Rushed Video Game Platform Launches

[mjk45]

Leynos said:
Dreamcast was. It's Japan launch lineup in 1998 was not ready so it was pretty bare. Should have waited for a year for a worldwide launch. As much as I love DC. If I could retroactively change some things. I'd add DVD playback. A second analog stick and 24MB of the main ram on top of the 8MB of Vram. It was a well-designed console but just needed a little more oomph.

Saturn and 360 are the biggest offenders. Saturn was a great console of the Japanese library but man was it complex and a mess. Powerful but difficult to work with. I don't have articles from 2005 on a defunct website handy but as I recall DS was originally meant to be a dual-screen GBA. I can't confirm this tho. The rumblings of PSP's power in 2003 I believe left Nintendo to change the hardware to be a 3D machine fairly late. I think this is why a lot of 3rd party games early on did not look like anything better than a slightly enhanced GBA game.

The problem with Saturn was it was built with 2D in mind but when they got wind of the PS1 and it's 3D polygon approach.they changed the Saturn to dual processors and that lead to as you put it a complex mess , they should have delayed it and added a singe 3D capable processor.