3 ms·
What made the NES great was what others have already mentioned: by 1985 chip technology was at a point where you could do hardware tiling and RAM was cheap enou
by phendrenad2 5y ago
What made the NES great was what others have already mentioned: by 1985 chip technology was at a point where you could do hardware tiling and RAM was cheap enough that you could do nice color lookup tables. Also the NES came out during a video game crash, so competitors were holding back on making new consoles (their latest consoles were a few years earlier).
Also the ability to do simple stored audio wave patterns and not just sine waves and white noise probably mattered a lot.
Another little detail is the controller layout. Nintendo was the first to figure out that "shitty rubber joystick" wasn't a selling point, and a simple d-pad was infinitely preferable for real games.
- ddingus 5y agoYeah, that D-pad was a big deal. So many "new" input dynamics possible allowed for more expressive and robust input. Platformers on a single or two button joystick, for example, just do not work as well.
- flatiron 5y agoAnd then proceeded to come out with the wii and forced motion games.
- eropple 5y ago...which sold eye-poppingly to a mass audience, while the DS and 3DS sold a ton to a more core gaming audience, and the two have merged in really neat ways with the Switch. (I am very much a "core gamer", I'm playing Triangle Strategy right now, but Ring Fit Adventure also owns.)
- phendrenad2 5y agoTechnically, many games (such as the massively popular smash bros) allowed you to use the wiimote sideways as a normal controller.