Random Gaming Thoughts

[J T]

OH BOY CHECK THIS OUT
(noise especially)

Sweet! It's been a long time since I have played Venture or Space Fury.

[marurun]

Sweet! It's been a long time since I have played Venture or Space Fury.

That "or" is really important. It took me almost a full minute to figure out what "Venture of Space Fury" was.

[Ziggy]

That "or" is really important. It took me almost a full minute to figure out what "Venture of Space Fury" was.

But that does sound like an awesome title for something.

[isiolia]

The only other mid-cycle upgrade I know about is the 32X

Didn't the Turbografx effectively have several? May depend on how you count it. There have been a number of add-ons that wound up needed for some games, but you weren't replacing the base console. That's more what the 32X, N64 expansion pak, CD-ROMs, and so on were. Not all that different from, say, the PS Move or Kinect were last gen.

Otherwise, it's largely been Nintendo handhelds I can think of in the console space. The Game Boy Color, the DSi, and the New 3DS.

A big difference though, to me, is that the software targeting the Xbox One tends to already be multi-platform in nature. There's the occasional half-ass job, but typically, tuning the game for the hardware is part of the development process. Plenty of 360 games ran as well as you could expect the hardware to, even if there was a PC version out there as well.

[ApolloBoy]

Didn't the Turbografx effectively have several?

There's the TG-CD but that came out early on so it doesn't count as mid-cycle.

[Xeogred]

Are a lot of TG games in limbo license hell or anything? Is the Wii VC shop one of the only places where a lot of them got re-released?

[marurun]

Didn't the Turbografx effectively have several? May depend on how you count it. There have been a number of add-ons that wound up needed for some games, but you weren't replacing the base console. That's more what the 32X, N64 expansion pak, CD-ROMs, and so on were. Not all that different from, say, the PS Move or Kinect were last gen.

Yes and no. This is one of those areas where semantics cloud the issue. Hudson designed the system's core chips, but NEC was the hardware partner, so they influenced things quite a bit. NEC intended the system to interface with a CD-ROM right from the get-go and the CD unit was released just a little more than a year after the PC Engine. When the Super CD-ROM unit and Duo were released they expanded the RAM cache massively over the base CD-ROM, but NEC also released a Super System 3.0 Card to put in the card slot to ensure your old system could still play the new software. So while it's an upgrade, it doesn't require a new piece of hardware in quite the same way as we traditionally think of such things. When the Arcade Card was released it took the same form as the Super CD 3.0 Card, so folks already knew what to expect, and the market had contracted some by then anyway, so I'm not sure it was expected to turn the ship around so much as ensure a presence in the market until NEC had the next thing ready.

I think it would be safe to consider the CD-ROM a major system upgrade, and the system cards minor upgrades (not so much for their effect on the quality of software as the impact on owners' pocketbooks), and every single one of these add-ons could be integrated in some form or fashion with the original PC-Engine. If you bought one of the little white PCE units at launch, you could upgrade all the way up to the Arcade CD, and the resulting system wouldn't necessarily be a tower of ridiculousness or take up a ton of space.

If you want to talk about the approach being taken by the X Box Scorpio and Playstation 4 Neo, the closest analogue would be the SuperGrafx. It was literally a PC Engine with 4 times the system RAM and two of the PC Engine's standard video processors (complete with independent VRAM) with a controller to manage display priority. That means the system had two background tile planes and double the number of sprites that could be displayed per line and total on-screen.

[RCBH928]

Now that I think about it, I don't know of any other mid-cycle console upgrades. They were all either add-ons or different designs.

If you want to talk about the approach being taken by the X Box Scorpio and Playstation 4 Neo, the closest analogue would be the SuperGrafx. It was literally a PC Engine with 4 times the system RAM and two of the PC Engine's standard video processors (complete with independent VRAM) with a controller to manage display priority. That means the system had two background tile planes and double the number of sprites that could be displayed per line and total on-screen.

wow, you know your stuff.

[ElkinFencer10]

The DSi and the New 3DS were upgrades, but that's all I can think of.

[Xeogred]

Honestly I'm thinking about trading in my PS4 towards a Pro for the extra space and perhaps the console is a lot quieter. Though I think I've heard the new controllers now have TWO LED lights on it was is completely stupid.

So tired of having to delete applications. 500GB initial HDD space for these current consoles is a complete joke.

Did anyone here get a Pro or Slim or have heard first hand impressions?