disolitude said:
Touch Screen control - Pocket PC, Palm Treo and other PDA's which ran games with touch screens WAAAAY before DS did it Analog stick - Atari 5200 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_5200#Controllers Rumble pack - Nintendo Memory Expansion - Sega with the saturn memory cart 3d Visor - Sega with the Master system 3d glasses which came out before NES ones - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Master_System#SegaScope_3-D_Glasses You went through pretty much all nintendo innovations half of which were done somewhere else but made famous by nintendo...just like with Sony. Let me know if you'd like a list of Sega innovations form 1986 to 2001. It will be very long...
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The actual advancement fo the analog stick was not that it was na analog stick but that it was an analog stick controlled by the thumb and thumb alone giving it the convience of a digital pad..Which is more truth than most will recognize since the analog sticks are not really analog but infact digital analog in the case of the N64(an 8 bit or 256 stages of sensitivity). The old analogs controls were mostly variable rate resistors and or capacaitors. This is why the N64 analog controller is recognized as an innovation...Ita ctually existed on teh CD-I before hand but that to is a by product of the failed SNES CD product.
Memory expansion- Take a look at the bottom of all Nintendo consoles the NES/famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, N64, and GC. They all have expansion slots on the bottom as opposed to its competitors. The famicom had a modem even and online game. It also supported memory expansion through the game cartriidge which meant the game could have more RAM by adding it on the game cart its self. You also see this idea continued though the SNES with on chip upgrades. In terms of system expansion this was a more succesful route than an add-on. It is also not an innovation in my view as it doesn't rock the world.
Now if what you mean is memory cards as in saving to an external back up source. Both Sega and So.ny developed that technology along the same time. Nintendo had no need at thistime for a memory card though they did have one since carts still supported battery back up(developed by nintendo). However the first system to use a memory card was the Neo Geo back in 1990. So I am not really sure what you are getting at here and as above I find all of these things in this paragraph not neccesarily so much an innovation but a neccesatiyt to push forward. Passwords were annoying and PC games were saving game states well before consoles.
Touch Screen controls- It is true Palm/Pocket PC have been doing gaming on touchscreen for years before the DS. I have played those games Solitaire on my pocket PC. My Axim 50v gave me kick ass 3d gaming to before the DS. I think the real innovation is the use of a second screen which frees up the possibility of more uses for the touch screen as wel as the intergration of the microphone in the portable system.
Motion control-There were motion controllers before the Wii MS. the Playstation had a third party and then MS also had one. Force feedback was around i other forms before hand too. but nintendo si generally given this innovations for making them work in a software package. BTW you forgot the big innovation the 4-way D-pad.
