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Best Retro Console?

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vertexguy:
Of your list I went SNES for many reasons already stated.  Would be harder to decide between SNES and NES though.  No other consoles had the range of quality games. Sure there are great games on every console, but Nintendo really had a consistent spread of options done really well.  Sadly I think they've lost their touch with more recent consoles where they seem to be lost more in hardware then games.  They've seemingly abandoned so many hit titles and IPs it just blows my mind.

pbj:

--- Quote from: KenToad on March 26, 2021, 02:50:01 pm ---For me, the biggest leap is from the Atari and other US consoles to the NES. No more keypad style controllers or mushy arcade sticks, the NES had crisp graphics, smooth scrolling, and responsive controls, not to mention actual good music, which was virtually nonexistent in home consoles before then.

--- End quote ---

This is a very, very good point.  The 2600 was already old news when I was a kid.

It's been interesting the peruse the NES library with my Everdrive lately.  There was some very good stuff early on with that system

Howard_Casto:
The NES is without a doubt the most important console.   You no longer needed an instruction manual to know wtf the pink block on the screen is supposed to be or what you are supposed to be doing.... graphics had lept forward enough to where goals were self-evident.  Saved the industry.   They didn't lose their way though... Super Mario Odyssey and botw are probably the two best games of the last 10 years.   They just stick to the main IPs because they are a relatively small company and can only do so many games a year.  When they do try to farm out their old IPs half the time it becomes a disaster like Metroid Prime 4, which they had to scrap and give to another studio it was so bad.

Vigo:
The NES was great, but I disagree with comments that it was the graphics that made the difference. The Atari 2600 was already almost 10 years old by the time the NES was globally released at the end of '86. What was current was home gaming computers that had  saturated the market. Depending on the computer, they had more or less comparable graphics and sound to what an NES offered, and because everything was open development, there were big libraries of games, peripherals and a lot of stuff at cheap prices.

My feeling is NES was so insanely successful because they bided their time to create a package deal, not just a build a console and throw out games as they finished them. They did that in Japan in '83 with poor results, but kept going and locally until it could drop a juggernaut of games and peripherals in America and Europe, and department stores had a clear swatch of compatible games to shelve. Even if half the titles at the time were crap, there were options. I have a hard time thinking Nintendo would have turned around the industry if it needed to survive 2 years on the shelves before Super Mario Bros even came out.

KenToad:

--- Quote from: Vigo on March 27, 2021, 04:41:43 am ---The NES was great, but I disagree with comments that it was the graphics that made the difference. The Atari 2600 was already almost 10 years old by the time the NES was globally released at the end of '86. What was current was home gaming computers that had  saturated the market. Depending on the computer, they had more or less comparable graphics and sound to what an NES offered, and because everything was open development, there were big libraries of games, peripherals and a lot of stuff at cheap prices.

My feeling is NES was so insanely successful because they bided their time to create a package deal, not just a build a console and throw out games as they finished them. They did that in Japan in '83 with poor results, but kept going and locally until it could drop a juggernaut of games and peripherals in America and Europe, and department stores had a clear swatch of compatible games to shelve. Even if half the titles at the time were crap, there were options. I have a hard time thinking Nintendo would have turned around the industry if it needed to survive 2 years on the shelves before Super Mario Bros even came out.

--- End quote ---

Computer games at the time of the NES's release from 85-87 were awful, bad arcade ports, grating sound and music, choppy scrolling, really poor controller possibilities. Remember the pencil-thin analog stick PC controller that didn't even re-center? (There was that one red top-fire that wasn't complete garbage.) All the PC games were bad ports or even unlicensed clones of arcade games with virtually none of the original gameplay intact. Let's not even discuss the lack of quality control, with a virtual flood of shovelware being pirated and shared by PC enthusiasts. I can't think of even one PC game from that era that's playable today, especially with era-appropriate controls?

The NES outshone the computers of the day because it was designed to do exactly what it did. I saw a documentary talking about how it took John Carmack a ton of work to get smooth scrolling on a top of the line PC of the same era and no one could figure out how he did it. He had challenged himself to do it because he was so impressed by the smooth scrolling on the NES.

Yup, there's a reason why Nintendo put those pixels on the black box covers. The NES was state of the art.

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