Why Nintendo is horrid! (the list is endless)

[vol.2]

Outside of the games themselves, it feels like anything Nintendo does well is entirely by accident. Just waiting for something to totally derail the Switch 2 launch now!

I wouldn't rule out massive tariffs just prior to the launch.

[Steven]

Kids didn't talk about the GameCube's video output in schools lol
Nerds talked about it on internet forums and chats such as this and many other that I would frequent.

And yeah, it was most likely more prevalent in Europe where people are more likely to care about non-shitty video.

I'm pretty sure I talked about progressive scan at school and how I was sad that I didn't have it lol

[mycophobia]

in school i mostly remember having to defend the GameCube against accusations that "it sucks" and "is gay"

[Steven]

Yeah, I heard a lot of both of those as well. I finally shut at least one guy up when I showed him the Gamecube version of a game he'd played on PS2 and within about three seconds he was like "yeah, you're right, the Gamecube version does have way better graphics". After that he conceded that the Gamecube was the more powerful system. I have no idea why so many people around me thought the Gamecube was weaker than the PS2, but they did. Then I'd go back to playing on my computer because it had more and better games than both the PS2 and the Gamecube.

[vol.2]

I have no idea why so many people around me thought the Gamecube was weaker than the PS2, but they did.

Nintendo had a lot of problems with the N64 and their reluctance to give up on cartridges. They had an opportunity to create a superior system to the PSX, and they completely biffed it by not including an optical drive. That lead to the complicated memory add-on and severely cut-down games. On top of that, they introduced a ridiculously complicated multi-processor architecture that nobody liked to develop for. All at a time when studios had spent years mastering the PSX quirks, and were still getting better and better looking games out of the aging system. And PSX developer support was massive. I don't even have to tell you that some of it's best game came in it's later years.

Nintendo had 2 extra years to come up with a PlayStation killer, and they face-planted so hard that the general public was still disrespecting them up through the PS2 and GC rivalry.

They finally clawed their way back on the merits of a kid-friendly general gaming console that wasn't focused on cutting-edge graphics at all, and they have not pivoted from that since.

[BulletMagnet]

I have no idea why so many people around me thought the Gamecube was weaker than the PS2, but they did.

I'd honestly guess that Nintendo unintentionally played into the years of insinuation from its competition that while they made big-boy state-of-the-art supercomputers, fuddy-duddy Nintendo was all about kiddy toys; thus when people saw the beefy black boxes from Sony and MS next to the goofy little purple Playskool block (let alone heard the "doonka-doonka-DOONK" startup jingle), anyone who hadn't actually looked up the raw stats for the systems would likely be inclined to assume that the GC was intended to be a more "accessible" - i.e. weaker - product than its more "hardcore" counterparts. Of course, as V2 notes, one generation later they legitimately did go that route, and laughed all the way to the bank when they did.

[Sumez]

Getting rid of the gold coins seems like a dick move. The company is doing better than they ever have yet can't be bothered to toss their loyal customers a bone. It's all about that profit-profit-profit, not the good feels these days.

What the heck is gold coins, and why do they matter?

[Zoinkity]

To be fair, the most successful console of a generation is rarely the most advanced.

Since OP never mentioned N64, here's the gripes of a serial hacker/translator:

The biggest problem of the N64 is that nobody knew how to use it, Nintendo included. All aspects of it were massively outsourced. SGI famously made it, but they also wrote all the microcodes and standard development libraries. With the exception of Wu (who went on to make the iQue handheld version) it's safe to say none of SGI had any idea how or why you'd make games. Here's a fun comment (slightly reformatted) that SGI's programmers left in one of the header files:
/*
* DANGER!
* This is bad programming. Where the *heck* do these numbers come from?
* They are obviously 'maximums' from the sprite library, but since the sprite library is built on top of gbi.h, which includes macros that decode into multiple macros, etc., it is nearly impossible to know what these maximums should be.
* Worse, there are some gbi macros (texture alignment mostly) that decode into *many* macros, so if we choose that as a maximum, we are wasting TONS of space...
* These numbers work for "reasonable" sprite library usage, and there is an assert() in the library to detect when they aren't enough. (use the debug version)
*/
...then they update the sprite microcodes and introduce a tiling bug that makes certain combinations of sizes/counts print the last tile backward and don't fix it. Probably why USA/PAL never got a WaveRace rumble version. 90% of the menu options need to be redone to avoid the tiling bug introduced by the microcode update. Ever wonder why Japanese titles seem plagued by emulation issues? Many include heavy amounts of or exclusively are 2D.

Ah, and they exclusively offered midi conversion tools for audio. Nobody used midi midi, that's not how VG music works. MML/tracker, sure. SRD made a series of MML audio engines for their own games...sorry, for Nintendo's own games. End result? No standardized music playback formats. Sample storage is (mostly) standard, playback is a mess. EOL you start to see that situation change, but would it have killed them to license out SRD's devkit early on?

Hilariously, although SGI wrote the SDK for them the tools in the SDK were mostly written by Hudson. A mix-and-match collection of these was found in the psyQ devkit, but they were late to push updates until they saw what bugs popped up in the latest version. More often than not, if there's a revision A or B for a game it's because there was a bug in the SDK's save data code.
Case and point: half of all games saving to FlashRAM don't follow device datasheets. As a result, the only reasonable way to use them was to blank the entire thing and rewrite it all. Once the SDK was updated to follow specs you could write individual blocks. The very first flash game was even worse: due to a bug, it wouldn't check if the device was ready so you could potentially try to write data while an operation was ongoing with no warning whatsoever. It got a revision A shortly after.

The 64DD... What Nintendo wanted was another Satellaview, but what they got was a multiyear runaround from ALPS. It's actual gimmick was storage, like upwards of ~200MB of it per disk. All evidence points to the device and SDK being finalized in the N64's first year. The holdup was ALPS' insistence on a leasing model, and after extensive deliberation Nintendo eventually talked them into a 1 year plan on top of the 1 month plan they wanted. So yes, you didn't buy a 64DD, you leased (to own?) and could throw other items onto your debt (smokey consoles & games).
Again, Nintendo had no idea how to use this themselves. They exclusively made expansions for their cart games (not unlike the multiple broadcasts for Satellaview), all but one (OoT) of which had the entire game's code on the disk. Like, what was the point here besides streaming its audio from cart? The 3rd party stuff really rocked that storage though: talent studio where you can make video plays, a golf game where you could download whole courses, Doshin's entire map state would be saved back to disk, etc.
(F-Zero X, for all the talk about its track editor, only needed the spare room for ghosts. Courses are fixed-size and you could fit a dozen in the smallest LBA on a disk. Problem is they store individual files to an LBA, just like floppies, so lots of lost room.)

Peripherals. There's just no good way to do these without growing a spare port or two. In fact, the go/no go device for testing hardware on the factory line was, no joke, implemented as a controller peripheral.

Ah, but it's one saving grace is the real nail in the coffin long-term: it only works properly with CRTs.
Its video out is actually a really nice analog encoder. Full-featured too. Progressive and interlaced as simply a matter of rates and lengths. You can even send output during the blanking period. If you want to go extra crazy and provide it a nonstandard color burst that will actually work...so long as you're using a CRT. At least some (meaning my) TVs assume if a colorbust is present it ignores the signal it's getting and just interprets the color however it feels like. -and there's the fundamental problem: output is dependent on how intricate the decoder circuit is in whatever modern device you're using to play these things back. Will it fritz when you jump between interlaced and progressive? What about scaling via output signal widths?
So, it looked nice on original hardware but long-term that's a horrendous thing to emulate. You literally need to emulate the NTSC & PAL analog video standards accurately to guarantee games look like they should in all circumstances.


..and then there's these brilliant pieces of code that are absolutely fascinating. Pokemon Snap's image and rendering code is absolutely unique. The audio in Space Invaders is actually over a dozen simultaneous tracks that are mixed at runtime; most are just muted, but they can switch them on/off or change audio levels at any time and since they're all constantly playing everything is absolutely synchronized. Then there's the most interesting microcode of all: the combination audio/video microcode Boss Studios wrote for Stunt Racer 64/World Driving Championship.

[Sumez]

The biggest problem of the N64 is that nobody knew how to use it, Nintendo included.

Bigger than the issues with the cost of cartridge production, causing games to cost 2 or 3 times as much as on competing platforms? As well as creating severe restrictions on storage space in an age where streamed music, voice-over and full motion videos became massive selling points, causing most third party developers to vastly prefer previously mentioned competitors?

[Austin]

Getting rid of the gold coins seems like a dick move. The company is doing better than they ever have yet can't be bothered to toss their loyal customers a bone. It's all about that profit-profit-profit, not the good feels these days.

What the heck is gold coins, and why do they matter?

When you buy digital games you get a percentage of that sale back as gold coins, which can be converted into money and applied to future digital purchases. You can also register physical purchases within a timeframe of buying and earn gold coins that way. They add up relatively quick and it’s just a nice gesture. “Hey, thanks for buying, now here’s something on us.”

[Zoinkity]

Bigger than the issues with the cost of cartridge production, causing games to cost 2 or 3 times as much as on competing platforms? As well as creating severe restrictions on storage space in an age where streamed music, voice-over and full motion videos became massive selling points, causing most third party developers to vastly prefer previously mentioned competitors?

Yes.
Knowing what a system can do and actually being able to program it is more important. Honestly, your answer rather proves the point Nintendo never could explain what the N64 is good at--or better at--than its competition. Frankly, I don't think they know.

Cost was an issue. A huge issue. It kept out the lower-profit weird games that honestly make the PSX library so fun. No Power Shovel! So what can it do instead?

Having near-instant random access is a huge benefit and made certain types of games much easier to write or downright viable. Much, much better at multitasking as a result (despite how often I complain about that).
When's that matter? Look at a title on both consoles: Robotron. An N64 conversion of Robotron is basically a simple cross-compile of PC. PSX though? All your code and data needs to be present in < 2MB of memory at one time because you're streaming audio out and data access is dang slow (especially when you're streaming). It's also lower MIPS with a less capable FPU, so realistically you need to convert everything to integer math, then redo collisions and scaling to compensate, try to unjank the jankiness that creates, then reduce render count because that's another bottleneck, etc. It's months of work and debugging, plus reworking gameplay to account for something the platform just isn't as good at.

There's an awful lot of VO in Japanese N64 titles. In western titles you don't hear much voice outside sports games and the SRD/HAL titles. It is a huge lump of the data in any cart though. Just assume 2/3 of any random game is audio. 3/4 of any Japanese one. Not joking about the amount of VO they got. Usually wasn't as much as the same PSX/PC titles though.

Streamed vs sequenced music is a silly argument, never understood it really. First, PSX has several of its own sequence formats because CD seeking is still a thing, and although there are workarounds there's also the slight problem of only being able to read data when you're not playing audio. Sequenced is largely a matter of storage and affords versatility for playback, but it does require more work out of your composer. It requires you have a composer though. How much arcade music is sequenced? Does that sound bad?

FMV was a bigger selling point within the industry than with gamers. Most were annoying injections of low quality 15fps or worse segments because "FMV sells a game" with no regard for when it's useful at all. PSX was great for video novels thanks to that though, most of them confined to Japan. It's a game you couldn't realistically have on N64 at the time, the same way PSX will never have a clone of Majora's Mask. There's a handful of Myst-alikes that were possible because of it. That's good design use! The rest of the time you're mashing the button to skip. Then Final Fantasy made that silly incentive to actually watch through the entire doomtrain summon while mashing buttons to get a damage boost... FMV as a filler feature dominated PC as well. FMV as bonus features: virtual tours of golf courses, ships, history lessons, etc. Might be interesting but does it actually sell a game?
Heck, one of the worst N64 games was nothing but 39 minutes of FMV: the Doshin the Giant 2 Supplement Disk. You pee on things and watch videos inbetween.

It goes both ways too. There's Nintendo's own overfocus on "3D is better than 2D", completely oblivious to the fact they had a 2D powerhouse on their hands. An example? Ogre Battle 64. It's a 2D game. That's all pre-rendered 3D, heavily layered. Fundamentally its display processor combines tiles the same way photosh*p or G!mp handles layers, with some nice color key replacement features to boot. To be fair 3D the only thing about the console they ever promoted: it renders a lot pretty dang quick (even with the fill rate bottleneck) and you basically get perspective and antialiasing for free. Just write your own depth buffer code or at the very least don't use blasted coverage bits for that. SGI has no common sense...

Their own documentation is horribly misleading when it isn't an outright fraud. It's frustrating when the thing can actually output at arbitrary resolution, progressive and interlaced, output audio at arbitrary rates, has arbitrary access to anything on its data bus, ditto for attached serial devices. Heck, it can even stream analog audio through the left and right audio pins on the cart slot for off-boarded audio. One of the biggest factors in the sudden surge in emulation accuracy was throwing away the documents and just testing things out.

Nintendo never explained what kinds of games it's good at--much less best at--and it killed anyone making games for it specifically. Too much of its library is available elsewhere, underutilizing its abilities.

Anyway, that's my rant and I'll try not to follow up on it ;*)
Weird aside, but ironically N64 long-term is better at FMV than PSX. It turns out the vector-based signal processor is much, much better at running modern video codecs than MPEG1. There's demos (and a couple LD arcade ports in the works) with the console running mp4 video at normal speed, no frameskipping.

[BrainΦΠΦTemple]

fukk nintendo

[Sumez]

Knowing what a system can do and actually being able to program it is more important. Honestly, your answer rather proves the point Nintendo never could explain what the N64 is good at--or better at--than its competition. Frankly, I don't think they know.

As a programmer myself, I agree on a personal level.

On a business level, however? Well programmed and optimized games has rarely been a top factor for a business success.
Does it annoy me that most N64 games look blurry and run at a horrible framerare? Hell yes. Does it affect my overall opinion on the platform? Hell yes. But I don't think any of that had much of an effect on the actual commercial failure of the system. It was all about the attraction of the CD-ROM format. Being there when it happened made it extremely clear that this was what gave Sony the upper hand. The PlayStation also famously had an official devkit that baiscally locked developers out of actually making good use of that system's hardware performance. So the issues you're pointing out aren't unique to the N64 either. Far from it.

FMV was a bigger selling point within the industry than with gamers.

Absolutely true as well. Hell, I never liked disc based media formats at all. But "within the industry" is the keyword here. Nintendo had extremely weak third party support for the N64, and its strengths are almost exclusively related to its inhouse software. Imagine if it had kept the third party support of the SNES! Imagine if it had had just a third of the insane library that ended up on the PS1.

[1KMS]

The thing I'm most curious about Switch 2 is whether its backwards compatibility will remove the extra 1-2 frames of input lag added by Switch 1's stupidity.

[Sumez]

How much extra lag games get on Switch seems to be very situational based on the devs, the game in question, and which frameworks it relies on.
I don't really know anything about the Switch hardware, but it seems to me more like its design causes it to be easier for devs to accidentally add lag to the software, moreso than something being straight up enforced in the hardware? If this is the case, backwards compatibility likely won't be able to help things in the first place.

But maybe someone in here tried developing something for the platform, and can offer som first-hand insight? It's really hard to trust claims from random forum posts, considering how much misinformation generally roams around in regards to video game hardware.

[vol.2]

Imagine if it had kept the third party support of the SNES! Imagine if it had had just a third of the insane library that ended up on the PS1.

I think this also shows how Nintendo's early predatory publishing practices came back to bite them in the ass. They had everyone over a barrel in the NES and early SNES days, but after the Genesis and then the PSX swept in and provided tangible alternative paths to revenue, 3rd party developers were eager to jump ship.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

They add up relatively quick and it’s just a nice gesture. “Hey, thanks for buying, now here’s something on us.”

It's important to remember though that they price their games knowing they're incentivizing and subsidizing further purchases with the coins system as a customer loyalty program. They're doing it to make money and it's obviously not a purely altruistic thing or anything like that. Same with places that offer "free shipping"; the shipping is never free, it's simply hidden in the price of the goods and achieved with cutthroat, barebones shipping contracts that are usually abusive for the shippers. That's how Amazon works, at least.

[Sumez]

I think this also shows how Nintendo's early predatory publishing practices came back to bite them in the ass. They had everyone over a barrel in the NES and early SNES days, but after the Genesis and then the PSX swept in and provided tangible alternative paths to revenue, 3rd party developers were eager to jump ship.

Oh yeah, that's definitely a part of it as well.
Though it's funny to consider the counter-example of Camelot who have been very vocal about how horrible it was for them to be working under Sega. They jumped ship to Nintendo somewhere around the N64 era, and has stayed there ever since (kinda sadly).

[Zoinkity]

Basically everything

Really, the recipe for success is to have something mid-spec at a manageable cost with a presentable gimmick that is relatively easy to program for without going too far off schedule or over budget. Like the GameBoy line. Ultimately the thing that sells games is the size of the audience.

It really was a perfect storm though, wasn't it? Sony came in when the cost of CD players significantly dropped (a bar of gold for a PCE CD collection anyone?) at the end of the 16bit era's life but before competitors were ready for market, and PR could clearly tell you why you want to buy it or sell games for it. Saying "this can do multimedia" and having a basically drag-and-drop way to encode video really helped sell the commercial side of it. By the time anyone responded the market was already theirs.

Sony didn't just wipe the floor with Nintendo, they put the first nail in Sega's coffin. One of the 16bit superpowers rendered all but irrelevant.

Imagine if it had kept the third party support of the SNES!

Imagine if Sega kept the third party support of the Genesis! On paper the Saturn should have been a major competitor, yet its market receded back into Japan and it's hard not to blame management. All of Nintendo's mistakes and then some. It was a confusing mess to program sure, but this was also a company that would lock you in a room for days on end until you resigned.

[Starfighter]

They add up relatively quick and it’s just a nice gesture. “Hey, thanks for buying, now here’s something on us.”

It's important to remember though that they price their games knowing they're incentivizing and subsidizing further purchases with the coins system as a customer loyalty program. They're doing it to make money and it's obviously not a purely altruistic thing or anything like that. Same with places that offer "free shipping"; the shipping is never free, it's simply hidden in the price of the goods and achieved with cutthroat, barebones shipping contracts that are usually abusive for the shippers. That's how Amazon works, at least.

+1

I wonder if their prices will drop now that they get rid of the gold coins, my guess is

[vol.2]

I wonder if their prices will drop now that they get rid of the gold coins[/img]

Way of raising the price without raising the price. Works like tips

[Austin]

I wonder if their prices will drop now that they get rid of the gold coins, my guess is

Ha! Of course not. These companies have an infinite growth mindset, and all that ends up as a result over time is a poorer experience for the consumer. Yay, capitalism!

I can only dream of a time where companies manage to make lots and lots of money, while also realizing that what they have is more than enough.