How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#2I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress, just better iteration.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#3I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress, just better iteration.
I am a bit younger but I agree. Going from the SNES/Genesis to Playstation/N64 with 3d graphics was amazing. It was like having an arcade machine at home. Going to the PS2/Xbox and then 360/PS3 was again a massive jump. Every console jump was a very noticeable improvement in graphics, so it became a big deal. PS4/PS5/XBONE these were just such minor improvements, there is no big wow factor.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#4I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress, just better iteration.
I am a bit younger but I agree. Going from the SNES/Genesis to Playstation/N64 with 3d graphics was amazing. It was like having an arcade machine at home. Going to the PS2/Xbox and then 360/PS3 was again a massive jump. Every console jump was a very noticeable improvement in graphics, so it became a big deal. PS4/PS5/XBONE these were just such minor improvements, there is no big wow factor.
The snes to N64 jump to me is definitely the biggest. It wasn't just graphics, the gameplay completely changed too.
By the end of the snes era I had grown out of games due to endless platforms and 2d fighters (I was 13ish). I was 16 by time I started playing them again. Wave race 64 was just mind blowing. And like nothing else I'd played before.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#5Good times, they were. Good times indeed. (And we're still married, too!)
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#6I mean the PS2 was a bigger hit than the PS1 and anything Nintendo put out so that analysis wains.
The jump in graphics was massive.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#7[flagged]
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#8I’ll never forget the PS2 US launch. I visited the US for holidays and landed just the day before launch. I thought I was going to be able to get one unit the next day if I asked in a few shops if they knew they were going to have stock. After my sister took me to a few it was clear it was going to be next to impossible, some were going to get as few as a dozen of them and those were already reserved.
But in the last Best Buy we visited the person I asked about the launch told me the same as all the other stores we visited before but said “you really want one?” And he pulled out his wallet and started digging into a bunch of papers and gave me a receipt of his own PS2 reservation at another chain (I think it was Electronics Boutique?) and said “keep it, I don’t feel like getting it now I’ll just get one down the road”, he didn’t want any money for it, we insisted profusely, even though his reservation had like 15 dollars already paid. I was so lucky.
That other store was doing a midnight launch, they even had police in the parking lot keeping an eye. Picked up the console with Ridge Racer V, Tekken Tag Tournament, Kessen and a 2nd controller if I recall correctly.
Good times.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#9>In the end, the console wars of the late 1990s were won by Nintendo, which built on the momentum of the Nintendo 64 by launching the GameCube in 2001, along with an arsenal of handheld systems
Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?
>The limited amount of storage on the cartridge means that the textures laid over the game’s polygons are blurry and often hideously ugly.
The cartridge storage wasn't the limiting factor here. The problem was the unified RDRAM memory architecture of the N64 which turned out to be too slow for texturing. Instead developers had to use a 4KiB bit of onboard memory which was just too little in hindsight.
Re: How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)
#10[flagged]
Enshittification caused food to become more processed and laden with garbage and the ability for a single job to allow people to live a dignified life died fully after the GFC. Health is one of the first to go in this new era.