game history. a hand please?

BlitzKrieg

Does anyone know any articles online of one of the fiirst inquiry's into computer games involving sega and nintendo. i'm looking for it cause i remembered a little story about Sega embarresing nintendo using their shooter periphel (the one for snes) i'm just curious to see if its true or not.


cheers.

KdjaCL

inquiries?


Micro machines on Nes is a good story if you can dig up info on it.

kdjac

BlitzKrieg

there a big USA government investigation into the computer game industry during the mega drive, snes era.

now the story as i remember it (not very well) was that because sega's advertising was more *mature* then nintendo the government was going harder on them and nintendo showed a thrilling display of their software with games like mario and kirby showing off how un violent and friendly nintendo games were.

so the head of sega of america of the time goes into the inquiry carrying the bazooka add on for the snes and starts playing around with it during the inquires and simply gives nintendo a great big kick in the teeth.


now this is very much second hand info passed down again and again so it might be very inaccurate but i would still like some info on these inquires ( i have no idea what to google)

but will look up that mirco machines thing...cheers,

ok i cant find anything. what happened with micro machines?

dearg_doom

dunno about micro machines:)

But if you want a similar story to the SEGA/Nintendo one you mentioned, do a few Google's for some info about the Tetris story!

It's ****ing epic, Nintendo come out of it looking like dickheads, kinda like the EA of the time!

It's the real start of games companies enforcement of region encoding, publishers' rights, small companies being muscled out of the scene by big-cash corporations...

I can't remember the links I had though(I read it about 5/6 ya)

but its some tale

Winters

BlitzKrieg wrote:

the bazooka add on for the snes

That was quite a fantastic addon. I wish I had bought one. Its a near-useless add-on for like 99% of games .. but for that 1% I'd say it was fantastic fun.

Retr0gamer

Micro machines on Nes is a good story if you can dig up info on it.

Thats a great one.

It was a bug in the game that if you raced backwards on the first track the game froze up. However when it was found all the cartridges had been manufactured already. It was only one line of code in the game that caused this problem. However lucky for Codemasters thay had developed the Game Genie at the same time. They put a game genie chip in every micro machines cartridge that rewrote the code of the game and got rid of the bug.

Think the story was in Games TM or Edge recently.

Cake Fiend

Winters wrote:

That was quite a fantastic addon. I wish I had bought one. Its a near-useless add-on for like 99% of games .. but for that 1% I'd say it was fantastic fun.

I had one, all the (few available) games were sh1te. Which was a pity, because it looked the business. Even featured (in a revamped form) in the Super Mario Bros. movie!

koneko

I wish I had a power glove

"I LOVE the power glove!"

dearg_doom

ohh just remembered...

look up the story of the big games crash in the early 80's,

and take your hat off to the genii that was Atari:)

dearg_doom

koneko wrote:

I wish I had a power glove

"I LOVE the power glove!"

Don't tell me that's another slashDong xBox mod:D

BlitzKrieg

FOUND IT!


had to search the 1993 congressional hearing with liebermann and sega in the search engine.


here it is.

http://www.g4tv.com/screensavers/features/45301/A_Brief_History_of_Videogame_Controversy.html

In late 1993, Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl called a congressional hearing on violence in video games. Some in the industry muttered that the hearing had been spurred in part by complaints from Nintendo, angry at seeing rival Sega gain ground with the sale of its more violent games. The lawmakers' attention was focused industrywide, however. In the hope of defusing some of the criticism, a large group of leading companies, including Sega and Nintendo, announced early on the first day of the hearing that they had agreed to create a rating system for their games. The peace didn't last long. In the hearing, a Nintendo representative attacked Sega for its release of violent games and said his own company had tried to mitigate the industry's worst excesses. In response, the Sega representative pulled out a prop-a bazooka-style gun accessory used by some Nintendo games-and asked if that was the appropriate means to teach nonviolence to children.

only good thing about gwb winning the elections. liebermann would have been vice president if Gore had won.

i had forgot that i had that book at home and that was where i read it.

recommanding *Trigger Happy* as well a damn good book on computer games (not the tv series

dearg_doom

haha, its so wrong hearing SEGA attack Nintendo on violence:D

I remember a time when I'd be on the verge of violence defending the SNES port of Mortal Kombat over the megadrive's(bloodier) one:)

calhob_ie

Indeed, green blood on the snes anybody.

I'd recommend "Game Over" probably the most famous novel on the early games industry, although it does focus heavily on Ninty and Atari at the expense of the others. Some great snippets in it, like Mario being named after Ninty USA's first warehouse manager and Ataris infamous dumping of thousands of ET cartridges in the New Mexico desert. Not to mention some of the more serious stuff like Nintys stranglehold on early third party developers and all the collapse of the mid eighties. Great book and very readable as well.

Retr0gamer

MK1 was a better game on the SNES but without the blood there wasn't any point since MK1 is crap.

MK2 on the other hand was far superior on the SNES. The MD version had most of the juggle combos taken out and played like a dog.

KdjaCL

Retr0gamer wrote:

Thats a great one.

It was a bug in the game that if you raced backwards on the first track the game froze up. However when it was found all the cartridges had been manufactured already. It was only one line of code in the game that caused this problem. However lucky for Codemasters thay had developed the Game Genie at the same time. They put a game genie chip in every micro machines cartridge that rewrote the code of the game and got rid of the bug.

Think the story was in Games TM or Edge recently.

Theres that and the fact they had no licence to make games for the NEs and and backwards engineered the whole process and had lots of legal action which still today has an impact on gaming and licencing.

kdjac

Retr0gamer

KdjaC wrote:

Theres that and the fact they had no licence to make games for the NEs and and backwards engineered the whole process and had lots of legal action which still today has an impact on gaming and licencing.

I could be wrong but wasn't that to do with the Tengen version of Tetris and not micr machines?

KdjaCL

I still have the Edge the whole article was in ,great read, twas a time when Edge was half decent.


kdjac

condra

I love this thread .. more please... i especially love hearing about nintento being dickheads and sega being cool. Sonic does piss all over mario every time. And phantasy star is better than zelda albeit not as popular.

monkeyfudge

The bazooka thing really didn't look anything like a real wepon though... it just looked like a prop from a bad sci-fi movie.

And I'm pretty sure that the games that came with it were all very much a cartoony affair.

dearg_doom

KdjaC wrote:

I still have the Edge the whole article was in ,great read, twas a time when Edge was half decent.


kdjac

EDGE has been ****e forever!!

It is simply misguided nostalgia that makes you think it was once any good!

It was always pretentious as ****, seeing itself as above the 'usual' crap games jouralism, while spouting bollix of the highest order, still it's the only mag that's lasted I guess!

CiDeRmAn

You're wrong Dearg Doom & Kdjac, Edge has for years provided adults with a mag that addresses our hobby in a grown-up manner. Maybe you two have pretensions of being journalists in the field of videogaming, I don't know.
Edge has consistently sifted through each months news, previews and reviews to distill all that is great in our hobby.
The respect it commands from developers and gamers alike speaks for itself.
The standard of writing is excellent and it is due to all these factors that it has lasted.
How do you hold an opinion on the magazine? You don't read it do you?
When is the last time you read it, cover to cover?
Edited by Tony Mott, one of the writers for the greatest videogame mag ever, Digitiser, with contributions from Steven Poole, Gary Penn and developers from Japan freely giving their time to write for it.
The only people here talking ****e is you two!

Or perhaps you would have us all read Gamesmaster or some other childish rubbish,
If you are going to critisise then at least provide people with alternatives.

dearg_doom

CiDeRmAn wrote:

You're wrong Dearg Doom & Kdjac, Edge has for years provided adults with a mag that addresses our hobby in a grown-up manner.
Edge has consistently sifted through each months news, previews and reviews to distill all that is great in our hobby.
The respect it commands from developers and gamers alike speaks for itself.
The standard of writing is excellent and it is due to all these factors that it has lasted.
How do you hold an opinion on the magazine? You don't read it do you?
When is the last time you read it, cover to cover?
Edited by Tony Mott, one of the writers for the greatest videogame mag ever, Digitiser, with contributions from Steven Poole, Gary Penn and developers from Japan freely giving their time to write for it.
The only people here talking ****e is you two!

Or perhaps you would have us all read Gamesmaster or some other childish rubbish,

Wow nice one!

That is the best re-iteration of a press release I've ever seen!

CiDeRmAn wrote:

If you are going to critisise then at least provide people with alternatives.

Well I thought it was clear that from my post that I don't rate ANY of the current crop of games mags in print, with the exception of Edge and GamesTM, but of the two, GamesTM represents how myself and my mates think about games.

Edge is, and has always been, pretentious and flashy. Seeing itself as a gaming version of GQ or whatever. It has always been pretentious and up-its-own-arse analysing trends in 'the industry' in some attempt to be cool or to try to make games seem cool, instead of just trying portray how much fun playing games actually is.

CiDeRmAn wrote:

Maybe you two have pretensions of being journalists in the field of videogaming, I don't know.

haha, that's stupid, I'm no jurnalist-wannabe, are you?

Another thing that I find laughable about 'games journalists', be they Edge staffers of OPS2/XBOXWhatever, is how they feel 'they' are part of 'the industry' as opposed to just the lackies hired for peanuts to bumph up press releases and create not only vapid hype for certain games/systems but also obscene profits for big multi-national publishers [Future I'm looking in your direction]

As for alternatives, as you rightly said, Digi was the king of games journalism imo, but TM had little to do with how it's format or viewpoint, that was down to Mr. Biffo and Legs. I just didn't like TM's GameCentral as much as Digi, although it is still streets ahead of most;)

Back in the day SuperPLAY was class ,but again I never rated mags because most of them seem to have 'agendas'.

For the last year or so the best reviews have come from Consolevania

CiDeRmAn

No but I do appreciate the effort and views that Edge represent, they would be also similar to my own, nice to see that there are at least two magazines out there that cater for adults, and not in a big tits, plenty of ass kind of way.
Superplay was my favorite mag in the 90's along with a short lived mag called Maximum, that ruled! they were better than the rest of the tripe although I did enjoy a mag called Megatech, did a great preview of the MegaCD, WOW!
How I wanted one of those.
C&VG was a good mag in the 80's as was Crash and ZZap, but Your Sinclair was the best of the bunch, think they went on to work on Superplay actually.
Saddest mag was the 3DO magazine, especially at the end when no-body was making games anymore for them to review.
Deary Deary Me!

Sorry to have sounded so personal with my previous post, won't happen again.

Retr0gamer

I wish they didn't stop making Arcade. That was a fantastic games magazine.

Winters

koneko wrote:

I wish I had a power glove

Well, everythign else IS child's play.

BlitzKrieg

ahh the power glove. Nature's way of telling us that we are idiots.






on a side note there are some great sega vs nintendo adverts on that game advert link given a while back (this:http://www.majkel.mds.pl/html/reklama/indexUKG.htm)

esp. the GENESIS DOES! and the squirrel...

BlitzKrieg

rumour has it there was a power glove for the psx? is this true?

CiDeRmAn

God there were some godawful peripherals, never felt as stupid though as playing with the lightgun for the snes, SuperScope, very sad indeed.
At least it worked though, better so than the blasted Menacer for the Megadrive!
Liked the Lethal Inforcers gun, still have two along with the SegaCD version of the game, Sweet.
The coolest peripherals are the Donkey Konga bongos and of course the controller for Steel Battalion.
The Nes had consistently the worst stuff, how about the robot buddy who was supposed to play along with you, or the joystick they had out in the early ninties that had no base, just mercury switches, impossible to use the thing.