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Nintendo Entertainment System Turns 25
harrymcc writes "On October 18th 1985, Nintendo launched its NES console in the US, reviving a near-dead video game industry and establishing Nintendo as a leader in home consoles. We've celebrated with a roundup of some of the stranger spinoffs that the NES has inspired over the last quarter century, from odd controllers to a lock parents could use to disable the console to do-it-yourself projects like an NES built into a Super Mario cartridge."
The thing is, games for the NES and that era were -made- to be abstract, when we got to the N64/PS1 era, developers started releasing "realistic" games which end up looking like crap when the next generation of games come out.
Graphics were secondary to making an entertaining game, the game was developed with the concept first then the graphics followed and the graphics were what made sense. For example, the look of Mario wasn't developed to look like a specific person, but rather to compensate for the lack of advanced hardware. Today, developers take graphics first, take a storyline first, then let the game fill in the cracks.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hey, it's already pretty good. The lockout inside the console is easily neutered (cut pin 4 on the DIP IC with "CIC" on the silkscreen), the cartridge connector -- while flawed -- is straightforward to repair and you can buy replacements for about $5, and the console can be opened up with regular old Phillips screwdriver.
If it were made today, it would use security screws under rubber feet and labels, have a sticker about voiding the warranty, and disabling any kind of protection device would either brick it, make it impossible to play with more than one player at a time, or get you in trouble under DMCA.
More Twoson than Cupertino