CubsWoo said:
Is it wrong to point out that Nintendo's home console division has been defying the odds by continually sabotaging itself for over ten years now? They went from the 800lb gorilla juggernaut gaming company where you didn't call it playing 'video games,' you called it 'playing Nintendo,' and now they're fallen so far behind the curve and gamer opinion is close to rock bottom, and they take a name the people, by and large loved for their new console - and turn it into psuedo-iFaggotry that people are going to be ashamed to ask for at Gamestop? Public opinion was already sour on the Revolution.
Actually, if you do some research, back when Nintendo was the 800lb gorilla juggernaut, they used scare tactics with store chains and threatened to pull their product if the stores sold any competitors' hardware (directly resulting in the rather dismal failure of the Sega Master System in the US). After several lawsuits and a LOT of problems for Nintendo (but Nintendo never actually lost a case - Nintendo has one of the most scarily powerful legal departments of any company in the industry), the subsequent generation rolled around and had the Super Nintendo competing with the Genesis - and the history books record this battle as an effective
tie - but the Genesis was actually
ahead in sales for several months before StarFox secured SNES's power in the eyes of the consumer.
I digress, slightly. Anyway. "Playing Nintendo" was an apt description because at the time, every company that came before the NES was gone (with the sole exception of Intellivision), and the Master System was only sold by very small chains that couldn't afford to stock NES and its games. There WERE no other choices at the time for most consumers.
This just reminds me of when the Mortal Kombat blood turned to sweat. Or how gamers wanted cartridges instead of optical media. Or when the GBA shipped without a backlight (but then again, the handheld division can make ten different versions of the same product and people will buy three of the same handheld just because it looks 'prettier,' or in the case of the DS, lie and say they aren't making a slimline DS and then a month later announce it in Japan) or how the lack of online capabilities and DVD-media makes the console better, not worse.
Nintendo was banking more on the Family-Friendly side of things with Mortal Kombat - and for a good reason, because at the time, there would be no indication on a home console game of the content within. When MK appeared for home systems, the ESRB had not yet formed. The original Japanese console is actually called the "Family Computer" - or Famicom. The idea here was that punching someone and seeing blood fly out of it - while more correct than sweat - was
not a "family" deal.
Shortly after Mortal Kombat (the uncensored Genesis version) and a less-known game titled Night Trap (early Sega CD title) became available, several lawsuits were filed against the game companies. The ESRB was formed to appease the indignant parents, but we all know the issue is still rather hot today.
Nintendo 64 had a much larger issue than the cartridge media, which I won't get into because it'll probably go over most of your heads, but suffice it to say, N64's already crippled system performance would've been
dismal with an optical drive. Nintendo was banking on more people preferring fast load times to fancy CGI, and unfortunately they were wrong, but history always favours the winners. Nintendo was right, though, as there are a lot of gamers who
do strongly prefer N64's exceptional loading speed. Some PS1 games (and more recently also PS2 games) have
absurd loading times which really break the flow of the games. Sadly, N64's difficult architecture turned many developers away from the system and even most of the people obsessed with loading times in the end concede that N64's library was sorely lacking.
Not only that, but especially with the shocking success of Final Fantasy 7, American gamers became far more aware of and familiar with RPGs, one of the few formats that really demands a huge amount of storage and graphics throughput.
I'm going to go on an ironic tangent for a moment here. RPGs tend to favour systems with less raw processing power and more graphical/system throughput, as well as memory. The really ironic thing about the Nintendo 64's design was that the Super Nintendo is heralded as one of the greatest systems of all time for RPGs.. and rightly so, as its design was, in fact, catered toward the increasingly popular RPG genre (in Japan, of course - America didn't catch on until FF7). It had a very slow central processor - 3.4MHz, barely enough to get by - but a graphics chip and audio coprocessor that were
years ahead of the curve. Genesis, on the other hand, was the exact opposite - a very primitive empty shell of a rasteriser, an FM synthesis POS sound chip, but a screaming fast 16MHz processor (who remebers the old marketing catchphrase - "Blast Processing" lol). The irony of this situation was that Nintendo decided instead to opt for a more CPU-centric design with the N64, coupled with cartridge media. Terrible for RPGs, but better for the action games that seemed to be popular among the competitors' products. Oops.
GBA shipping without a backlight was actually a more correct decision than most people seem to realise. If you look at the previous history of handhelds - Game Boy vs. Lynx, Lynx had a backlit screen, which won? Game Boy vs. Game Gear, Game Gear had a coloured and backlit screen, which won? Game Boy vs. Nomad - Sega simultaneously cannibalized their own Game Gear market here (I won't get into the story of Sega's fuckups - that can go somewhere else) and had such a huge price tag... which won?
The biggest issue that had people still buying the terrifyingly inferior Game Boy over the competitors? Battery life.
There's also the issue of the Game Gear's screen sucking monkey cock, but as I said, Sega's fuckups - another time
The commonly available screen technology at the time of GBA's release was such that if they
had included a backlit screen, it would have toasted batteries more than four times faster. As-is, a classic GBA can approach 15 hours on a pair of AA batteries, which is magnificent... but backlighting needs a gigantic amount of power, so you could easy knock that down to 3-5 hours tops on a pair of AA's. I know I, for one, went through an absolutely hellish number of batteries on my GBA. Who the
fuck would
prefer spending and soaking up
four times more batteries?! I know I sure wouldn't!
Now, the Afterburner project (aka Portablemonopoly) showed Nintendo that a
front-lit solution was viable on the GBA's reflective HD-TFT -
two and a half years after GBA's release. After Nintendo saw the technology, what did we get? The incomparably successful GBA-SP, which, in retrospect, proves that Nintendo made the right decision when they released the GBA in the first place. The SP incorporated a Li-Ion battery (which had only recently become economically viable in such a small, high-volume commodity package); without the
front-light on, SP can last up to 17-18 hours. Leave it on permanently and that goes down to about 9-11 - very nearly cutting the life in half. Li-Ion batteries are generally considered more efficient than alkaline batteries, and front-lit solutions consume less power than backlights. Please don't make me spell it out for you.
The people that whined about GBA's unlit screen were primarily a vocal minority.
Finally - the GOD (which stands for Gamecube Optical Disc). Piracy has always been one of Nintendo's highest concerns; cartridge copying in the SNES era was more common than most people seem to believe, and NES's boot code was cracked and used for quite a huge number of unlicensed games. N64 was difficult enough to program, and PS1 so easy, that bootleggers shied away from it (incidentally, this was the final but least significant reason why N64 stuck with cartridges - no matter how easy it may become to copy a cartridge, it's still easier to copy media as ubiquitous as a CD).
The GOD was developed primarily as an anti-piracy measure; it was also developed in a mini format to minimise loading times (what a coincidence!) by eliminating potentially long, cross-disc seeks from the equation (some GCN games still have issues with this - listen to the drive during cutscenes in Eternal Darkness! - but these are few and far between). To that end, Nintendo was disturbingly successful, once again. PS2 was modded within weeks of its release. Xbox was modded within
a week of its release, with a
software mod coming only weeks later. GCN didn't get cracked to run commercial games until
Phantasy Star Online was tinkered with, and that method required having the game disc image on a PC, with a network cord attached to the GCN's
very rare network adapter, and couldn't run many games, crashed on most, and had massive slowdown issues with the rest.
It wasn't until about a year ago that the GCN hardware actually got modded to play backup discs. Four years. I'd put money down that that's quite possibly the longest any original console design has ever gone unable to run backups... very impressive.* There's one problem with this assertion, which I will note shortly.
The size of the GODs barely affected Nintendo at all, by the way. Any game that needed more space simply spread across multiple GODs, the first game being Resident Evil, and there are some fairly huge Gamecube games (Tales of Symphonia comes to mind).
Not being able to play DVD video was a marketing bullet point Nintendo lacked by the time they launched. The DVD player in PS2 was much bigger because at the time, in Japan, DVD players were very rarely found in peoples' homes. In the US, the majority of PS2 owners already owned a DVD set top box at its release, and that number only increased by the time Gamecube launched.
Admittedly, Gamecube having DVD playback would've been a nice side feature, but as noted earlier, there's a piracy problem, and the Panasonic Q turned out to be very vulnerable to it. Within a month of Q's release in Asia, the good old Chinese cracking crew had a method for backing GOD's up onto regular DVDs and playing them normally in the Q.
I will admit, Nintendo proved me wrong with the DS. I still think it's gimmicky and haven't bought one, but then again, the handheld division doesn't normally shoot itself in the foot. As a matter of fact, if they scrapped the Rev/wii and just poured all the money into making more quality handheld products I don't think anyone would mind.
I think I would mind. The DS is amazing, but there's always a breaking point between hardware quality and battery life, and DS is straddling that line very well. PSP, naturally, crossed it with a gigantic stride, like all the handhelds that Nintendo defeated on its way to the top of the handheld game industry. The sole reason PSP is seeing any real success is the word "Playstation".
That, and peoples' pathetic obsession with graphics... yet, people can't identify bad motion blur when they see it? Fucking retards... that isn't image quality dammit
Sorry for the long post. >_> I get really long-winded about this stuff. Nerding out is my business. @_@
