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I remember when I bought Zelda OoT and Perfect Dark home. The feeling of quality was amazing. I bought Final Fantasy 9 home and it slipped out of the PlayStation tray and onto the floor. No biggie. Cleaning the contacts was always fun. I guess I saw cartridges as a physical extension of the console rather than just a piece of code to run on it. To me this increases the feel that you have for the game. If you go into a retro shop now, it is the shelve filled with cartridges that draws you towards them. Even the rows upon rows of Boxless Atari VCS carts seem more appealing than the bin of soleless CD's. Or is it just me? I'm actually tempted to rake out any old cartidges I can find and have a smell-o-thon.
SNES was when gaming was gaming - no FMV, useless non gaming stuff, just gameplay. I used to love the burning smell of the cartridge after hours upon hours of gameplaying (remember - hardly any save options in some games) - its like you could smell what Sonic's sneakers smelt like after all that running. But on a more positive view; larger formats hold larger game ideas. Although I suppose they also hold that 'lets fill the disk with useless rubbish because we can' theory, ie, pointless FMVs, cutscenes and silly amounts of (sometimes) uneeded non-actual gameplay stuff. CD's/DVD's just don't seem tangible enough, and you could switch games much quicker, in 4 easy steps:
1. Hit the power switch off.
2. Pull out/eject cartridge and drop/throw anywhere you like, because it won't break. Ever.
3. Whip out next cartridge, blow quickly along connectors and slam it into the machine.
4. Trip the power back on.
Allotted time: 1.5 secs approx. Changing CD's takes ages...especially if you're as much of a perfectionist as I am...
Oh well...On the other side of the argument, at least CD's and DVD's don't have battery backups that expire with age. Any SNES/NES collector must be well aware of that - it gets to a point where you try to save as little as possible in the hope that the BB will last longer. Strange, though, as I've never had this problem at all. I recently bought a copy of the original Might and Magic on the Mega Drive circa 1990 I think and the battery still worked fine with all the saves. How strange.
This reminds me of a debate I once had with a friend about Vinyl .vs. CDs. And once again, surprise, surprise, CDs lose, even though they are obviously superior. I love cartridges, but have a special place in my heart for the GameCube CDs (despite the fact that I've never used one :D), I think they retain some of the magic, sort of connected. Another point - could the fact that we love cartridges be that it makes us different? Despite the constant push to make videogames mainstream and more widely used, we still want something that we can relate to as gamers, for exmaple the GameCube CDs, which are obviously very unique and different from normal CD's and hence the 'magic'. We want gaming to be noticed but if they are going to notice us, we dont want to feel like we've changed for them in any way, which is the same as being accepted in life in general. So really, its all sort of obvious.
I'm hoping for a return to cartridges one day. Perhaps a new form of solid-state media will be designed that is cheap as...er...chips. My main gripe with discs is that they scratch. The copy of Halo that is boxed and stacked on a shelf in my mate's living room will almost certainly be outlived by the copy of Mario 64 that is chucked into a corner of my untidy bedroom. I'd even be happy if they put DVDs in some sort of cassette, like they do with floppies. The fact that Nintendo were talking about casing for CDs when the Snes CD add-on came out made me believe that they would do that exact thing when they eventually did go with an optical format.
To be fair, the loading times will undoubtedly get to the point where the only ones who notice anything will be a few freaks. Hell, I haven't seen any signs of loading times on the GC (apart from the excessively long startup animation obviously). But until they do put them into some sort of cases, they would always be more susceptible to damage than carts. In my old school, they had a PC with a CD drive that accepted CDs in clear plastic cases. If Nintendo used a similar thing, then surely that would make the game virtually indestructible - you could just buy a replacement case if the old one got buggered, and these could be sold for a quid each or something.
*Large sniff* Ah...its funny how you can actually still smell that burning now, on long-time-unused cartidges. I always prefered cartridges for their loading times and durability. I knew someone who left a Sonic and Knuckles cartrige by a table lamp and under the corner of a magazine once. The cartridge melted! Now it looks all gloopy and has a bit of ripped paper stuck to it, but it still works fine. Does anybody else feel my pain?
Thanks for reading,
LF.
> The concept of cartridges...
>
> the posts in Prime get more intresting by the day...
Meh, at least I WRITE some, sodding git...
"Hybrid of carts and discs....
Hang on a minute, havnt sony already kinda done this with the Mini-disc :)"
Well, carts are hardly small things :P
Thanks for all the replies! :)
Carts remind us of the days when we didn't mind admitting that our consoles were toys.
It had toy based advantages, like the way you could leave them lying around on the floor until you needed them instead of having to keep them in a protected case...
Hang on a minute, havnt sony already kinda done this with the Mini-disc :)
Would most definietly be cool if someone makes a disc like MD which could store game data.
Even though My N64 is packed away now, I still got all my carts lined up on the bookshelf next to me. Always like flicking through them, brings back some great memories...
Nice post...
That was actually very good.
Incredibly good.
Well, good good. I agree with the 'collectability' point you raised at the start - I remember the free cart rack I got with N64 magazine. It was great - I had all my good games slotted in, next to my N64. They really were extensions to the machine - the stuck out the top for crying out loud. I also hate CDs - especially when they stop working eventually.
:P
the posts in Prime get more intresting by the day...
Likewise, Carts are simple, which is what makes them my preferred medium. What is really needed is a hybrid of carts and DVDs in a "packages DVD" style case you mentioned!
Good post