Future of Consoles

General and high profile video game topics.
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VideoGameCritic
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Future of Consoles

Postby VideoGameCritic » February 22nd, 2015, 10:18 pm

I think we might be going a little overboard talking about cartridge prices.

Yes, I heard Virtual Racer was $100 but I never saw it in a store.  And yes, I once spent $75 for Super Empire Strikes Back.  

But I don't think I ever spent more that $60 for a Genesis or SNES game.   And I don't know about those "adjusted for inflation" figures, but I think most of my Atari 2600 cartridge were in the $20-$30 range.

N64 games were always expensive - I'll give you that.

ptdebate1
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Future of Consoles

Postby ptdebate1 » February 22nd, 2015, 10:25 pm

[QUOTE=videogamecritic]I think we might be going a little overboard talking about cartridge prices.

Yes, I heard Virtual Racer was $100 but I never saw it in a store.  And yes, I once spent $75 for Super Empire Strikes Back.  

But I don't think I ever spent more that $60 for a Genesis or SNES game.   And I don't know about those "adjusted for inflation" figures, but I think most of my Atari 2600 cartridge were in the $20-$30 range.

N64 games were always expensive - I'll give you that.[/QUOTE]

Well, I adjusted the Atari games for inflation because of how long ago that was. The dollar was stronger back then--more than three times stronger. $30 back then had the buying power that $117 does today. Because the dollar is worth less, a $60 game today would have cost $15.36 back then (when the VCS was released).

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

We're paying a lot less money for games these days than we used to.

Jon1
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Future of Consoles

Postby Jon1 » February 22nd, 2015, 10:50 pm

It's not just 2d. I liked a lot of early 3d games because it had worlds that weren't too big it didn't seem tedious, it still had the charm of the pre 3d era. And pseudo 3d too. It's been ignored like it was some gateway to the huge 3d we have now like we should just forget about it. So this whole evolution of video games, was for what? Call of Duty? I mean, cmon. But the biggest problem to me, and the one that has been plaguing the industry since the PS1 brought us overly digitized 3d, "digitized hell". It's an annoying way of doing 3d which we can't shake out of. There are incredibly less powerful systems from 20 years ago that had beautiful 3d graphics, not this digital crap which is our only option by the way. And any sort of different way of doing 3d (maybe elaborating on what the Jag was doing for example) was thrown by the wayside. That's the problem. It can all be traced, in my opinion, back to the PS1. Because the early 3d systems (Jag, 3do) didn't have that "digitized hell" problem. In fact, I think they look great. I thought arcade games looked great too in the mid 90s, Sega comes to mind. As I thought more and more, I came to the conclusion that the PS1 was the worst thing that ever happened to the industry. It's funny, because when it came out, I really liked it. It had really good titles in it's first several months in 1995 and it was exciting playing these really good 3d games. But you wake up a year or so later, and you realize, this brand of digitized 3d graphics is all that's available. And, I was very upset by 1997-1998 at everything that was going on. So it wasn't just that we were robbed of the huge breakthrough 2d was ready to make by 1993-1994, which I'm still upset about. We were robbed of early 3d too. I thought there were some really nice looking 3d games for the 3do and Jaguar, games that didn't suffer from crippling issues like the PS1 and N64. But that was quickly extinguished. There was never to be another 3d system that either didn't suffer from horrifyingly pathetic graphical flaws or from games being too complicated.


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