Hynad said:
Soundwave said:
Not really it was just a different direction input, flattened out instead of a standard joystick. I was there in the 80s, lol, I remember the reactions to it.
Sega Master System had basically all the same shit ... flattened d-pad controller, light gun, it even had 3D glasses.
The reason why no one wanted the Sega was because it didn't have any freaking games other than some really good Sega games (the irony is Nintendo has turned themselves into "Sega" of the Master System era in many ways. But back then Sega didn't have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which was a big fucking deal circa 1989). It didn't have Ninja Gaiden. No Blades of Steel. No Castlevania. No Megaman. No Final Fantasy. No RBI Baseball. No Tecmo Bowl. No Batman '89. No Duck Tales. No Mike Tyson Punch-Out. No Contra or Super C. And of course no Super Mario Brothers.
If you wanted to play any of the "hot" games of the day, you had to get the NES and it wasn't just Nintendo's 1st party games by a long shot.
I actually specifically remember driving to the store to get an NES and my friends rushing alongside the car to yell "make sure you get the Nintendo not the Sega, it has all the games!", I remember too there was one kid on the block who's parents got him the Sega Master System and we all felt sorry for the kid but made fun of him anyway, lol.
Well I mean today that is basically the Playstation, Sony basically co-opted the real Nintendo console lineage because Nintendo made too many stupid mistakes in the 90s and handed them the keys to the market and Sony basically took those keys and locked Nintendo out of their own market.
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You don't remember it well then. Or I suspect it's your propention to downplay Nintendo that's clouding your memory. Becasue the D-Pad was a huge step forward in controller input. It allowed you to hold the controler in a way that your thumbs would allos for exponential possibilities compared to the Joystick layout that came before it. The movement of the thumb is much faster than the movement of the wrist required for the joysticks that predate the NES controller.
let's just illustrate this using pictures:
VS
One is much more comfortable. It's also much more ergonomic, and input are easier and much faster to input.
The reaction was clear. If you were really there, and weren't a toddler trying to figure out what your father or whoever was doing with that piece of plastic, and if you're an ounce honest, you'll admit that it was a moment where everyone thought "there's no going back".
There's no reason for you to bring up Sega into this (Seriously, what the heck does that have anything to do with the topic?), but since I know you try to steer the topic away from what you don't understand, let me mention this: The Sega Master System having the same shit, as you say, is no coincidence. The Mark III came out two years after the NES came out in Japan in july 1983. The controller Nintendo had created made so much fucking sense that Sega discarded the SG-1000 and SG-1000 II analog sticks and opted for Nintendo's solution for the Sega Mark III, the Sega Master System that was released in october 1985.
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Did you seriously even use the term "d-pad" in the 80s? I never really heard that used much until really the SNES came around. It was just "Nintendo controller". We didn't care about any of that shit, we just played the games and the games were what was important.
But it was never "ah man, you have to buy a NES because it has a d-pad!". Lol. You had to have a NES because it had Ninja Turtles and Mario and Mike Tyson and Contra and Ghouls N' Ghosts, etc. etc. etc.
I also had one of these bad boys, so it's not like the joystick was completely forgotten, and it wasn't like you walked into an arcade and went "ewww! Joystick! I can't use this". Like no one thought like that.
The biggest difference in the NES to me and to many people I think wasn't really even the controller. It was that you were going from this shit:
To NES games that had real scrolling environments and real music (not just blips and bleeps) and even stories in some cases was monumentally earth shattering.
The d-pad itself though ... I mean by the late 80s everything had some variant of a d-pad on it, Sega had a direction pad, even those cheap Tiger toys, any kid who grew up in the 80s will likely remember these:
There's a lot of 20-something (or even teenager) Nintendo fans who think they know what it was like in the NES era ... not saying you, but a lot of these people don't have a freaking clue, lol. The 80s/early 90s Nintendo era was very different. The PS4 and the way it dominates the market and is the defacto system for all the big games is actually the closest thing to what the NES was for its time.
