Nintendo vs. Seaga: Anyone else miss those days?
 

Granted, this is for the gamers who grew up in the 16-bit era or just prior to it, and were witness to some great games, commercials, stories, and really just stuff you wish you could relive again.

Yes, I miss asking Nintendo owning friends "DID YOU KNOW?" and then I'd never follow on.

YouTube Video

SEAGA.

Oh my fucking god Seaga. :tpg:

That is fucking unbelievable.

You know when the Sonic games start up with "SAAAAYGAAAAH"? Yeah. That confused the fuck out of us as kids.

Where is the "SEEAAAAGAAAAAHHH", SEAGA?!

SEA-GUH

Isn't it funny that in the 15 years since the SNES-Genesis days Sega stopped making consoles. And Sonic became a laughingstock of a mascot.

Actually, those WERE the days. :(

I think it will never be the same again. Current games take themselves too seriosly and some new ideas are bad or overdone. I am not planning to buy any nextgen in the near future. Time games being developed is getting longer and longer and what we get in return? I remember playing Super Mario Bros 3 (NES) with my sister or TMNT with everybody. Even my father completed two levels of Doom on SNES :tpg: Today, there is no chance they will play any new games. Not that they don't have time, the games are just silly...

Aw hell no. Console games back in the day were largely toilet compared with the stuff on Amiga, Atari or even Acorn. Even the games they ported over were pale shadows of the awesome originals. The SNES version of Gods is like some horrible joke-mode, SNES Doom is about the most homosexual thing ever and SNES SimCity? Why?

The best thing the SNES did was Beat em ups. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct were about the only things anyone ever played that I knew. Oh yeah, and MarioKart but even that rarely got a look in after Mortal Kombat 2 came out. I always disliked Mario games, mainly because compared with some of the awesome platformers you could get on the Amiga at the time they were shallow, ugly and frankly annoying. When you've been playing Gods and Magic Pockets and Flashback, SMB3 is like some kind of Fisherprice kids toy.

As for the Megadrive, well I can only remember one person who actually had one and that was only because he had rich parents and the only games he had were the Sonic games and Altered Beast, prefering to buy games for his SNES, as they were all much better as a rule.

To be fair, I'm a bit older than a lot of you so rather than growing up with the SNES, I grew up with Spectrums, BBC Micros and C64s. I don't remember ever knowing anyone with an NES and only a couple of people had Master Systems and at the time, the games were pretty dull compared to playing Elite on the BBC or any of the hundreds of mental Spectrum games.

The Acorn in particular had some amazing games and the system as a whole was way ahead of it's time and it's a shame it was so battered into submission by Microsoft and IBM. Risc-OS 3 back in 1992 had many features not stuck into Windows until '98 and looked incredible to boot. Games like Chocks Away, Stunt Race 2000, Pandora's Box, Cataclysm, the remake of Elite, all looked better than console games and had much more depth than console games so my group of friends had very little interest in consoles. Then when the Acorn died out, we all got PCs and played Doom and the old Lucas Arts adventures and so on. Consoles only became interesting when the Playstation came out and that's probably because I was the exact demographic they were aiming the thing at, late teens with a bit of cash and a sense of style, rather than the kiddie market that Nintendo and Sega had always courted.

I had a SNES and we used to have a blast playing Street Fighter as I said but I have very little in the way of nostalgic memories of the system, even less so for the Megadrive.

I recall feeling like a pile of horse-shit just because I had an SNES with NO GAMES while my pals all had Seagas with a million games.

Ah, but it was I who had the last laugh. Never owning a Seaga system of anykind I mocked my pals years later when their investment in Seaga crumbled before their eyes and their pitiful Seaga-related dreams that seemed to go on forever died in a whirlwind of darkness. Dreamcast died, and so did their childhoods!

Ha! HAHAHA!

THIS. My brother had an Amiga and a C64 and I loved the hell out of them. Monty on the Run, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Crystal Castles, Wizball, Lemmings... It wasn't until we moved from Germany to the US that I'd even heard of Nintendo or Sega. My first console was actually the N64. Despite having spent a few years listening to the GENESIS DOES WHAT NINTENDON'T stuff on the playground I didn't really see the fuss about being partisan about systems.

I think that's why I never understood the whole console war, fanboy thing. Most of the games I liked were multiplatform and the ones that weren't, you either had the platform for anyway or you'd just play at a mate's house. I never fostered any sense of loyalty to one brand so never saw the point in arguing over which is better. By the time I got into console gaming in a big way, I had enough cash to buy all of them which makes arguing about it completely retarded.

The whole concept of console wars is basically one of the greatest marketing strategies ever devised and took the brand loyalty concept that companies like Coca Cola had been working on for decades and ramped it right up to crazy levels. I mean, everyone has their preference of Coke or Pepsi and I suppose they do taste slightly different but it's largely a branding thing. Nintendo and Sega managed to persuade a lot of kids that their product was better to the extent they'd actually argue about it with other kids and identify themselves as a fan of that product, to the extent that a lot of people to this day support Nintendo products based on childhood experiences rather than because their games are actually any good any more.

They were helped by the fact that their products were pretty expensive and their target market didn't have the funds to get both consoles (How many kids bought their own SNES and how many kids' parents would buy them more than one console? I'm guessing not many on both counts) and the whole marketing strategy revolved around persuading those kids they'd made the right decision, playing on the innate dislike kids have of being on the losing team.

Sony's entry into the market focussing on people who could afford their own shit was a fucking masterstroke and it's the initial marketing of the first Playstation that led to Sony's dominance for the last ten years, far more than the actual quality of the product. The first few PS games were actually pretty shitty but 16 and 17 year olds were always going to choose Wipeout with it's techno music and Tomb Raider with her big tits over Star Fox and his cartoon animal chums. It's only really now that more people are buying based on quality alone rather than brand image (Although there's still a lot of tards out there who fall for the advertising) and that's why the Xbox is proving so successful, the Live service is fantastic compared to the opposition and there are more great games on Xbox than on the other consoles. If Sony can crack out a few killer titles in the next year or so (And reduce the price of the console, it's still a touch too expensive) they can easily get back into the market but I honestly believe that these days you need quality of product, you can't get away with a clever marketing strategy like Nintendo and Sega did back in the day.

Shit, sorry Paco, I've written another tl;dr essay. :(

Bingo. What's weird is that I still saw the factional thing going on even though the majority of kids I knew were rich sods whose parents would buy them a new game for every day they managed to not shit their pants at school. The marketing worked so well that even the kids who were fortunate enough to own both products were still adamantly defensive about their preferred piece of consumer electronics.

Until Sony came along, the notion of consoles being for kids while PCs/microcomputers were where the big boys got their game on was completely (and unsurprisingly) commonplace. Sure, a lot of their marketing reeked of old men in suits desperately trying to figure out what teenagers were into, but it worked. Unfortunately they did bring about the era of HAHA YOU LIKE MARIO? YOU BIG GAY PERSON WITH DICKS IN YOUR MOUTH HURRRRR THIS GAME IS LACKING IN BLOOD AND GRUE.

It's a step up from HAHA YOU PLAY ON COMPUTERS, YOU MASSIVE NERD WHY DON'T YOU LIKE FOOTBALL though and to be fair, only paedos and furries like Mario games.

There's just got to be a third category. I don't care if it's insulting, but I refuse to be put into either of those groups.

Aspergers?

Cool people :cool:

The thing Sony missed was putting in four player support in the PSX, and then I still have no idea why they didn't put it in by default for the PS2. It's because of that the N64 and Gamecube became the consoles of choice for myself and my friends when we'd all get together.

True, but I had a multitap and eight player MicroMachines V3 was the best thing ever. That said, the lack of multiplayer support in a lot of PS1 games was a let down but again, by the time I got to uni, pretty much everyone had one so hooking two PS1's together for Wipeout multiplayer was simplicity in itself. None of my friends were hugely into Goldeneye. Most console sessions would be on MicroMachines, Tekken (Then Soul Blade, so much Soul Blade) or Bust a Move with Quake on PC being the FPS of choice through Barry's World. I don't recall playing much on N64, even though I had one, it was only ever really used for Lylat Wars, likewise the GameCube only ever had Monkeyball in it but that did get a lot of use. I think the difference was that a couple of us had the Nintendo consoles with a couple of games and enough controllers for everyone whereas everyone had a PS1 and 2 and a bundle of games for each. The Nintendos were always something you might get out for a laugh when everyone's drunk rather than putting any serious amount of time into playing (which I guess they still are although now everyone plays Guitar Hero on 360, I've not played on a Wii for literally months).

Yes. But what's annoying is that any attempt at informative hardware comparison (which is useful for people that own both systems and want to know which version to get) also gets lumped into "lol fanboyism." What I liked about the Nintendo/Seaga era was that magazines could talk about color palettes and sound channels and tell you which version of a game was superior. Yeah, there were buzzwords like "blast processing," but there was far less technobabble to hide behind, and no one with eyes was going to claim that, say, Earthworm Jim looked better on the Genesis than the SNES. Nintendo/Seaga competition taught me that brand loyalty is stupid, but hardware matters.

Currently, it takes arcane divination just to figure out rendering resolutions, and the instant you try to say, "The 360/PS3 port is technically superior," you get drowned in a wave of furious spittle.

What. Of course the PS1 had a library full of trash (as all consoles do), but stuff like Ridge Racer had no competition at launch, much less Wipeout. Air Combat, Tekken, Jumping Flash!, Warhawk, Doom--all first-generation titles, and all without peer on consoles at the time.

I see no evidence that current consumers are becoming more discerning; if anything, I think it's the opposite, since the Internet has made it easy to find a community that will support anyone's taste, no matter how awful.

Oh no, I'm not saying all the launch games were crap, Ridge Racer, Worms and Wipeout were what sold most of the first batch of Playstations. There was a lot of graphic demo type stuff out at first though. Also did anyone honestly buy Doom on a console and if so, why when the superior PC version was available free everywhere and would run on pretty much any computer?

I don't remember there being any games on both Nintendo and Sega so I don't remember ever comparing tech-specs, you just got whatever was on the console you had. Again, nobody had a Megadrive though so everyone I knew always had the SNES version. If you start banging on about technical superiority these days then expect to get looked at funny. There are so few instances of there being one version significantly better than another technically now that you'd have to be a pretty huge nerd to even care. For me the deciding factor is Xbox Live. I know more people on there so I'd get the Xbox version and play with them, the relative framerates are entirely uninteresting to me.

As for current consumers being more discerning, what I meant was that people are more likely to get whichever console has the better games, not which they perceive to be the blanket better console based on what advertising execs have told them. People now say they bought a 360 because of the range of good games, not because it's by Microsoft and Sony suck ass just coz. I'm aware that there are a lot of shitty games getting bought, one only has to glance at the DS section in any shop to see that.

Doom 64 was supposed to be interesting. It got reworked on so many times and eventually a piece of shit was released. I was a big Doom 2 fan at the time so it was one of the titles I was looking forward to. Thank god I only gave it a rental.

It ended up in the "Greatest Hits" collection on the PS1, surprisingly. It wasn't a bad port, to be honest--all the levels from Ultimate Doom and Doom II, new music and sound, and a few new tricks like colored lighting and transparencies. Of course the PC version is better, but maybe it's the allure of the TV + couch?

I understand your point about console choice, now. I remember everyone being all "lol Microsoft is making a console" and that attitude vanished pretty quickly after the Xbox came out.

And Acer, what is wrong with you. Doom 64 has some of the best levels in the series, along with the awesome sounds from the PS1 version and similarly creepy music.

Everyone with a Doom2.wad should download the PC "port" and play it right now:
Doom Depot - Doom 64 TC - Download

P.S. This thread is now about Doom.

I didn't have a PC back then so... It's not I wanted to say. Making your old father to play a console game is some sort of achieviement.

PS Doom has 32-bit color palette, some nice cool levels and awesome soundtrack. Other than that I agree.

PS2 was the last great console for me, but it had to much re-warmed steaks. I am not a fanboy, I have a few consoles and my number one would be the PSX. Then goes PS2 & NES. I like every console have - I wouldn't even sell the Jaguar for life. Jaguar & 3DO have the only Wolf3D ports so I had to buy them :D I won't hide it. I am console and FPS games maniac. I have Doom for EVERY possible platform etc.

Hell yeah Doom 64 map are awesome. There was only shit hard one where you had to lift up a bridge or platform and then dash from the other side of the level over it. I never did make it, but it was still rad playing it on PC.

^ Yeah it was that damn Alpha Quadrant level.

And yep I recomend Worm's link. BTW the TC was made by my old pal (and others).

Techinically, Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the Xbox had Wolf3D built in as a bonus when you finished the game. Was a damn good game in it's own right too. One of my friends had a Jaguar I think, was it that that had the great Aliens vs Predator game on it?

Also, I have to say my favourite Doom 2 levels are the secret Wolfenstein levels.

RTCW: Tides Of War has Wolf3D? Didn't know.

Another strange case. To be really honest I bought Jag also for that AVP. And it was some sort of disappointment. No music, awful training maze floor, going through ducts over the acidic bodies of killed Xenomorphs and a gem: respawning Aliens. I had to save in lifts, because if I don't and then load, three Aliens could respawn next to me slicing & dicing me in seconds even though I cleared entire floor before saving. I think it was a good game, but not great. The best Alien-themed game I've completed is... Alien Trilogy. Best Alien mood was in Alien Resurrection - but I haven't completed it. Tough as hell on joypad.

At least it's a label I can live with. XD

Shin, I think the party games in college was mostly about the kinds of games you and your buddies were into. We'd do racing games occasionally, but it would usually fall back on smash brothers, mario tennis, mario kart, and maybe some other game for a change of pace. A few of us were into FPS games, but we preferred playing stuff like Unreal Tournament on the PC instead of console variants.

And none of us actually owned a full set of controllers for the N64 or Gamecube. My roommate and I shared a console, and one of our friends had two controllers, so between our group we'd manage to get something for everyone.

And, to be fair, I did only own a PS2, but I hardly had any two player games since I'm just a giant nerd. The only one I can remember sinking decent amounts of time into was Starsky & Hutch since I had a light gun and our dorm freshman year had a 50"+ TV in the common room.

Oh, and nobody had better forget about Tetris Attack. I played my one friend every night for two years until he finally beat me (he had practiced every night over the summer of junior year so he could finally manage).

We used to play a lot Gran Turismo at uni, either vs or on seperate consoles trying to get the lap records. The first TOCA game was a legendary vs game too, although the hilarious rubber-banding in multiplayer meant whoever was behind on the last corner would invariably win as they didn't need to use the brakes to get round it. Apart from that, we pretty much just played Soul Blade over and over and over again and my mates still never got good enough to beat me...

Ouch. The Gran Turismo too. The parts which we were playing the most were 1 & 4. I assume you had the PAL version. Then you should remember that unbelievable Corvette 427 '67 (damn I love old American muscle cars). Poor guy tried to beat me with NSX :D The Vette was tough to control, but only the Viper could beat it (from the Arcade Mode stock car selection). While in GT4 I remember lots of fabulous races with his favourite BMW M5. Guess what car did I use... *hint* The mighty green killer, hehe *hint*

BTW, the thread changed into random rambling topic, but it brings back some great memories. We used to have much more time for playing, didn't we? :tpg:

I can honestly say, having owned all the Gran Turismo games up to the end of the PS2 run, I have never once played a single game in Arcade mode using the arcade mode cars. As such, the only American car I'd ever have picked would be the Viper for the unmodified car cup and even then that was to make it a challenge as winning in a TVR Cerberus was too easy.

I've never seen the appeal of US muscle cars either in real life or computer games to be honest. In real life, I'd rather have something that'll take a corner and in computer games they tend to come slathered in Stars and Stripes regalia and not have turbos so you don't get the dump valve noise when you change gear. Gran Turismo 1 was all about the GTO's and Skylines, GT2 was the FTO LM and LM TVRs, GT3 I prefered driving the Zonda or Gillet, something like that, Concept had the Bugatti Vayron of course and GT4 again had a load of variety but still, I'd er in favour of the European super-cars. Was it GT2 that first introduced the muscle car races? I remember winning them all by several laps using an early model Mitsubishi Lancer thanks to some rather sketchy qualification criteria...

We all know that old muscle cars have crappy handling. If you still have GT1 PAL, just start Arcade and look at the Chevrolet garage. This '67 Vette is only in NTSC-US and PAL. What a pitty it isn't available in the Simulation mode.

GT2 indeed introduced muscle cars in the series (if you don't coun't that Vette). There is a competitive vehicle among oldies: Ford GT40. I love the engine noise and its top speed at 350km/h.

You should really try my fav car in GT4. It's called Buick Special '62. The green killer...

pic

Its like you're channeling Clarkson, Hammond, and May. However, generally agree, as many are far too overpowered for their handling ability and are a good way to end up in a ditch. It doesn't help that people have a habit of going for shit tires in favor of 10 more HP. I think the only reason that the 900+ HP GTO was a such a killer in GT1 was because it wasn't possible to flip, or significantly diverge from the track. It had so much power you literally just flew around maps like Deep Forest doing 300 MPH constantly and didn't even notice grass.

Oh yeah, you could grind every wall on the High Speed Ring and get round in about 46 seconds, turning in for the corners about halfway down the straights and doing ludicrous drifts into the barriers that would have killed both you and half the spectators had there been a semblance of realistic physics in the game. GT2 was a far better game in terms of actually making you race, especially with the increased limitations on what you could enter into each race, although the LM TVRs were so much faster than anything else it was silly, you'd struggle to lose a race in one.

Muscle cars have never been part of motoring culture in this country. British sports cars are (pretty much) always light and nimble rather than hugely powerful and I'd far rather have a Caterham or a Noble than a Corvette or Mustang (Although I would have a Viper, they're fucking sexy). On top of that, the modding scene is all about getting a shitty hatchback and putting a big enough turbo in for it to out-drag an Aston Martin, people just don't like big cars over here as a rule. Top Gear is so popular because they really do tap in to the general psyche about cars here.

I've probably got that car in GT4, leaf, I played it so much I've got most of them! In the GT games, once you load up with racing suspension and brakes and shit every car handles exactly the same but I do still tend to avoid the muscle cars as I basically think they're ugly and I quite like watching the replays. Give me a chavved up Saxo with an over-sized spoiler every day of the week, the reason I love NFS Underground so much is how filthy you can make the cars look!

Did anyone else ever play the first TOCA game from Codemasters? That was a hell of a game and really difficult. That's when they first started making other drivers dislike you if you rammed them off and being a touring car game, that tended to happen quite a lot. Most of the cars were really evenly matched with only the Mondeos beign laughably bad so you had to know the tracks fucking well to have a chance of winning. The best tactic in two player if you had a bit of a lead on the last lap was to deliberately knock over a few of the distance boards before a tight corner so your opponent had no idea when to brake, knowing that the damage they'd suffer from the barrier would probably make their car veer off to the side and guarantee you a win. I did eventually manage to win the championship in career mode but it took an awful lot of practice. To this day I can still recognice BTC tracks in real life within seconds when it's on tv having memorised them all so well in TOCA.

If by 'play' you mean attempt but with very limited success, then yeah. That game got hard real quick. Only racing game I can think of that was more difficult at the time? V-Rally. I honestly never figured out how to complete a race. I just couldn't keep from spinning out.

V-Rally was savage. A friend of mine was insanely good at it but I had no skills at all. The same friend used to regularly piss all over the first Colin McRae game too though so I guess he's just good at rally games whereas I'm more of a track racer. The trick to TOCA was never turn and brake at the same time, always brake, then turn in then hit the gas once you're past the apex, essentially how real touring car driving goes. Also set the steering sensitivity waaaay down if you were using the analogue sticks as on default, full lock was about a 5 degreee angle on the stick. I'm sure the cars also used to be easier to handle if you knocked off the front bumper too, provided you didn't damage the steering in the process. It all boiled down to just learning the braking points for every corner in the game though. Being able to nail near-perfet laps on an empty track let you qualify in pole and as such, not have to worry too much about overtaking which tended to be where races were lost. I think it was the hours of doing that that made me such a fan of Gran Turismo as with the terrible AI it has, the game is basically a time trial game only with other cars on the track. In fact, GT3Concept was probably my favourite of the GT games and there aren't any other cars in that, it really is just time trials (Plus you can drive the Vayron).

I played TOCA 2 and V-Rally (PSX & N64). TOCA 2 is easier than original and to be honest I didn't find it that hard. You are right Shin, never brake & turn at the same time. TOCA 2 has one awful, dark and rainy track called Knockhill. But there was one funny raceway called Loch Ranoch where you could push down the AI from the hills - pretty funny. Even though I don't like the idea to go rally with the AI, I loved V-Rally. It had quite interesting locations in that time and it was fast. The bad thing that car could just go crazy if you had contact with a small bush. So all in all GT4 is my fav racer. But the second place goes to Test Drive 5 with its open roads (almost 5 minutes of non-stop driving). And it had muscle cars :)

I think muscle cars are popular over here because we have roads that go in straight lines.

Driving on the highways that go across the country was a pretty huge snore in my little Focus. Driving down Route 1 was a hell of a lot of fun, though.

Nintendo & Sega defined most of my childhood. I actually bought Sega Genesis just for Mortal Kombat II. I remember spending nights on Mario, Sonic, Ghouls & Ghosts, Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion....Watching those games on youtube brings back such fond memories.