TaroYamada said:
People were already looking at it seriously, that was my point. I read what you said and I entirely disagree with it, nobody was looking at CD and thinking to themselves 'Oh, optical media is going nowhere'.
It certainly wasn't making any ground, and Sega CD had a major issue in that you needed to first buy a Sega Genesis and then buy a Sega Genesis, which meant spending nearly $200 for the Genesis and an additional $300 for the Sega CD if you wanted to try it out (as opposed to the PS1's $300 price point). Plus the technology wasn't there at the time so even on CD the games lacked a lot of color depth and horsepower (you just have to look at the horrible FMVs for proof).
I am certainly not saying the Sega CD or Saturn didn't have good games, but both consoles were practically invisible to the market at large. I think you're one of the best people I have met who have defending the Sega CD, though. Outside of Lunar and Sonic CD, there were no games that were any good, unless you enjoy masochism, so I wouldn't really call them "very high quality games" by any stretch.
For the Sega Saturn, sure, you had a handful of great games like NiGHTs, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Albert Odyssey, Dragon Force, and Burning Rangers, games I still play to this day, but those were niche titles that weren't system sellers on the scale of what Nintendo and Sony were putting out, so it ultimately failed. There's a difference between personal favorite and the opinion of the market at large, and it was obvious what people thought was the much stronger platform right out of the gate.
In the PS1's case, you had games that really showed off the 3D graphical technology like Battle Arena Toshinden, Rayman, Ridge Racer, Wipeout, Jumping Flash, and other really good games for the time with Rayman, Wipeout, and Ridge Racer still being huge sellers to this day. That's the difference here.
TaroYamada said:
No. I'll deny "history" here. I don't think you should try to use Nintendo as a means of demonstrating how little faith there is in a certain 'new' technology, have you not noticed how much this company clings to the past? Online gaming has certainly been proven by now and I'd argue it was proven in the sixth generation, so there is no question of faith in it; Yet to this day we are still using friend codes, in 2012. Without a cohesive online network that begins to rival the offerings from their competitors. Then there's HD output with Wii, was those unproven? Despite a year of 360 being on the market, and Sony also migrating towards it? Not to mention years of higher resolutions being available on the PC platform? Or the smattering of sixth generations games that supported higher resolutions? What about handheld blacklighting? Or using the 1.4 GB Gamecube Optical Disc despite their competitors using larger formats, the same thing is happening moving forward from Wii to Wii U and it's optical format as you mentioned.
Essentially, what I am trying to say is you shouldn't try to use Nintendo as an example to say 'Oh, nobody believed in this technology, Nintendo's attitude is proof'. It's just not true, they have always been stuck in the past. Nintendo's stance is the least representative of mainstream opinion on new technologies in this industry.
That's the point I have been trying to make since the beginning of my conversation. This all started with someone saying that Sony and Microsoft were the worst things to happen to the industry, and my point was that both companies helped shape the industry to great effect and moved hardware and software substantially forward. That's why I brought up the whole point of Sony being a great help in optical technology for gaming platforms. But if we're talking about Nintendo attitude, to be perfectly clear, the Gamecube was stronger than the PS2 in terms of graphical horsepower. Sure, it wasn't moving the online market forward, but it wasn't really at a point at the time were having such an environment was a serious market advantage. But if we're talking way back in 1994 when the PS1 launched, the fact that all of these other CD consoles failed, of course Nintendo had very little faith in the platform and didn't think that the technology was there. The fact that Sony stood up and was willing to take the risk is important to note, and launched with a strong library of games that could have easily been on the N64 (although a couple were multiplatform, but looked better on the Ps1). Talk about the current state of events all you want, but when you look at the SNES vs. the Genesis, Nintendo led the charge in good-looking games in terms of the mainstream market (especially when it came to audio). No one at that time thought Nintendo had fallen behind in competition in any form. But then you had the PS1 come out and then the PS2, and you saw this clear void inbetween the two companies in terms of gaming technology. It was only with the Wii that you saw something clearly different, and that was only because of Nintendo's decision to use off-the-shelf technology so that they could have the price advantage.
TaroYamada said:
GD-ROM is similar to CD-ROM, but not the same. The reason Dreamcast could read CD-R was because it could read CD's in general, not because it could read GD-ROM. I'll give you DVD I guess, but yet again I think the momentum towards DVD was inevitable because regardless of PS2 I feel that format would have been used in the Xbox.
The strong, almost confirmed rumor was that Microsoft was helping Sega make their next console to rival the PS2 using DVD technology, but it ultimately fell through and the Xbox ended up being released, similar to the Sony and Nintendo path with the PS1. That's why you saw a lot of big Sega names like Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, and Phantasy Star Online arriving on the Xbox and not the PS2. As far as the "reading CDs" are concerned, I can understand that it could read music CDs (I used to use mine for that), but the fact that it could actually play video games on CDs mean it wasn't very, very close to what a normal game CD would be anyway, so only very slight modifications were made.