There’s a lot of misconceptions and misinformation about retro games. What are some things that people often believe that aren’t true?
For starters, here’s some that get at me:
“Doom running on a pregnancy test” is a misconception that too many people take literally. Doom has never been installed on a pregnancy test. Foone, the creator of the Doom pregnancy test, simply put a screen and microcontroller inside a pregnancy test’s plastic shell. Notably, this was not intended to be taken seriously, and was done as a bit of a shitpost.
The original PS3 model is not the only model of PS3 that can run PS1 discs. In fact, all PS3 models can run PS1 games from the disc.
The Video Game Crash of 1983 was not worldwide. It was essentially only contained to North America. The video game industry in the rest of the world was thriving.
Donkey Kong Country 2’s subtitle is Diddy’s Kong Quest, not Diddy Kong’s Quest.
GameCube and Wii discs do not spin counterclockwise.
The Wii Sensor Bar does not have any sensors in it. The sensors are in the Wii Remote. The Sensor Bar is just infrared LEDs.
Can you think of any other retro gaming misconceptions?
A couple of easy ones would be the misconceptions around Saturn and N64 and their overall success. Saturn was quite successful in Japan up until late 1997, enough to afford it ample third party support through to Dreamcast’s launch. Over 300 games were released on Saturn in Japan in 1997 alone. Meanwhile, Nintendo almost sold as many N64s in North America as it did the SNES, but it was absolutely a flop in Japan relative to its predecessor.
Otherwise: 3DS halves the resolution of games in 3D mode 3DS actually doubles the resolution of games in 3D mode, using the full 800 x 240 for 400 x 240 per eye.
1994’s Sega Saturn was the last system to do hardware sprites 2004’s Nintendo DS was the last system to do tiled hardware sprites with two 2D graphics engines
Game Boy Advance and N64 contain dedicated audio hardware Audio must be programmed in software on both N64 and Game Boy Advance
Xbox 360 introduced large game patches to video games Microsoft charged developed tens of thousands of dollars to release patches for their games, and patch sizes had to be kept small. It wasn’t until 2013 where this limitation was lifted.
I’d forgotten about the backwards compatibility, I guess at a stretch GBA does give developers access to the four channels that Game Boy had, which the best GBA composers used to enrich their audio.
Many seem to think the only reason people play old games is nostalgia, either for the games themselves or a different era. While this element undoubtedly exists, I think it obscures another, far more important factor. Video games of the eighties and nineties, and probably a few years either side of that period, were the result of an especially creative movement in Japan. Like Classical Hollywood in cinema, this movement led to a golden era. There have been similar moments in the history of music, painting and literature.
Perhaps we are too close to the dawn of the medium to fully comprehend what happened? Still, I believe people will be playing, appreciating and referencing these games forever.
The language of videogames was born in the arcades, but it was definitely being perfected on the 2D plane during the 16-bit era. If not for the full press on 3D, and the press of the time constantly denigrating the 2D games of the 32-bit era, that golden age probably would have continued properly until Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/Gamecube when 3D truly came of age at home.
There are a lot of people today that really look down on the days prior to 3D games. They have no reference point for what made that era so special, and how hand drawn sprites of high quality moving with fluid animation was a thing of beauty to behold back then.
16-bit, and to a lesser extent 32-bit will always be my favorite eras of gaming. That’s the language of videogames that I love the most, and it started with the arcades in the late 70’s.
Luigi was found in the files for Super Mario 64 in 2018, solving the mystery behind the famous “L is Real 2401” texture exactly 24 years, one month and two days after the game’s original release. An untextured and uncolored 3D model of Luigi was found in a leaked batch of Nintendo files and was completed and ported into the game by fans. Luigi was not found within the game’s source code, he was simply found as a WIP file leaked from Nintendo.
I thought that when people were talking about backwards compatibility with PS3 models they were referring to the emotion engine chip that is present in early PS3 models, which makes it backwards compatible with PS2 games.
Virtual Boy gives you headaches Eyestrain is a cause of headaches…but Virtual Boy is actually good for your eyes. like stereoscopic 3D in general, playing VB strengthens the eye muscles.
Now if it was neckache we would be talking - the stand is hardly ergonomic.
Microsoft has the full Xbox and Xbox 360 back-catalog available on its current systems. Microsoft has only 63 out of 989 Xbox titles and only 632 out of 2155 Xbox 360 titles available on its current systems.
Can’t believe it’s been ten years since peak Sony Computer Entertainment, back when they made the entire PS Classics catalogue free to redeem if you had a running PS Plus subscription. Still got access to a huge chunk of those 300+ games today…
aside from the axe i have to grind about sega/NEC/SNK etc being left out of popular “retro” discussions most times:
like 10 years back, a friend of mine was talking about doing a little youtube thing highlighting certain scenes (which i thought was cool! i’d wanted to do a history of comic book games thing at one point) and debunking meme-like shit going around at the time. one thing that the cursed discourse was on about then was how “sonic games were never good” and that was its own mess, but i’d kept noticing a trend where “arcade type gameplay” was being thrown around as a pejorative, meaning shallow, or cheap game mechanics
i thought it’d be cool to talk about the design behind notorious quarter munchers - the era of gauntlet, crime fighters etc having your health meter on a timer, many others being designed around the math of getting players to put quarters in within a few minutes of gameplay, etc (and how vs fighters post SF II WW changed some of that). but the evolution of said design - especially when consoles were powerful enough to bring proper experiences home - lead to a mix of pick-up-and-play with sometimes masterful risk vs reward gameplay, the latter of which was hailed as a renaissance when the souls games blew up
at this point, i’m certain far more knowledgable people than myself have really dived into this between books & longform videos, but that particular framing always drove me nuts. it wasn’t always just younger folks who’d missed the arcade experience either; you’d sometimes see it from old heads that either didn’t really have/use access to arcades, or just based the stereotype off whatever few games they felt cheated on at a laundramat or something
The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls (Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru) uses the same “game engine” as Link’s Awakening (and vice versa)
After picking up the game last year, I see zero evidence of this. Both games play and feel very differently in every aspect that I’d find it hard to believe code was shared between them. Conceptually they have some similarities though, and the sprite designs share a similar design language, which is probably where the confusion comes from. Also, Link’s Awakening was from Nintendo EAD whereas the former is from R&D1.
Even those who romhack the game and translate it say the engine was later used for Link’s Awakening. Wouldn’t they know better than anyone (other than Nintendo)?
That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t ripped apart and heavily modified for LA, but it seems true to me.
Thanks for sharing this. Yeah, would love to be proven wrong but it probably warrants further investigation.
It’s just hard to believe given how differently the games play, animate and feel to play, but maybe some code is shared between them. I had a look at the credits again and the only staff member that worked on both games is composer Kazumi Totaka.
Considering how early 90s Nintendo under Yamauchi pitted R&D1 against EAD I just can’t see both games sharing a lot of code, especially as they don’t share programmers or staff!
But it’s also significant that Link’s Awakening has references to Prince Richard in it.
If anything that makes the game pretty fascinating as you rarely saw any crossover between R&D1’s handheld-focused output (many of the team also worked on Wario Land 3 and Super Metroid) and EAD’s console focused output in that era. You can only imagine how different things could have been if R&D1 got to make games for N64, yet two Fire Emblem titles released in the late 90s for Super Famicom instead, plus there was Virtual Boy, Game Boy and Sattelaview to support.
EDIT Someone has taken both games apart to investigate this:
Conclusion: taking into account all these changes, it is very unlikely that the sprite code was shared.
Conclusion: the map code was not shared.
Conclusion: the text code was not shared.
Conclusion: the main code was not shared.
Considering this, along with the research I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I can confidently state that the story of Link’s Awakening using Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru’s engine is false.
3DS halves the resolution of games in 3D mode
3DS actually doubles the resolution of games in 3D mode, using the full 800 x 240 for 400 x 240 per eye.
The Frog For Whom the Bell Tolls (Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru) uses the same “game engine” as Link’s Awakening (and vice versa)