No, it wasn’t any of the games, it was the medium they were on.
Backing up, I’m 37. Before this I had only owned two gaming systems. An Atari 2600 and an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). After that I never bought another, as I was happy to play games on PCs instead. And although I’ve known people over the years with newer systems, I never played them. So I missed out on when game consoles switched from cartridges to discs.
Yes, I saw ads about how you could play DVDs and then Blu-rays on PS3s for example, but I always thought that the player was an add-on, or something like that. :smack::smack:
It seems strange to me though that home console companies moved away from cartridges. They’re electronic. No moving parts. Disk players have drive motors that can break or wear out. I guess cartridges couldn’t match the 700mb CDs can hold maybe?
Cartridges have the advantage if being fast (they’re basically plugin ROM) but they couldn’t approach the storage capacity of CDs at the time. The last cartridge-based system was the Nintendo 64 which could not compete againt the PS1. CD’s (and now DVD’s and Blu-rays) are far cheaper to mass produce as well, since everyone is already making them.
or the 4.7-8.5 GB that DVDs hold (used on the Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS2) and forget about the 50 GB that Blu-Ray discs (used for PS3 games) can hold.
plus a cartridge is relatively expensive to make, you’ve got the chip(s) that store the game data, the circuit board(s,) the case, and fasteners to hold it together. An optical disc costs a few cents to press.
Years ago, I was involved in a project to develop a video game accessory and learned a little bit about the business. This was when most of the video game systems were cartridge-based and one of the reasons was that the manufacturer of the game system (Nintendo or Sega, mostly) controlled the market and collected a royalty on every game cartridge sold. I think that was one reason that the market moved to disc-based games, along with the increased storage capacity of the CD/DVD/BD format.
You guys make good points about how cheap it is to put games on disks. Dewey, wouldn’t Nintendo, Sony, whoever, get royalties on the disks they publish or games they allow other companies to make for them?
Also, part of what makes me feel stupid is, I’m really into computers (OK, predominantly PCs and predominantly Windows OS’s and software) and am trying to get into an IT job, and yet I was living in the past when it came to game consoles.
Yes, they do, actually. In fact, the big three (Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft) sell game developing kits to the various third party game developers so they can make games for a particular system.
One thing I was interested to learn after buying a Wii is that the sensor bar is misnamed. It doesn’t sense anything, it puts out light that the controller picks up.
Here’s a youtube video of the candle trick. There’s a lot of these videos but this one is popular even though the picture quality is crap. I think it may be because the guy sounds like Kripke from Big Bang Theory.
Yip. But they specifically use a slower speed of ROM than any of the older cartridges, in order to save costs. It’s still faster than a disk, though, and the price is similar to a minidisk, which are actually (more expensive that large disks of the same density due to the lower demand).
I don’t know what the 3DS is doing, but I’d guess it;ll use cartridges as well. It at least has to have a cartridge slot for its claimed DS compatibility. I’d suspect having both would make the device too bulky.
What do you think Wii tennis is? Yes. Pong 3D. You can also play ping pong on… I mean, table tennis… on Wii fit.
Yes, but since the company designed the game and designed what cartridges they used, you had to pay them royalties to use their technology to make a cartridge with a game on it.
Of course, after 1984 and the big video game market crash, all console manufacturers started requiring 3rd party game creators to pay a license fee in order to get their games approved. So, for a while there, you had to pay a royalty (fee) for the cartridge to burn your game onto, and you had to pay a licensing fee… eventually it was consolidated to a single large licensing fee when Sony started using discs instead of cartridges.
Man oh man, I’m in trouble. I haven’t played a game console since the earliest days. I played a Wii for about 5 minutes last Christmas with the nephew, who kicked my ass. I avoid on-line games both for the expense and the time commitment, knowing that I’d probably become addicted to them and catch myself still up playing at 3am on work nights. I only play a couple of games on my computer, because I used to buy games and do that sort of late night thing in the past.
My parents - both 72 - have temporary loan of my sister’s Wii and are off out to buy one of their own when they’ve recovered from Xmas.
They love it - and the funniest thing over Xmas was watching my mum playing sword fighting on Wii Sports Resort. It appears she has a tendency to get a little aggressive and over competitive.
When it was introduced, the Wii was unique. But now there are motion-sensing options for the PS3 (the Playstation Move) and for the XBox 360 (the Kinect system). I’m not sure whether the Wii is still the best one.
My wife is disabled so besides some care-givers who come over my mother lives with us and helps me take care of my wife.
She got the Wii for the three of us…well, effectively just me and her. Anyway, part of the reason she got it was me thinking that maybe Wii Fitness could help me get into shape. She got some sort of sports package and we have three disks: Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort, and Summer Athletics.
The only game I’ve played so far, is the one I’ve wanted to play forever. Wii Bowling off the Wii Sports disk. It’s not as great as I thought since I’m constantly getting a left spin on the ball no matter what I do. I can avoid it sometimes, but more often then not it goes off to the left :mad:.
No, not really.