Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The PlayStation is another one of those consoles that defined a generation, introduced changes such as the use of CD-ROM technology and multimedia capabilities that are here to stay and broke the record of being the first console to surpass the 100 Million units sold mark. While the Sega Genesis put up a great fight against Nintendo, it was this one that finally shined well above the already established Nintendo franchise.
It wasn’t the lack of great games on Nintendo’s side, that part was fully covered with games like Mario 64, Super Smash Bros, Goldeneye, The Legend of Zelda and others, but there seems to be a trend here.
All these games are first party titles, that were great, but the lack of third party titles were evident (aside from Rare).
On Sony’s side, the PlayStation was the number 1 choice for most third party developers, and it also got a handful of great first party ones. This doesn’t mean the PS1 lacked shovelware, those things always exist in every system, but at the very least the good grealy outshined the bad.
While it was the games that made this console so popular, this attraction to third party studios couldn’t have been done without the hardware that the PS1 sported.
On a side to side comparison, the N64 leads the way when it comes to powerful hardware, having a 100MHz MIPS R4000 compared to the 30MHz MIPS R3000 of the PS1. Graphically the N64 was also pretty good, and lacked all the warping that the PS1 had. All this might have given a slight advantage to the N64. But Nintendo made a huge mistake when they unveiled the N64.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I’ve already talked about the birth of the Philips CD-i and the PlayStation, originally CD addons for the SNES. When Nintendo saw the huge disaster of the Sega CD, they decided to discontinue them and stick to cartridges instead. The problem came when Nintendo was unable to see that the Sega CD’s failure wasn’t due to CD technology, but how Sega used it, if used correctly it will be the future of gaming, but instead of this they decided to play safe and stick to what they knew that worked.
This was their own undoing as Sony did manage to utilize the full potential of CD technology for gaming, with much higher sound quality in games, full motion video, full voice dialog, longer games, better storytelling, and a lot of room for developers to be creative.
You have to take into consideration that CD-ROMs have 700MB of capacity, compared to the N64 cartridges having 100MB, CD-ROMs being a lot cheaper also helped, as some games even had two or three discs.
The only disadvantage to CD-ROM media was the loading times, due to game cartridges being mounted as Read-Only RAM, the load times where almost nonexistent, as opposed to some rather lengthy load times seen of the PlayStation, and there’s also the problem with piracy, although I tend to believe piracy mostly exists on the more popular consoles, had the N64 be the norm back then we’d probably be seeing a lot of N64 flashcart lying around. Overall CD-ROM technology was far superior to that of traditional cartridges, and with the PS1 they came here to stay.
Both the PS1 and N64 were great systems with lots of games that brought fun to many childs all around the globe. If you were lucky enough to own both systems you had the best of both worlds, if not then whatever system you chose of the two wasn’t by any means a bad decision.
Now that we’ve covered the good, let’s talk about the bad.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Jaguar was the last console Atari came up in an attempt to get back into the console market after the Videogame Crash of the 80′s. The console was marketed as a 64 bit console, because Atari thought the bit wars was still relevant. Although it wasn’t really a 64 bit system, a combination of CPU registers or something like that made Atari come up with those numbers (I don’t know nor care about the full details, if you do and would like to contribute with it feel free to do it in the comments below).
Atari used this 64 bit marketing campaign to treat gamers as dumbasses with their slogan “Do the Math”.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Not only was their commercials insulting, the quality of the games was too. They were mostly composed of really primitive and eye-soring polygon graphics with little details, bad sound effects, missing ambient music, bad controls, and pretty much everything else that makes a game bad. The best Jaguar game can be qualified as mediocre at best. What’s even worse was Atari’s ego, not only they thought their console was good, they thought it was top notch for its price, so much that when the PlayStation was announced Atari’s then CEO said that it wasn’t possible to sell that system with those specs for anything less than $700, and that if Sony does sell it for anything lower than that they will sue them. When the PS1 launched at $300 Atari had to eat their words and the Atari Jaguar fell into obscurity.
The system also saw an addon in the same veins of the SegaCD, the Jaguar CD, how they expected people to buy an expensive addon for a console that wasn’t selling well is beyond me.
Here’s the AVGN episodes for the Atari Jaguar and Jaguar CD.
Finally, we got Sega’s answer to the upcoming generation, the Sega Saturn.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Sega Saturn was a weird console, but not in the way you think. It utilized CD-ROM as the primary games distribution media, but also had a cartridge slot that could be used for either games or RAM expansion. Not a bad idea in itself, it’s basically an upgradeable console.
The problem came with its internals. The Saturn operated with two 32 bit CPUs running parallel, or at least that was Sega’s idea. The problem here is that both CPUs could not access RAM at the same time, so there’s not much to gain from having both of them, and it made programming for the system much harder, so this ultimately dropped the quality of games, the exact opposite of what Sega was attempting to do.
The system also lacked vital games like Sonic (Sonic extreme was being developed but got scrapped in its early stages), and although it had some great games, some of them available also on the PS1 with little changes between them, there wasn’t really anything memorable that could have made the system a top seller. It wasn’t as bad as the Atari Jaguar, but it wasn’t on par with the N64 and PS1.
The system is not crappy enough for the AVGN to make a video about it (at least not yet), but it isn’t that great either.
This generation was characterized for the appearance of the Sony PlayStation, which entered the market, saw the problems it had and what it needed, and it dominated it. Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Stay tuned as Sony wasn’t happy with beating the record of reaching 100 Million units sold, Sega still hadn’t say its last words, and Nintendo finally realized their mistake with game cartridges, and we’re about to see even another challenger entering the market, all in the next generation.