
Development of the Saturn in 1992 the extra CPU being added in 1994 and it uses Quads at a time everyone was using polygons for 3D.
Even with the new hardware, Saturn was still seen as a 2D machine primarily.
As for the Jaguar..it was in development alongside the Atari Panther, a console designed purely as 2D powerhouse, yet Martin Brennan whilst at Atari in 1989 convinced Atari 3D was the way to go...Panther scrapped in favour of Jaguar which had been in R+D alongside it.
I said multiple times that PSX followed 3DO in going the 3D route. Read my posts completely.
As for the Saturn i've seen a lot of Sega interviews mention the jaguar but very few that mention 3Do, and I highly doubt Sega understood the 3DO as I'm sure they were not expecting a game like NFS to come out on it.
As for the jaguar yeah, Sega did have notes on that, and to not be left behind Sega of America panicked, and with help from SOJ, put the 32X out to beat it on the market.
But The Saturn wasn't made to fully go all-in on 3D. In fact, it was designed like the Jaguar, 3D capabilities in the design but a lot of focus on 32-bit 2D capability. (or 64 in the jaguars case)
The rest of your post proves my point Sega had no idea what direction the industry was going in.
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NO
NO
It's not me saying that,s those are just claims that are still prevalent in 2018 across the net.
Exactly.
Lee talked of a second Jaguar CD Racing Game coming from himself, using an optimised version of the WTR engine, but it would deliver cleaner, faster 3D.
I've always read that as WTR but with a better frame rate, not much higher polygon counts, lots more texture mapping and using a higher resolution mode of the Jaguar.
I think the biggest Asset the Jaguar has, even compared to the N64/PSX, is that it has image quality. it's image quality for it's flat texture polygon games are absolutely amazing. If WTR got a sequel with higher frame rates and some fake lighting and shadow effects you could make the game look amazing despite the game really being shoe boxes rolling around a track with buildings that are gray blocks.
Jaguar can do some texturing though, I'm sure that if given time and budget a WTR sequel could add some textures to the road and wheels a little. Maybe an Iron Soldier 3 with more destruction could be done as well wit better optimization (and also higher frame rate)
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The Game Boy Advance and the Neo Geo Pocket are as far as I care to go back. Having said that, the GBA plays old Game Boy games just fine, and with a backlight, so you can actually see them!
What people seem to forget about the Lynx is that while it had solid arcade ports and adaptations, a lot of the original titles were, uh, not very good? As shooters go, Gates of Zendocon was pretty weak... it's no Gradius, that's for sure. Then there's Gordo 106, Dirty Larry, Viking Child, Kung Food... bleech to them all.
People like Dirty Larry though, it reviews well.
Also that's a weird comment to make, original titles like Awesome Golf, Toki, Super Asteroids Missile Command, Checkered Flag, Rampart, Turbo Sub, Switch II, Chips Challenge (at the time) were all pretty good. Then you had arcade hits that were not on other consoles.
I mean sure, it had some genres it lacked in (but to be honest that applies to the GB and GG as well) and it has some very odd titles, (Kung food as you mentioned) but I'd say the majority of its library is playable, and I think that may be one advantage of the small library of the Lynx, well small relative to the GB and GG anyway.
Now when you say Neo Geo Pocket, you mean Pocket Color right?
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Yes I was as some of it seems just a bit over exaggerated, maybe a bit out of context, or cherry picked from the largest pieces of tin foil hat possible.
I mean if you were not around then you can just say so because all those quotes were said. These are things that existed. Especially during earlier internet and later, early wikipedia.
Some of which are still repeated today buy your favorite "gaming history" youtuber. I swear those popular Youtubers have done more damage to gaming history than...
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I'm curious why you keep saying consoles skipped by the super scaler type stuff. I had a Genesis a few times over the years, and those games from the arcade had ports on there and they worked just fine. Just saying it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't and it didn't happen. Tech moved along fast enough that they became quickly irrelevant thanks to the FX chip with Nintendo and other things elsewhere overtaking it. But it did happen, and did have a few short years on the market in the Genesis life (and PCE in Japan too), up until 3D chips crept into the picture. As you said Saturn was made for it, but thanks to what Sony pulled on Nintendo, then them going on their own pushing up the Saturn, it just got abandoned for polygons. Consoles developed as a different pace than expensive hardware arcade boards, then it caught up and closed the window on that.
Because the Genesis couldn't run the vast majority of them. But systems like SAt/3DO could. The ones the Genesis could run were mostly never even close to the arcade. The FX chip also had nothing to do with making things irrelevant. Also the PCE was worse at it than the Genesis, did you see powerdrift on the PCE/ I mean those compromised versions did have their value for a time you're right.
But for a good 4-5 years we had computers and consoles that could run the high-end stuff at a time where they could have taken off and we basically got none. But we got plenty of traditional 2D 32-bit games though. Most of which just threw in weird CG artstyles and never really took advantage of the console power (See most Mega Man sat/psx games.)
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EXcept most of those plug and play systesm sold at mall kiosks back in the early 2000s were illegal bootleg famiclones. The guys peddling those systesm did not ahve a right to the content contained within.
Eh, no they were not, that's why I specified mid 2000's. The NES clones were the cheap ones, the ones in the mid-2000's were actually made by companies that had an actually history of you know, existing unlike the Nintendo ones which were LLC's or the likes that only existed with a year before. The ones that gobbled up so much money ot made companies go out to get official licensees for theirs.
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Yay, another "x vs y" thread, we don't have enough of these already.
Here is a picture of me
Reported for not reading the thread.
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I don't know the manufacturing cost for either one, but both of them launched in late 1993.
Jaguar launch price was $250 (which would be like $429 today, adjusting for inflation)
3DO launch price was $700 (which would be like $1202 today, adjusting for inflation)
This information is easy to find, even if you don't remember when it happened (as I do).
Both were steeply discounted after a while. The Sony Playstation ate their lunches, rendering the "who wore it best" question moot in my opinion.
I mean I don't know what this post has to do with anything. I was responding to Punishers implication the 3DO's power was based on its price.
(Also 3D0 launched at $500 and $700 not just $700. Still expensive.)
$100? Pretty sure the Jag was around the $300 range when it hit, the 3DO was a $600 console. So unless it was very poorly bid out parts or greed, I'd say one over the other had more going on under the hood, yet as some said already, history is there how various levels of stupidity and incompetence crippled the potential of both.
Try reading my post again.
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Of the major consoles in the first wave, Gameboy, Lynx, Gamegear, Supervision, which do you go back to PRESENTLY?
I recently played with all four of these machines and went through good chunks of their original libraries, however in 2018 I have come to conclusion that the Gameboy(as well as SV) has only a handful of games that are even playable. the rest were either always bad to mediocre, or have aged like cheese sitting out on a picnic table in 80 degree weather. Also the GB(and SV) have tons of technical issues.
Even at the time I also though of GB as outdated, but the prices of its games (and console) as well as the limited options back then, made it easy to let GB issues slide, especially for kids whos parents only brought them a gameboy.But in 2018? Ehhh.
As for the Lynx and Game Gear, there are a few issues. First is that the Gamegear does have some original games but a good chunk are SMS games. That in itself wouldn't be too much of a problem, if they reformatted the SMS games on GG to look and/or play well on the Game Gears smaller screen. Add to the fact it has the worst battery life of the three, and has a horribly tingy sound chip, the Game Gear hasn't age well.
Now that's not to say the Lynx also doesn't have it's issues, it's resolution is tiny and the first edition of it is quite large.
However I do believe the LYNX is much easier to go back to than the other three:
1. Resolution aside, it has a better backlight than the Game Gear, and has more reliable hardware because control issues and speaker issues hover over the Gamegear like the plague.
2. Graphics that match in ways, the SNES/GEN/TG16 era, on a portable, basically guarantee that it would graphically age better.
3. 2nd longest battery life.
4. Games that have replay-ability. In many cases, when finishing Gameboy and Game Gear games, even if they are arcade styled, I usually stop playable. Sure, the games aging better may help with that, but even back then it just seemed more fun to play link games multiple times than replaying Bugs crazy 2, or Mega Man II GB, or Sonic 1 or 2 SMS.
Of course that's just my opinion. What's yours?
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I guess what strikes me as weird (and what I suspect the original poster was thinking) is how home consoles just kind of skipped right past the "super scaler" hardware. We had hardware that couldn't handle sprite scaling and rotation, then we had hardware that could do stuff better than sprite scaling and rotation. I think the Saturn was going to be a "super scaler" powerhouse when they realized that nope, 3D is what you have to have, and you have to have it yesterday and we ended up with 3D hardware that didn't use triangles and couldn't do transparencies.
That entire timeframe was really a *massive* explosion in computing power and technology, so I'm not surprised we'd leapfrog an entire technology. When the Genesis was released, PCs were still getting pretty crummy versions of arcade games and just starting to move from EGA to VGA. By the time the Saturn came out, Doom was already well established on PCs.
The entire leap from the 16-bit to 32-bit era is an interesting discussion on its own, IMHO.
This only applies to PC's not other home computers. In fact I'd argue for gaming PC didn't catch up to the others until DOOM in terms of audience.
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Yes, Saturn couldn't ran those games in its sleep, but you're forgetting about context: there's a reason led the Japanese launch with Virtua Fighter and not, say, Galaxy Force II; that gen was going to be decided in terms of 3D games and they knew it. The boat sailed for super-scaler games to be in the limelight by then. Plus once you see the 3D PlayStation was pushing in the West, for Sega to try relying on those games to go up against Ridge Racer, Tekken, Toshinden etc. in the press would've been a marketing disaster, and they already shot themselves in the foot launching the Saturn that May way ahead of schedule.
3D arcade games and 3D PC games...even the very few 3D console games at the time (including the few standouts on systems like 3DO and Jaguar) had wet the appetite in the mainstream for 3D gaming. On a *technical* level the systems weren't ready to handle it, and another generation of 2D being pushed to its max would've found the super-scaler games in the limelight for sure (and imo would've been very interesting to see what could be done in that style; just imagining something like Sin & Punishment as a super-scaler game is pretty godlike).
But when you had movies like Jurassic Park and Toy Story being box office hits, and 3D dominating headlines, everyone and their grandmother could tell where mainstream preferences were shifting, and it wasn't towards 2D super-scaler games.
Purely from a UK Press perspective:
The press had really been hyping the entire Next Generation aspect of the new generation of RISC based consoles, starting with the 3DO and Jaguar.
Both were going to make your SNES and Genesis look primitive, hardware prices (in Jaguar's case once you added on cost of the CD unit to the base hardware), above what you'd be paying for 16 bit cartridge based hardware.
Comments from likes of Bullfrog's Peter Molyneux that finally developers could leave the SNES and MD consoles behind.
Lot of expectations for types of games not seen outside of the arcades and high end PC's in terms of polygon 3D.
Consoles had been given a taste with the SNES FX chips and Sega's SVP chip...but there was only so much that could be done.
New and far more powerful hardware was needed and the biggest shake up of the console market in years was apon us.
Sprite based games were simply viewed as old hat.
This was a time reviewers honestly did get taken in by games with flashy visuals and very little else.
Stinkers like Rise Of The Robots pulled in fantastic reviews from some Amiga press and C+VG magazine.
Jaguar Crescent Galaxly got some rave reviews also....
C+VG i think gave Playstation Toh Shin Den something like 97% and review was all about it's texture mapped visuals surpassing those of Virtua Fighter...
Titles like Bladeforce on 3DO took flak for frame rate issues as it couldn't match latest Playstation titles in this area...
Imagitec Design and others have spoken of Atari wanting W.I.P Jaguar games to be beefed up with loads of texture mapping and lighting effects by Atari, even though Atari knew it would cripple frame rates, Jaguar had to be seen to be able to compete.
The 3D arms race, console wise, was in full effect.
This is revisionist history. Hi-Fi 2D games were still throwing big hits while 3D was still trying to find a foothold between the time frame of 1992-1996. During that time frame we had more than capable computer and later console hardware that could run high-end scaling games the older consoles/computers couldn't. It's clear that more Pseudo-3D 2D games would have brought in more success during that time the 3D thirst was there but was still establishing a platform for itself. Because at least those type of games would have some amazing effects to grab attention instead of more colorful/vibrant traditional 2D games.
Another piece of Revision is this belief that developers and manufactures knew where the industry was headed. For all intents and purposes, the 3DO was the only console that though 3D was the future and built their product with a lot of tools specifically for 3D support unlike the Jaguar which seems to hae had minal 3D support in mind but wanted a semi-scaling hi-fi 2D architecture thrown in as well. The PSX would follow the 3Do's lead on this.
Every other console initially, or even at release, was either all in on FMV, all in on 2D, or a mixture of both. Even some home computers suffered from this. FMV would be a popular format alone in 1997, and used for parts of games until 2001. But by itself it would take some years before it was clear FMV's time was up, at least in the form it took on consoles. FMV adventure games on computers would last another year or two. Also 2D 32-bit graphics was also something that was on the menu that a lot of console and computer makers put into their design.
Look at the list of consoles/computers released during 1992-1996 outside PSX and 3DO. Heck even the SAT wasn't intending to focus all-in on 3D. In fact additional 3D hardware was rushed into the architecture.
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What could the N-gage have done to succeed in the market?
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted · Edited by Atari Pogostick
The N-Gage sold 3 million units, while that's not too shabby, it was not enough to succeed in the portable market and Nokia lost a ton of money on the project for both variations of the device.
The N-Gage was vastly more powerful than the Gameboy, actually had western developers on it, and doubled as a phone with multi-media features including mp3 listening which was hot at the time. $299 was a great price for what you were getting.
I know that there was the whole taco thing, and the fact it was $200 more than the GBA, but given the price of multi-media hardware at the time, that $299 was a steal to get an MP3 player, video, internet, and games on a phone. You'd think it would have sold more. The QD model fixed a lot of the firsts problems as well.
What do you think went wrong? Even if it couldn't beat the GBA I'd have expected maybe several more million sold. It was either a Razr V3 or a N-Gage, not a hard decision, or at least ti seems like it's not a hard decision. On some carriers you only payed $99 (or free) with contract as well.
One consolation is that it did get 2nd place, that's something, I guess.