7/15: Famicom turns 30 - http://www.mmcafe.com/ Forums


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Maou
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"7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sat 13 Jul 16:02post reply

Hey kids, this Monday, the Famicom is officially 30 (!?) years old! Ways to celebrate:

1. Enjoy the charts at this (tragically subscriber-locked) Asahi piece on the best sellers domestically: Super Mario Bros. (6.8 million), Super Mario Bros. 3 (3.8 million), Dragon Quest 3 (3.8 million), Dragon Quest 4 (3.1 million), Super Mario Bros. 2 (2.6 million), Golf (2.4 million), Dragon Quest 2 (2.4 million), Baseball (2.3 million), Mahjong (2.1 million), Pro Baseball Family Stadium (2 million). Hmmm, that seems about right.

2. Listen to Jeremey Parish and the Retronauts talk about it in their reborn podcast.

3. (Re- (re-)) Recount your first Famicom experience: I was very young, and my mother wasn't keen on games in the house, but my father's colleague had a Famicom and Mario 1 was a thing of wonder and intrigue. I tried to figure out what the nomenclature meant ("Worlds?"). Later, we rented 3 and brought it over to play and things got really exciting.





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Toxico
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"Re(1):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 00:26:post reply

I have been thinking on doing a thread like this, after all I coincidentally was thinking about talking about my very own definition of a bullied childhood or on how being lost at a certain game feels like fighting Golden Experience Requiem (a never ending situation which ends always the same, and it repeats over and over and over again).

As for Funny / Stupid stories, I can say that "Embarrassingly" my true interest with languages and stuff like that didn't come from reading (which I did a lot), with movies (was even more into them than books), nor foreign song lyrics nor culture nor anything like that. It was obviously NES games the ones that pushed me to be more serious about understanding the little bits that escaped me from regular conversations or to better understand situational speech. In fact I usually copied over the script from Final Fantasy 1 in a copybook and did sentence / subject / predicate analysis to it, which helped me boost compatibility with the language greatly (In fact, I still have those copybooks at hand to remind me on how foolish I was at the time); thus I consider the "NES" and specifically "Final Fantasy 1" as the ones that taught me English.

As a trivia, I'll tell you that I have been asking "my teacher" for some japanese lessons as well & I have been going through most of the games that I have played over 90 times in their famicom versions (and the number of such games for me is pretty steep ), and to be honest it has been helping me a lot. That, and having such an intricate knowledge of the "translation" makes reverse engineering the text more interesting and entertaining (like, realizing 20 years later that you where ripped off on your first ever buy).

And yeah, the movie announcement has nothing to do with my nostalgia.






さっきの感じならあと100発はもつ‥‥と思うぜ
Update 24 as of 03/04/12. // 104 personajes traducidos

Now sponsoring : video game analogies (ES)
Last update : Chapter 25 as of 31/08/12

[this message was edited by Toxico on Tue 16 Jul 00:38]

Iggy
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"Re(1):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 01:39post reply

4. be amazed about how old you are and you don't get kids nowaday anymore.
Because let's be honest, games were much better in our time.





Ishmael
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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 05:26post reply

I can't think of a good NES anecdote at the moment. Sorry!

quote:
And yeah, the movie announcement has nothing to do with my nostalgia.


That's amazing. I'm certain it will join the pile of bad game movies but I still want to see it.

quote:
4. be amazed about how old you are and you don't get kids nowaday anymore.
Because let's be honest, games were much better in our time.



That's also amazing but for different reasons. The article itself is funny but the fact that some of the posters seem to believe it's real is what boggles my mind. Did those folks just fall off the turnip truck? Then again, you'll never go broke selling people stories that fuel their paranoia.





karasu99
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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 05:29:post reply

It's a little funny (to me at least) that the first time I managed to see a Famicom in person was about a week and a half before its 30th anniversary. Reaction: somehow, I thought it would be bigger, given the enormous clunky size of the US version. In retrospect I should have realized how small it was given the relative size of the controllers!

Anyway! First time playing the Famicom/NES! Not counting playing Super Mario Bros. on a Nintendo VS machine at a movie theater, I was first introduced to the humble NES by of all people my older sister, who had SMB1, Castlevania, and some hockey game that I never played. It wasn't until a few years later that I played one more regularly, when my roommate and I went on an odyssey to obtain one at a startlingly late hour from a crappy DC-area mall. We managed to arrive at the last minute and he bought one, and then after the slow ride back to the apartment we stayed up for a full 24 hours playing SMB1 and Duck Hunt on my tiny 11 inch TV. We fortunately had a really great rental place not far from us, and over the next year or so we rented just about every halfway interesting game they had.

Given my my game-playing proclivities, it's surprising that I didn't actually own an NES until around 1999 when I bought a pristine one off an old friend who was about to sell it at his yard sale. I'm feeling more and more like I should have just picked a Famicom up during my recent Japan trip. They're shockingly cheap!

Toxico, it was interesting to hear about your experience with language learning and the NES! I've been thinking that games might be a decent aid for learning Japanese finally, although games these days are much more text-intensive than they were decades ago.

EDIT: Also, these. I'm sure they've been mentioned here before, but still kinda cool.






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[this message was edited by karasu99 on Sun 14 Jul 05:33]

nobinobita
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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 13:41:post reply

quote:
4. be amazed about how old you are and you don't get kids nowaday anymore.
Because let's be honest, games were much better in our time.



Fake news site. Been seeing this article reposted very seriously on Facebook lately. I can't even call that site satire, I think it's meant to trick people into reposting ridiculous stories by playing to their fears.

Mario continues to sell well worldwide. I can attest from personal experience that the iOS generation prefers playing Mario on a controller than any mobile game. And Monster Hunter is an unwavering mega hit and it's wayyyyyyy more hardcore than anything we grew up with.

The kids are alright!

*edit*

Wait ... did I just miss the intended sarcasm of the original post? Dammit, this is the second time it's happened to me today.

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[this message was edited by nobinobita on Sun 14 Jul 13:44]

Professor
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"Re(1):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 15:28:post reply

quote:
Hey kids, this Monday, the Famicom is officially 30 (!?) years old! Ways to celebrate:



It's not even Monday yet, and I feel OLD. Thank you so much, Famicom!


Oh, the memories of the Famicom. It was because of that console that I was able to learn so much Japanese. Things in life would probably have been quite different had it not been for that 8-bit wonder!




And then, there was the Virtual B... ehh, nevermind!





[this message was edited by Professor on Sun 14 Jul 15:39]

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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 17:10post reply

Video games have been a language-learning tool for me, too (well, they still are). Nothing as impressive as Toxico's incredible story, though.

My first Famicom memory is maybe the earliest clear memory I have. I can't think of anything earlier off the top of my head at least. Anyway, I went to visit my great grandmother and we stopped by her neighbor's house for some reason. Their kid had an NES (and the robot). My mom turned to me and whispered "we're going to have to get one of these, aren't we?"

I don't remember getting the system itself, but the first game we bought was Ghosts and Goblins, followed by Section Z, I believe. That gave an early impression of "if Capcom makes it, it's good" that lasted for years to come.





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"Re(3):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Sun 14 Jul 17:16:post reply

Even though Famicoms were definitely in the market where I live back in the day, my first solid memory is of the first day we got an NES. Naturally, we got the Super Mario Bros + Duck Hunt cart and also WWF WrestleMania Challenge (which meant we got the NES in late 1990/early 1991). I think we put in WWF first, got bored, then put in SMB and of course got hooked. We played the NES for maybe an hour in black and white before discovering that you can change the color system of the TV to display colors. I liked a lot of the same stuff you'd expect (Marios, Contra, Ninja Gaiden 2, Battletoads, Batman: Return of The Joker etc.) but my odd ones are probably Kick Master and Big Foot. And my older brother was very fond of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. We also played a lot of Jaleco's Goal!, which I just played recently and still think is great.

We still bought a famicom even after getting an NES, or more precisely, one of the many 100-games-in-1 famiclones (Of course, they never really had 100 distinct games. Many were duplicates or slightly hacked duplicates. And most of them were super early famicom titles, like Pooyan, a favorite of mine that was surprising referenced in MGS Peace Walker). And it would be a while until I discover that both NES and the famicom are the same hardware.

But to keep this post from being all cheerful and like, I think I might have been slightly traumatized by Taito's Chack'n Pop, a game that seems to pop (haha) in a lot of famiclones. For one, It was extremely difficult to me. Chack'n moves very slowly and awkwardly compared to the free moving "Monstas". And your smoke bombs are also very slow and unpredictable, always exploding too late or just bouncing off and falling from a platform, or accidentally killing yourself.

And two, the game gives me this weird feeling that something ominous is coming. Helps sink in the feeling of despair. You always start a level with no enemies hatched. So I feel calm and hopeful. Then enemies start to hatch, some after some time has passed. But all will usually hatch as soon as you free the hearts. And the only good tactic is to kill them before they're even born. The time limit always felt too short. And it's denoted by this slowly moving green object at the top, which I could never articulate what it was exactly, that's trying to block your exit. So really, you don't die when the time runs out. You are instead trapped forever with a host of pink whale-looking creatures who want to kill you. By the time you start the next level, you already know that this sense of safety at the start of a new level, when all the enemies haven't hatchet yet, is a false one. And that soon things will get really bad.

I could never get too far into it. But for some reason I always kept trying to beat it whenever I turned on a famiclone, even though I kind of despised it and it creeped me out. Is it a coincidence that the 2-note music in the game mirrors the 2-note Jaws theme?

Though if things went to dark, I would always recuperate with Binary Land. That game is just a joy. Always cheers me up.





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[this message was edited by badoor on Sun 14 Jul 17:24]

Seizya
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"Re(1):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Mon 15 Jul 07:05post reply

quote:
Hey kids, this Monday, the Famicom is officially 30 (!?) years old!


Wow. I really feel old. The system that started it all for me. (I've only played on an original Famicom a handful of times, though the NES one got a lot of time from me.)





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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Tue 16 Jul 00:04post reply

The educational opportunities and moments of personal growth that were brought about by the Famicom are inspiring to read. I, however, used the NES as the time-wasting gadget it was designed to be and didn't learn a damn thing.





Toxico
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"Re(3):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Tue 16 Jul 00:37:post reply

quote:
The educational opportunities and moments of personal growth that were brought about by the Famicom are inspiring to read. I, however, used the NES as the time-wasting gadget it was designed to be and didn't learn a damn thing.



C'mon, it can't be that hard, right? I mean, the most basic "life improvement" that I had with the NES & console in general are that my reading speed skyrocketed.

There is also the fact that most of the friends that I meet through games, I still keep in touch with (unlike the guys that I meet through school, college, work and stuff like that).






さっきの感じならあと100発はもつ‥‥と思うぜ
Update 24 as of 03/04/12. // 104 personajes traducidos

Now sponsoring : video game analogies (ES)
Last update : Chapter 25 as of 31/08/12

[this message was edited by Toxico on Tue 16 Jul 00:39]

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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Tue 16 Jul 01:05post reply

quote:
the movie announcement has nothing to do with my nostalgia


Eh, I'd rather have a Super Dodge Ball movie instead. Stephen Chow has nothing on Kunio.





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"Re(1):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Tue 16 Jul 10:56:post reply

quote:
Hey kids, this Monday, the Famicom is officially 30 (!?) years old! Ways to celebrate:

3. (Re- (re-)) Recount your first Famicom experience.



First experience with an NES was back in 1986 or 87 when I played it at my cousin's house. In '88, my dad finally bought one but didn't realize that in order to make it work, you had to press the cartridge down (he was from the Atari generation)...

Anyway, lots of memories playing the classics. Also, lots of fun messing with the TV settings while playing Super Mario Bros... pink sky and stuff... it was like playing SMB in bizarro world...






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[this message was edited by Burning Ranger on Tue 16 Jul 11:02]

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"Re(2):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Wed 17 Jul 15:25post reply

I was in preschool when I first played an NES, and I remember playing Punch Out and then SMB, and not doing well in either.

A few years later, I remember trying to play SMB and not being able to make the jump over the pair of goombas in 1-2.

The first game console I ever owned was a Famicom with Disk System purchased in Hong Kong, along with a massive pile of pirated Disk System games, about 3 or 4 of which were Super Mario Bros. 2 (or "The Lost Levels"), some of which had slightly different tilesets.

Aside from maybe the PC (and in part because of its ability to emulate other systems), I don't think that any console has given me the number and diversity of memories as the 8 and 16 bit Nintendos. I see infants in child seats at restaurants fingering tablets these days, and I hope that they get the sense of wonderment at video games that I got when I first held a game controller.





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"Re(3):7/15: Famicom turns 30" , posted Wed 17 Jul 21:21post reply

To celebrate the Famicom, I went through my games to see what I should play, and to my horror I realised that my only first party release for it was Kirby... So I played Challenger and Super Pitfall mostly. But I made a pile of stuff to sell in order to buy some first party games and more. I really need to get Popeye and Donkey Kong 3.

Also, badoor, your blog is awesome. I'm on the lookout for The Super Spy now. Anyone got an MVS kit they want to get rid of? a bit off topic, I know, but... I vaguely remember clickstick trying to sell stuff here years ago but apart from that there's really no buying, selling trading stuff going on here. I've got some MVS kits to trade, if anyone is interested.





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