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A counterpoint: If you look back at the history of console games (and early PCs, for that matter), the 1980s were littered with examples of games that were por
by blahedo 14y ago
A counterpoint:
If you look back at the history of console games (and early PCs, for that matter), the 1980s were littered with examples of games that were ported from the upright arcade consoles to the home market; the home version was often inferior and didn't always take advantage of the different controller available for that device. (This is especially true for the PC ports.) People bought a game for their Atari at home because they'd played it in an upright at the arcade a few years earlier.
Then, Nintendo came in with Super Mario Bros and said, hey, there's a whole different paradigm we can work with here. They came out with Legend of Zelda and said, hey, we can actually save games! (Remember how exciting that was? And how novel?) PC games started actually making use of more of the keyboard (not to mention the processing power).
So... I think we'll be okay on this one.
Edit: this is similar to the point that rollypolly makes below/above.
- fpgeek 14y agoI'm sorry, this is a tangential point, but I just can't get past the idea that you see saving games as a novel feature of The Legend of Zelda. Saving in adventure games goes all the way back to the original Colossal Cave Adventure. And I, at least, can't think of a major adventure game that didn't have saving.
- nutjob123 14y agomario?
- blahedo 14y agoIt was new to the cartridge-based consoles of the time; I suppose you could say it enabled the "adventure" genre on such devices, which would be unplayable without a save feature. Other games of the time, some of which had rather long play times to get from start to finish, didn't have any way to save, although some tried to fake it by displaying codes after each level that you could later enter in manually. Do you know of any savable console "adventure" games (or any others) that predate Zelda?
- fpgeek 14y agoNo, but as you can probably guess, I played far more text adventures than I did console games. In any case, I think what we're really disagreeing about is what qualifies as novel. In your opinion, new to console games is enough to call a feature novel even when that same feature is familiar in PC games. In my opinion, implementing a standard feature from PC adventure games in console adventure games doesn't qualify as novel. That's especially true when, as you note, saving is a feature required to get nontrivial adventure games off the ground.