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Best Retro Console?
Vigo:
JUSTIN
BAILEY
KenToad:
Just reading more about the history of c64 pricing on Wikipedia, it looks like it had several price drops as the cost of chips plummeted in the early 80's and their marketing became more aggressive.
wp34:
--- Quote from: Vigo on March 27, 2021, 02:23:02 pm ---Are you talking about games on like an IBM PC, or games on actual gaming computers? Yeah, the best stuff on those PCs were monochromatic text adventures, rpgs and cerebral games with terrible bibs and boops, getting something like a c64 was completely different. You could get a nice wico made joystick and play games that looked far better than many of the NES launch titles, just look at most of what Epyx and other decent companies were putting down 2-3 years before the NES was available -
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This describes me. Since I was still playing and happy with my Atari 800 I didn't get an NES until almost 1990. Even then it was only after a friend who had one showed me Zelda. I was never particularly impressed with the graphics or playability of the NES. The SNES on the other hand was a huge leap and I played the heck out of it.
bobbyb13:
I had to think more about this to remember the timeline of these for me...
I think I lost interest in the 2600 after E.T. (seriously) since by then I could ride my bike to play real arcade machines in various spots anyway, and just how bad those games could be comparatively was the end of it.
Then mostly played the Zorks on an IBM, a few games on my Apple Macintosh, watched a kid down the street play Wolfenstein on his C64...
and then was floored when another buddy showed me his NES.
For something you could have in your house, that wasn't floppy disks or casettes, the leap to that was a big one.
The next leap of commensurate size would have been the jump to PS1 then I would guess?
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: Vigo on March 27, 2021, 06:21:11 pm ---Ken, I am not arguing against the significance of the NES, and never said the graphics of the NES were inferior, When I say the NES is comparable to computers, though, I am acknowledging that the NES did do certain things better, and computers at the time did certain things better. It all depends on the spec. I was responding to comments stating that before the NES, video game characters looked like indecipherable dots, which isn’t true at all.
I knew tons of people with c64s and other gaming computers, I’m a little young, but my brothers were trading games all the time. I have no clue where you got $600 from, but a C64 retailed for $150 in 1985, and the scrolling was usually fine. Games were far cheaper, too. Price point wasn’t the difference.
With an example of scrolling, Commando comes to mind. It came out in late 85, and the NES version a year later. Generally, the C64 version was considered superior in just about every way.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cdGaZ8Fakok
honestly the best weapon Nintendo had in Hardware was instant booting. No cassette or floppy disks and loading sequences to get you to the game. Blasted the demographics wide open.
FYI - that racing game is Pitstop II, released in 1984. Cool game, as you make pit stops and can control the entire pit crew.There were plenty like it. Commando comes to mind as it was
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No man it's cool that you liked the c64, there are some good b and c grade games on it but the NES had almost everything going for it and the c64 had next to nothing. The NES, like every other 8-bit console in the mid-80's had a d-pad with two action buttons and additionally two menu buttons. The C64 had a 2600 era wico joystick with a single action button. That right there limits gameplay mechanics severely. In addition there wasn't any control standardization on the c64 so you'd be pecking on that keyboard even with a joystick plugged in. The main reason NES games are superior is because you can do more, and you can do more due to those extra buttons and a more precise directional input method. The NES also had smooth scrolling graphics with a decent amount of sprites on the screen at a time while the c64 struggled to do any of that without sacrificing something else. I believe the NES had a better sound chip... either that or nobody that developed games for the c64 knew how to do sound effects and background music. The most important thing the NES had going for it though was big studio support. The c64 was very much a hobbyist computer and unfortunately that meant a lot of the game "studios" were a handful of guys in a basement somewhere and it showed. Meanwhile the videogame all stars like the Nintendo r and d divisions, konami, capcom and all the rest were releasing all their AAA titles on the NES and similar consoles. The c64 had a few things going for it but they don't effect gameplay that much. More colors could be displayed in certain modes, obviously without game carts games could theoretically be larger, and of course disk and tape drives meant piracy ran rampant. In theory it's easier to develop for, but just from what I understand mind you, making games of a higher quality meant pure assembly programming and having to know the quirks of the hardware so it's probably a wash on that one.
Yes there is a lot of fun stuff to play and do on a c64 but at it's heart it's a computer, not a gaming console and the slight but distinct differences made it inferior hardware that the big developers just didn't want to work on. Again, the hardware aspect isn't that important or else everyone would have gotten a master system back in the day but the big developers not making games for it (or at least not with their best teams) does. Also let's not kid ourselves it's a suped up version of the VIC 20, which is early 80's era tech trying to compete with mid 80's tech.
PC gaming didn't become a contender until Microsoft consolidated the market place, developers could program a game for one OS (Dos or Windows) instead of a million variations of hobby computers and thus larger developers were actually willing to make AAA games for the PC.
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