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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
Following the Great Video Game Crash, the NES was the system to have for small children of my era. With significantly better graphics than the blocky Atari, since it could display sprites, and even more so, display layered sprites so there could be interaction between foreground and background, or sprites hidden behind others, the gap between box art and game art closed significantly. (That, and it often meant the ability to put over arcade games that looked like the ones that were in the cabinets.) Games like Ninja Ryūkenden (localized as Ninja Gaiden) specifically tried to tell a movie-like story, with letterboxed cutscenes between their gameplay sequences (with narrative cutscenes and gameplay bundled together into Acts to progress the story). Games like Super Mario Brothers had barely an excuse plot to go on, or their plot was relegated to the manuals that also explained how to do the gameplay actions. (Still before the era of playable tutorials and the existence of websites and videos to teach you all you ever needed to know.)
I didn't actually own an NES until much later in life, when they were being sold out of garage sales already complete with others' collections of games, but I certainly played it as much as I could when I was with others who had one and we had time to play games. And, unlike Atari games, the sprite capabilities of the NES made it possible to port over licensed property games that looked like the licensed properties, which is how I got introduced to both of the Turtles games released in the U.S., neither of which I could beat at the time, and the concept of in-game advertising, thanks to Pizza Hut's product placement in Turtles II: The Arcade Game. (Avoid the Noid is when we start talking about PCs of that era.)
NES games have a well-earned reputation for being blisteringly hard. I think at least some of this comes from many of the games being console ports of arcade games that left the quarter-eating difficulty completely intact but gave the player a limited number of lives to try and win the game with. I would have thought the appeal of having the arcade game on your home console would be the ability to turn on free play mode, but it was not to be. What's now known as the Konami code used to be called the Contra code, because Contra was the first game where using the sequence (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A B A (Select) Start) was the only way that normal players would last more than a few seconds in the game, as the default allotment of lives was three and everything not specifically a pickup would kill your character if it touched them. The Contra Code started someone out with fifty lives.
The NES and its games were also my first introduction to strategy guides, which laid out levels in detail, highlighting where extra lives, secret attacks, and tricky spots that would require extra skill to finesse their way through lived, as well as guides to any mini games the main game contained, and to cheat devices, for the collection of games I bought also came with the Game Genie. The Game Genie was an aftermarket cheat device, mostly for cartridge-based systems, that could change the values of various bits in memory at the start of the game, so as to grant late game powerups at the beginning, or change the number of starting lives, resources, points, or warp to a specific level, or that would prevent the overwriting of certain values in memory throughout the game, so as to grant infinite lives, special attack energy, ammunition, to lock a character into a specific powerup loadout for the entire game, or any other number of ways that the game could be modified, usually for making the game easier, but sometimes just for silly purposes as well. But like the character of the lamp from the Tales of a Thousand Nights and One Night, the Game Genie could only offer three wishes to a player, forcing them to make decisions about which things they needed most on their journey to beating a game. The inputs for it were strings of letters, chosen carefully as not to be lexically confused, each of which corresponded to one memory modification. Some games required a master code to unlock the cheats, reducing their availability to two, and other, extremely powerful cheats, required two lines to complete (one to set the character into a particular mode, the other to prevent them from changing out of that mode during the game).
Cheats make games fun, and for many players, cheats make games accessible. There are still too many games in our era that don't think about how players with limited sight or hearing, or who might need simplified controls, or extra reaction time, or who might not have the skill to perform double-flawless-fatality and don't have the patience or desire to learn how to do it against a computer that will punish every mistake they make, or who aren't able to or interested in finding the exact subpixel-frame-perfect trick that's necessary to proceed can still play and succeed at their game. And as much as the tendency from certain corners is to dismiss this request for accessibility with a sneer and "git gud, scrub," the Stop Having Fun Guys are always a vocal and tiny minority whose time of being catered to will not last forever.
Sadly, my NES suffered from the same problems that basically all of the front loading ones did, but before it did, I also found out that even when using a cheat device to get farther in the story for a game like Ninja Gaiden III, there was a point in time after having played sufficiently where the character, despite having an infinite life bar, would randomly keel over and die without being touched by an enemy. At whatever point the memory value rolled over and everything went out of whack, that was the end of that session. Which meant I rarely got more than one crack at the triple end boss rush that was the culmination of the game before my hidden time limit ran out, and infinite life bars don't protect you from pits or one hit kill attacks.
The NES was the first console I owned for myself, many years after it was the hottest thing, but I got a lot of good play time out of it all the same. Often at games that I wasn't all that good at when the difficulty ramped up.
- CPU: Ricoh 2A03, an 8-bit microprocessor containing a second source MOS Technology 6502 core, 1.79 MHz.
- RAM: 2 KB of onboard work RAM. Cartridges may contain expanded RAM to increase this amount, from 8 KB to 1 MB.
- Video Processor: Custom-made Picture Processing Unit (PPU) developed by Ricoh. 2 KB of video RAM, 256 bytes of on-die "object attribute memory" (OAM) to store the positions, colors, and tile indices of up to 64 sprites on the screen, and 28 bytes of on-die palette RAM to allow selection of background and sprite colors. Standard display resolution is 256 horizontal pixels by 240 vertical pixels.
- Video output: Composite video through RCA connectors in addition to a real frequency (RF) modulator.
- Sound: Five sound channels, two of which are pulse channels with 4 pulse width settings, one is a triangle wave generator, another is a noise generator (often used for percussion), and the fifth one plays low-quality digital samples.
- Input: Two custom seven-pin ports, expandable to four ports with accessories, able to accept gamepads and joysticks (four directions, two buttons marked A and B, and two buttons marked Select and Start), some with turbo button pressing functions, light gun (reflective mirror with trigger, position calculated by flashing the screen bright white and reading the reflection in the mirror), floor pad with six buttons for each side, and Robotic Operating Buddy.
Following the Great Video Game Crash, the NES was the system to have for small children of my era. With significantly better graphics than the blocky Atari, since it could display sprites, and even more so, display layered sprites so there could be interaction between foreground and background, or sprites hidden behind others, the gap between box art and game art closed significantly. (That, and it often meant the ability to put over arcade games that looked like the ones that were in the cabinets.) Games like Ninja Ryūkenden (localized as Ninja Gaiden) specifically tried to tell a movie-like story, with letterboxed cutscenes between their gameplay sequences (with narrative cutscenes and gameplay bundled together into Acts to progress the story). Games like Super Mario Brothers had barely an excuse plot to go on, or their plot was relegated to the manuals that also explained how to do the gameplay actions. (Still before the era of playable tutorials and the existence of websites and videos to teach you all you ever needed to know.)
I didn't actually own an NES until much later in life, when they were being sold out of garage sales already complete with others' collections of games, but I certainly played it as much as I could when I was with others who had one and we had time to play games. And, unlike Atari games, the sprite capabilities of the NES made it possible to port over licensed property games that looked like the licensed properties, which is how I got introduced to both of the Turtles games released in the U.S., neither of which I could beat at the time, and the concept of in-game advertising, thanks to Pizza Hut's product placement in Turtles II: The Arcade Game. (Avoid the Noid is when we start talking about PCs of that era.)
NES games have a well-earned reputation for being blisteringly hard. I think at least some of this comes from many of the games being console ports of arcade games that left the quarter-eating difficulty completely intact but gave the player a limited number of lives to try and win the game with. I would have thought the appeal of having the arcade game on your home console would be the ability to turn on free play mode, but it was not to be. What's now known as the Konami code used to be called the Contra code, because Contra was the first game where using the sequence (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A B A (Select) Start) was the only way that normal players would last more than a few seconds in the game, as the default allotment of lives was three and everything not specifically a pickup would kill your character if it touched them. The Contra Code started someone out with fifty lives.
The NES and its games were also my first introduction to strategy guides, which laid out levels in detail, highlighting where extra lives, secret attacks, and tricky spots that would require extra skill to finesse their way through lived, as well as guides to any mini games the main game contained, and to cheat devices, for the collection of games I bought also came with the Game Genie. The Game Genie was an aftermarket cheat device, mostly for cartridge-based systems, that could change the values of various bits in memory at the start of the game, so as to grant late game powerups at the beginning, or change the number of starting lives, resources, points, or warp to a specific level, or that would prevent the overwriting of certain values in memory throughout the game, so as to grant infinite lives, special attack energy, ammunition, to lock a character into a specific powerup loadout for the entire game, or any other number of ways that the game could be modified, usually for making the game easier, but sometimes just for silly purposes as well. But like the character of the lamp from the Tales of a Thousand Nights and One Night, the Game Genie could only offer three wishes to a player, forcing them to make decisions about which things they needed most on their journey to beating a game. The inputs for it were strings of letters, chosen carefully as not to be lexically confused, each of which corresponded to one memory modification. Some games required a master code to unlock the cheats, reducing their availability to two, and other, extremely powerful cheats, required two lines to complete (one to set the character into a particular mode, the other to prevent them from changing out of that mode during the game).
Cheats make games fun, and for many players, cheats make games accessible. There are still too many games in our era that don't think about how players with limited sight or hearing, or who might need simplified controls, or extra reaction time, or who might not have the skill to perform double-flawless-fatality and don't have the patience or desire to learn how to do it against a computer that will punish every mistake they make, or who aren't able to or interested in finding the exact subpixel-frame-perfect trick that's necessary to proceed can still play and succeed at their game. And as much as the tendency from certain corners is to dismiss this request for accessibility with a sneer and "git gud, scrub," the Stop Having Fun Guys are always a vocal and tiny minority whose time of being catered to will not last forever.
Sadly, my NES suffered from the same problems that basically all of the front loading ones did, but before it did, I also found out that even when using a cheat device to get farther in the story for a game like Ninja Gaiden III, there was a point in time after having played sufficiently where the character, despite having an infinite life bar, would randomly keel over and die without being touched by an enemy. At whatever point the memory value rolled over and everything went out of whack, that was the end of that session. Which meant I rarely got more than one crack at the triple end boss rush that was the culmination of the game before my hidden time limit ran out, and infinite life bars don't protect you from pits or one hit kill attacks.
The NES was the first console I owned for myself, many years after it was the hottest thing, but I got a lot of good play time out of it all the same. Often at games that I wasn't all that good at when the difficulty ramped up.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-04 01:51 pm (UTC)I did learn to play a decent game of tetris later on a PC though. :)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-04 04:46 pm (UTC)It's really nice that emulation exists for most of these systems of yesteryear. It's not a perfect recreation of the experiences of them, but it's usually good enough for people who want to play the games.