Most meaningless / silliest video game marketing terms

[Jess Ragan]

The names for Sony's processors. Emotion Engine? Reality Synthesizer? Sounds like the product of the development team's self-congratulatory, masturbatory fantasies. Makes me pine for the days when processors were named after the secretaries that Nolan Bushnell would sexually harass.

[Seob]

How about amiga chip name set, Fat Agnes, Denise, paula.

[4Ks]

"Now you playing with power, Portable Power!" ~ Nintendo's GameBoy ads

 

Yeah, right. Let's just pretend Lynx and Game Gear never existed, and that GameBoy's screen wasn't so hard to see that it's almost impossible for people with imperfect eyesight to play it.

[Herbarius]

the most meaningless / silliest video game marketing term has to be "interactive"

Funny how usually those games, who feel the need to highlight being "interactive" on the box are the ones which seriously lack in interactivity

Edited February 9, 2010 by Herbarius

[jahfish]

the most meaningless / silliest video game marketing term has to be "interactive"

Funny how usually those games, who feel the need to highlight being "interactive" on the box are the ones which seriously lack in interactivity

 

yeah, if at least they would tell you "you have 2 minutes of loading time ahead, het yourself a coke" ... now that would be interactive

Edited February 9, 2010 by jahfish

[roland p]

On a PC, everything more than monochrome and bleep was called 'multimedia'. Yuck.

 

 

Interactive? Name me one game that's not interactive lol.

[malducci]

On a PC, everything more than monochrome and bleep was called 'multimedia'. Yuck.

 

 

Interactive? Name me one game that's not interactive lol.

 

Haha, that's right. I remember all the "multimedia" stuff. God, that period really did suck for the PC. I had a CDROM for my PC BITD when they first came out. Back then, they all came with their own controller cards (weren't scsi or ide, something proprietary). Man, there was soooo much junk out there. Yes, the original Myst sucked IMO. So did Journey Man Project, 7th Guest, 11th hour, that FMV star wars game, etc. All those interactive multimedia softs..

 

To comment on the original post, looking back - I do think those terms were a bitsilly. They weren't literal. More general. As if anything 16bit was going to be instantly better than 8bit. What if the NES ran at 20mhz? Would 16bit at 7mhz still be better? It didn't really tell you anything, other than this is the next generation of consoles. That's it. 16bit graphics? Where? There was no 16bit colored pixels. Not even on the SNES. It really was just a marketing term to differentiate between the old console(s) and the newer/better/whatever console(s). Funny thing, that type of advertising didn't really work in Japan, but it sure caught on here in the US. People really were hung up on what was "truely" 16bit. I remember reading, BITD, from multiple sources (back when it was just the Genesis VS the TG16) the TG16 actually have two 8bit processors - just at half the reported speed. Lol, like that would be any better than a single processor at double the speed. Hahahaha. Ahh man, those were the days. EGM was really bad at reporting specs, and it often changed from issue to issue. I remember in the SNES vs Genesis issue where they stack up the specs and strengths to each other - and they listed the Genesis as "while not having scaling and rotation, the Genesis has have polygon capability". I was like WTF? As if it had some special hardware polygon support or something. Dumb asses. Any cpu can render polygons. Speed might be an issue, but capability sure as hell was not an issue. I'm sure the article was just poorly written and the author didn't really believe, but then again.. this is EGM. No one seems to have commented how the original 8086 is 16bit too, or even the i286 successor. Both those processors are dog ass slow too. 16bit systems with 2bit color of a 3bit palette (CGA ftw!).

 

The Blast Processing thing was hilarious. I think I read somewhere, where one of the Sega reps actually tried to describe on the record just what it was. Classic. And they kinda shot themselves in the foot with all the 16bit this and that. They could have touted the machine as 32bit! (Even though the original 68k isn't, via software it codes like it is). Maybe they thought that was too much of a stretch? Heh - Atari didn't with their ST line (sixteen/Thirty two "bit").

 

Oh and cart size. On the same system, it was a little more relevant. But comparing NES 2megabit game to a Genesis 2megabit game? A 2megabit NES game is going to be way bigger content wise. It's a small platform, graphics are going to take up as much room - system can't really handle large pieces of details be it sprites or tiles at one time, etc. And even if it's the same system, you don't really know what those megabits are going towards anyway. You have no clue what kind of compression schemes are used, etc. One reason why the SF2 carts were as big as they were on the home console, is that because they didn't compress ANY of the sprite frames. The systems weren't fast enough to decompress a sprite frame and send it off to vram in the time they needed. Nor was there enough temp storage to decompress both player frames too (64k and 128k of ram is too small). You got an article bloat in cart space. There there are things like speech samples that take up quite a bit of room, but don't really add that much back in return. So while yeah, you got some idea with the advertised size - it wasn't much. And kids didn't really know what to do it with, other than if it's bigger, it must be better. The old American sales pitch. Did that also work on you guys across the pond?

 

Oh and not to mention they pretty much came up with a bullshit measurement. Megabits? Only the video game industry used that term. It was a definite play on megabyte and the confusion was on purpose. Megabyte was thrown around ALOT for computers users, shops, and magazines. It's also something some adults/parents could relate to when buying their child a game. IIRC, it was Sega who started that with the Genesis. I honestly don't remember the matter of the game size ever coming up and definitely not specific sizes, before then. If Sega didn't start it, they sure as hell ran with it and made it popular. That's another one that goes to Sega: Blast Processing, "16bit" whatever, X megabits cart.

Edited February 11, 2010 by malducci

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

Now that you've brung up Street Fighter 2, is there a real reason why the top and bottom are forced blanked off? I can't beleive 2 32x64 sprites animated at around 8fps can take up so much bandwidth that they needed forced blank.

[Video]

Now that you've brung up Street Fighter 2, is there a real reason why the top and bottom are forced blanked off? I can't beleive 2 32x64 sprites animated at around 8fps can take up so much bandwidth that they needed forced blank.

 

Remember there was also the voices and effects (and quiet a bit of BG stuff, paralax 3Dish scrolling of the floor in a couple arenas) The SNES just didn't quiet have the memory to keep up. It's probably the same reason polygon games like Starfox are in a window, cause the system was to slow (or not enough memory) to render the whole screen.

 

As for video, the SNES was 8 bit videowise..but that would be going strictly by at the time computer terms, where an 8 bit chunk could represent up to 256 different possible colors... I always took Bit to be the processor's marking, not the graphics capability.

[Herbarius]

I always took Bit to be the processor's marking, not the graphics capability.

 

Of course, that's the definition. "16 bit" doesn't mean "the graphics are better" - however, it was used as a gauge for the overall capabilities of a video game console, propably thinking along the line "if the processor is more advanced then the rest of the hardware is as well, overall more advanced hardware results in better graphics"...

 

So it's never been a real gauge to determine a console's "power", but more of a "rule of thumbs"... which some people took literally anyway, so there were the "bit wars" - where console manufacturers actually encouraged the misconception of "more bits = better graphics" for the sake of the marketing.

 

As there is limited use for processors above 32 bit especially for gaming, eventually this faded.

 

Now we maybe have "dpi wars" but... well not really. At least I rarely heard people comparing the current gen consoles in terms of hardware specs, the debates tend to be about reliability and the actual (exclusive) games availabe for each console.

Edited February 14, 2010 by Herbarius

[doubleminor]

I never really understood the purpose of polygon count. Who's going to sit at their game and take the time to count them all?

[Tr3vor]

the most meaningless / silliest video game marketing term has to be "interactive"

Funny how usually those games, who feel the need to highlight being "interactive" on the box are the ones which seriously lack in interactivity

 

 

the might as well put "inactive" on the boxes

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

Now that you've brung up Street Fighter 2, is there a real reason why the top and bottom are forced blanked off? I can't beleive 2 32x64 sprites animated at around 8fps can take up so much bandwidth that they needed forced blank.

 

Remember there was also the voices and effects (and quiet a bit of BG stuff, paralax 3Dish scrolling of the floor in a couple arenas) The SNES just didn't quiet have the memory to keep up. It's probably the same reason polygon games like Starfox are in a window, cause the system was to slow (or not enough memory) to render the whole screen.

 

As for video, the SNES was 8 bit videowise..but that would be going strictly by at the time computer terms, where an 8 bit chunk could represent up to 256 different possible colors... I always took Bit to be the processor's marking, not the graphics capability.

 

That's called linescrolling, it was built into the system.

[Video]

Yeah, but built in or not, the more effects you throw into a game, the more it eats memory or processor cycles. (actually, I have no Idea how much memory it eats, but I know it was done a LOT on 8 bit games for "scene changes" (where they would wiggle the whole screen) but seemed to be quiet rare when used in actual gameplay (so on the 8 bits, it must have eaten a lot, or maybe because it was useually a full screen effect? )

 

Speaking of meaningless and "built in" How about Polygon count? (or triangles, I think is more accurate for most consoles) Remember how people would compare them, like Nintendo said "ours does X" and sony said, "yeah? well ours does Y" (but if you do a little research, Nintendo was talking textured, and Sony was talking nekid, so you had a count that made Sony look better) and you had people swear to god "OMG< THE 64 LoOkS like SCHIT, cause it only has half the polys of the PSX )

Edited February 16, 2010 by Video

[Multijointed Monster Maker]

For the Genesis, I beleive there is a scroll table section of video-ram that stores the per-line offsets, so I beleive that is what your talking about. On the Super Nintendo, there is a feature built into the cpu where you select a video-register and it changes it every scanline off a list from either the ROM itself or from the work ram. You can only move large chunks of data from rom or work-ram into video-ram during v-blank, so changing scroll registers between visible scanlines won't make a difference.