悠久幻想曲 保存版　Perpetual Collection（メディアワークス） 2000/12/07
If that's a new game (and not just a budget re-release of something, I wouldn't count re-releases), then the Saturn did outlast the N64 in Japan, in terms of launch-aligned third party support, ~6 years to ~5 1/2. However, the N64 did do better in terms of first-party support, ~5 years to 4.
It very well could have been an issue like what Sony had with the Vita, Nintendo simply assumed support. As far as the dream team games, I still woul dhave loved to have seen that Robotech one, sigh, high school me is sad again.
Yeah, you could well be right about Nintendo assuming that Japanese third parties would move over to the N64... but by mid '96, it was clear that that wasn't happening, and Nintendo didn't seem to do anything to stop that. Like, moneyhat Capcom to put SF Alpha 2 on N64 instead of, or in addition to, SNES, or something, for instance.
You make an interesting point. N64 seemed very western focused, and Gamecube was very Japan focused, even though it did worse in all territories than the N64 did. It looks like at times Nintendo has a very bad case of tunnel vision, and locks down one one particular thing is considers important to the near exclusion of all else.
Tunnel vision... yeah, good point indeed. That same problem hurt the Wii and Wii U, as well. Definitely a good way to describe it, I think.
Was there an issue with third parties when it came to the GBA? It seemed they had great Japanese support on that little beast throughout its lifespan, and that continued on to the DS. Gamecube was huge improvement as car as Eastern third parties was concerned.
The only issue I can think of on GBA is that in the West handheld teams have always been very low priority, and thus low budget, while in Japan handheld budgets were starting to increase that gen, I believe...
The changes for Nintendo have been good as well as bad, I just wish that they could have somehow had both (good Japanese AND Western support). Ah well.
This should be in quotes, it's my sentence.
But the fact that Nintendo ended up never going with CDs can pretty much be traced back to the horrible handling of the CD-ROM add ons and its desire for complete control over every part of the equation. We've discussed that a lot
in this other thread. and that lead me to making this thread.
It's true Nintendo wanted control, but I still believe that the fact that games played better on carts than CDs (access times, loading, area size, etc.) were vitally important parts of their (good, correct) decision to stick with carts in the N64.
Being a crazy person does not mean you're a bad business man. Sometimes it's quite a boon. The man had balls of steel no one can deny it, but he definitely had problems in dealing with partners, he was very much about the stick, and not the carrot from everything I have read.
I agree that he probably was more about the stick than the carrot, but "crazy" is going too far. He wanted to win.
It really is a shame, PCE was this weird middle ground between the Japanese PC market and the consoles. The sheer number of CD-ROM games suggest a massive attach rate of the peripheral though. I wish we knew more. Nintendo clearly took the 16 bit era, but the NEC was a hell of a plucky upstart.
Yeah, as I said in my last post, the PCE CD is definitely the most successful addon, in terms of how well it did versus the system it attached to. Of course though, from 1991 on, new systems came with the Super CD system included (Duo, Duo-R, Duo-RX). That surely helped adoption rates a LOT. But even so, they got a lot of people who'd only owned the base systems to buy CD drives too... NEC had success despite overwhelming people in a mountain of hardware. Well, that strategy didn't work in the US at all, but it did in Japan.
but maybe i'm wrong. I was impressed when i saw too many board games on those series.
