Post #81 · Posted at 2012-11-04 02:07:29am 11.4 years ago
Quote: n00b_saib0t
HOLY HELL. This is something I didn't know. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you have a few years one me, I was born in 1985 so most of what I remember is toward the end of the NES life span when I was 5
Have you ever read This? It's pretty much the best account of the videogame industry, from the people who were actually involved at the time. It's very old now, but I think every videogame book in the past 20 years lists it as a reference. The Amazon Kindle version is fairly cheap, and very easy to find on.. uh.. other sites.
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No kidding. Between the failed Genesis add ons and the quality titles making it to the N64 and PSX the Saturn never stood a chance with everything developers had to do with it. It still blows my mind to hook mine up and go back and play X-Men vs Street Fighter or Nights Into Dreams and see what could be done with that system.
They also launched it with one of the biggest marketting gaffes of all time. After setting a release date for late 1995, Sega came out on stage at the 1995 E3, and announced that the Saturn was already on sale at Toys R Us, 6 months before the announced release date. Instead of launching with Blazing Heroes, Bug and Virtua Fighters Remx, it just appeared in the stores at $399, with only 4 (fairly terrible) games.
Sony came out on stage immediately afterwards, and announced that the Playstation would launch on-shcedule with 11 games, and would cost $100 less than The Saturn.
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It may have been cheap media, but wasn't it more powerful? Maybe I'm getting things mixed up, but weren't things toned down graphically for the US release of Zelda 2 because the cart couldn't do what the disc system could?
It didn't realistically make it much more powerful, but it had a little bit of RAM build in that the console could make use of, and since the discs were bigger than cartridges, you could store a lot more sprite data. You could also spread the game across both sides of the disc, or across multiple discs. Some of the murder mystery games that were popular at the time were even released in episodic (monthly) chapters, letting you carry over your game save from one disc to another.
It added extra sound channels, and let the Famicom use FM Syhtnesis, which was huge at the time. Although a few years later, Konami figured out how to include advanced sound chips on actual cartridges themselves, and send the sound data through the cartridge slot, instead of the Famicom's actual sound chip.
Besides not being able to save the game in Metroid or Super Mario Bros 2, I think Zelda 2 is the only top-tier game with really noticable differences, but I think most of them are personal design choices, rather than necessities. They removed some animations, and added some sprites. They made it easier for the NES, but I don't think any of those choices were down to hardware changes - they probably had a few months to look at the feedback from Japanese players, and make changes to tweak the game for it's US release.