8-bit guy, arcade ports, and the nes library

I've never thought much about it before, but this comparison of consoles/computers which did get arcade ports helped me see how few came to be a part of the NES library. The commentary on why is solid, i think. Thoughts and comments? Is there a need to make more homebrew ditos (assuming stepping on infringement territory is avoidable)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwPuuqTxV-I

What a load of crap. Of course the software selection the youtuber chose would favor Atari consoles and computers. Also he states in the title and in the video that the games are "popular arcade games that got ports", but... have you ever seen a HERO or River Raid arcade cabinet? No? Just checking.

Choosing mostly western developed games, a good part being distributed or originating by Atari, would yield an obvious choice. I can't believe no one's questioning a video that claims that the Atari 800 is the best choice to play vintage arcade games. WTF?



13 Japanese arcade games vs: 1 western PC game converted to coin-op, 7 non-atari western arcade games, 1 non-atari western PC game, 7 ATARI coin-ops, 2 ATARI distributed arcade games, 4 non-coinop games originating on the ATARI 2600, 4 games originating on ATARI 8-bit computers. I think I missed one game but you get the point, hurr durr atari 800 "wins", sure thing buddy.

I wouldn't be so hard on him. It's a north american perspective from what i can tell. He's transparent about leaving out the 'european' scene (really, british - i don't recall ever seing a bbc micro or spectrum where i come from, and msx was fairly popular in some european countries), and is likely to miss out on some japanese experiences.

Atari is likely to "win" in this context because atari had such a firm grip on n. america.

I think it's fair to say Nintendo's licensing system and policies didn't help in the respect he mentioned.

Yeah, having a list of games is not a good criteria, especially since he only takes in account cartridge games on the C64, while floppy games were 100 times more common. I have something like 100+ C64 disks, but only one single cartridge and it's not even a game.

I find a good criteria is how much units were produced and sold back then. By this criteria, the C64 and the NES clearly wins, and *maybe* the Atari 2600. Other things such as the Atari computers or the VIC-20 or the C128 were not very popular, and thus are rare today and you are not likely to encounter one.

Maybe I am being too harsh, but that's just a natural response to a video claiming that for arcade games the NES sucks and you should place a 2600 or a 800 PC in your living room.



That's another good point against the video, I understand that tapes are annoying and not very practical these days, but excluding floppies is a dumb thing to do. If the Konix was released it would be disqualified because of using 3 1/4 inch Diskettes? (aside from probably being an UK thing and not very popular in the US). The C64 absolutely trucidates the NES and 8-bit Atari in the sheer amount of arcade ports it received, old or "modern", and most of them were actually pretty good ports, but it doesn't "win" in his video because of the dumb game selection and cart-only limitation.

His definition of "arcade games" is confusing "16-bit systems are generally too new for arcade games". He seems to mean arcade games from a certain era that was popular in North America. So for example Street Fighter II isn't an arcade game by his definition.

But also his list of arcade games for NES doesn't seem right. Dig Dug, Galaxian, Lode Runner (several games even) and Popeye definitely came for the NES, and usually superior versions too. Other games like Breakout and Space Invaders are a bit too old for the NES but it had newer games in the same genres (Arkanoid, Galaga etc).


Yeah he made a good point there at least.

Perhaps the difference is that the Commodore 1541 disk drive's loading time was atrocious before fast loaders, as was the Disk II's before Diversi-DOS and ProDOS. Thus cartridges represented a huge latency improvement over the time-inefficient floppy disk drivers with which each of those drives shipped.

A part of the arcade experience is precisely that the game starts and plays immediately, which a disk based storage doesn't cater for.
A C64 enthusiast will get those floppies, and maybe even tapes, but if you're the kind of person that just want a simple yet original entertainment station next to the tv, that might not be satisfactory. 8-bit guy has also reviewed options for laptop x86 dos gaming, so he's trying a different scope here.

The arbitrary selection of just 40 games is problematic. It's a far too small selection, which leads to a margin of error so large it tips the result. Worse still if there's factual errors; re pokuns' " Dig Dug, Galaxian, Lode Runner (several games even) and Popeye definitely came for the NES".

Ideally, i'd like selection criteria to be something like "every arcade game using an 8-bit graphics unit that sold more than n cabinets/boards/cabinet cartridges", but researching sales figures for something like that might not even be possible. It's also problematic to determine n. How many are significant enough?

This data is distorted by subsequent popularity of cabinets, but the "top 100 most still-owned arcade hardware" list from the data in the KLOV/VAPS ownership census is a place to start.

Thanks for that link, lidnariq! It's been an interesting read browsing through that site.

One thing i didn't notice first time i watched the episode is that there seems to be some weight to the word "classic" in "classic arcade games".

What is precisely a classic game in this context? It seems to me it means an arcade game with a clear, minimalist design concept, for example "player climbs to the top avoiding moving obstacles to clear the level" or "shoot all enemies before they reach the bottom, rinse and repeat but at faster speed". Often with the common goal of reaching a high score.

This would exclude somewhat more complex games like ghosts n' goblins, which was an arcade game, but the outline would be more like "you progress and fight your way through a number of levels with changing layout as you go from right to left; each with a unique boss fight in the end, and you have a plethora of weapons to strategically choose from, but you need to have a specific weapon in your inventory to be able to reach the point in the game where you will need to go back to the village and go through it all again to reach the true ending and defeat the final boss once and for all, and oh, there's some story, not just action.". This is also where the incentive to play is gradually being shifted from achieving high scores to feeling a sense of accomplishment from the game experience all on itself.

But that difference is far from clear-cut. I find moon patrol to be somewhere in between, for example.

I'd still go with a list that checks if the game has been launched as an arcade game first, not judging it on the loose merit if the game feels retro-arcadey to the general public.

The title of the video is generic, but right at the beggining of it he says "classic arcade games up until 1984, that started the videogame industry and remain iconic".
I had no idea that pitfall or pitfall II were arcade games. Also, one could say the NES has pitfall 2... It's super pitfall.

Oh, did miss that twice. Since GnG is -85, that makes sense within the criteria logic of the video.

I think of Pitfall as the game that started the adventure genre in arcades (and on 2600 i guess, but i don't have enough experience to comment on that any further), though i could be wrong.

So he did mention he limited it to 84 and earlier? He must said that only once, because later he used the word arcade games like it was an universal word for early 8-bit era games.

Nes was a later console than the Atari 2600 and so, so it naturally had the later and more advanced versions of these games. But I guess that is a problem if he aims for a system with more primitive games.


It's an early action platform game.
Adventure games are usually either used for the kind of interactive novel games driven mainly by text and or pictures and sound (text adventure, point n click, visual novel etc), or any game that's kind of like an RPG but doesn't really fill up enough of the RPG criterias to be a real RPG.

Just by-the-by, 8-bit-guy completely copied my old video about repairing the Sega Radica TV games audio, step by step. I thought it was odd to see that done with no credit given from a normally high quality video producer.

Mine from 2012: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QmBm211FAv8

His from 2016: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mA-vJWW9WaQ

Mine wasn't very good, but at least was done using original research and experimentation. His doesn't really offer improvements...

Hm.. It's possible he based it on something someone's written (which in turn may have gotten the right idea from watching your video)? I found this reply from 8-bit guy in the top of the comment section:
"I didn't figure it out.. There was a fix on the internet somebody else figured out. But it was only a text description of what to do, no illustrations or tutorials."