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Version 4.0b                                                                                            Main Features 

Console Wars

The console generations of the past and how they shape the future of new consoles.

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 ::: The Sega Saturn  1995 -1998::::

Sega Saturn

Released in November 1994, Sega Saturn took popularity from the NeoGeoTurbo. Sega Saturn was priced at huge 400 bucks for a combo w/ Virua Fighter (1994). But in 1994, all good playstation games were in development. Rage Racer from Namco, was Playstation's premere racing game.  This was a early driving sim that had manificent graphics for it's time. The control was also new at the time, but Rage Racer also was a high profile. Sega spent years trying to come up with a solid design for their console. Unlike Nintendo, Sega desided to go with optimal disc. Sega CD failed because the lack of good advertisement campaign, and with only one good game out, it wasn't worth it.  Sega also had high profile games in store, like Panzer Dragoon (1995)  Panzer Dragoon II (1996) with the following Saga also had plans for Sonic in Sonic 3D Blast (1996), but became a lack luster because of it's control. However, Sonic Team came out with another game called NiGHTS(1996). Nights had good graphics for it's time, it also featured a fully 3D engine. The death of Saturn was it hard in 1997 when Squaresoft released Final Fantasy 7 on Playstation. Final Fantasy went on to be a famous game which marked the beginning of 32-bit age RPGs. It may surprised everyone, but Sega came out with 4 fantastic games, Radiant Silvergun (1997), Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998), Shining Force III (1999) and Burning Rangers (1999). Shining Force III and Panzer Dragoon became ideal RPGs to bet when buying the console. 3rd party games like Grandia and Lunar were close behind with sales, but also were on Playstation. So 3rd party RPGs didn't really sell well on Saturn. Sega also tried having lasergun action with games like Virua Cop (1994) and House of the Dead (1995). But it was all done, Sega  announced Saturn dead later that year. In 1996, Sony updates the PSX to Playstation version 1.1 which means they fixed a lot of bugs and made the console more durable. Now everyone who wants a Playstation is buying one. Sega Saturn survived only through videogame retailers being sold to new constumers 2 or 3 times. Playstation gets used a lot more, Saturn seems old to us now. Dreamcast was not backwards capible with Saturn games. Saturn saw no support in Japan because Sega went completely to support Dreamcast, which was the predessessor. So sales dried up completely because of it. In a sense, Sega killed Saturn.

Main CPU 32bit RISC SH2 (28.6MHz, 25MIPS) x 2
32bit RISC SH1 (20.0MHz)
16 bit Stereo Sound, Audio DSP (32 Channel, 44.1KHz Frequency (CD Quality))
Resolution 320 x 224
16mbit Work Ram
12mbit Video Ram
4mbit Sound Ram

16.77 Million Colours, Sprite Enlargement, Reduction, Rotation, Transformation.

Double Speed CD- ROM

Dimensions
Width 260 mm
Length 230mm
Height 86mm

My personal Impressions on owning a Sega Saturn are moderate  because I knew that Sega would have a good product. Sega Saturn feels empty inside and not built with as strong plastic as Dreamcast and Nintendo 64. The controller feels light in my hand. I am very use to the Playstation controller feel. So I reject some of the Saturns controller. Although, it is packaged away in my closet, I have played games like Sonic 3D Blast, Sega Championship Ralley, Rayman, Gex and Nights. Picture here. Nights is my favorite Saturn title. I could never find a 3D controller for my Nights title, so I failed to make me play it for hours. Sega Rally is a good game. I like drafting all the time. It's a average game in my opinion. Not as fun as some of the RPGs on Playstation, but does have a little good playing it. It is 3D and I can understand that it can barely handle 3D racers. Playstation was suppose to be that way, until they came out with Gran Tranismo, and that opened some eyes. Some never knew it was possible. So all and all I give Saturn a 6.0 out of 10.  (posted March 27, 2003)

 
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 : The Nintendo Enertainment System (1985-1991)::

NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)

For more information go here

NES was the starting console of Nintendo's big business as a console manufacturer. It gets very confusing who Nintendo's competitors were. Atari 2600 was still competing against Nintendo in 1985. I've heard sites that said that it was the Itellivision. It is true that some developers were waiting for Atari to declare bankruptcy. Atari was highly guarded for successfully lengthing the life of the Atari 2600. There was still games coming out for Atari 2600 in 1986. Atari was most successful in the late 70s and early 80s, but lost money due to inflation and the ability to produce at better product. As a result Atari became a multiplatform developer where it still exists in one form or another creating games for Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.  I am not clear on the story on "The Crash of 1984" But Nintendo had Super Mario Bros. People loved the plummer so much that he began his carrier starring in several more games and people end up buying every game starring Mario and Luigi. In 1987, it came apparent that SEGA, formally a US Army division called Service Games, had a more powerful console called the SEGA Masters System. Before they just created Pinball Machine business. SEGA didn't have the 3rd party developer support that Nintendo had.  Those years of the NES was the time that people were passion to play games over and over. Nintendo made highly regarded deals with videogame developers. Since the U.S. government regulated monopolies like Microsoft. Nintendo turned out lucky that it wasn't one at the turn of the decade.

Nintendo had the same success with the Gameboy. The orginal Gameboy was in black and white. Technolegy was too expensive to develop a color LCD screen in 1989. A Green LCD screen was less costly then black and white version. So Nintendo chose to create games in "Green and Black" The finished design of Gameboy was the exact replica of the NES design. The 8-bit handheld stayed in the market for 11 years without any significant drops in popularity.  Gameboy sales / games had a 3:1 ratio over Nintendo 64. Everyone loved Gameboy. Nintendo became a monopoly in the handheld market for 10 years. The government had trouble classifing Nintendo has a monopoly because it wasn't in the console market. They classified Nintendo as a monoply in 1988 when Nintendo had a contract that each videogame developer had supply the NES with 3 titles until it could supply 1 title to another console. Still today, Nintendo President owns the Seattle Mariners and an NBA team which he later sold to Nintendo. Nintendo owns large stock in both teams. Strange, but very true. I can only tell you that I own 3 Gameboy Advance games, so I missed out on the Gameboy entirely. (Article posted May 18, 2003)

 
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 : Sega Genesis 1989 - 1996 ::

SEGA GENESIS / SEGA CD

SEGA Genesis (MEGA DRIVE) is not the latest console, but Sega's most successful system. The debut price was better then Nintendo's selling at 190 US dollars. Sega finally got to steal the market for a little while before the Super NES came out. What is interesting about it is that it had some orginal titles like Nintendo, but it had a mascot Sonic the Hedgehog. His debut in Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) was the top selling game for the console. He was fast and everyone liked him. Sonic Team soon made three sequels and Travler's Tales made an enhanced Sonic 3D late late in the consoles life. Sega never really gained back the market after Super NES took over in 1992. SNES game just were too good for Sega's luck. Nintendo and Sega both survived the "crash of the videogame industry" in the late 1980s. Atari was sold off to Hasbro Interactive.

Who could forget Castlevania on any system. The Castlevania series has had a repetition of being good. Same goes with Castlevania - Blood Lines (1994). Castlevania is a well known game today as it was back then. It was a horror survival title for mature audiences and had a twist that made people like it and play long hours. Sega released Shadow Dancer (1992) as a sword action game. Ever played any of these games myself. Other games that came along that people liked are : Mortal Kombat II (1992) and a enhanced version of Mega Man (1993), Ecco the Dolphin (1992) Golden Axe (1989) and Strider (1990) and Shinobi ( 1993 : before the remake on Playstation 2 )  

Sega also released the Sega CD add-on in 1993 with their flagship title Sonic CD. Sega set one milestone, the first 3D game called Virua Fighter became the first 3D game ever and it's in the Smithsonian in Washington CD. Sonic CD turned out to be pretty good with improved graphics over Sonic 2. Although some people bought the add on, many people ignored Sega CD for what ever reason. It was released under the best attentions. Sony was going to make Nintendo's new CD perhiberal, but it never took off. It was scrapped months before it went under mass production.

The same year Sega came out with the Sega 32x which made the Genesis 32-bit. Sega made the wrong decision in making it and the developers didn't have enough time to develop any high profile games for it. Which made it a useless unity. That cost Sega millions of dollars that they couldn't invest into the Saturn, in my opinion.

In 1996, Sega released a 16-bit version of Sonic 3D Blast. It resembled closely to the Saturn counterpart. It didn't do as well as Sega hoped it would. But it was a pioneer as 16 bit titles go.

Sega Genesis had an unusually long life of seven years in the United States (1989-1996). It is still popular in Brazil and Australia, South Korea and a few Asian countries today.  

[ posted April 17, 2003 ]

 
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 : Sega Dreamcast  ( 1999 - 2001 ) ::

After the demise of the Saturn, could anyone say that Dreamcast sucked too. It wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible. Some people were surprised that Dreamcast was as small as it was. The controller is the almost the sized of the console. Playstation 2 was this too cool for Dreamcast. Sega  continued relations with NEC to provide their processor.  NEC, the largest chip distributer in Japan. In my opinion, Dreamcast sounds better then Playstation or Nintendo 64. Sega reentered the console genre, this time a few new 1st party developers and all the other developers came back too (Activision, Capcom, Midway, Uri Soft, Namco, CBI, Crave, Infrogames) As for games went, Sega supprised everyone with Virual Fighter 3, the only fighter with 128 bit graphics at the time. The time was November 1998 when it was released. Sega released Sonic Adventure (1999), a improvement over Sonic 3D Blast (1996), on Dreamcast. It didn't sell over a million copies, but did get media attention. Sega wanted Sonic to be a simutanist runner like Genesis Sonic games were. Sega striked a big deal with Namco to make a port of the arcade game, Soul Caliber (1999). Soul Caliber was the only dreamcast title to sell over a million copies. The title was arcade perfect and looked better then any other lauching title.

Sega was determined or despret (what ever way you view it) to became focused in North America. The huge marketing compain was unleased in 1999 to show off Sega's new console with avertisemetns to support Soul Caliber, Sonic Adventure and Power Stone. Later Sega advertised Resident Evil 2, Crazy Taxi, Jet Grid Radio and Space Channel 5. Resident Evil was a popular horror survival action game upgraded to Dreamcast. Space Channel 5 was a musical game dependant on pressing buttons to keep the beat. Shanmue (2000) was the in development for many years and was the largest scale game on any console . It's about a Japanese in his mid 20s trying to unlock what really happened to him long ago in this huge vast city environment with thousands of things to do.

Skies of Arcadia became Sega's new RPG from Overworks, the developer also made Shinobi for PS2 and Dreamcast. The dreamcast version never came to the USA , but the PS2 version has. Gamers could also browse the web and search for Game Saves online. Many people were surprised that sega brought back and enhanced the Saturn version of Phantasy Star IV in form of Phantasy Star Online. The game had decent gameplay and really good graphics. In no way could it compete with today's games. There was only a few online titles, like Vanishing Point (2000), Chu Chu Rocket (1999), NFL 2K1(2001), Unreal Tournament (2001), Quake III (2001), Soldier of Fortune (2001) and Phantasy Star Online (2000, 2001) which went online. Atari came out with one quality title, Ikaruga, which is a overhead shooter, which had high resolution graphics and had tight control which had it over looked by many gamers. This game is coming out for Gamecube and hopefully I will have the review up soon! All of the games went online for free but only lasted 6 months as a server. In 2003, thoses servers still alive, but no one is playing the online espect of them anymore. The largest online game was Quake III which cerpassed Phantasy Star Online because Quake III could be played with PC gamers too. Playstation 2 took a huge chunk for Sega's proftis. In many ways, Sega underestimated the wrath of Sony's Playstation 2. By the end of 2000, Sega knew that Dreamcast wasn't going to last a another year and changes had to be met for the company's survival in the instrustry. Sega prepared to become a third party. Sega gave Dreamcast source code to Pace which freely displayed it over the Internet. That made this whole underground department of running emulators to run on Dreamcast. (posted March 27, 2003)

Hitachi SH4 RISC Processor (128bit 3D engine)
NEC CLX2 graphics processor
Yamaha 64 channel sound processor
Custom GD Rom technology with 1gb storage space
Networking Capability (i.e. 33.6k modem) allowing complete Net use
Four controller ports
Controller with 6 'fire' buttons, analogue and d-pad controls. Also features two expansion ports for Virtual memory unit and rumble pack.

 

 
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 : Nintendo 64 ( 1996 - 2001) ::

 Nintendo 64 Entertainment Console

This is sort of my impressions of the Nintendo 64. This is the only console which went from low resolution to high resolution. I have no idea how they made a 64 bit machine look like a early 128-bit generation game like in Perfect Dark and Turok 2 : Seeds of Evil. One thing that made Nintendo a reconizable console was Rare (which later moved to Microsoft Gaming Studios.) But kept the platform games favoriable (espesially Conker's Bad Fur Day) until Nintendo could reorganize a better plan for their next generation console. Nintendo had released Legend of Zelda Orcania of Time (an exceptional game) Second transition Nintendo did that wasn't bad. The first was Super Mario 64, both are on the top 50 best videogames of all time (source: Game Informer Magazine.) Nintendo didn't get any support from any RPGs, so Final Fantasy never made it to Nintendo 64. So Nintendo missed out of Squaresoft's multimillion dollar high profile project due to Nintendo's old technolegy of cartridge based games. Although the most of the games where midi format of cd quality music found in Playstation games. Nintendo did support MP3s in three N64 titles : Resident Evil 2, Conker's Bad Fur Day and Perfect Dark. MP3 fitted cd quality audio onto a 512 MB cartridge, their largest cartridge. If Nintendo had technolegy to produce a 1 Gigabyte cartidge, they may of pulled off the Final Fantasy 7 title in 1997. But the technolegy wasn't there.

Games like Legend of Zelda Orcania of Time, Mario Kart 64, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie, Ridge Racer, Madden Football, All Star Baseball, Turok 2, Orge Battle 64 and Rayman 2 kept the console alive along enough for people to not say, "Nintendo Sucks." Nintendo 64 was good enough, that it didn't suck though it didn't have the balls that Playstation has.

Nintendo 64 was expensive to make, but in 1996, the cartridge technolegy was improved enough that it would still be good to go. And this was 8 months before Intel came out with the Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM. Back them, Nintendo didn't scope out the cash and make the outrageous deal with IBM which they did in 1999. It was rather a large sum of money.

 
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 : Playstation  ( 1994 - 2003 ) ::

Sony was really successful after the Christmas of 1996. Although Nintendo 64 was a bit better nudged in with the competition, PSone was going to see it's console triple any console that existed in homes across America. One reason was because after 1996, Sony designed a new Playstation had was bug free unlike the ordinal. Sega Saturn looked like an expensive alternative compared to Playstation. Playstation stayed number one because it was on shelves since 1995. Playstation has games like Spyro the Dragon (1997), Madden 2000 (1999), Final Fantasy 7 (1997) and Resident Evil II (1998) to name a few. It had a long enough life span were you could see a sequel or two for your favorite game. The list is to large after 1997 to name all decent titles for Playstation.

Originally Sony was asked to built a CD add-on for Super Nintendo. Nintendo had the right idea there. But Sony Entertainment shot Nintendo in the foot and said, "We are going to compete against you, Nintendo" They paid off all their debts they owned for manufacturing, and became everyone's favorite videogame system from 1996 - 2000.

Sony also made a developers kit version for PSX called the Yaroze. It was very expensive, but it made it possible to create your own games running an advanced platform such as the Playstation. Most computers weren't as fast. I suppose that the Playstation 2 version is called Yaroze 2. I am fantasizing a bit, but wouldn't you be able to import your Yaroze game to a Yaroze 2 to run on Playstation 2. Think of it, you can have your own underground ps2 game coping business. All you would need is a DVD burner and they've come down in price since 2000. I imagin that DVD burners cost anywhere from $90.00 to $225.00.

32-bit R3000A
  • Processor clock speed: 33.8688 MHz
  • MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second): 30
  • Bus speed: 132 MB per second
  • Cache:

Graphics:

  • Resolution: 640x480 maximum (five interlaced and four non-interlaced modes supported)
  • Colors: 24-bit (16,777,216) maximum; other modes supported are 4-bit (16), 8-bit (256) and 15-bit (32,768)
  • Maximum sprite size: 256 pixels high x 256 pixels wide
  • Polygon rendering: 360,000 polygons per second
  • Geometry engine: Provides additional hardware rendering of polygons to include Gouraud shading, texture-mapping and lighting effects
  • Memory: 1 MB RAM
  • MPEG decoder
 
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 : Nintendo Gamecube  ( 2001 - 2005 ) ::
  •  

Nintendo Gamecube

For more information go here.

Gamecube is undeniably Nintendo's biggest project since the SNES. Nintendo called it the Dolphin for a code name. We know it as Nintendo's only 128-bit gaming machine.  Nintendo focused on games not extra hardware format so it allowed the Gamecube to be fast, let simple. Nintendo made the gamecube have the best compression rate of any console of it's class. A 4:1 Ratio. The design is compact. Nintendo wanted to spend money so it could save money in the long run. My sources say that Gamecube has the cleanest agriculture of any home videogame system. Code named Nintendo Dolphin in 1999, Gamecube was leaked on the Internet when Nintendo announced a new gaming platform at E3 1999. Nintendo struck a fairly large deal with IBM to make the central processor that would process the graphics in Gamecube at a very high compression rate - 1:4 ratio with no image quality lost. It was called the Gecko, the most advanced technology on the market. ATI designed the graphics chip which is also really small in size. One major difference from the N64 and Gamecube is that gamecube has a disk drive. This disk drive spends a 80 resolutions per minute which allows the buffer to analyze data faster then a dvd rom could.

Gamecube is a good machine. It recently came out with Red Faction 2  Nintendo has 5 average to above average first person shooters for the Gamecube, and made 5 first person shooter titles in stock. Nintendo, being the largest videogame developer, has made hit titles like Super Smash Bros Melee, sequel to the N64 fighter. Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime (presquel to Metroid for the NES) , Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker (sequel to Orcania of Time) Sega became a 3rd party developer and brought quality titles such as Super Monkey Ball (2001 Puzzle), Phantasy Star (2002 RPG), NFL 2K3 (2002 Sports), NCAA Football 2K3 (2002 Sports), Sega Soccer Slam (2002), Sonic Action Pack (2002 Platformer) and Skies of Arcadia Legends (2003 RPG). Nintendo and Sega have worked together to bring out the next F-Zero game.

Nintendo has come out with a modem, but there is no software to surf the web. I doubt that a 3rd party will have a web browser out before 2004. Nintendo doesn't want gamers to download saved games off the Internet. In my opinion, Nintendo is only hurting themselves. However, Electronic Arts is releasing online sports games next year for Gamecube. Nintendo also released a Gameboy Advance enhancer which allows you to play GBA games on your television. In may 2003, Nintendo announced that the gameboy addon will be attached to Gamecubes right out of the box still being able to keep the package at 150 dollars. Now you can stick gameboy cartridges in the side of the console to play it on tv.

But the LSD Display for Gamecube is the best addon you can buy. If you have the money. The LSD Display makes Gamecube portable. Plug the adapter in your car's ciggerate lighter and you have an instant gaming machine of your dreams. (posted March 30, 2003 9:33 AM)

 
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