| vonboy said: i thought the nes had the best graphics yet for a console when it was first releases? something about "it's a real arcade experience, in you living room!" and their marketing slogan at the time "now your playing with power!" |
Nope, it was 8-bit so therefore a generation behind in graphics compared to computers. At the time consoles were considered a non-product because of the Atari 2600 crash, so gaming was taken over by computers temporarily because of that. Today the computers of then are the Xbox 360 and the PS3. As far as consoles went, it was a non-business so definitely the NES was among the best looking ones, but still less powerful than the Master System which was hardware released earlier than the NES.
Consoles were always a generation behind in terms of graphics when you compared them to the Arcades(and therefore high tech). It's just that along the lines console standards evolved from products pushing huge profits out of the box at launch as a necessity, to minimal profits with hardware at launch(PS1), and then losses at launch(PS2), and even bigger losses today. This gradually blurred the line between what was considered to be console technology and the estate of the art Arcade technology, today they're almost the same.
If you trace back the Wii is actually a correction, not an exception. It correctly uses technology in line with what used to be the standard for consoles, aiming for a profitable sale from the start and smaller chipsets(the big casing of the NES and other American versions of consoles back then were mostly for show, the Famicom was released two years earlier and was about half the size for instance). What we have today with the HD systems are essentially computers once again, the Wii is really the only console, much like the NES.
