Is there any retro consoles that you never lived up to their potential? where the games fell short of the hardware?.
Personally I feel that the NDS was under-utilized, as it was a fully 3d capable console, that was used mostly for 2d pixel art games, and platformers. When it was able to support full 3d platformers and even a fan remake of portal.
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The Nintendo64 has so much power in the hardware that goes more or less wasted in every game that ever officially released for the console. I mean, they could never have known back then the programming techniques we know now, so it’s not really their fault.
despite my love for the Saturn, there’s no denying that between it’s bizzaro architecture and short lifespan to make way for the Dreamcast, it ended up leaving a lot on the table. thankfully the homebrew community is picking up more and more speed
if you’ll stretch the definition of console to include computers, the MSX Turbo-R is another example. it was an 8-bitter but with a souped-up, faster z80 meant to at least give it a fighting chance against the onalaught of 16-bitters, but the few games it’s known for are all RPGs that look great but don’t exactly flex the speed of the new processor. and while the MSX homebrew scene is massive and still pumping out games by the dozen, the Turbo-R is a rare target for new games with it still commanding 1000+ USD prices. someday!
Honestly everything sega.
The master system had a built in maze game which was incredible to me as a kid. The Genesis/Mega Drive was fantastic but its add ons sega Cd and 32x were barely utilized. Saturn and Dreamcast both abandoned far too quickly.
I recently played my first Saturn game and honestly had my mind blown knowing what the competition was doing at the time.
Gamegear was dope too when you compared it to its contemporary.
Gamegear was crippled by abysmal battery life. If you took the lithium battery technology of today and warped it back to where the Gamegear was, it would have made a huge difference. Gamegear fans loved to dunk on the Gameboy, but you could get a decent playtime out of it, whereas the Gamegear sucked down batteries like nobody’s business.
I had the wall power adapters as a kid so battery life rarely kept me down. But yeah you’re right.
This. Aside from the Genesis and its mega success, Sega’s hardware was woefully underused. It’s a shame, too, because they were at the forefront of experimentation back in the day.
If anything, this experimentation was the problem. Look back to when the SegaCD/32X/Saturn were all around. No one knew what to buy and Sega didn’t make it very clear either. They were split waaaay too much.
That’s fair but what I mean is that Sega wasn’t afraid to try new things and attempt to push the boundaries. Nowadays, everyone plays it too safe.
They pushed em all right. It was too many different things in too short of a period. SEGA is now a shell of its former self, mostly chucking the name on things for some cash.
Atari Lynx. Remarkably powerful handheld for coming out two months after the Game Boy, but no truly memorable games that aren’t ports (which could be said about all of Atari’s non-2600 consoles tbf.)
I feel like 3do never quite got the success that it deserved. At the time it was pretty advanced, one of my buddies had one but there weren’t a lot of games available
Lack of advertising and its business model of the hardware basically being produced by licensees tacked on to other electronics products of the time ended up crippling consumer awareness, and the price point was the big nail in the coffin, at roughly $700 in the early 90s you really had to commit to wanting one. Unlike most other console companies, 3DO couldn’t afford to sell the hardware at a loss because they didn’t have much, if anything, for first party games to make up for it. It had some games that look like they’d be decent, at least a better quality library overall than arguably the Jaguar and definitely the CDi, but it’s that tough cycle in gaming where you need good games to sell consoles (especially at $700, in any time) but third party devs won’t make good games for consoles that don’t sell.
This guy 3do’s
I’ve just seen a bunch of videos about it, haha.
I often wonder if mobile gaming wouldn’t be in the current freemium hellscape if the N-Gage had a better launch library. We knew even back then that everyone was going to have a phone, so it was a natural evolution. Unfortunately, the games weren’t very good, and they also weren’t again when Square Enix tried up-front pricing a little while later with Final Fantasy Dimensions and The After Years, for example.
Now I don’t know if single-price games are ever going to have a chance in the mobile market.
The DS 3D was pretty weak, though. Don’t get me wrong, great games like The Force Unleashed and Assassin’s Creed: Altaïr’s Chronicles are amazing games but the 3D in both was almost worse than PS1/Saturn 3D. Loved my NDS but I get why games tended to go for 2D.
As for my opinion on the subject matter, the aforementioned Sega Saturn is my pick. The potential that console had could have delivered truly incredible games and memories but Sega made one too many stupid business decisions.
Plenty of DS games did use 3D graphics though? Like lots of them did? The system’s flagship launch title was a remake of Super Mario 64, and launch units included a demo of Metroid Prime Hunters.
But those kinds of 3D games often looked pretty bad on the DS, to the point where lists of the most fondly-remembered DS games will be dominated by the much more beautiful spritework the system was capable of. Or titles that deliberately limited their use of 3D to the point where you’re maybe forgetting about them as such.
Just off the top of my head, some titles that did have good looking 3D on the system:
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Animal Crossing: Wild World - Heavily stylized in ways that cover the system’s limitations. Low poly looks good here, and flat textures are better than bad textures.
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Rhythm Heaven - Like ACWW, the minigames that use 3D are heavily stylized. And these are mixed in with lots of 2D minigames in the same package, so it doesn’t feel like a low-poly game.
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Etrian Odyssey - A good example of limited 3D, only used for the maze exploration. No models, just walls. Combat transitions back to a 2D screen, so that you’re focused on the spritework.
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Rune Factory - Like Etrian Odyssey, you’re looking at the large 2D portraits accompanying every dialogue box more than you’re looking at the 3D. Keeping the farming and combat at a zoomed out and fixed camera angle actually helps to kinda cover it up.
I could name plenty more games that tried to make 3D more of a focal point with detailed models and textures, games that tried to look more like console games, but the point is that the games that did so rarely looked good. Lots more of those existed than I think you remember.
Pilotwings Resort had good-looking 3D that was practically required, as it gave you the depth perception you needed to locate and fly into faraway objects.
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Ouya
The Sega Mega CD and the 32x were genuinely great pieces of hardware…but nearly all the games were awful. I love the Mega CD in particular, and I say that as a Nintendo kid.
Lunar 1&2 were originally released on the Sega CD, as was shining force CD.
There were a few decent games on it, but agreed, not many.
To be fair to the DS, playing 3D platformers with a d-pad isn’t great lol so I can see why developers mostly stuck to 2D games
GoldenEye on the N64 was the only game I’m aware of to have a control layout where you could use the left and centre prongs to get a proto-dual-stick experience
The WiiU’s second screen is great for asymmetric multiplayer or an auxiliary screen for things like inventories, most games just duplicated what was on the main screen
Nintendo really had their thinking-caps on tight when they decided that a third of the N64 controller was always inaccessible
The n64 controller is a very cautious design.
they were not sure if people(players and devs) would utilize the analogstick and chose to design the controller in a way that it could be used in the same way established controllers were used, the n64 predates the dualshock by a whole year afterall.
Perfect Dark (spiritual successor to GoldenEye) iterated on that. You can use two N64 controllers, one in each hand, to get a true dual stick experience
As far as hardware gimmicks go, I agree that the WiiU’s gamepad could’ve done so much more, I can think of so many different unique ways a game could’ve made use of it, like having two different perspectives or mini games like in GTA Chinatown wars.
I remember reading this comic back in the day, don’t remember playing anything like it other than Nintendo Land
The one notable time I can think of a game trying the dual perspective thing with the gamepad was Star Fox Zero at the end of its life cycle, and it was not received well at all because it made the control and aiming way too complicated since it was too much of a challenge to try to look at both screens at the same time. Can’t think of another game that tried something like that, but I did see a good number of games that used the gamepad for inventory, like the Zelda games and Monster Hunter.
The Wii U tried to bring the DS to console, but there was one major limitation that kept it from being used the way the DS was: human eyes cannot focus on screens at different distances from the eyes. The DS only worked because both screens were right next to each other.
The one thing the Gamepad could do that worked quite well and deserved to be explored more was asymmetric multiplayer. But at the same time, it felt like it was an era too late to be a big deal - giving players separate screens is something we can already do via online multiplayer.
The PSVita but I’m a GenZ so I haven’t used any hardware before the PS2
The Vita’s first-party though are remarkable compared to other stuff releasing, it kinda felt like everyone wanted to port PS3 games and forgot to make games targeting the handheld itself, the community is making a great job though, you can run CUPHEAD AND HOLLOW KNIGHT on that tiny beast
Original PlayStation for not shipping with dual analog sticks from the start. Almost all games had to be to be playable with non-analog controllers as well. As a result, dual shock support was mostly an afterthought. Especially FPS games were awful to play.
Imagine the games that could’ve been possible if all games were designed with two analog sticks in mind. We would certainly have fewer games with tank controls.
I think this is also the main reason why it didn’t take until PlayStation 2 for developers to realize that the second analog stick is awesome for camera movement (instead of awkwardly mapping camera motion to the shoulder buttons).
This was actually a major gripe I had when playing Jersey Devil on my PS1, once I found out about emulators I created a custom controller config for it that made it much more playable though.
Metroid Prime Hunters is a fully fledged 3d, fps and platformer type game on the nintendo DS.
Metroid Prime Hunters and Moon are both great examples of what the DS is capable of, but they both struggle to be fun as videogames because of the stylish camera controls, what I mean by under-utilized is that a significant portion of the DS library Is 2d pixel art graphics, in games that would have benefited a lot from 3d, even within the same franchise. like super princess peach having essentially GBA graphics when New Super Mario Bros had fancy rendering and 3d assets for many aspects of the game.
