MottZilla

Pretty much improved possibilities through hardware upgrades of more memory, fast cpu and gpu. Which is pretty much all that seems worth while in the 3DS to me. They added 3D which I saw for myself, and while I see the effect and all, I can't understand why you'd want that. It didn't blow my mind or anything. It just seemed like what I thought it would be, a gimmick. The analog control, higher screen resolution, more memory, faster cpu and gpu are all nice. Though the cameras I can't really say I care about, or the gyroscopes that are supposed to be in it. When I heard that NGP would have a touch screen I was pretty disappointed. I don't like them and they end up looking crappy cause of finger prints or other smudges.

Might have something to do with CA having no money and a population overworking the roads. But lots of places in the US are suffering due to funding being cut to maintaining infrastructure. I really hope they manage to get a handle on their nuclear plant. If they suffer a meltdown or an actual fission reaction resulting in an explosion that would be terrible for everyone. Even this is terrible for everyone but it could still get worse.

You say that like it's a bad thing. The RAM Cart for the Saturn was absolutely awesome. I still think Sony fucked up big time by never providing developers and gamers with a memory expansion for PS1. But then again Sony was pretty shitty on 2D games in the North American region.

Not really. People download PS3 games all the time. These people have plenty of time. It beats spending money to them. They are certainly willing to wait, willing to tinker, etc to get free games. People may assume oh PS3 games are too big to pirate, but that just isn't the case at all. Infact some are quite small, smaller than some PS2 games.

I haven't really played too many Saturn exclusive games. A lot of what I've played are top notch arcade ports like Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter and Street Fighter Zero 3. I do want to give Panzer Dragoon a try as well as other titles. Sometime I'd like to actually play through Nights, I've only played the first few levels. It's a real shame the Sega Saturn was abandon everywhere but Japan. There were some great titles released in Japan after NA and Europe gave it the axe.

That was something else I found particularly with friends I knew that pirated 360 games. They would pirate everything. Didn't matter if the game wasn't a AAA title. They'd pirate it and play it. So yes they would pirate games they wouldn't buy, honestly. Which in my opinion, is a waste of time. People that pirate games like crazy can ruin gaming for themselves as they basically throw their standards out the window and become a gaming whore. Generally I usually only play a few new games over a year. I skip most stuff that comes out, including multiplayer games that I feel are just a passing fad and not worth 60$. Pretty much there aren't enough awesome games I'm interested in that I would need to jump through hoops to pirate them to play them all. I will point out that piracy is probably very appealing to kids with no income. When I was a kid I couldn't buy many games myself but I got to go to the video store and rent them alot. So pirating games through the internet just seems to be kids modern way of playing alot of games despite having no money. Not that it makes it ok or anything. I guess you could say I blame them for being the device that enables people and encourages people to do this. Also I blame them for making money while not creating anything of value. They are just an asshole middleman. Used game stores never were exactly wonderful but they generally had a nice selection of titles including older titles. I don't ever recall it being like it is today which you mentioned. With a game like Fallout New Vegas which I bought (and unfortunately lost interest in) I should have gone to sell it as soon as I was done with it to recoup the maximum amount of money possible. This is because of a trend that only Nintendo doesn't follow, of reducing game prices not long after the game comes out. Maybe it's a long time in video game land, but in real time it can be as soon as a few months a game will go down in price by 1/3rd its original cost. This may seem good but I find it bad for me actually giving a shit about playing any new non-multiplayer games. It's been this way for awhile. On my Xbox 360, nearly every single game I bought is multiplayer. Assassin's Creed, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, and Dead Rising are the only ones that are not. And I probably got burned on all of them. I paid full price for all but AC which was $40 for one week when I bought it. Now other than FO NV which is still new, all these games can be bought for far less. I'm not sure there is anything to be done about this, but I just wanted to complain that this is bullshit and makes me uninterested in buying games. I'm most interested in buying games that are retro perhaps in part because of the throw-away nature of modern games.

I find piracy kind of disturbing these days. At first it was just kind of funny. Then it just grows and grows. There are tons of people out there with modded Xbox 360s (and now PS3s) who just pirate the shit out of all the games. This certainly hurts the industry. The best defense so far seems to be to make it annoying or otherwise a pain in the ass to keep up. I modded my Xbox 360 but never played enough games for it to be worth it. After getting the console banned I got another for free from a friend that I modded and then it now would be banned if I logged online with it. And it's all very silly since I barely played any games I hadn't purchased retail copies of. Same thing happened with my PS3. I modded it and yet only seem to play the games I bought. Really the only piracy that I think is ok is after the game is out of the market. And I mean the retail market. Ebay and other 2nd hand outlets don't count. No need to pay some inflated collector's price for some old game when you could just pirate it and either way have zero impact on the industry. On a similar note, GameStop is evil. Their massive reselling of games for huge profit hurts the industry too. I certainly agree with consumers having the right to sell their games when they are finished with them or decide they don't like them. But GameStop reaps huge benefits from this. That and just in general I hate GameStop.

The Sega CD and Sega 32X didn't directly have any such effect on the Genesis. The reason also that the SNES kept going so late was because of the delay of the N64. If the N64 had been ready sooner, SNES would have died out sooner. The Saturn was out and Sega shifted their focus to it and let the Genesis rot. You have to understand that in Japan the MegaDrive wasn't the success that the Genesis was and in the end the Sega Saturn did well in Japan even though they like the Genesis, like the Saturn die in the US. SNES wasn't "technically superior" in some general way. Both systems had strengths and weaknesses compared to each other.

The Genesis/Megadrive actually was more "mainstream" than the SNES in North America for a time. Somewhere between 89 and 92. But then Sega pulled its infamous dumb ass moves and managed to even leave the 16bit market almost solely to Nintendo's SNES.

I liked Fire Emblem on the Famicom, FE and FE Gaiden. I also liked one of the ones on Super Famicom. Never played any of the ones actually released outside Japan though.

The 3DS sounded much better when less was known about it. The DS really needed an upgrade as it was pathetically mismatched against the PSP. But so far the big things that stand out are: poor battery life, dismal launch line-up, expensive console, expensive games. I think PSP2 has a good opening. Contrary to some people's perception the PSP actually was a fairly successful product. While I doubt they will steal the casual idiot consumer from Nintendo, the real gamers they could get more of.

Castlevania Megaman Ninja Gaiden Super Mario Bros TMNT Metroid Kid Icarus Top Gun Batman Zelda Contra Kid Dracula Gradius Guerilla War Snake Rattle 'n' Roll Battletoads Tetris Duck Tales Star Wars Punch-Out Tiger Heli Fire Emblem To name a few.

Retro games to me would be anything from the 16bit generation and back. Though I think PS1, Saturn, and N64 could be considered retro too. Pretty much the cut off though.

SNES for sure. Though PS1 might not be a bad choice due to the huge library. For a portable, Gameboy Advance SP is obviously the best choice. Too bad Game Gear didn't survive.

The first game I played was likely something on the Atari 400/800 home computer like Pac-Man, Joust, Missile Command, or something else. We had that before we got a NES with SMB/Duck Hunt. I have no clue when I started playing games, and have no real memory of it. So I can only assume I started very early.

Final Fantasy 4 was the best in my opinion with FF6 close behind. I feel like FF4 just edges out over FF6 or it's just preference. Both are fantastic games and they are the reason, along with the first game, that people think anything good about Final Fantasy. Most of the other games are pretty sub-par or just uninteresting. Granted after 9 I stopped looking at them. I would rank them in an order like 4,6,1,5,7, followed by who cares. 7 edges out the rest that I don't care about because it's the first 3D one and nostalgia.

Batman had some good music.

It sounds better when you're Japanese and have little to no understanding of English.

You can leave Sega CD out of that. Sega CD was well before the Sega Saturn. Sega 32X was the one that people were scratching their heads over when they new the Saturn was coming. To be fair what really killed the Sega 32X was the high cost and low number of titles for it. Or in short the value of it. If the Sega 32X idea, to upgrade the aging Genesis, had been much cheaper and more games took advantage of it then it may have been a successful product. You have to remember that SNES managed to push itself really late into the 90s because of the N64 delays it was critical. But the Genesis was still around after all support for Sega CD and 32X were gone. So if they had come up with a simple, cheap, yet powerful enough upgrade to throw into a new model of Genesis console as well as provide a cheap upgrade for existing ones it might have worked. The problem is 150$ was not cheap at all. If they could have worked the cost down to something more like the cost of 1 brand new game it may have had a chance. But what they wanted was a "32bit upgrade" to do 3D graphics which plainly was just too expensive the way they did it. The Sega 32X contained not one but 2 SH-2 CPUs, the Sega Saturn has 2 of these as well. However the Saturn had a dedicated chip for 3d graphics rendering while the 32X was left with software rendering by the SH-2s. I think given the sad state of early 3D to begin with they should have dropped the idea of a so called 32bit console upgrade and instead just improved on the Genesis' weak points. Sound and Graphics. Genesis definitely needed an upgrade in those departments by the time 32X was being cooked up. Even before then it could have used one. The problem is Sega wanted to do too much with their upgrades. The Sega CD might have been decent if they hadn't tried to add so much crazy bullshit making it insanely expensive. Genesis needed a VDP (graphics) upgrade simply to put it on better footing to match the SNES and TG16 atleast in color depth. But at the same time maybe they could have added more sprite capabilities allowing for more objects with less sprite drop. Maybe added useful effects like manipulations of sprites and backgrounds like other systems had such as color blending for translucent layers or scaling and rotation. Then they could have used a sound upgrade using samples sort of like SNES or Capcom CPS or NeoGeo. Mixing that with the existing synthesis audio would have helped alot. But just those relatively simple upgrades if provided cheap enough would have kept Sega competing strongly in the 16bit arena while the 32bit arena was still something many gamers hadn't invested in yet. I mean come on if you owned a SNES chances are you were still playing it while others were playing early Saturn and PS1 games. And one more thing. Sega Saturn was pretty successful in Japan. While it didn't fair very well elsewhere you can't deny Saturn got great Japanese releases. While we thought Sega was basically dead they were doing well enough in Japan. Which is totally opposite the 16bit era where the Megadrive didn't do that great in Japan but was doing well in Europe and very well in the US atleast early on.

Plenty of old TV shows from the 80s and 90s to remember. Power Rangers is a great example. When you're a kid you don't see the same thing I think. I've gone back to watch the Power Rangers awhile ago and was just amazed at all the things you never notice as a kid. If anything it's proof that you can have really low production value so long as it's a show for kids. Still funny to watch for adults though.

Which actually makes it seem like the idea of an add-on was more limited by the nature of the consumers of the time and not so much the idea. If you had a more savvy gaming consumer that had their own money to spend it might have actually been much more practical for a device like Sega CD, Sega 32X, or a SNES CD to do well. One thing that definitely helps that NEC figured out what cutting costs by releasing a new version of the console with the add-on built in, as well as reducing the confusion of hooking up an add-on that happens like with the Sega 32X. The Turbo DUO/PC Engine DUO certainly helped the popularity of the CD-ROM add-on to a large degree.

I liked the Power Rangers "Fighting Edition" for SNES. Apparently it was related the the Japanese only Gundam Wing fighting game on SNES. Same developer and game engine some say.

The concept of improving the existing system is a nice one though in theory. But they were executed terribly. The only successful major add-on for a console was the PC-Engine's CD-ROM. While only a success in Japan it definitely did better than Sega CD or Sega 32X. Hell even the american version the TurboGrafx 16 CD-ROM if you count the Turbo DUO probably didn't do that bad compared to Sega CD, definitely better than Sega 32X.

The worst thing is Sega experienced success with the Genesis on North America and I think did well in Europe too. Atleast for a time, atleast 1992, Genesis was leading the SNES. But Sega managed to fuck it all up with consumer base division and confusion. They had way too many platforms at once. Genesis, Game Gear, Sega Saturn, Sega CD, Sega 32X were all doing something at the same time while Nintendo had just NES their old beast on its way out, SNES, and Gameboy. Not that the addons weren't cool devices but it fucked up their consumer relations and in general turned out poorly. It is a good point that back then games were alot more expensive both in list price but also cause of the change of the value of currency. I never had that many games as a kid, renting games was a big thing then. I'd never have played as many games without cheap rentals.

Mortal Kombat 1 on SNES was totally different because it was fucking awful. On the other hand Power Rangers on Genesis is an awful 1 on 1 fighting game where as on SNES it's a sub-par beat em up. I seem to recall trying the Genesis or Sega CD Shadowrun once expecting something like the SNES version and being very disappointed and turning it off shortly after. On that note though while the same game, Lords of Thunder on Sega CD sucks ass compared to the Turbo Grafx 16 CD original. The music was kick ass but they decided to fuck it all up for the Sega CD version. And then the Sega Genesis doesn't have enough color palettes to equal the PCE so the colors on the Sega CD version leave the graphics looking pretty poor.