Random Gaming Thoughts

[o.pwuaioc]

Amazing how they made the Wii only a bit of an upgrade to the Gamecube, but totally won in the market. The output resolution couldn't even show off the textures that could be mapped to the 3D objects - but this was a conscious decision knowing that the majority of the market would never use anything but composite for video..

Yeah, the Wii is somewhere between 1.5x and 2x more powerful than the GameCube, which in console generation terms is pretty meager.

That's because it's not always about raw processing power. It never was, either, which is why the Jaguar and Lynx failed and the PS2 crushed the Xbox.

[RCBH928]

Amazing how they made the Wii only a bit of an upgrade to the Gamecube, but totally won in the market. The output resolution couldn't even show off the textures that could be mapped to the 3D objects - but this was a conscious decision knowing that the majority of the market would never use anything but composite for video..

Yeah, the Wii is somewhere between 1.5x and 2x more powerful than the GameCube, which in console generation terms is pretty meager.

That's because it's not always about raw processing power. It never was, either, which is why the Jaguar and Lynx failed and the PS2 crushed the Xbox.

I am kind of shocked that the "kiddy" NGC is actually more powerful than the "adult" oriented PS2. Not a usual Nintendo tactic. I think I heard that before though. I think PS2 won over Xbox based on brand loyalty, that or the DVD playback. Technically speaking, the XBOX offered everything better than PS2. Then again, as I remember it, the XBOX felt more like a PC with a controller more than a console. Maybe thats what kept console fans on the PS2 side, that or the mega-sized controller.

I personally think the original XBOX console is one of the most underrated consoles of all time. The library is superb but we don't hear too many fans of the original XBOX. Maybe due to lack of exclusivity?

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I was going to bash on Jaguar graphics but I gave it a second look and its pretty impressive. Was it supposed to be PSX competitor or SNES? But yeah, you don't expect to drop powerful chip and get high sales, there is a whole community inertia to it. What were they thinking with that keypad controller though.

[RCBH928]

Amazing how they made the Wii only a bit of an upgrade to the Gamecube, but totally won in the market. ..

The Wii won on price and motion control novelty. It was a big hit, price was $250 vs $600 ps3. The library was very different, there was even a website called Wii60 as in you need to buy both wii+XB360.

[Reprise]

The PS2 won simply because of the huge install base they had and the ginormous library of games. It was backwards compatibility, with the idea you could trade in/sell your PS1, keep a huge library of games, as well as DVD playback that won it for them. The Playstation brand was just so strong after the PS1's success.

Being a cheap DVD player was a big aspect. As a kid, in high school, it was practically unheard of for kids here (in my experience) to have VHS tape players in their room, let alone DVD players. It blew a lot of kids' minds back then.

The Xbox did start gaining a lot of momentum, particularly with people that were my age, in our mid to late teens. A lot of my friends ended up getting Xboxs. I had one too for a short while. It was stuff like Halo, and more mature PC type games (FPSs, stuff like Deus Ex etc) and the XBox live service that was selling it to us.

Gamecube did ok at the start. It was the cheapest by a mile, but then Microsoft quickly slashed the price of the Xbox and Nintendo lost Rare and it all seemed downhill from there.

[marurun]

Nintendo didn’t lose Rare. They cut them loose. Rare for some reason was just unable to deliver on the nicer hardware. All their projects were slipping on timelines and not producing the expected quality.

[MrPopo]

And Rare's post-Nintendo output wasn't the greatest. I suspect they had trouble with their processes when they scaled up to the team sizes needed for the later generation titles.

[Reprise]

I didn't mean they lost them literally or that they were the ones that left Nintendo. I know now we can look back and see that Rare post-N64 just was not that same anymore and were probably worth cutting loose as well. But at the time, it was a huge blow and disappointed a lot of gamers. A lot of people picked up Gamecubes thinking and assuming they would be able to play Rare titles and sequels to games like Perfect Dark and Banjo Kazooie, so when it was announced Rare was moving to Xbox, at the time, it was perceived as a blow to Nintendo and a major gain for Microsoft.

[Anapan]

Rare Replay is an excellent compilation disc. Also very cheap on Ebay.

[o.pwuaioc]

I was going to bash on Jaguar graphics but I gave it a second look and its pretty impressive. Was it supposed to be PSX competitor or SNES? But yeah, you don't expect to drop powerful chip and get high sales, there is a whole community inertia to it. What were they thinking with that keypad controller though.

It's games weren't the greatest (sorry, Mark!), but it was actually positioned against the SNES and Genesis/32X as one of the first "next level" systems along with the 3DO. Like Sega's Dreamcast, it came out a whole year before the real winner (PS1 launched in Japan 12/94, while the 3DO and Jaguar launched in the US first in 10/93 and 11/93 respectively; Saturn launched too early in 11/94). It had no hopes of competing against the PS1 or even the Saturn.

This site suggests 2.4m SNES units sold in 1994, while the Jaguar max only sold a couple hundred thousand for its whole (meagre) existence.

[marurun]

The Jaguar wasn’t a bad idea, conceptually, but the implementation was disastrous. The final silicon was buggy and difficult to design around, so many programmers just utilized the 68k CPU that was included as a system coordinator for core game code instead of managing resources for the actual main CPU.