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The fail of NES hardware/gaming video from UK outlook


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I also don't get the NES f..boys laughing about the 1 button Joystick and on how great their stupid 2 button pad is

 

The Atari 2600 had controllers with 1-button, 2 buttons, 12 buttons, any problems there? Of course not.

Colecovision had 14 buttons

Vectrex had 4 buttons

5200 had 19 buttons,

Intellivision had 16 buttons

 

Computers had numerous button/keys.

Edited by high voltage
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I also don't get the NES f..boys laughing about the 1 button Joystick and on how great their stupid 2 button pad is

 

The Atari 2600 had controllers with 1-button, 2 buttons, 12 buttons, any problems there? Of course not.

Colecovision had 14 buttons

Vectrex had 4 buttons

5200 had 4 buttons,

Intellivision had 16 buttons

Yet most games never utilized more than the single fire button. And I can imagine platformers and action adventure games playing like ass using them.

 

Buts that's beside the point. The point is gaming had evolved to the point where a single button joystick was never going to cut it anymore. And yet the standard joystick for euro computers was slightly more ergonomic version of the Old Atari joystick. There is a reason why playing Castlevania on the Amiga is ass.

 

 

 

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Except, you had the 4 score adapter for 4 player action for a bunch of games. My cousin had it for his copy of Bomberman ii for instance.

 

 

Except Super Mario Bros is an evolution of gameplay. The utilization of things like a second button for run and fire as well as hold that in conjunction with an action button. You know advancements in QOL that make gameplay smoother. Whereas for Amiga platformers it's generally pushing up because you need to fit all actions to a single button joystick and/or keyboard.

 

The NES has these games as well. From the Wizardry series to the ultima games to space sims like Star Luster. From the AD&D games by SSI to early 3d combat games like Battle Tank to one of the early FPS's in Bandai's Space Shadow that utilized a light gun with a built in Dpad for movement on screen.

 

 

 

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SMB is a evolution gameplay copy from Jump Bug, Pitfall, HERO etc...

VCS and Intellivision had RPGs far earlier.

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The NES has hundreds of titles with almost every genre represented. PC type games such the KOEI strategy games, Shadowgate, Maniac Mansion, Pirates, MULE, Might & Magic, etc. are on the NES. Of course some genres are going to be better on a computer.

 

 

 

"When there are like 4 people hanging out, and two dominate the NES because they racked up 25 bonus lives, it is still boring for the other two people."

 

Then play something else that is more challenging and players can't rack up lives. Or make an agreement to forbid the life racking. Did you guys only have SMB?

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Yet most games never utilized more than the single fire button.

 

 

 

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Doesn't matter, the buttons were there if needed, for example Omega Race, Raiders of the lost Ark and many others. Do you really need a 'jump' button when you can just 'push up'? It's so irrelevant.

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Except Super Mario Bros is an evolution of gameplay. The utilization of things like a second button for run and fire as well as hold that in conjunction with an action button. You know advancements in QOL that make gameplay smoother. Whereas for Amiga platformers it's generally pushing up because you need to fit all actions to a single button joystick and/or keyboard.

So what? I can count on one hand the number of platformers I even wanted to play.

 

The NES has these games as well. From the Wizardry series to the ultima games to space sims like Star Luster. From the AD&D games by SSI to early 3d combat games like Battle Tank to one of the early FPS's in Bandai's Space Shadow that utilized a light gun with a built in Dpad for movement on screen.

The NES had Civilization? Populous? Dungeon Master? Railroad Tycoon? I've seen Ultima 3 on NES, it's horrendous. Everything is has an overpowering slime green. Totally loses the feel of the originals.

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So what? I can count on one hand the number of platformers I even wanted to play.

 

 

The NES had Civilization? Populous? Dungeon Master? Railroad Tycoon? I've seen Ultima 3 on NES, it's horrendous. Everything is has an overpowering slime green. Totally loses the feel of the originals.

 

This is a fair point. If you're more into sims and RPGs then you probably were better off with a computer than a NES. The NES is great for action games, but some genres are better on computer.

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@Mayhem:Sure the Amiga suffered from a lot of ST Ports in the early years and was easier to code for, so Amiga games followed, with enhancements in many cases, but it wasn't odd to have to wait for ST versions of things like Defender Of The Crown, Shadow Of The Beast, let alone those advertised but never appeared Fright Night, Myth etc.

 

You'd often see ST version under consideration or simply told it wasn't coming as game written for the superior hardware of the Amiga.

 

Publishers would send Amiga games out for review 1ST knowing they'd score higher than ST version.

 

We never saw Jaguar XJ220 or Chuck Rock 2 on ST..

 

You look back to releases like Domark with Cyberball, ST version coming soon when Amiga version reviewed,same with Hammerfist, Persian Gulf Inferno, BSS Jane Seymour-Amiga version reviewed, ST version not finished at that moment in time.

 

You pick up a copy of C+VG from Summer 1990 onwards and look in reviews section..Shift towards Amiga 1ST becomes stronger as year draws to a close...Murder, Torvak, Corporation,Mr Do! Run! Run!,Captive, Lotus Expiry Turbo, Atomic Robo Kid,James Pond, Powermonger,NARC, ..you get the idea..

 

AMIGA version out for review, ST version mentioned in Update box out..review to follow in shorts section in following months.

 

 

Even before that..Populous Amiga 1ST, Sword Of Sodan..vague plans for ST version.

 

Hybris Amiga 1ST

 

Phantom Fighter no ST version as coders didn't think hardware could do it justice.

 

Meance,Blood Money..Amiga 1ST..

 

 

I've always laughed at claims the ST was still strong by time Jaguar launched here, but that's a story for another day.

 

Fact was as an avid magazine buyer i would be reading about the Amiga version and hoping the ST version wasn't too far behind and hadn't lost too much from the Amiga version.

Edited by Lost Dragon
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Just to put things in a UK perspective, our games press were reviewing NES games like Legend Of Zelda in the September 1988 editions saying finally the game had arrived in the UK..

 

Meanwhile likes of Silica Shop heavily advertising the Atari 520 STFM for £299 Inc VAT, which was playing host to mind blowing, open world, polygon 3D games like Starglider 2.

 

There simply was no comparison, the dawning if the 16 bit era was apon us and the ST put it within the price range of so many of us.

 

Meanwhile the aging C64 was being pushed to the limit with likes if Armalyte, so we tended to stick with existing systems and saved up for an ST or Amiga.

 

Oh and Star Ray another Amiga 1ST title, Mayhem. :-)

Edited by Lost Dragon
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I also don't get the NES f..boys laughing about the 1 button Joystick and on how great their stupid 2 button pad is

 

The Atari 2600 had controllers with 1-button, 2 buttons, 12 buttons, any problems there? Of course not.

Colecovision had 14 buttons

Vectrex had 4 buttons

5200 had 19 buttons,

Intellivision had 16 buttons

 

Computers had numerous button/keys.

 

If you're going to count number pads etc I think the NES is more fairly considered a 4 button controller.

 

(Which is 4x better than a one button controller, as opposed to only 2X!

Math!)

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Doesn't matter, the buttons were there if needed, for example Omega Race, Raiders of the lost Ark and many others. Do you really need a 'jump' button when you can just 'push up'? It's so irrelevant.

Actually, you do need a jump button separately. Take a look at Castlevania for the Amiga, it is shit because the use of sub weapons for that game is next to impossible to pull off because jump is tied to up. Up is also tied to the sub weapon action making this port next to impossible to play.

 

 

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Edited by empsolo
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Wow railing on the NES for having its 2(technically 4 button) d-pad config over a joystick or a button collage some other older systems had? That's straw grabbing. Some games are just better suited to less, some more, which I'd put into the PC realm from back in that era. Currently 2 buttons wouldn't cut it, hell SNES with a joystick(or not) on it would be a good standard minimum with the complexity of things and even then some stuff still more is suited for the PC anyway.

 

Ever heard of sometimes less is more? One button is more of a bad idea than anything if you want anything more than the most basic of functions in a game which is why so many classic arcade games went with a 2 or even 3 button setup, eventually evolving into 4 and 6 between stuff like Neo Geo and Capcom (CPS1-SF2) and other fighters.

 

That was a pretty grand high level of ignorance calling SMB1 a copy of the gameplay in older 2600 stuff like Pitfall. That's like calling every FPS game a copycat of Catacomb3D, and every vertical shooter a ripoff of Space Invaders. Sure you have some similar elements, but the core gameplay mechanics taken as a whole is apples and oranges entirely.

 

I'm sure someone will piss on my post due to my user name and icon, but let's be clear here I'm a multi-system and computer gamer going back at home the mid 80s, arcades a bit earlier. I've had my toe dipped into the world of Nintendo, Sega, NEC, SNK, and Sony as far as hardware makers go on personal ownership and more beyond with others. I'm not trying to take Nintendo's side here on this, and as of late with the Wii and WiiU *spit* they don't deserve it, but some of these comments are just absurd troll bait.

 

Oh and Civilization was on the SNES, and used the mouse too, it plays remarkably well and an honorable conversion up against the old PC DOS version of it. The NES had SimCity, finished too, yet scrapped it (jerks due to trolling it in NIntendo Power years ago) for the SNES release. It also did have a good version of Populous, I think Dungeon Master as well, but not Railroad Tycoon sadly (though DS got one with really crap visuals as Lionel Trains on Track.) Further with RPGs, maybe it did have a few meh copies of Ultima, but there was also the 4 Dragon Quest titles, Final Fantasy, Ghost Lion, Wizardry and others and they were solid titles. You even got some of the PC learning stuff like Carmen Sandiego which even came with its own thick encyclopedia in a box with the game as a reference tool. The NES was hardly lacking unless people were hardly looking.

 

The reality of it is going back to the NES era there were a lot of games that crossed over from the PC. Some actually did very well, some sucked, it kind of depends how the effort went into it and how well the gameplay/control mechanics worked. WORM was ok, many of the sim titles (Nobunaga) were solid too. But in the end it also would come down to comfort would you prefer a d-pad or a keyboard in those pre-mouse controlled titles type days (or even not?) That said there were a lot of PC games I wouldn't have wanted to touch on NES or SNES for that matter (some by example like Wing Commander) and others just because it just wouldn't play out well like Star Control 2. Each system has its own variety and strengths but to dog it over blind assumptions and bad reasoning isn't right.

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Oh and Civilization was on the SNES, and used the mouse too, it plays remarkably well and an honorable conversion up against the old PC DOS version of it. The NES had SimCity, finished too, yet scrapped it (jerks due to trolling it in NIntendo Power years ago) for the SNES release. It also did have a good version of Populous, I think Dungeon Master as well, but not Railroad Tycoon sadly (though DS got one with really crap visuals as Lionel Trains on Track.) Further with RPGs, maybe it did have a few meh copies of Ultima, but there was also the 4 Dragon Quest titles, Final Fantasy, Ghost Lion, Wizardry and others and they were solid titles. You even got some of the PC learning stuff like Carmen Sandiego which even came with its own thick encyclopedia in a box with the game as a reference tool. The NES was hardly lacking unless people were hardly looking.

 

 

I was talking NES, not SNES. I brought those games up after someone said Amiga/ST represented "backwards 1984" game design. I see no evidence that Populous, Dungeon Master and Railroad Tycoon were one NES. Many of them had SNES ports- but that was a 16-bit system that should be able to handle them.

Edited by zzip
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I was talking NES, not SNES. I brought those games up after someone said Amiga/ST represented "backwards 1984" game design. I see no evidence that Populous, Dungeon Master and Railroad Tycoon were one NES. Many of them had SNES ports- but that was a 16-bit system that should be able to hand them.

That was me and I said that in the context of having Amiga and ST game devs mapping games to the same tired one button joystick from the mid 1980's. Acting as if developments coming out of Japan and the US never happened.

 

 

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Fair enough I was more into generalizing the whole mess as if such games didn't exist on old Nintendo systems and weren't handled well as they surprisingly were given the limits of the hardware. It wasn't always the case, Wing Commander was ruined by just two bad decisions (1 - sloppy motion in the controls so it ticks along impossible to smoothly shoot the enemy, and 2-long password save and no battery for a game that needs it.)

 

And I am in that camp anyone taking a few controls and dumbing it into a 1 button solution is just tired, sloppy and just really stupid. Some people move along with the times, others stick their fingers in their ears and need to be forceably dragged along or they're made irrelevant.

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There is a reason why playing Castlevania on the Amiga is ass.

 

 

 

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The instructions for Amiga version look OK to me, but I only finished the IBM version with a 2 button stick.

I think you just had to be a better player playing C64/Amiga games (1: quick tap for whip 2: press and hold down for other options....sounds good to me)

 

Scan10002_zpscvhpe0ub.jpg

Edited by high voltage
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The instructions for Amiga version look OK to me, but I only finished the IBM version with a 2 button stick.

I think you just had to be a better player playing C64/Amiga games (1: quick tap for whip 2: press and hold down for other options....sounds good to me)

 

Scan10002_zpscvhpe0ub.jpg

 

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that challenge should come from fighting poor controls that were only that way as a shitty compromise because these computers still used joysticks that were out of date for the games being released.

Edited by mbd30
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Blame the programmers then. Controllers with more than one fire button existed, and could be handled by computers (certainly the C64 could), but games were barely written to take advantage of that.

I'm not sure blame is the issue...someone is actually trying to say one button is just as good as two, that up is just as good as another button for jump, that using badly designed controls means you are a better player...etc. I mean, to me, these are comical statements (ones I think made out of a very defensive sense of love that I totally get)

 

But even if you do talk blame, I'd look at economics and the companies that hired the programmers, which, I assume, wanted them to design for the biggest market in mind--that is, the equipment most people already owned. If most people had one button controllers, companies are not going to design games that use two buttons I'd think.The stock controller for a system and it's abilities are important.

 

And even when readily available, it really doesn't make sense to design games that requires extra hardware purchases, unless you're trying to move hardware too.

Edited by GoldenWheels
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Don't know about other '80s computers but the IBM compatibles gameport had up to four buttons and analog 360d control. Still some games were still programmed for eight directions and one button.

 

The NES could barely do eight directions. I guess that's why the most popular NES games were side scrollers where you're mostly pushing right.

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Don't know about other '80s computers but the IBM compatibles gameport had up to four buttons and analog 360d control. Still some games were still programmed for eight directions and one button.

 

The NES could barely do eight directions. I guess that's why the most popular NES games were side scrollers where you're mostly pushing right.

 

The NES pad is good enough so that I can get very high scores in Marble Madness and sometimes beat it without dying, a game that is meant for a trackball.

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