Nintendo Ruined Video Games

[deepthaw]

I seem to recall Next Generation magazine being very anti-Nintendo - not out of a sense of malice I think, but more a sense that they represented the past while Sony was the future. Next Generation seemed to be editorially tilted towards being "adult" and "serious" so Nintendo caught their ire quite often.

 

I *did* end up selling my N64 after finishing Ocarina of Time but held onto my PS1 for many years, largely due to the vast number of JRPGs that were coming out on it. Back in the 90s, there were a vast number of fanboys who went where the JPRGs were (myself included.) It's why I played SNES over Genesis, and why I jumped ship to Sony with Final Fantasy VII. Then I stuck with Sony and Sega because their systems were getting the Capcom arcade ports (Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, the VS series, etc.) I think Nintendo underestimated how much that loss would hurt them.

[Tanooki]

They were, though EGM was even more so. Both were generally seen at least around where i was living at the time as both anti-Nintendo but also pro-blow job to whoever the staff either fanboyed up to, or said hardware company gave them some fat bribes and attention so their egos would get puffed up high on their own self importance. Nintendo never was much about kissing ass or giving out extra free systems / test carts or other fluff to print magazines back then. But companies like Sega and even more so Sony would bend over backwards, perhaps due to the old Nintendo stature, and in turn they got the extra love in print to the point of even truth stretching, manipulation, or just ignoring things. One I loved from back in the day was EGM with MK1, the reviewers (obviously blood/death aside) would stunningly talk how the Genesis version had better audio and visuals which was not even in the least bit landing within reality, though their other versions got closer. SNES nailed it pretty strongly but was also dumbed down to G rated stupidity with sweaty Immortal Kombat.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Yeah, punch the sweat out of your opponent. I also remember tons of beat em up games where you punched martians or aliens or cyborgs and green goo came out.

[Osgeld]

Ill argue that the genesis version is closer to the arcade in both terms of speed, and aspect ratio, the SNES version always felt very cropped in and you have days to do a move

 

I cant stand either one these days since we got mame

[spacecadet]

Ruin is a strong word. But wouldn't it have been better had some of the popular NES games been produced for the SMS with its better hardware.

 

I just think that's the wrong question. Earlier in the thread, there were people saying things like "nobody would have made SMB if Nintendo didn't". Who cares? You wouldn't have known any better in that case. The industry would have been different. Maybe rail shooters would have been the dominant genre instead of platformers. I don't think that would have been a bad thing, to be honest. Nobody's saying Nintendo had no influence on the industry. But not everybody thinks their influence was a good influence, and if they hadn't been there, somebody else would have just influenced the industry in a different way.

 

My point being, if Nintendo hadn't existed, we'd just have to go without a lot of Nintendo games. They wouldn't have existed on any other console. And maybe - just maybe - the world would have been better for that. We'd have other games instead.

Edited April 27, 2018 by spacecadet

[Atari PAC-MAN Fan]

I can't help but disagree. To me, Nintendo made video games awesome again. We had so many terrible games during the crash that nobody was buying any video games anymore.

 

Nintendo brought video games back to life and made them popular again.

[Flojomojo]

Right ...if not for Super Mario Bros and Zelda (and their sequels), I don't think the NES would have been nearly as compelling. I don't think I would have run out to get a SMS to play Alex Kidd. There's a qualitative difference between the two platforms.

[Pixelboy]

A gaming world without Mega Man... (shudders)

[Flojomojo]

A gaming world without Mega Man... (shudders)

 

Maybe it could have been done on the Master System?

 

There's this home-brew, which doesn't sound like much fun somehow.

 

 

Version 0.33

• Megaman controlable: now It's possible to run and jump. All Metatiles can be solid or background, so no latters, witch makes upwards scrolling impossible. Also, no moveables plataforms. Still, it's possible to "complete" Quickman and Flashman stages, and most of the others by editing the Ram location that contains the maps (starts at $cf00). It's also possible to die by falling into an endless pit, this will just cause the game to return to the main menu.
• There is a small bug that can be trigged by crossing the left limit of the screen. This will be corrected on the next update, also, no source code this time, again, on the next update.

[deepthaw]

I propose that it wasn't Nintendo, but Nintendo's heavy use of cartridge-based mappers to allow games to continuously improve throughout the lifespan that saved gaming.

 

If Nintendo games had kept the same complexity as the first run of "black box" titles, it would have burned itself out early and suffered the same fate as Atari.

[+save2600]

... We had so many terrible games during the crash that nobody was buying any video games anymore.

Except of course, for the people that were taking advantage of all the great bargains to be had. Many of us bought more video games than ever during that time.

[Flojomojo]

Sure ... though on the supplier end, no one was making any money on the brand new in package games we were buying for just a few bucks.

 

I do love a good sale, even though it comes with a dark side. In the mobile app store, it was a "race to the bottom" such that it's hard to even ask for a single dollar when everything is free. On Steam, it leads to waiting for the inevitable sale, assuming someone even finds you among the huge lists of available games.

[zzip]

I can't help but disagree. To me, Nintendo made video games awesome again. We had so many terrible games during the crash that nobody was buying any video games anymore.

I don't remember games not being good during the crash. They got better every year after. The only reason we stopped buying games was the stores stopped selling them! Or they didn't carry the ones we wanted.

 

Now there were a lot of people into gaming for the hype. They are the ones who lost interest in gaming. Like most of my classmates- they were just following trends. One year they were all about videogames, the next year they were into MTV, Duran Duran, or break-dancing (or whatever) and gaming was no longer cool and "only nerds played them"

 

So gaming went from one extreme before the crash (the faddishness made it seem more popular than it was). To another extreme during the crash (gaming was uncool). Eventually those extremes had to normalize and the NES was in the right place for when that happened.

 

If it wasn't Nintendo, it would have been someone else.

[zzip]

Sure ... though on the supplier end, no one was making any money on the brand new in package games we were buying for just a few bucks.

Most of those companies were already defunct anyway. The real problem is people weren't buying the full-priced games from still viable publishers like Activision because they could get 5 or so games from the discount bin for the same price.

[Tanooki]

I propose that it wasn't Nintendo, but Nintendo's heavy use of cartridge-based mappers to allow games to continuously improve throughout the lifespan that saved gaming.

 

If Nintendo games had kept the same complexity as the first run of "black box" titles, it would have burned itself out early and suffered the same fate as Atari.

I like this, it fits so well. No one really bothered before thinking into the future, just the present as a way to rapidly cash in as much as possible in the now of the late 70s early 80s in the pre-during crash period in the US. Outside of the PC, no one really thought to leave something more open for better parts. While the NES was locked down itself, it was setup so that through that pin array with the carts, there was a lot more allowed by the complexity of what was put to the boards in the cartridges. Suddenly you had more ram, more colors, higher pixel density(MMC5 on all those), upgraded audio and/or added audio channels, bank switching, and other effects various chips allowed the hardware would do nothing with beyond the original black box stuff allowed. Had the NES stayed in that stuck realm, like the SMS did along side it, you'd have to be stuck with those limits, but Nintendo bypassed it so people could do more. It ended up being a development competition to do more, do better, throw another chip in and go nuts and the consumer benefited from hardware that lasts years longer than it could have. Idiots at Atari never learned that lesson, and outside of 1 $100 Genesis game (Virtua Racing) didn't learn it either trying to pander stackable faiiled hardware with the 32X that required more parts to run games. Nintendo showed you could do more with smart design and rolled with it again on SNES too with even crazier highs thanks to SA1, FX, DSP, etc.

[Pixelboy]

I like this, it fits so well. No one really bothered before thinking into the future, just the present as a way to rapidly cash in as much as possible in the now of the late 70s early 80s in the pre-during crash period in the US. Outside of the PC, no one really thought to leave something more open for better parts.

Um, not so fast. The ColecoVision had the front expansion port that made almost everything overridable in its architecture. You could even design a module that accepts its own cartridges, which could have been different from the standard ColecoVision carts that were limited to 32K in size.

 

It should be noted that cartridge ROM chips were rather expensive in the early 80s, which explains why there were very few commercial 32K games released on the ColecoVision (most carts were 16K at the time, together with several in the 20-to-24K range).

 

Given that the Famicom was released in Japan in the same general time frame, they were stuck with the same production limitation for cartridges. But they had the good sense to keep things open on the cartridge port (just like Coleco did with the CV's expansion port). So when the bigger ROM chips became generally affordable in the mid-80s, the Famicom/NES was able to take advantage of them.

[Tanooki]

Look fair enough they did a way to try to hit that but the console (which was really good) just failed to stick around to exploit it really. I was thinking more in the realm of actual practiced reality. A lot of those pre-85 systems choked pretty fast in the general market, even the Coleco which was pretty near stock Famicom quality stuff which I like it for as it doesn't feel backwater like the earlier things. Yes the Coleco had the port, but the port required things go into it, Nintendo at least had the sense to design their port(for games) to have enough throughput to be able to do the expansions on the game board itself. Shame no one thought of that one earlier and put it into practice but as you said, ROM was not cheap.

[mr_me]

In the later 1980s cheaper ram and processors meant every year more could be put on a cartridge. But every system had fundamental limitations and ultimately had to be replaced. The NES had sprite limitations that couldn't be fixed with a cartridge. Atari had a replacement for the 2600 in 1979/80 but made the mistake of releasing the Atari 400 rather than a console. The Atari 2600 was promoted well beyond it should have and the games suffered. The 1983 NES/famicom replacement in 1991, came too late and users suffered by paying too much for cartridges and games that should have leveraged better hardware. It's hard to blame Atari or Nintendo executives from milking every dollar they could; but was it best for gaming.

 

The 1983 NES/famicom only had 2kB graphics ram, the 1982 coleco vision had 16kB, the Intellivision 0.75k, and the Atari 2600 had practically no graphics ram. The nes/famicom got away with so little graphics ram by extending the graphics bus to the cartridge. Initially it was designed so they could use cheaper graphics rom directly from the cartridge but it allowed for graphics ram and processor expansion. It was a smart design that let Nintendo sell the console at a very low price.

 

The system that might have been pushed the furthest beyond its initial design may have been the Atari 2600. This was a 1977 system designed to play pong and combat; it has only two hardware sprites. To lower costs, engineers put most of the work on the software and may not have realised how flexible this made it to game designers. Few programmers had the skill and experience necessary to make a great cartridge, so many games looked like they belonged in 1977. Still there was some truely amazing things accomplished.

 

The Intellivision was designed for expansion through its cartridge port. The system bus extends to the cartridge supporting processors and around 50k ram/rom can be directly addressed, more with page/banking. That was a huge amount in the early 1980s. The graphics bus was not extended to the cartridge but a cartridge port video input meant the graphics system could be upgraded by cartridge. Adding ram, rom, and processors to cartridges was very expensive in the early 1980s but by late 1983 Mattel Electronics did entertain the idea of putting speech chips on cartridges. By 1982 Mattel Electronics had a Motorola 68000 based replacement console with 3D sprite effects planned before they exited the video game hardware market in 1983.

 

I don't remember games not being good during the crash. They got better every year after. The only reason we stopped buying games was the stores stopped selling them! Or they didn't carry the ones we wanted.

 

Now there were a lot of people into gaming for the hype. They are the ones who lost interest in gaming. Like most of my classmates- they were just following trends. One year they were all about videogames, the next year they were into MTV, Duran Duran, or break-dancing (or whatever) and gaming was no longer cool and "only nerds played them"

 

So gaming went from one extreme before the crash (the faddishness made it seem more popular than it was). To another extreme during the crash (gaming was uncool). Eventually those extremes had to normalize and the NES was in the right place for when that happened.

 

If it wasn't Nintendo, it would have been someone else.

This was my experience as well. To be fair, Nintendo deserved credit for being that company. Edited April 28, 2018 by mr_me

[Andromeda Stardust]

The 1983 NES/famicom only had 2kB graphics ram, the 1982 coleco vision had 16kB, the Intellivision 0.75k, and the Atari 2600 had practically no graphics ram. The nes/famicom got away with so little graphics ram by extending the graphics bus to the cartridge.

It was a brilliant system. By linking the tile graphics to on cart rom rather than console ram, the data could be loaded from cart in real time with zero delay. Then later use of bankswitching to instantly switch out the character graphics allowed an incredible amount of detail to be presented in later games.

 

No other home console I'm aware of had separate graphics and program banks, but store the graphics on the same rom with the game code. The later ability to instantly swap out tile data in 8kbyte chunks enabled games to have level variety that flat out didn't exist in other precrash consoles. This is fundamentally why the nes/famicom stayed in the game for such a long time, and has lasting appeal far beyond it's heyday.

 

The other big advancement with NES was it's scrolling engine. Most other consoles used hardware "tricks" to move graphics around creating the illusion of scrolling, which was chunky and inefficient at best. Not NES. Any game could offset the screen incrementally by up to 8 pixels, creating worlds which scrolled seemlessly. It changed the landscape of home console gaming forever. Not only did side-scrolling platformers come of age (not only run and jump, but run and gun, beat em up, etc), but vertically and horizontally scrolling SHMUPs became far more advanced than the Galaxian and Space Invaders type stuff pre crash systems had.

 

NES was the first home console with graphical fidelity that truly matched or surpassedthat of golden era arcade games.

[mr_me]

The 1979 Intellivision has fine pixel hardware diagonal scrolling. The Dreadnaught Factor is a nice shooter with full diagonal scrolling. Hoverforce had a huge smooth scrolling world, only limited by cartridge rom. Better yet are randomly generated worlds like Tower of Doom or Treasure of Tarmin. Games in the early 1980s were more limited by cartridge rom budgets.

 

It is expected that newer systems should surpass what was existing. The nes/famicom was a nice improvement for 1983 and the SMS was another nice improvement for 1985/86. It's too bad the sms hardware wasn't better utilised.

Edited April 28, 2018 by mr_me

[schuwalker]

I don't remember games not being good during the crash. They got better every year after. The only reason we stopped buying games was the stores stopped selling them! Or they didn't carry the ones we wanted.

 

Now there were a lot of people into gaming for the hype. They are the ones who lost interest in gaming. Like most of my classmates- they were just following trends. One year they were all about videogames, the next year they were into MTV, Duran Duran, or break-dancing (or whatever) and gaming was no longer cool and "only nerds played them"

 

So gaming went from one extreme before the crash (the faddishness made it seem more popular than it was). To another extreme during the crash (gaming was uncool). Eventually those extremes had to normalize and the NES was in the right place for when that happened.

 

If it wasn't Nintendo, it would have been someone else.

 

Very true... I was still heavy into the Colecovision and getting gems like 2010 and Frogger II (gem to me) and waiting forever for Dracula and Swords and Serpents

 

In '85 the major department stores axed their video game section - Sears, Penny's, Zayres, Wards (think Kmart did too). So, I relied on Toys R Us and a truncated selection at KB for older games. It actually got to the point I was getting burned out on the Colecovision since nothing new was coming out and starting hanging out with the neighbor kid who had a C64.

 

So I guess you can say it was almost a forced break in 1985. You have people that checked out of console gaming entirely, people move onto computers or people (like me) on standby that were still jonesin for a gaming console. I'm going out on a limb and guess the latter option had a lot to do with Nintendo's sales. Mitigate that with later packing in the second biggest arcade hit next to Atari's Gauntlet further aided sales.

[Tanooki]

I don't know about the if it wasn't Nintendo it would have been someone else. Maybe? The Sega systems of Japan that had one eventually show up here in 1986 (Master System) didn't show much care to do better than what the hardware allowed so they were stuck in those hard limits other than a little more storage to work with in late titles. I guess you had NEC though a few years after with the PC Engine, but again up until that disc media arrived it was stuck too. Genesis/MD didn't really allow for it either until they went with external devices, but eventually someone did figure a way to address it with their 1 chipped SVP game Virtua Racing which was too little, too late, and too damn expensive. Then you have SNK with the Neo-Geo that lasted a crap ton of years given its hardware which did no better than its confines too outside of ever larger chips on the carts (maxing out about 90MB with KOF 2003.)

 

Who really knows what would have happened had Nintendo just stayed in toys/tv games or handheld stuff instead. People just didn't seem to care about making hardware that could better itself in the way the Famicom and Super Famicom did.

[Lost Dragon]

I seem to recall Next Generation magazine being very anti-Nintendo - not out of a sense of malice I think, but more a sense that they represented the past while Sony was the future. Next Generation seemed to be editorially tilted towards being "adult" and "serious" so Nintendo caught their ire quite often.

 

I *did* end up selling my N64 after finishing Ocarina of Time but held onto my PS1 for many years, largely due to the vast number of JRPGs that were coming out on it. Back in the 90s, there were a vast number of fanboys who went where the JPRGs were (myself included.) It's why I played SNES over Genesis, and why I jumped ship to Sony with Final Fantasy VII. Then I stuck with Sony and Sega because their systems were getting the Capcom arcade ports (Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, the VS series, etc.) I think Nintendo underestimated how much that loss would hurt them.

 

Did they do the Infamous smashed N64 cover we had in the UK with Edge?

 

Edge went through a stage of trying to tap into the audience Sony had created, games being cool and something people who previously had shown little or no interest in gaming bought into..

 

Playstation was part of that era's culture,big names onboard providing music and advertising etc. Nintendo still seen as producing games for the existing games market,Sony going after the disposable income area previously ignored by Sega and Nintendo to a degree.

[zzip]

Very true... I was still heavy into the Colecovision and getting gems like 2010 and Frogger II (gem to me) and waiting forever for Dracula and Swords and Serpents

 

In '85 the major department stores axed their video game section - Sears, Penny's, Zayres, Wards (think Kmart did too). So, I relied on Toys R Us and a truncated selection at KB for older games. It actually got to the point I was getting burned out on the Colecovision since nothing new was coming out and starting hanging out with the neighbor kid who had a C64.

 

So I guess you can say it was almost a forced break in 1985. You have people that checked out of console gaming entirely, people move onto computers or people (like me) on standby that were still jonesin for a gaming console. I'm going out on a limb and guess the latter option had a lot to do with Nintendo's sales. Mitigate that with later packing in the second biggest arcade hit next to Atari's Gauntlet further aided sales.

85 was definitely the bleakest year for gaming. I remember stores like Kmart and Service Merchandise still had games, but it was a very limited selection with mostly oddball games, but popular titles not available at all. Toys R Us was the best bet as they still had a relatively huge selection.

[Flojomojo]

Did they do the Infamous smashed N64 cover we had in the UK with Edge?

"Something Is Wrong With Nintendo 64" -- yes, same cover and same editorial inside as well. I think we (as in you and I) might have discussed it in another thread, maybe proximal to some Jaguar discussion a few weeks ago. I can't find the post but I know I mentioned it with a link to archive.org.

 

85 was definitely the bleakest year for gaming. I remember stores like Kmart and Service Merchandise still had games, but it was a very limited selection with mostly oddball games, but popular titles not available at all. Toys R Us was the best bet as they still had a relatively huge selection.

Star Wars fandom talks about "The Dark Times" between Return of the Jedi (film, 1983) and the release of Heir to the Empire (book, 1991) ... nothing was happening and it seemed like our series was OVER. We had to find other things to do, different hobbies and obsessions. For example, Star Trek started spinning up again, with more films, and a new TV show. That wasn't the same, but it was OK for what it was, and it had a lot of books and junk tied to it. Batman awoke, got some innovative (or at least darker) comics, films, games. There were other nerdly pursuits.

 

Whether Nintendo "saved" or "ruined" gaming, it was something else many of us did after our thing ended, if we weren't already occupied with home computers or (gasp) outdoor activities.

 

I would think the financial situation of the time probably had something to do with risky game business of the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession