91–100 of 119 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And there's far less meaningful innovation in gaming today. VR was pretty promising, but has failed to be transformative. The new consoles' graphics frankly don't look much better than current ones IMHO, despite having 10x or 100x the performance. Game streaming is the most interesting and disruptive technology, once the major players figure out the right business model. Back in the 90s, opening a gaming magazine was…
VR will be a lot more exciting when we hit ‘retina’ VR, where immersion will be much more effective. The screen dooring effect of the original Vive and Oculus was a huge negative for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive that.
Heh, my friend believed it turned his 64bit system into a 68bit system.
Not just Sega, but Nintendo as well. The N64 was a moderate success, but if it was a CD-based system and came out a year earlier, Nintendo would have cut the PSOne at the knees and maintained console dominance.
Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply very slow loading. N64 fall was mostly due to: * Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures. * (Very) bad developer API…
>Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures.
So what? The PSOne hardware also had its own set of constraints that made their games pixelated and ugly. In fact, I would argue N64 games were generally better looking than PSOne games.
>(Very) bad developer API (actually ABI).
Again, who cares? If the system sold as well as the PSOne did, developers and publishers would deal with it.
>Cost heavy support (cartridge).
This is the big one. The fact that N64 was not a CD-based system, however, really hurt it with consumers, who wanted a CD-based system, because CDs were new and exciting. Third-parties also hated paying Nintendo for a license AND for cartridges because it cut into their profit margins. The fact that N64 was a cartridge-based system also shut them out from a bunch of AAA titles that used large amount of textures, voice/video and FMV cutscenes because it made straight ports impossible. It may seem silly these days, but FMV in video games was really exciting back then.
I also think it hurt them that the PSOne was released almost two years before the N64 did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Saturn always struck me as overdesigned and underengineered. So many custom chips to program and coordinate and a high unit cost when the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony ends up being just as good and cheaper almost all of the time.
>the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony I mean, up to a point? The PS1 was so simple it didn't have a floating point processor. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bkedc/heres_a_quest...
The PS1 platform prospered because it was cheap, and relatively welcoming for developers (lots of tooling, libraries, infrastructure), and it ended up selling over 100 million units.
It's very tough to argue too much with that kind of success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy. In reality, the exact opposite happened. Ken Kutaragi (creator of the PlayStation) and Norio Ohga (then-president of Sony) were outraged that the Sony executives in America were not following their instructions, and they fired the v…
"he American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black)" I have to love that these aesthetics the Americans were upset about made no difference to the success of the PlayStation.
Not just Sega, but Nintendo as well. The N64 was a moderate success, but if it was a CD-based system and came out a year earlier, Nintendo would have cut the PSOne at the knees and maintained console dominance.
Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply very slow loading. N64 fall was mostly due to: * Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures. * (Very) bad developer API…
I'd be very interested in learning about the N64's 3D API and ABI and the issues with it, if you'd like to expand on that. Or maybe you know of a blog post or article already covering the topic?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"he American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black)" I have to love that these aesthetics the Americans were upset about made no difference to the success of the PlayStation.
Or maybe it succeeded in spite of the name, color, and small controllers and would've been even more successful if the Americans got their way. I guess we'll never know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"he American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black)" I have to love that these aesthetics the Americans were upset about made no difference to the success of the PlayStation.
It's hard to say if that's entirely true. Sony did end up changing the system's color and making the controller bigger and bigger on subsequent iterations of the PlayStation, so apparently they came around on those ideas.