[Classic] Nintendo vs. Seaga: Anyone else miss those days?

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

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Originally Posted by Krel

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.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Aspergers?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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).

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Worm

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.

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.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by leaf

Jaguar & 3DO have the only Wolf3D ports so I had to buy them

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.

FELIPE NO

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...

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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...

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Originally Posted by Araes

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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).

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.