THE SYSTEM
CROSS-REFERENCE JESSBOARD
|
must-have |
awesome |
pretty good |
half decent |
kinda shaky |
weaksauce |
miserable |
|
NES |
PC |
Vectrex |
Playstation
3 |
Sega
CD |
Odyssey2 |
CD-i |
|
Playstation
2 |
Nintendo
DS |
GameBoy |
GameCube |
3DO |
Atari
XEGS |
Channel
F |
|
GB
Advance |
Sega
Saturn |
Nintendo
Wii |
iPhone |
Atari
Jaguar |
Macintosh |
32X |
|
Playstation |
Xbox
360 |
TurboDuo |
Astrocade |
Atari
7800 |
GB
Color |
Arcadia |
|
Atari
2600 |
Neo-Geo |
Intellivision |
Atari
Lynx |
N-Gage |
ADAM |
Microvision |
|
Dreamcast |
Xbox |
TurboGrafx |
SMS |
Wonderswan |
Neo-Geo
CD |
APF-1000 |
|
Super
NES |
NG
Pocket |
Atari
5200 |
Game
Gear |
Amiga
CD32 |
SuperGrafx |
Adventurevis |
|
Genesis |
PSP |
ColecoVision |
Nintendo
64 |
Gizmondo |
Virtual
Boy |
game.com |
I've been doing
this for over a decade now, so you know the drill.
I take a bunch of video game systems from the past thirty
five years, and review them in order of
personal preference. If you're curious to see
how the ratings have changed over the years, you
can check out the 2006, 2003, and 2000 installments of
Systematix by clicking the appropriate
links.
In
the past three installments of Systematix, the NES was
declared the best game system of all time. Surprise of the
century, folks... that winning streak ain't gonna change this
year, or the next year, or the the decade after
that. In fact,
I'm looking into having my tombstone engraved with the words
"NES: Best Game System Ever," which will hopefully distract
mourners from the graffiti that reads "Jess Ragan: Biggest
Douchebag Ever."
It's as close to perfect as a console can get, with
cutting-edge hardware, unrivaled third-party support, and a
comfortable, responsive controller all rolled into one
outstanding package.
It's also worth mentioning that the NES resurrected
video games after a crash that left many analysts convinced
that they were both a passing fad and a lost cause. A feat like that
pretty much pins you to the top of the charts for the rest of
eternity, or at least until the Holodecks finally
arrive.
The Playstation 2 didn't have to fight for its
industry leadership... people just accepted it as an
inevitability. It
didn't matter that the Dreamcast already had an established
and very strong library, or that the Playstation 2's own
launch titles were pretty miserable, or that two more powerful
machines were just a year away. People lined up around
the block to purchase one, because they were told to do it by
Sony and an overly enthusiastic press. The normally
reasonable Steven Kent checked his objectivity at the door
when covering the system and called the Playstation 2 launch a
"coronation," as if its success was a lock from the moment it
was set on store shelves.
He may have called the
fight before it even started, but ultimately, Steve was
right. The
Playstation 2 shot past the competition to become the
best-selling console of all time, a title it still holds
nearly a decade after its debut. However, after the
first shaky year when the system got by on the charm of its
predecessor and a handy DVD drive, the Playstation 2 earned
all its victories fair and square. It had the best
controller of its generation, the best peripherals, and oh
yeah, hundreds of the best games. Where else are you
going to climb a fifty foot minotaur, fend off an alien
invasion with Japanese pop music, and roll a random assortment
of junk into a small planet? Add compatibility with
the first Playstation and the ability to play DVDs without the
need for extra hardware and you've got all your entertainment
needs in one handy package.
The
best handheld game system ever? Yes, yes, a thousand
times yes! The
GameBoy Advance was the perfect apology for a decade of
underpowered Nintendo portables. Often described as a
handheld Super NES, the 21st century GameBoy had all the
features that made that system a hit. The vibrant
colors! The handy
shoulder buttons!
The nifty special effects, including scaling, rotation,
and transparencies!
The potent portable even had a few advantages over the
Super NES, including a speedy 32-bit processor (beefy enough
to handle smooth texture-mapped polygons) and high-capacity
cartridges (leaving plenty of room for sprawling worlds and
full-motion video).
There was just one teeny
little problem.
Well, not so little, really. The first model of the
GameBoy Advance was held back by an unlit screen that made
games tough to see without an adequate light source... and by
"adequate light source," I mean "standing directly behind a
supernova." After
customers voiced their frustration (for years), Nintendo
addressed the issue with the GameBoy Advance SP, letting
players enjoy the hundreds of great games on the system
without the risk of permanent blindness. Whether you want to
kick back with the classics, challenge your mind with some
deep turn-based strategy, knock some heads together in a
frantic beat 'em up, or satisfy an unhealthy yeti fetish, this
baby's got you covered!
My
relationship with the original Playstation was like Jean-Luc
Picard's battle with the Borg in Star Trek. He fought long and
hard against the invasion, claiming that his cause was
righteous, until he was eventually overwhelmed by the bionic
menace. After he
was kidnapped and consumed by the Borg, a funny thing
happened... he embraced their way of life. Even after he was
rescued by the Enterprise and stripped of his cybernetic
implants, he was still able to communicate with the hivemind
and even briefly adopted a Borg nicknamed Hugh.
Yes, I'm a huge
nerd. My point is
that I resisted the Playstation invasion with the same
ferocity as the courageous starship captain, swearing that I
would never succumb to its big breasted grave robbers,
obnoxious marsupials, and... hey, that purple dragon is pretty
cool! No, I can't
give in now! I
must remain loyal to my beloved Saturn, because- wait, they're
not making games for it anymore? Not even in
Japan? All right,
Sony... you may have won this round, but just because
I'm buying a Playstation doesn't mean I'm going to like
it. This is for
Rival Schools and Mega Man Legends and that's IT!
Yeah, right. I must have bought
close to a hundred games for the Playstation after making that
vow, and you know what?
I don't regret a single one of those purchases. While Sony was aiming
squarely for the newly defined hardcore gamer with the
majority of Playstation releases, there were plenty of titles
left over for a guy like me with eclectic (read: weird)
tastes.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night! No One Can Stop Mr.
Domino!
Intelligent Qube!
Suikoden II!
Man, it's never felt so good to have my spirit broken
by a sinister multinational corporation!
The
irony of the Atari 2600 is that it's one of the earliest and
most primitive of the pre-crash consoles... yet it's the one
that's aged the most gracefully. The system's lack of a
visual memory buffer forced programmers to draw each
horizontal line before the television's scanline could display
it, making the 2600 a developer's nightmare. Yet there were some
game designers who took this limitation as a challenge, using
layers of color to turn their software into works of art. The lush jungle
scenery and distinctive characters of Pitfall! have become
some of gaming's most iconic imagery, but that's just the tip
of the iceberg... there's also Midnight Magic, Crystal
Castles, and Solaris, three titles so gorgeous they could
leave even the more demanding gamers of the late 1980s
impressed. It's
why the Atari 2600 was one of the few consoles to make a
successful comeback a decade after its debut... and the vast
selection of games, including many timeless classics, probably
didn't hurt either.
Time
and the meteoric rise of the Playstation 2 has tarnished this
system slightly, but from 2000 to 2002, the Dreamcast could do
no wrong. It had
all the innovation... no other console had the maraca shaking
fun of Samba de Amigo or the unique characters and interaction
of Seaman. It had
all the hot arcade games, including Capcom's best fighters and
a port of Namco's Soul Calibur that was vastly improved over
the original. It
had the cutting-edge hardware... the Dreamcast brought
polygonal graphics into the modern age, offering expressive
cartoon heroes and stunningly realistic humans while other
systems could only muster origami. It had a clumsy
controller the size of Vermont... wait, that's not something
anyone would want!
All right, the Dreamcast wasn't perfect even when it
was actively supported, but it came a lot closer to the mark
than most systems, breaking new ground and dazzling gamers
long after its unfortunate cancellation in 2001.
They
say that he who hesitates is lost, but Nintendo's most
stubborn fans were willing to wait a lifetime for the Super
NES. Although
pictures of the system's launch titles appeared in EGM as
early as 1989,
Nintendo kept the Super NES in development for two
years while squeezing every last drop of profit out of the
venerable NES.
Some Americans grew tired of Nintendo dragging its feet
and bought a Sega Genesis instead, but the Japanese remained
loyal, patiently waiting for the console that Famitsu promised
would be vastly superior to any of its competitors.
When the Super NES
finally arrived in 1991, it lived up to the hype... well, most
of it, anyway.
While the color-drenched visuals, silky smooth 3D
effects, and a custom sound processor by Sony's best engineers
were a leap ahead of the audiovisuals of the Genesis and
TurboGrafx-16, the system had a low clock speed that put the
brakes on intense shooters and other demanding games. Once developers found
ways to overcome that handicap and Nintendo got its hands on
some hot exclusives, the Super NES proved that it was worth
the wait... and worth a look from gamers who already spent a
couple hundred bucks on a Genesis.
It's
hard to overestimate the success of the Sega Genesis,
especially after the lukewarm sales of its predecessor the
Master System.
This 16-bit super system utterly demolished one
competitor and nearly toppled Nintendo as the industry leader,
thwarted only by the popularity of Street Fighter II and
Donkey Kong Country years later. You could blame some
of Sega's good fortune on sheer dumb luck- the TurboGrafx-16
launch was a comedy of errors and it didn't seem like Nintendo
was ever going to release the Super Nintendo- but luck
alone didn't make the Genesis a hit.
No, it was the hardware
that was the key to the system's success. The 16-bit CPU in the
Genesis was a big improvement over the processors in competing
game systems, and boy did the games ever reflect it! While the NES had a
peculiar remake of Strider with bite-sized characters and
redesigned levels, Genesis owners were treated to the real
deal, an arcade conversion nearly indistinguishable from the
original. When
Sega segued from arcade ports to original releases, the speedy
processor still came in handy, giving Genesis fans the sleek
and dynamic Sonic the Hedgehog while the NES was stuck with
dumpy old Mario.
That technological edge didn't last long, but by the
time the Super NES hit the market, the Genesis had already
amassed a sizable user base and a whole lot of games. It wasn't going
anywhere, to the great relief of millions of
gamers.
The
personal computer has so many uses that you'd almost expect to
see it pushed in an infomercial by a bearded loudmouth... er,
better make that a sleazy Steve Buschemi wannabee. It slices! It dices! It does your
taxes! Add an
internet connection and it even gives you all the free porn
you could ever want!
Are you following this, camera guy? Oh, after looking down
I can see you are.
Never mind.
It wasn't always this
way, though. When
it was launched in 1980, the first wave of PCs by IBM were
designed especially for businesses, with a price to
match. There were
a few games available, but they weren't much fun to play on a
keyboard, with a green monitor for a display and a harsh
buzzer for sound.
However, as time progressed, the system was built piece
by piece into a formidable game machine. Floppy discs were
replaced with spacious hard drives and CD-ROMs, monochrome
monitors were put into retirement by full color displays, and
that buzzer was mercifully silenced, replaced with the sweet,
sweet music of a sound card.
These days, personal
computers have become a leading video game format, with
big-budget titles released every month and a mammoth software
library that spans nearly thirty years. PCs have taken a dip
in popularity thanks to the convenience of game consoles, but
there are things computers can do that ordinary game systems
just can't. No,
I'm not talking about the friggin' porn! I'm referring to the
thousands of independent titles like Cave Story and Spelunky
that would be almost impossible to publish on today's game
systems. Heck,
PCs have been a great development tool for the older
systems, making it indispensible for gamers and game designers
alike.
There
was a time when I was convinced that the PSP would win the
handheld wars, and that the Nintendo DS would be a misstep for
Nintendo, quickly swept under the rug and replaced with an
even more advanced GameBoy Advance. That notion ended in a
hurry when I was hanging out with a friend, playing my PSP
while he was kicking back with his newly purchased DS. While staring at the
"Now Loading" message on my screen, and watching the endless
fun of Wario Ware on his, I suddenly realized that all the
cutting edge technology in the world doesn't mean jack if it
puts a wall between you and the games you want to
play.
Millions of other gamers
must have come to that conclusion as well, because the
Nintendo DS is currently the best-selling handheld on the
market. That's
not too shabby for a system whose harshest critics predicted
it would be the next Virtual Boy thanks to its peculiar dual
screen display and touchscreen interface. It took time to get
used to these features, but after developers learned to tap
the full potential of the touchscreen, people began to wonder
how they lived without it. It's hard to say if
the cameras and multimedia features in the recent DSi will
have the same impact, but they're a nice bonus in a system
that brought the fun back to handheld gaming.
"Why the hell is this rated so highly?!," you might
ask yourself.
"The Saturn was a titanic bomb here in the United
States!" Ah yes,
that may be true, but in its native Japan, the Saturn rocked
the house harder than a Kobe earthquake, nearly rivalling the
Playstation in sales and stomping all over the Nintendo 64
until 1997, when Bernie Stolar unwisely pulled the plug on the
system.
Come to think of
it, the Saturn's success in the land of the rising sun, along
with its miserable failure here, seems to hinge entirely on
Bernie Stolar's involvement. In America, Stolar
shrieked "NO RPGS!!!" and left the Saturn hopelessly unarmed
when the award-winning Final Fantasy VII was released for the
Playstation. In
Japan, licensees released any damn thing they pleased for the
Saturn, including GameArts' sensational Grandia. In America, Stolar
launched a series of awful ad campaigns, starting with the
"Theater of the Mind" commercials starring apparent members of
the Ku Klux Klan and ending with desperate, childish digs at
the competition ("Plaything?" Yeah, I'm sure Kaz Hirai was
crying into his fat sacks of money over that one). In Japan, television
viewers were treated to Segata Sanshiro, a mascot more
aggressively awesome than Randy "Snap into a Slim Jim" Savage,
Punchy the Hawaiian Punch Kid, and the Kool-Aid Man
combined.
Wait, wait, I'm almost
done! In America,
Stolar declared that the Saturn was a stillbirth and used EGM
to taunt gamers who weren't able to get their hands on one of
the seventeen copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga released at the
end of the system's life. In Japan, third
parties supported the Saturn in spite of its balding sabateur,
releasing games until the turn of the century, and everyone
had a fair shot at adding Panzer Dragoon Azel to their
collections. So I
guess there are two morals to this story... the grass is
always greener on the other side of the ocean, and Bernie
Stolar needs to be forcibly raped with a Sugaro
Cactus.
It's a sad commentary on this console cycle that the
best system of the three falls to pieces when you brush up
against it and is nearly as deluged with first-person shooters
as its predecessor.
Sorry folks, but that's just the way it is. Developers for the
Xbox 360 have a serious case of tunnel vision, releasing the
same six games over and over with new scenarios and sharper
graphics ("it's Doom... but underwater!"). Also, three years of
the dreaded red ring of death have left a lot of gamers
gunshy, even after Microsoft promised to fix the faulty Xbox
360 units and addressed the overheating issue in later
models.
However... however. As rehashed as they
are, the games on the Xbox 360 are among the best in the
business, and the curvaceous white console is the undisputed
online king, with a service that (while rather costly) is
superior to the Playstation Network and light years ahead of
anything Nintendo has bothered to offer. There are downloadable
games, fresh content for games purchased at retail, movie
rentals, online chat, text messaging, web cams, interactive
avatars, and of course, online competition, making for an
extremely well-rounded package that's very nearly worth the
price. Also, in a
somewhat puzzling move on Microsoft's part, the Xbox 360 is
the cheapest of the three systems, yet very nearly the most
powerful. I've
said it before and I'll say it again... it's not perfect, but
right now, it's the best we've got.
In
the technologically humble early 1990s, the Neo-Geo seemed to
have it all.
Brilliantly colorful, ornately detailed
backgrounds!
Lifelike sound and digitized voice! Sprites so enormous
they could battle Mothra and Rodan for control of Tokyo! And oh yeah, a price
tag that would make even Donald Trump flip his wig. (Seriously Don, it
looks good on you!
You can hardly tell it's fake!) At a dumbfounding
$599, back when American money was actually worth something,
the Neo-Geo was as hard to afford as it was to resist. Fortunately, SNK had
the good sense to release the system as an arcade jukebox as
well, letting players enjoy critically acclaimed titles like
Samurai Shodown and Blazing Star for just a quarter a
pop. With a deal
like that, is it any wonder the Neo-Geo was supported well
into the 21st century?
In 2001, video game systems suffered from an identity
crisis. Either
they were the Playstation 2, or they wanted to
be the Playstation 2. Aside from some minor
features and a handful of exclusives, neither the Xbox nor the
GameCube did much to distinguish themselves from the
Playstation 2, and considering its massive popularity, this
was probably by design.
Despite its lack of originality, the Xbox had a leg up
on both the GameCube and its obvious inspiration thanks to
several smart decisions on the part of its creator, Seamus
Blakely.
First, it was the most
powerful system on the market in the early 2000s, with double
the processing speed of its competitors and cutting edge
graphics hardware that turned even mediocre games like Tao
Feng and Kakuto Chojin into feasts for the eyes. Secondly, it was more
online-friendly than any of its contemporaries. While the Dreamcast
had a wimpy 33.6K modem and neither the Playstation 2 nor the
GameCube offered any access to the outside world
without costly peripherals, the Xbox had an Ethernet jack
built right into it, making it ready for online play the
moment you took it out of the box... if you were willing to
cough up the extra seven dollars a month for Microsoft's Xbox
Live service, anyway.
Finally, the Xbox had one more advantage over its
rivals; an integrated hard drive that offered practically
infinite storage for game saves and let the player rip music
CDs and create custom soundtracks for their favorite
games.
Strip away the bells and
whistles and the Xbox experience isn't far removed from the
one offered by the Playstation 2, but with the extra features
you feel like you're getting the deluxe package; a PS2 Plus if
you will. Despite
this, the Playstation 2 still gets the nod as the better
system due to its immense library of games and the dedication
of its creators.
Games are still being developed for the console three
years after the Playstation 3 made its debut, while the Xbox
was dumped like a hot rock the moment its successor hit store
shelves.
Admittedly, I didn't fall in love with this one when
I first saw it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in
1999. You're
trying to pass off this silly thing with its shrinky-dink
characters and chirpy sound processor as a handheld version of
the mighty Neo-Geo?
You're kidding me, right? Oh crap, you're not
laughing.
However, once I accepted
that this wouldn't literally be a Neo-Geo in my pocket, and
once I spent some time with its software, the Neo-Geo Pocket
really grew on me.
I loved the tiny thumbstick that was more responsive
than any handheld controller had a right to be. I loved that you could
play it for nearly two days straight without ever having to
change batteries.
Most importantly, I loved the games, which were
endlessly playable and irresistably charming. Nearly ten years after
its debut, Match of the Millennium may still be the
best handheld fighting game ever made, even if the characters
look like sun-deprived toddlers and sound like parakeets. It didn't make a
strong first impression, but the Neo-Geo Pocket earned my love
after I gave it a second chance.
I just don't know what went wrong with this one. The pocket powerhouse
seemed to have so much promise back in 2005, with launch
titles like WipeOut Pure and Darkstalkers Chronicles that were
a vast visual improvement over anything that had been
attempted on the Game Boy Advance or the Nintendo DS. Even after the DS
started to gain ground, the PSP still had the clear
technological edge, as well as a real Burnout game and
titles like Mega Man Powered Up which could make even the most
outspoken Nintendo fan jealous. Then out of nowhere,
the bubble burst, and sales of the curiously strong handheld
took a nosedive in the United States. What happened?
Well, the hardware hacks
and the piracy that quickly followed couldn't have helped it
much. After
running an exploit, PSP owners can play nearly any game they
want on the system, including many they don't actually
own. I suspect
Sony's refusal to think outside the box must have figured into
the equation as well.
The system designed to outmuscle the Nintendo DS
couldn't outcharm it thanks to a hefty price and a dearth of
imaginative new features. Sony hopes to change
the PSP's fortunes with the tiny PSP Go!, but its even higher
price tag and a largely unchanged gaming experience only prove
that the company doesn't have the slightest idea what went
wrong with the system, either.
Why
bother going to the arcade when you can bring the arcade
experience home?
That was the premise behind the Vectrex, a sleek black
console with its own integrated display. Instead of chunky,
low-resolution graphics, the Vectrex served up sharp white
lines with an eerie phosphorescent glow, similar to the
visuals in arcade hits like Asteroids and Battlezone. The only problem was,
Atari already had its own very successful console, so GCE and
its successor Milton Bradley had to settle for the lesser
known games in the Cinematronics library, along with a handful
of lackluster original titles. Atari's cornering the
market on vector games probably hurt the Vectrex the most...
without access to classics like Tempest and Star Wars: The
Arcade Game, the advanced system could never live up to its
full potential.
Luckily, homebrewers have bulldozed over the licensing
restrictions that held the Vectrex back, porting over a dozen
arcade hits with or without the blessing of their original
creators. Hooray
for intellectual property theft!
The GameBoy leaves
me incredibly torn.
Such great software! Such horrendous
hardware! Such a
frustrating dilemma!
In the past, I've given the handheld a thumbs down
because of its many shortcomings... the wimpy processor, the
tiny monochrome display, and the lousy refresh rate that blurs
graphics beyond recognition.
However, the success of a
console lies not only in the quality of its hardware, but in
the quality of the games it plays. While the GameBoy's
launch titles were pretty shaky, generally watered down
adaptations of NES favorites, later releases by both Nintendo
and its licensees demonstrated an ability to work within the
confines of the system.
The system's limitations were also addressed by
peripherals like the Super GameBoy and GameBoy Player, along
with the Game Boy Advance, the pinnacle of the system's
evolution.
Trademark GameBoy annoyances like blurry graphics and
tiny unlit screens mercifully became a thing of the past, but
the excellence of top-shelf titles like Operation C,
Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge, and Mole Mania remains. You balance the best
and the worst the system has to offer, then throw in its
historical significance, and the GameBoy ultimately comes out
on top. (You can
stop writing the angry letters now.)
Despite the enthusiastic name and an innovative
control interface, it's hard to get excited about the
Wii. To its
credit, it's got a lot of features that make it more than just
"two GameCubes duct taped together." Web integration is one
of the biggies... the Wii's built-in wi-fi adapter lets you
download games, surf the internet, and yes, even compete
against other players in certain games. This is an important
step forward for Nintendo, who until recently was extremely
reluctant to let gamers connect online. The Wii's controller
also brought a lot of new gamers into the fold and forced the
rest of the industry to take notice. The motion sensitivity of
the device makes it the controller of a hundred uses. Turn it on its side
and it becomes an ordinary joypad. Aim it at the screen
and it's a deadly accurate light gun. You can also use it as
a bowling ball, a handsaw, a steering wheel, or practically
anything else you can imagine!
Unfortunately, developers
for the Wii haven't been feeling all that imaginative. There's a whole lot of
crap on the system, and even the killer apps are kind of a
letdown next to their closest Xbox 360 and Playstation 3
equivalents. The
true genius of the Wii can only be found in tailor-made titles
like Boom Blox and Zack and Wiki, but those games are
frustratingly rare, no doubt a result of the industry's waning
creativity. The
system's only three years old and still has potential... I
just hope that in the near future, developers are given more
incentive to tap it.
Sega pretty much creamed
NEC in the console wars of the early 1990s, but the one thing
NEC got right was its own CD-ROM expansion. While the Sega CD
phoned it in with rehashed Genesis games and faintly
interactive movies, the Turbo CD featured real games with real
improvements over what could be done on an ordinary
TurboGrafx-16.
Years later, NEC upped the ante with the TurboDuo, a
high performance TurboGrafx with both the CD player and
additional memory under the hood. Along with the
humble
TurboChips, the Duo could play the entire Turbo CD
library and fresh new games designed especially for the
system. Sadly,
NEC was squeezed out of the American market shortly after the
Super NES was introduced, but TurboDuo owners didn't care...
with outstanding games like Gate of Thunder and Ys Books 1
& 2 at their fingertips, and the option to import the
Arcade Card and top-quality Neo-Geo ports from Japan, the
taste of defeat didn't seem all that bitter.
Like
the Wii with its motion sensitive controllers, or the Xbox 360
with its comprehensive online experience, the Intellivision
was a pioneer whose bright ideas would define its era of
gaming. It
was the first
system with realistic sports simulations licensed by
professional leagues.
It was the first system to bring true depth and
complexity to video games, as evidenced by flight combat
simulation B-17 Bomber and competitive real-time strategy
title Utopia.
Finally, the Intellivision was the first system with a
celebrity spokesman who was a total dillweed. Who needs Josh Long's
smirking Mac guy when you can have George Plimpton, the snooty
Brit referred to by one critic as "the best preppie money can
buy?"
The Intellivision was the
most visionary and frequently imitated of the pre-crash
consoles, but not everything it brought to the table was
welcome. It
singlehandedly set back video game controllers twenty years
with a joypad that couldn't have been less inviting to use if
it were covered in poison oak and porcupine quills. The thumb-blistering
dial, confusing numeric keypad, stiff action buttons, and
uncomfortable shape of the Intellivision controller were
frustrating enough, but Mattel had to go that extra mile and
hardwire it into the console, leaving a permanent black mark
on an otherwise satisfying experience.
Keith Courage in Alpha Zones was a pretty good choice
as a pack-in for the TurboGrafx-16. Not because it was a
pretty good game, because it definitely wasn't, but because it
gave gamers an idea of what to expect from the rest of the
system's library.
The way-too-Japanese-for-1990 art design, the amazingly
strange characters, the tunes straight from a Casio keyboard
with low batteries, the mystifying choices for import to the
United States, the nightmarish localization with its boring
scripts and all the fun stuff censored... yeah, that was every
game on the TurboGrafx.
Every game.
With that kind of
unwelcome consistency, it's not hard to figure out why the
TurboGrafx-16 bombed in the United States... and that's
without factoring in marketing decisions like those
idiotic Johnny Turbo comics. Even though it was
beaten mercilessly by the Sega Genesis and swept into the
gutter by the Super NES shortly afterward, there are still
some darned good reasons to add a TurboGrafx to your
collection. It's
got many of the Sega arcade games that the Genesis didn't get,
as well as the best Bomberman titles of its generation
and some obscure Namco releases you couldn't find anywhere
else.
You've probably seen a certain disgruntled game dork
tear into this system, but what he doesn't tell you in
his frothing rants is that nearly all of the Atari 5200's
issues can be addressed by picking up a later model. The last remaining
annoyance, that wretched joystick, can be replaced with the
Wico Command Controller and a Y-cable. This dynamic duo is a
little expensive, but it's an investment that pays off
handsomely in a very short time.
Now that all those issues
have been addressed, you can sit back and enjoy the games,
which offer brighter colors, larger characters, cleaner sound,
and smoother scrolling than anything the competing
ColecoVision could muster. Over twenty-five years
later, the 5200 is still surpassing expectations, with
a port of Donkey Kong that's practically perfect and a sequel
to Adventure that comes close to the standards set by early
NES games. I'd
rather play Adventure II than Deadly Towers or Hydlide, that's
for sure!
This
system never quite lived up to its boastful claim of bringing
the arcade experience home. The arcade games were
there, certainly... half the system's library and a
significant majority of Coleco's own releases were conversions
of arcade hits by future industry bigshots like Konami and
Sega. The problem
is that many of these ports were lackluster, without the look,
feel, and key elements of their coin-operated cousins. The ColecoVision's
headliner, Donkey Kong, was a perfect example, pared down to
three rounds and with drab artwork that was a pale imitation
of the original.
However, developers would
occasionally get it right, proving the system's potential as
an arcade surrogate.
Turbo and Slither both came with peripherals that put
them one step closer to the real thing, and Ladybug and Frenzy
actually improved on the originals with exclusive
features. Today,
homebrew game designers are tipping the scales in favor of
arcade faithfulness with extremely close conversions of
Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, demonstrating that
the ColecoVision was a more powerful machine than it may have
seemed back when it was actively supported.
There's a term in the
human resource business called a "redundancy," used to
describe workers who have become expendable simply because
there are already enough people in the company with their
skill set. In
this tight economy, that's exactly what the costly Playstation
3 has become... a redundancy. Aside from the ability
to play Blu-Ray media and some depressingly underwhelming
exclusives, there is absolutely nothing the PS3 can do that
the Xbox 360 can't do for a better price. That's not to say that
the Playstation 3 is a terrible system... it's evenly
matched with the Xbox 360 in most respects, with the bonus of
more reliable hardware and, if you're lucky enough to be an
early adopter, full backward compatibility. However, if you own a
late model Xbox 360 and have no attachment to the Sony brand
name, you have to ask yourself, "What's the point?"
Wow,
Father Time sure took a bat to this system! At first, it seemed
like the compact machine critics called the purple lunchbox
would pull ahead of the Xbox to become the second best-selling
console of its generation. It had Mario, it had
Zelda, it had a double helping of Metroid with a new, hardcore
friendly first-person perspective, and it had licked a lot of
the problems that plagued the underwhelming Nintendo 64. The cartridges were
gone, replaced by handy pocket-sized discs, and the third
parties that stampeded away from the N64 were willing to give
the GameCube and its more affordable development environment a
fair shake.
Sadly, the system that
was supposed to mark Nintendo's comeback failed due to errors
both past and present.
Super Mario Sunshine wasn't worth the six year wait
thanks to infuriating levels and awkward new play
mechanics. Zelda:
The Wind Waker left fans of the series scratching their heads,
wondering why the plucky green elf had turned into a Powerpuff
Girl. And the new
Metroid? That
went over pretty well, but the sequel with its light and dark
play mechanics was a bust.
Perhaps Nintendo's most
damning mistake was that it did nothing to dispel gamers'
perception of the company as toddler-coddling old fogeys. While everyone else
was hopping aboard the online train, even Sega (especially
Sega), Nintendo refused, apparently worried they'd find
themselves cornered by a smarmy sub-journalist on
Dateline. Instead
they offered connectivity with the GameBoy Advance... a safe
alternative, but not a particularly enjoyable one. Nintendo also gave the
thumbs down to Grand Theft Auto, cementing opinions that the
GameCube was just for kids and ultimately sending the
console's sales swirling down the drain. These days, with the
backward compatible Wii stealing the spotlight, there are only
two good uses for a GameCube... a GameBoy Advance with a 42
inch screen, and a doorstop.
This relative
newcomer to the cell phone market has already topped the
N-Gage as a gaming device... the highly responsive,
context-sensitive touchscreen is a far better interface than
the N-Gage's cramped cluster of numeric keys, and digital
downloads to a spacious internal hard drive beat the hell out
of cold-swapping tiny, easily lost cartridges.
However, the iPhone
has a long way to go before it can stand on even ground
with the Nintendo DS or even the PSP. Quality control has
been appalling on the unit, with its thousands of mostly
fly-by-night licensees limited only by Apple's high moral
standards. In
other words, a game is far less likely to be published on the
iPhone if it contains the word "crap" than if it actually
is crap.
Also, the touchscreen and
accelerometer that work perfectly for the iPhone's standout
release Rolando aren't nearly as well suited to more
traditional game designs. That's not going to
change until there's a joypad available for the system, and
because that would be an acknowledgement that the iPhone's
design is anything but perfect, you shouldn't hold your breath
for it.
The
"-cade" in the name comes from the fact that this ambitious
little console was built with the same arcade hardware as
classics like Wizard of Wor and Space Zap. The "Astro" part...
uh, probably came from the marketing department. Bring 'em together and
you've got a capable system in dire need of games. When Bally was at the
helm, the Astrocade did get conversions of Space
Invaders and Galaxian along with renamed versions of the
aforementioned Wizard of Wor and Space Zap, but after they
passed the torch to an obscure company called Astrovision, the
flame just flickered out. The drought of
software became so severe that Astrocade owners took it upon
themselves to make games for the system using the
full-featured Bally BASIC cartridge, starting the first
company supported homebrew community well before Sony's Net
Yaroze and Microsoft's XNA development kits. Too bad nobody told
Astrovision that it's the manufacturer's job to make
games for a system, not the underserved customers.
Originally developed at Epyx, the Lynx was sold to
Atari as a high-end alternative to the GameBoy. Looking back, this
bleeding edge handheld probably deserved better owners. The system had a
speedy processor, full color graphics, and the ability to
scale and rotate objects on the fly, but all the bells and
whistles in the world couldn't save it from the bumbling
leadership of the Tramiels. After Epyx pushed the
Lynx to its limit with innovative titles like Slime World and
Blue Lightning, Atari took the wheel, then quickly shifted
into cruise control with conversions of their most popular
arcade games.
Nobody complained when those games included
Roadblasters, Xybots, and Klax, but when Atari hit the bottom
of the barrel, Lynx owners were stuck with the splinters. Pit Fighter? Hard Drivin'? Phooey. Atari gave up on the
Lynx entirely in 1992, leaving gamers still loyal to the
handheld scraping by with overpriced Telegames releases and
wondering what might have been under better
management.
The
Master System wasn't a master of much, but it was the
uncontested leader in quality arcade translations throughout
the late 1980s.
While the NES took massive liberties with its own
coin-op conversions and the 7800 was stuck with crusty old
Atari games people had tired of years ago, the Master System
did its best to bring the hottest arcade hits home with as
little compromise as possible. These included not only Sega's
own flashy efforts, but Rampage, Rastan, and R-Type as well...
a shocking selection considering that Nintendo had
brought the arcade version of R-Type to the United
States!
However, the Master
System won't be remembered for what it had... just what it
didn't. Some of
what was missing was relatively minor, like a pause button on
its uncomfortable joypad and a lovable mascot (no Alex, I said
a loveable mascot). All that could be
forgiven, but it was the drought of original games with deep,
satisfying play mechanics that couldn't be ignored. Sega tried to close
the gap between the Master System and NES with rough
equivalents of its best-selling games, but Alex Kidd was no
Mario (or Sonic, or Bonk, or Rocky Rodent...), and Kenseiden
felt like the RC Cola to Castlevania's Coke Classic...
technically the same thing, but the flavor just wasn't
right.
From
a purely technical point of view, the Game Gear is the exact
same thing as the Master System, in a smaller package and with
its own display.
And oh yeah, double the onscreen colors, but that's not
really saying much when the Master System was limited to
sixteen of them.
The funny thing about the video game industry, though,
is that you can offer the same hardware in a different package
a few years later and get entirely different results. While the Master
System's library was chock full of surprisingly accurate
arcade conversions, the Game Gear rode the coattails of the
16-bit Genesis with watered down adaptations of its most
successful games.
Some attempts were made to make the handheld stand on
its own, but they didn't come often enough... and when you
consider miserable Game Gear exclusives like Chicago Syndicate
and Sonic Blast, maybe they shouldn't have come at
all.
I
actively resent this system, not only because it killed
Nintendo's momentum with its stone-aged cartridge format but
because it demonstrated serious hypocrisy on the part of the
management. The
only reason the Nintendo 64 even used cartridges was because
Shigeru Miyamoto demanded it, complaining that his next Mario
game would be compromised by frequent access times if it were
published on a compact disc. Nintendo agreed to
replace the disc drive on the Nintendo 64 with a cartridge
slot, pleasing its most famous employee but pissing off
practically everyone else in the process.
Publishers once
eager to make software for Nintendo's next console were
incensed by Nintendo's decision to cling to the past with a
medium that limited their artistic vision while raising
development costs through the roof. Some of these
developers grudgingly supported Nintendo anyway (typically
with throw-away releases that could fit on a cheaper
cartridge), but others made a mad dash for the door,
abandoning projects already in progress and putting their full
weight behind the Playstation instead. One of these scorned
developers, Square-Enix, released Final Fantasy VII, which
redefined the gaming experience and was crucial to the
Playstation's success.
Shigeru Miyamoto's
shortsighted stubbornness cost Nintendo Final Fantasy VII, its
industry leadership, and millions of dollars in sales. Yet when it came time
for heads to roll, it was Gumpei Yokoi who was led to
the guillotine.
Sure, his Virtual Boy was a disaster, but in the grand
scheme of things, it did a lot less damage to the company than
the Nintendo 64.
The system annoyed developers, who had to spend a small
fortune on publishing games. It annoyed its owners,
who were left in the cold when all the good stuff was released
for the Saturn and Playstation. It even annoyed
Nintendo, which watched helplessly as the video game market it
once controlled with absolute authority slip through its
fingers. I'm
pretty sure the only person who was happy with this
miserable thing was Shigeru Miyamoto. Admittedly, Super
Mario 64 was pretty terrific, but if you're making a console
for just one game and one person, you're doing it
wrong.
More
than just a CD-ROM tray, the Sega CD was packed with
technology that brought welcome improvements to the
handicapped Genesis hardware. Extra sound channels
soothed the sore throats of video game characters, scaling and
rotation guaranteed a smooth ride in racing games, and the
high capacity disc format freed the imaginations of developers
who were once forced to work within the confines of an eight
megabit cartridge.
So why didn't this
translate to better games? Laziness, for
one. Many of the
developers who should have rejoiced at their newly expanded
horizons settled for releasing Genesis games with full-motion
video clips grafted onto them. Others misused the
power of the compact disc format and released D-grade movies
(Night Trap) and ridiculous Japanese cartoons (Road Avenger)
with only the slightest hint of interactivity. Sift through the
hundred games available for the Sega CD and you'll find a
dozen that break the mold, offering a truly enhanced gaming
experience that put the player in control of the action. That's a pretty weak
batting average, especially for the three hundred dollar price
tag.
Former Electronic Arts CEO Trip Hawkins had high
hopes for this system... in an interview with WIRED's Chris
Kohler, he had explained that he wanted it to dominate the
market the way the original Playstation had years later. Well, there's nothing
wrong with having high hopes, but a high price is something
the market just won't forgive.
The 3DO was developed
during an awkward time for the industry, when processors were
stuck in the slow lane and 3D graphics never got any more
advanced than the flat-shaded polygons of Hard Drivin'. RJ Mical and David
Needle, the celebrated designers of the Commodore Amiga and
Atari Lynx, tried to push the envelope with the 3DO, giving it
a faster processor and more specialized graphics hardware than
any game system that had come before it.
Regrettably, all that
high-spec gear came at a terrible price. No, they didn't have
to sell their souls to the devil, but you probably would have
needed to make that pact before you could afford one. At seven hundred
dollars, the 3DO topped even the Neo-Geo as the most expensive
game system on the market... and the real kick in the pants
was that the top-class hardware aged badly, antiquated the
moment the Playstation and Saturn were introduced in
1995. On the plus
side, with a price that high, there probably weren't too many
people kicking themselves over the purchase!
The Jaguar will always be
joined at the hip with its rival, the 3DO, just as the Genesis
and Super NES were inseperably bonded by history. However, while the
Genesis and Super NES were locked in an epic battle between
industry giants, the relationship between the Jaguar and 3DO
was more akin to a sissy slap fight, inspiring more pity than
awe. Who would be
the victor in this sad little skirmish? Would it be the 3DO,
with its advanced technology and price far beyond the
comprehension of mortal man, or the Jaguar, the 64-bit console
with the 16-bit games?
Ultimately, the 3DO was
the winner in this war of nerds, selling a merely mediocre two
million units to the Jaguar's pathetic quarter million. What's even more
shocking is that the 3DO managed to pull these numbers despite
costing nearly three times as much as its competitor. How could the Jaguar
blow it with such a huge price advantage? Although the chunky,
retro-in-all-the-wrong-ways controller couldn't have helped
much, the blame lies squarely with the games. Aside from a remake of
Tempest that earned nearly as much praise as the original and
a slick first-person shooter based on the Alien vs. Predator
license, the Jaguar's software library was the absolute
pits. You'd need
some pretty tortured math to justify paying $250 for weaksauce
games like Zoop and Double Dragon V that you already hated on
the Sega Genesis.
1984 was a lousy vintage for game systems, if the
Atari 7800 was any indication. Just two years after
the release of the 5200, Atari decided to rectify the system's
issues by releasing... an entirely different system. Ooh, now I know where
Sega got all its ideas!
Anyway, the 7800 was developed by Ms. Pac-Man creators
GenCom, an uncommonly dumb move from a company with a
reputation for ingenious products. While the machine had
a sharper resolution than its predecessor and could play 2600
games right out of the box, it also had hideous sound courtesy
of the 2600's outdated TIA chip, and a software library that
had to be built from the ground up.
However, the 7800 was
more a victim of poor timing than its own poorly conceived
design. After the
industry crash, Atari sat on the console for a couple of
years, until the company was sold to the Tramiel family. Jack had no love for
video games, buying Atari to get a foothold in the home
computer market after he was pushed out of Commodore. However, he saw the
writing on the wall when the Nintendo Entertainment System
rose in popularity, and after much grunting and straining,
squeezed out the crusty 7800 as an alternative. Without the processing
muscle or the popular games to stand on even ground with the
mighty NES, it wasn't much of an alternative.
The N-Gage is a
frequent whipping boy for critics and historians, but here's a
scary thought... just a few years ago, its software was as
good as cell phone games could get! For all its flaws (and
there are plenty, but we'll get to that), the N-Gage is better
suited to playing video games than its contemporaries, as well
as many of today's cheaper handsets. It can handle polygons
nearly as well as the original Playstation, as its pack-in
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater proves, and the lion's share of its
games offer more depth than anything you'd find on an ordinary
cellular phone, particularly the warmly received turn-based
strategy titles like Pathway to Glory.
The problem with the
N-Gage is that although it could perform the duties of both a
phone and a game system, it didn't excel at either. Cell phone users
scoffed at the quirky design, which forced callers to hold the
system sideways and press the edge up to their ear. Gamers were frustrated
by the tiny, vertically oriented screen and a confusing
cluster of stiff, unresponsive buttons. They both chose to
ignore Nokia's aggressive sales pitch and stuck with what
worked for them.
Wonder... wonder... Wonderswan, noooo! Gumpei Yokoi's last
game system was a modest hit in Japan, selling millions of
units and even attracting the support of industry leaders like
Square-Enix. It's
anyone's guess as to how the system managed to accomplish all
this, because the hardware absolutely sucks. It's better than the
GameBoy in some respects, packing a 16-bit processor while the
GameBoy was still limping along with an 8-bit CPU, but a whole
lot worse in others.
The display is a blurry mess, making games like Rockman
and Forte an absolute nightmare to play, and the controls
couldn't be more confusing thanks to Yokoi's insistence on
accommodating both horizontally and vertically oriented
games. A later
color model and the further improved Wonderswan Crystal fixed
the shabby screen, but the system was still cursed with way
too many buttons, as well as the specter of the upcoming
GameBoy Advance.
By the time the hotly anticipated handheld was
released, third parties ditched the Wonderswan in record time,
putting it squarely on the fast track to
irrelevance.
The Amiga CD32 sold
remarkably well in its native Europe, outperforming all other
CD-based game consoles in that continent, but that just made
the Tramiel-free and hopelessly incompetent Commodore all the
more determined to destroy its momentum, the system, and
itself. The
company ordered thousands of CD32s from a factory in the
Philippines to sell in America, but couldn't actually
deliver them because of a court order stemming from
Commodore's failure to pay royalties to another tech
company.
Commodore didn't have the money to pay the fees, or the
factory that built the systems, or enough spare change to buy
a clue, so the systems went back to Asia and the company went
into bankruptcy.
All this is a great
history lesson, but it doesn't really tell you much about the
Amiga CD32. Well,
the short version is this... the CD32 is an Amiga computer
with a CD drive, but without the keyboard. Popular Amiga games
that were already released on floppy disc were reissued in the
CD32 format, but aside from redbook audio and the occasional
full-motion video clip, very little about those games
changed.
Conversely, the CD32 could be upgraded into a computer
with one of several expansion kits available by
mail-order.
However, the kits were expensive, and the customer was
better off buying a pre-assembled Amiga computer rather than
playing Voltron with a random jumble of components. So the short
short version is that in a market already glutted with
Amiga computers, there was no reason for the CD32 to be made
at all.
If the Game Boy was an example of terrible hardware
redeemed by exceptional games, the Gizmondo is the exact
opposite... an incredibly powerful machine sabotaged by rotten
software. And oh
yeah, the Swedish mafia.
You've heard all about the zany adventures of Stephan
Erikson, though... let's concentrate on the games. You know there's
something terribly wrong when the best the Gizmondo has to
offer include Electronic Arts sports titles a year past their
expiration dates, prettied up remakes of long-forgotten
Commodore 64 releases, and of course, Sticky Balls, which
sounds like the ailment every urologist dreads. The worst games
include a Starfox clone so bland it should have been sold
exclusively at health food stores, a table tennis tournament
featuring big-breasted contestants, and Carmageddon, a
low-octane racing game that had already sputtered out on the
Nintendo 64 and PC.
The unfathomably heinous
software is a shame, because the Gizmondo is a very capable
handheld, faster than the PSP and with multimedia features
missing from the original Nintendo DS. If it had been backed
by, say, Microsoft instead of a bunch of scam artists looking
for their next multi-million dollar score, it might still be
on store shelves today.
Before I begin this
review, it's worth pointing out that the original Odyssey was
little more than a television Etch-A-Sketch with cellophane
overlays for graphics and circuit jumpers for cartridges. So the Odyssey2 is
definitely an improvement... but not nearly enough to match
wits with the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and, and
Astrocade. The
Odyssey2 is the only system of its generation to rely on
"canned graphics," custom-made sprites built into the
system. The
notion was that if the Odyssey2 already had its own artwork
hardwired into the machine, the designers could cut corners
everywhere else, saving the manufacturer a small fortune on
production costs.
It must have seemed like
a good idea at the time, but any kid unfortunate enough to
have grown up with an Odyssey2 (say, myself) knew just how
short-sighted that design was. The reliance on
internal graphics meant that each game looked just like the
last, with square-headed robots marching over baby blue fields
and jet black voids.
Worse yet, the system's meager sixty four bytes of RAM
forced game designers to trim the fat, bone, and half the meat
from their creations, resulting in software so surreal it
borders on Dadaist absurdity. If you can recognize
Popeye as a conversion of the Nintendo arcade game, you've got
a much better imagination than I do.
Hey,
it's an Atari 5200 with smaller cartridges, more memory, and
good old-fashioned single button joysticks! This would have
been a great idea in, say, 1982, but six years later, it just
left customers who were already asked to buy the 2600 and 7800
confused. The
XEGS didn't play 2600 games, it didn't play 7800 games, and it
didn't even play 5200 games, but you could pop in a cartridge
from your old Atari 400, in case you had one of those in your
closet. Oh yeah,
and you could buy an optional keyboard and turn it into a
computer! With a
muddled business plan like that, it's a miracle Atari survived
long enough to release the Jaguar. Today's more cynical
and better informed gamers would have had Jack Tramiel's head
on a pike days after the XEGS was released.
I keep waiting for the
Macintosh commercial where the subject of games is brought
up. I could just
see it now... Joel Hodgman's frequently humiliated PC would do
cartwheels in raucous celebration, then jump on a table and
wiggle his ass in Josh Long's smug face, shouting "Who's on
top now, bitch?
Who's on top NOW?!" This would be
immediately followed by antagonistic cries of "Nah nah nah nah
nah!" and proclamations that the Macintosh had been
"pwned."
This will never
happen, of course, but even without visual aids by human
metaphors, that has been the reality since 1984, when the
Macintosh debuted.
It was a terrible game machine then, and twenty-five
years later, it's a terrible game machine now, despite
vastly improved technology and the occasional gem like
Marathon.
To Apple's credit, it
did make a half-hearted attempt to turn the Macintosh
into a dedicated game player, but the Japanese Pippen went
down in flames just one year after it was released, trumped in
sales by the PC-based Xbox many times over. So chin up, wimpy PC
guy... you'll always have the edge over Macs in at least one
area, even if the commercials will never admit it.
The GameBoy Color
represents the snowy peak of Nintendo's arrogance. They thought they
could stomp the competition with a barely updated version of
their popular handheld... and the sad part was, they were
right! Thanks
to the popularity of Pokemon, the GameBoy Color brushed away
superior handhelds like the Neo-Geo Pocket with little
effort. When I
say "little effort," I really mean it... you could count all
the good non-Pokemon titles on the GameBoy Color on two hands,
while on the Neo-Geo Pocket, nearly every game was a
winner until Aruze took the reins. The sting of the Game
Boy Color's shortcomings wouldn't have been as painful if EGM
hadn't reported months earlier on a Nintendo handheld called
Project Atlantis that was supposed to blow every other
portable out of the water. That could have
been the GameBoy Advance, mercifully released two years later,
but it sure as hell wasn't this!
The ADAM started
out as an expansion module for the ColecoVision, similar to
the Supercharger and later add-ons like the Sega CD. When the video game
industry started to tank, Coleco quickly switched gears and
transformed it into a full-fledged home computer. Big mistake! The ADAM was a huge
boondoggle for the company, retailing for twice the price of
the industry leading Commodore 64 and being built from
components so bulky and clunky, you'd suspect they were looted
from the set of Lost in Space.
Danger, prospective
computer buyers!
This blithering bucket of bolts had its AC adapter
built into an enormous daisy chain printer, making it
impossible to use the ADAM without taking the slow, noisy
sidekick along for the ride. Speaking of slow, the
system stored all its games on specially designed cassette
tapes, rather than damage resistant cartridges or faster, more
compact floppy discs.
The games were indeed improved over what was available
on the ColecoVision- there's a sequel to Zaxxon and an
ambitious conversion of Dragon's Lair that are both stunning-
but in the end, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the
headaches.
Loadin' loadin'
loadin', keep that system loadin', loadin' loadin' loadin' all
daaaaay! Anyone
who bought this hoping to enjoy the fantastic games on the
Neo-Geo while keeping a few dollars in their pocket was in for
a nasty surprise.
Launch titles play just as well on the CD-enhanced unit
as they do on its cartridge-based cousin, but pop in any of
the fighting games and you'll quickly hit a brick wall of
access time. You
won't be doing much else quickly, though... you could wait in
excess of thirty seconds before a fight begins, and the
lengthy loading is almost constant in the later King of
Fighters games thanks to their frequent character swaps and
heavy resource demands.
The rare Neo-Geo CDZ
slapped a Band-Aid on the gaping wound with a larger memory
buffer, but by the time it was released, the Saturn was
already out in Japan for several months, and was capable of
playing faithful conversions of hot arcade games with a
fraction of the access time. Eventually SNK
followed the lead of its fans, tossing the misbegotten Neo-Geo
CD in the trash and putting its full weight behind a system
that could actually do its games justice.
The PC Engine (our
TurboGrafx) had more than its share of fans in
Japan, but this ill-conceived follow-up killed the brand dead,
receiving only seven games and absolutely no third party
support. The
situation was so dire for the SuperGrafx that NEC and Hudson
Soft had to buy the rights to popular arcade games and port
them to the system on their own! Fortunately, all of
these conversions were sterling, particularly Ghouls 'n
Ghosts, which EGM couldn't stop gushing about in its early
years of publication.
After you play it, you'll understand why... aside from
the muted colors it's the next best thing to being at the
laundromat.
However, the original
games were decidedly less inspired, particularly Granzort
(they had a year to make a Keith Courage sequel, and they made
it worse?!)
and Battle Ace (whose only notable accomplishment is
squeezing a Castlevania soundtrack into a third-rate flight
combat game).
Salting the wound is the fact that the SuperGrafx
didn't soup up the graphics as much as you'd expect... the
system seems only marginally improved from the TurboGrafx,
with the same subpar sound processor and color
limitations. Wow,
NEC... when you bomb, you take out a city block!
With
the exception of Shigeru Miyamoto, Gumpei Yokoi did more to
make Nintendo an industry giant than any other person. This talented engineer
created the Game + Watch series of handhelds, designed the
crosskey directional pad that became a permanent fixture on
modern game controllers, was the mastermind behind the
best-selling NES and GameBoy, and led the design team
responsible for Metroid, the science-fiction adventure series
that remains popular and profoundly influential nearly
twenty-five years after its debut.
What would a guy have to
do to get fired from Nintendo after all these stunning
triumphs?
This. The
Virtual Boy was envisioned as the ultimate game system, an
immersive 3D experience unlike anything else on the
market. Yokoi was
convinced that his creation would revolutionize the gaming
industry, but the oversized headset was impractically designed
and hamstrung by the limited technology of the time. Instead of a full
color display, Yokoi was forced to settle for shades of
eye-searing red, and instead of hardware that could
effectively bring virtual worlds to life, he was stuck with a
peculiar processor that struggled to keep up with even
primitive wire-frame polygons.
The Virtual Boy bombed
hard at retail, dropping from two hundred dollars to twenty in
a matter of months.
Furious at its failure, Nintendo forgot all of Gumpei
Yokoi's positive contributions to the company and sentenced
him to twiddle his thumbs in the white room, a fate worse than
death in the shame-driven Japanese business world. Anyone who bought a
Virtual Boy was punished just as severely with migraine
headaches, lousy games, and a lighter wallet.
"I'm so hungry I could
eat an Octorok!"
These wimpy words will forever ring in the ears of
gamers who foolishly bought a CD-i for its Legend of Zelda
games. There were
three of them on the system, but not one had the touch of
genius that defined the series on Nintendo's consoles. What they had instead
were ridiculous, rough-edged cartoons that would become the
laughingstock of YouTube ten years later.
That ain't all,
folks! The CD-i
was also burdened with pretentious full-motion video "games"
which tried to elevate the medium to high art, while
forgetting that the only reason anyone even tried to
play Night Trap and Sewer Shark was for the camp value. Without it, titles
like Voyeur and Burn:Cycle were just late night cable movies
with the pointless distraction of joystick input. Hey Philips, did you
ever consider releasing actual games for this thing? You know, games,
not dictionaries or blustery multimedia presentations or
whatever the hell was on those three Zelda discs.
The
Fairchild Channel F has a fascinating history, full of
industry milestones.
It was the first programmable home game console,
released at a time when boring Pong units glutted the
market. Its
designer Jerry Lawson was as much a pioneer as the console he
created, the only African-American guiding the industry during
its early formative years. Then there are the
games, which are... uh, wow. They're groundbreaking
in that they exist, but they also demonstrate that engineering
genius doesn't necessarily translate to brilliant software
design. Only one
game out of the two dozen on the Channel F, Dodge It, is both
original and entertaining... the rest are functional at best,
with the "fun" part missing from the equation. The system's
contribution to gaming history is undeniable, but without
great software, history is all it will ever be.
More like 32X-crement,
amirite? Yeah,
yeah, that was a lame joke, but if Sega doesn't have to put
any effort into their work, neither do I. After the Sega CD,
there was absolutely, positively no reason for this horrible
thing to exist.
None. It
fractured the Genesis user base, again, gave anyone
dumb enough to purchase it a reason to put off buying a
Saturn, offered trivial improvements over the Genesis
hardware, and was a stone-cold bitch to set up, feeling more
like a wadded up invention fished out of Rube Goldberg's
garbage can than a legitimate system upgrade.
If you've never had the
unbridled joy of using a 32X, allow me to sum up the
experience for you.
"Where am I gonna put this second power supply? Do I really have to
daisy chain video cables from the Genesis to the 32X to my
television set?
What the hell are these metal things, and why do they
keep popping out of the cartridge slot? Wait, wait, now I need
to connect the Sega CD too?! Hell, I didn't have
this much trouble putting my Constructicons together when I
was ten. At least
I'm finished with this convoluted mess. I'll just turn on my
brand new super system and... wait, why is the Sega logo
green? Screw
this... where's my Super Nintendo?"
There are fans of the Emerson Arcadia and its many
European clones out there. Just know that I will
never be one of them.
It always struck me as a remarkably cynical attempt to
break into the video game market... a last generation console
competing with the next generation technology of the Atari
5200, ColecoVision, and Vectrex. Sure, it had the
support of some current industry heavyweights, including
Konami and Tekhan (then Tecmo, and now Kotec), but that
doesn't excuse the very lightweight hardware. Screeching sound
effects and jumpy graphics you have to view under an electron
microscope aren't my idea of a good time, and judging from the
system's shabby sales in the United States, it didn't win over
anyone else. I
suspect that the Europeans and Australians who still profess
their love for the Emerson Arcadia weren't given too many
other options...
The
first programmable handheld game system wasn't programmable
per se... the Microvision was just a crude monochrome
display and a dial, while the cartridges contained the
processor and software.
Dumb terminals were a popular money saver in the
computer industry at the time, but the Microvision was the
first time it had been attempted in the world of video
games. It was a
clever idea that dropped the price of the Microvision to
sub-GameBoy levels, but the games were primitive, ranging from
a Breakout clone that was packaged with the system to a simple
shooting gallery with the Star Trek license. It was an important
step forward for the industry, but a baby step next to what
the GameBoy would offer years later.
I actually owned one of
these obscure consoles for a week. A week was long
enough. The
APF-1000 brings together blocky sprites and pastel colors for
a look that reminds you of what would happen if Ms. Pac-Man
invited the cast of Adventure to her baby shower. Ugly graphics are only
the start of this system's problems, however... it also
suffers from a minute selection of games and a controller with
all the usual earmarks of faulty joystick design from the late
1970s. Seriously,
why were hardware manufacturers from that period so utterly
obsessed with numeric keypads? It was a bad industry
habit that wasn't broken for good until the failure of the
Atari Jaguar in 1995, and the stiff membrane keys certainly
didn't do this sad-sack system any favors.
This is the holy grail of
video game collecting; a machine so rare that one of its
cartridges makes Suikoden II or Radiant Silvergun look like
one of those copies of E.T. that Atari buried in a New Mexico
landfill. For all
its value as a collector's item, however, the Adventurevision
offers nothing in the way of entertainment value. Like the Virtual Boy,
this Entex disaster uses a clever arrangement of red LEDs and
mirrors for its display.
Unlike the Virtual Boy, the constantly
flickering graphics offer no illusion of depth... just violent
epileptic seizures.
On the bright side, the time you'll spend flopping
around on the floor is time you won't have to spend playing
the Adventurevision's four games, arcade conversions so
pathetic they make Entex's primitive tabletop games look
kingly by comparison.
Just think... all this can be yours for only five
thousand dollars!
Oh
ho ho... this is going to be fun! Not the system itself,
mind you... just giving it the big kick in the ass it
deserves. The
game.com was Tiger Electronics' attempt to break into the
mainstream video game market, and the press was all too eager
to give them a hand, treating the handheld like a masterpiece
rather than the master piece of crap it actually was. "It's got real
digitized voice!," the video game magazines shouted. "It can play advanced
games like Duke Nukem 3D!," they boasted. "It has touchscreen
features once available only on pricey PDAs!," they
crowed. "This is
going to dethrone Nintendo as the king of the handheld
market!," they smugly assured their readers, while secretly
making plans for the fat checks Tiger slipped into their
pockets.
Here's what the rags
didn't tell you about the game.com. The digitized
voice? It was
pretty rough, but no biggie... that was never a selling point
for a handheld anyway.
Those advanced games? They were faintly
recognizable as Duke Nukem and Fighter's Megamix, but ran at
four frames a second and were blurred to the point of zero
visibility on the game.com's sorry screen. The touchscreen
features? There
were a couple dozen pressure points on the screen which let
you point at objects with the stylus, but that was pretty much
it. As for the
notion that the game.com would rule the handheld market, we
all know how well that went. People took one look
at the system, then after their vision came back, they embraced their GameBoys as
if they were long departed grandparents returning from the
grave. After that
tender moment, they rolled up the magazines and beat the
filthy liars who wrote them like naughty
puppies.