Well, it seems that back at Baton Rouge, in order to get ready to sell his house, got rid of all that remained of the Nintendo products that were used so many years ago. This includes a cache of NES and SNES games (the N64 was sold a while back), as well as controllers and even a Virtual Boy. Now, granted, I have acquired the old Nintendo Power magazines and have a bunch of Nintendo ROMs backed up on the very computer that Carbonizer! writes from, but I just can't shake that sense of loss. I mean, this was what helped me get into Nintendo. This was the genesis of all things that came. Up there in that tiny converted attic, this is where the magic really happened.
Just a few days earlier, I was strolling around the local used video game store. A beloved used video game store up north in Bryan had recently closed, and the flea market really was a joke (at least, on my trip there five years ago): they had lots of NES games but no systems. But is a real NES system really that good? I mean, it would just take up space in my room, and eventually, my apartment. The "blinkies" often plague the system and require some minor fixing, the controllers are the best part but I could probably get a USB adaptor if I wanted to play (besides, I've never really gotten a controller to work properly with my Mac anyhow...). In terms of a SNES, I just can't get Stunt Race FX to work correctly, despite numerous upgrades to Snes9x. It still flickers in odd places and seems far harder to control than its real SNES counterpart.
So I still don't know what to do. I think an actual NES would be great: I saw a SNES/NES/Genesis combo at aforementioned video game store, but it was $60 and I was almost certain it used cheap "NES-on-a-chip" technology that would just not be the same.
But there are hundreds of NES games out there. A few are good, a lot are garbage. Said "garbage" are mere curiosities on emulators, but we know which are garbage nowadays due to online sources.
I watched several episodes of Angry Video Game Nerd, which explores some of the worst "garbage" games for consoles. In the interest of providing only SFW outbound links from Carbonizer!, I decided to let you Google that for yourself. The thing with AVGN is that the "novelty" (and what many have ripped off this from), is some dork with glasses screaming obscenities about some bad NES (or otherwise) game. While the character of the Nerd is purely fictional (James Rolfe, the guy playing him doesn't actually wear glasses), the games are not, and are usually culled from the vast collection of James Rolfe. What's interesting about AVGN is that in many cases, he provides background information for the system (although on occasion, he has gotten things wrong). The most interesting part what I've noticed is that the worse the game, the better episode it is. If a game is not great but mediocre, he'll give some vulgarity-filled outburst that can be quickly tuned out with a speaker control. And when something is NOT bad, the review will be almost certainly excellent. Perhaps someday I'll make a SFW-cut of some of the better episodes (Sega CD and Nintendo Power among them). There's also the theme song, which is catchy but has NSFW lyrics (quite a bummer).
Nevertheless, it has been a bit of inspiration in many aspects. Part of me has always wanted to make a YouTube show of anything. Food, video games, anything.
Another thing that has been bothering me in terms of video games, is why did the Nintendo 64 fail against the PlayStation?
A few reasons, I think.
- Nintendo had been promising an add-on from almost day one, the Nintendo 64DD for the system, which would hold eight times the amount of information as a normal N64 cartridge at the time. The system would allow gamers to "edit, trade, and add on" to games. Putting yourself in a video game, editing things, trading components, that was the future. Many games were announced for it. But the problem was that Nintendo wasn't open with the 64DD architecture, and the disks, "Zip Disk" type "cartridges" were still not as cheap to produce or as space-filled as CDs were, and eventually, most planned games moved to the N64 anyway, and the DD got a limited "subscription" release in Japan in 1999, which guaranteed it to fail. I remember reading somewhere on the Internet that would create a rift in N64 gamers, those that had the add-on, and those that didn't. It was possibly the confusion about the DD that doomed the system.
- The CD vs. cartridge debate is widely known. Nintendo 64 cartridges never got past 64MB (the size of planned 64DD disks, but that's not to say that 64DD disks could've gotten bigger themselves), with CD-ROMs having a max size of about 650MB. But most of that was never utilized. In reference to the Sega CD titles, most of the space was used for just new audio/video tracks and not gameplay themselves. In many cases, what the PlayStation got was some amazing cinematic sequences, but not much new gameplay. It could switch CDs thanks to memory cards, but N64 also had a Memory Pak which could've done the same thing. CDs were far less durable and were slow. But they were also cheap to produce. This had two points in itself: higher royalties for developers and lower prices for games (a good deal for all) BUT also easy to pirate. With the N64, pirating games required an expensive "Doctor V64" (or similar) to work, while it was relatively easy to pirate things for the PlayStation. If you cut out the cinematics and actually compared gameplay, N64 had a better processor and better graphics.
- Finally, there was the whole "kiddie" debate. The Nintendo 64 was derided for its games, like the colorful (but very fun) Super Mario 64 and Rare's games like Banjo-Kazooie. On the flipside, the PlayStation had Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy VII. Sony was able to capitalize on what the Sega Genesis had tried to do a few years earlier, position their system as the more "serious" game system. Gamers who had been with the NES were growing up and wanted those types of games. The advent of Pokémon was a great money-maker for Nintendo, but also cemented the N64's reputation as "games for kids" and sent more dollars toward the PlayStation.
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