| routsounmanman said: *double post* |
I come from a generation in gaming that always picked up new consoles for the improvements in graphics and not because of new control schemes. I became a big fan of King Kong the first time I saw the Jessica Lange version of the film at a Drive-In when I was five years old re-enforced by all the times NBC used to show it in the early eighties. A few years later I was on a cubscout trip and saw Donkey Kong in an arcade and I thought that's really neat. I hope they make a home version. I can't wait for this to be on the VCS. Well, a couple of months later, I saw Donkey Kong in the store for Atari 2600 and VCS, and I purchased it and couldn't wait to get home to play it.
Well, I put it in the Atari 2600 and I was appalled by what I saw. It looked like it had taken the arcade version and threw up all over it. Donkey Kong was reduced from being the majestic simian of the arcade version into a giant, fuzzy, orange stickfigure with cutout eyes. And the number of levels was dramatically reduced from the arcade version. However, I went down to the local convenience store and they had a videogame magazine sitting on their magazine rack that had a picture of the Colecovision on its cover running the Colecovision version of Donkey Kong that might not have been perfect but in comparison to the 2600 version it was close enough to perfect to count. And, I began saving all the coins I could get my hands on at that time to be able to pick up my Colecovision with its at the time as close to the arcade version as possible Donkey Kong pack-in.
Now its true that the Colecovision did feature some innovative controls and accesories like its controllers keypad (which although seemingly influenced by the 2600's keypad controller for Star Raiders) did allow for the play of an innovative early rts like Wargames, and the three expansion modules (#1 play 2600 games on your Colecovision, #2 the first driving controls I ever remember in a home system packed in with the Colecovision version of Turbo, and #3 turn your Colecovision into a full-fledged computer that will play games even closer to arcade games in quality than ever before) that also justified its purchase. The main reason to switch from Atari 2600 to Colecovision was the dramatic improvement in graphics that the Colecovision gave to games like Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, Mousetrap, and Donkey Kong Jr. over the horrible versions of these games that were available on the 2600.
And, I feel that this pattern, rather than Nintendo's insistance on controls being the deciding factor when they released Wii, that improvements in graphics have traditionally led to the purchase of the consoles in each next generation. And improvements in graphics have been the driving influence of transition in pc gaming as well as console gaming. The reason to buy new pcs every few years is because your old pc loses its ability to play the latest and greatest pc games rather rapidly over time.
