Reincarnating the NES

IGN has a piece on a modern NES clone, the NEX. Well constructed and designed to recapture a gamer's enthusiasm for the 80's gaming juggernaut, they have a rundown on the deck's features and extras. From the article: "Though there have been some rather weak attempts to remake the NES/Famicom prior to the NEX, Messiah really put some work into the production to make the NEX feel deserving of the love its users no doubt feel for the original. The device itself is small, cute, and very reminiscent of its forefathers with a front-loading NES cartridge slot and a top loading Famicom slot. The controller jacks are the same as the original NES, meaning you are welcome to use your original controllers if you still have some. Even the packaging is attractive, and the Generation NEX kit includes a cartridge-shaped manual in a slip case, packed with instructions written and illustrated in action-comic-book style and a mini rarity guide developed by Digital Press."

Comments

Re:Talk to me when....

[Yst]

The biggest problem for most would-be NES gamers though, I think, isn't scarcity or loss of carts. Most popular NES games, like popular Atari carts, are fairly abundant, so even if you've lost them, you can acquire them very cheaply.

A more insurmountable problem for many games is battery death. We're reaching the outside of the lifespan of most NES cart batteries, at this point. We're well past the time period most were speced for, but some have survived 18 or 19 years inside their plastic shells anyway, backing up save data much longer than they were ever expected to. Only they can't survive much longer.

This isn't a problem for games that don't use cart batteries, but it's a hell of a problem for those that do, unless you can play a whole game in one sitting. And it's all well and good to say that one may simply replace the cart battery, but that takes a proprietary Gamebit screwdriver (or an ersatz equivalent, like a melted pen tip) and a soldering iron, which isn't really something you can expect of a large, semi-mainstream playerbase.

My Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy and Zelda II carts are still going strong, but at some point, those batteries are going to need replacing. All well and good for me, who can be bothered with it, but for most people, when Dragon Warrior carts die, they're going to go in the trash. And scarcity will inevitably increase.