Famicom and NES!

[Foxxhoria]

The console that started it all. For Nintendo, in the West, at least...hehe.
But a significant console nonetheless!

It's a cool and tidy kind of system with a really huge library and so many great games, but what I find most fascinating about it is how it feels like a bridge between two eras in ways that other consoles simply don't.

The early "black box" games (and their contemporaries in Japan) feel so much like what you'd expect for a system originally designed and released in 1983 - simple sprites, simple backgrounds of just black or another single colour, and mostly single-screen gameplay with basic sound effects and perhaps a little melody playing over the top of them if you're lucky. But then, they really start to evolve, and become so large, and complex in both graphics and gameplay. Comparing for instance Kirby's Adventure with Popeye, they feel almost like completely different systems. And Sega's contemporary systems were - the Famicom released on the same day as the SG-1000, which feels like another in the same group as the Famicom's early games, along with the Colecovision, Intellivision, and Magnavox Odyssey 2. But then Sega upgraded that into the Mark III (later modified for export as the Master System) in 1985, which could then finally match what the Famicom was evolving to be.

Of course, this was down to what was likely a cost-cutting measure - put the video ram into the game cartridge. But putting it in there means that games can meddle with it as they please!!! (Well, with clever bank-switching tricks hehe.) And turned it into its greatest strength.

And all in such a compact little package. I love the design of the original Famicom - continuing with the theme, it also looks and feels like you'd expect from a console of 1983 - sturdy but rudimentary, with glossy plastic and bright colours. Like some kind of toy rather than a piece of serious electronics. And of course, Nintendo were at that time essentially a toy company!

The NES is much less compact, but still has a style of its own, doing its best to look as little like any of the games consoles prior due to the stigma attached to them after the crash in the market in the the US which had happened at the time it launched in Japan. Looks a lot less like a toy!

I'm pleased to have both - the stylish little Famicom which lets me play all the Japan and US games, and then the good ol' PAL NES, to let me play all the poor conversions. ...Or more accurately, the small handful of excellent games intended specifically for PAL regions! There are some!!

I've region-modded them both, which of course was especially important for the Famicom, given that my CRTs won't decode NTSC at all, let alone tune to whatever channel frequency it outputs for haha.

[NovaSquirrel]

The only other console I've seen store the graphics inside the cartridge itself is the Neo Geo, so that's definitely a very unique design detail. And then that leads directly into how we have hundreds of different kinds of cartridges, because now there's a bunch of things you can do with that graphics bus. I feel like a lot of NES stuff hasn't aged the best but it definitely had some great platformers that weren't super hard, like Kirby's Adventure, Super Mario Bros. 3 and M.C. Kids, and it has a very strong homebrew scene now. Gruniożerca 2 and Gruniożerca 2 are some very cute free puzzle games I like to recommend. (and of course I released a big free platformer years back)

[Lolo De Puzlo]

The NES homebrew scene is fantastic.
Games like Micro Mages, Blazing Rangers, Sam's Journey, and From Below are all amazing and it's surprising that we're getting homebrew the level of studio production NES games.

(Also I also recommend Nova the Squirrel It's a fun game! It's got an A- on my list of every game I've streamed for my ranking projects!)

[NovaSquirrel]

(Also I also recommend Nova the Squirrel It's a fun game! It's got an A- on my list of every game I've streamed for my ranking projects!)

I'm glad people still really like it! I think from the creator side of things, it's tricky not to look back at stuff you've made in the past and think about how you could've done stuff better with the skills you have now, but I guess I do have to give myself credit for making something fun with the complexity and scope it had after having only previously made tiny arcade-y games. Maybe in the future I can make it prettier.

[Enbyeon]

Most of my NES childhood knowledge comes from a famiclone that was really popular in Serbia called "Terminator - Ending Man."

Funnily, a lot of classics weren't available to us, like Castlevania, Zelda or Metroid, but things like Darkwing Duck, Ninja Gaiden, and others were.

[Trysdyn]

Most of my NES childhood knowledge comes from a famiclone that was really popular in Serbia called "Terminator - Ending Man."

Oh that's interesting. I was aware of the Dendy but not this. There was Big Drama in the NES speedrun world a few years ago over "No NES came with turbo so there should be no question about banning turbo" running face first into a community of people who grew up with Dendys (which did have turbo pack-in).

So seeing yet another famiclone with turbo being someone's formative experience is curious to me.

[Enbyeon]

Most of my NES childhood knowledge comes from a famiclone that was really popular in Serbia called "Terminator - Ending Man."

Oh that's interesting. I was aware of the Dendy but not this. There was Big Drama in the NES speedrun world a few years ago over "No NES came with turbo so there should be no question about banning turbo" running face first into a community of people who grew up with Dendys (which did have turbo pack-in).

So seeing yet another famiclone with turbo being someone's formative experience is curious to me.

Oh yeah we abused the shit out of turbo buttons and I thought it was normal to have it lol

[Lolo De Puzlo]

It's especially funny because NES Advantages were fairly common and in Japan, the Joy Card was also pretty common especially in the competitive scenes like the Hudson Caravans

[EdenCoven]

*opend thread. It fails to open*
*removes thread. blows into it. Replaces.*
*thread boots up*

[Foxxhoria]

Nooo don't blow on the cartridge, that adds moisture which can exacerbate corrosion!!!

[SlushieCat]

Mighty Bomb Jack. King's Knight. Robo Warrior. Power Blade. The NES was full of classics that everyone loves and talks about all the time.

Really though there's just so fucking many NES games that whip ass. The ones I listed are some of my favorites. Some are weird and experimental and some are just new takes on the usual formula. It's really hard to find a game on NES that isn't worth digging into, be it for the game's history or development or for how fun and/or unique it is.