/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.3227580]

Why didn't more games take advantage of Lock-On Technology?

Or rather, why didn't console expansion packs catch on when they were clearly possible.

Shit like the SEGA CD and 64DD failed because it's a whole extra console, if it's just an expansion for a game then it could still work.

[Anonymous No.3228256]

>>3227580
Because there's no advantage it's just a gimmick. Damn. Decades later they're still fooling kids.

[Anonymous No.3228262]

I was physically hurt in my lower abdomen by the obscene amount of leverage being applied to those S&K carts

[Anonymous No.3228267]

Sega CD was pretty successful for what it was, actually. It certainly can't be compared to the 64DD which only had like 10 games and sold 15k units.

[Anonymous No.3228431]

Sonic 3 and S&N were to be one game originally. It ended up being a perfect way to get people to buy a second game in the end.

"It and Sonic 3 were originally planned to compose a single story within the same cartridge. However, due to time constraints and the fact that the manufacturing costs of a cartridge with more non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) would have been prohibitively expensive for Sega, the decision was made to split the planned game in half, with Sonic & Knuckles as the second part of the Sonic 3 story-arc."

[Anonymous No.3231103]

>>3227580
Because they were expensive. Most gamers at the time were kids, they got one/two games (or peripherals) per year - as in, on their birthday, and on Christmas. Anything too complicated or without immediate support was doomed to fail.

That's why Power Glove failed - they pushed it out on the market too fast, without having enough games designed around it - and with pre-programmed controls being complex and clunky (instead of e.g. having a simple program reading header of the cart on plugging the glove, and picking a control scheme on it's own).

Also, developers were paying costs for buying cartridges, and cartridges were expensive, and could only be purchased from console manufacturer - and I can imagine making a Lock-On cartridge was much, much more expensive than normally. This skyrocketed manufacturing costs, which meant that noone other than Sega (who had first-hand access to cart manufacturing) could take risks making all their carts lock-on.

This is also why so few SNES games relied on cart chips - really only Nintendo banked entire games on using chips, like Starfox and Yoshi's Island - or they were used when there was no other way to get a killer app on the platform, like Doom. Other than that, chips were sparely used - because they cost money and were hard to get.

Most of the above is also why Playstation won the console war - CD meant lower manufacturing costs, and ANYONE could make CDs. I mean, Nintendo 64 was a better thought out console - it had an analog stick and set of buttons for camera control (camera control being a crucial problem for early 3D games) on launch, for god's sake, it was definitely technically superior in many regards.

[Anonymous No.3231223]

>>3227580

Would have been cool to get them for expansion games like UMK3 and Super SF2 (turbo?)

But then those games would not have been playable on its own, and they would still have cost the price of a normal game.

Fun idea now that I'm an adult, but back then I would not have had the money for that kinda stuff.

[Anonymous No.3231535]

Just throwing this out there OP, there was in Japan a sort of lock-on cart used by Bandai called Sufami Turbo. It was a single cart which had two slots in it for smaller game chips. The idea was that the Sufami Turbo itself would have all the typically shared components of a Super Famicom cart, while the unique game data would be stored on the chips. So when you bought Sufami Turbo games, you bought little chips that plugged into the main unit. They did this with license games (Gundam for example) and some games got special functionality if you plugged in two different carts (ie. sharing characters between two games).

[Anonymous No.3231539]

>>3231535
forgot pic

[Anonymous No.3231556]

>>3227580
Because this contraption was built specifically for Sonic 3

[Anonymous No.3231569]

>>3228431
yup this
S&K was not an expansion it was just the 2nd part of the game

>As the plans for the game were laid out, Yasuhara and Naka wanted to create a large, sprawling game, grander in scope than any Sonic title to date, essentially accomplishing what they had hoped to do in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 but couldn't due to time constraints. Roger Hector, a director at STI and Executive Coordinator for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, knew almost from the start that such an ambitious project might be impossible in the form they wanted to take it.

"There were so many creative ideas that it would take too much time to develop such a massive project. The team brainstormed up two games' worth of material initially and it was decided, before the Alpha stage I think, that it would make more sense to split it into two games."
—Roger Hector, Executive Coordinator, Sonic 3 & Knuckles

info.sonicretro.org/Game_Development:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_3

What really sucks about this is all the fucking faggot review sites nowadays never acknowledge this and instead consider them as 2 different games just so they can justify rating their fucking nostalgia game(sonic 2) higher

[Anonymous No.3231581]

>>3231103
>That's why Power Glove failed
No
Power Glove failed because it was a piece of crap that didn't work

[Anonymous No.3232921]

>>3231569
>What really sucks about this is all the fucking faggot review sites nowadays never acknowledge this and instead consider them as 2 different games just so they can justify rating their fucking nostalgia game(sonic 2) higher
This
I fucking hate when 2fags and normies do this