Retro Video Gamer

Been thinking a lot about the NES and what i call 'The UK years'-There seems to be a version of history that's popular these days on forums and in various magazines, that the NES was a huge hit over here, now whilst i was'nt a NES owner at the time, i 'grew up' during those years and was very aware of the system and my memory of events seems at complete contrast to those that are brought up by others, so thought it might create an interesting topic to discuss.

My inital introduction to the news was via the gaming press, likes of C+VG ran previews and reviews of it's games, Crash+Zzap 64 had a feature on the hardware and both seemed to suggest that the hardware was fine, but did'nt really offer that much over the C64/Speccy and besides expensive games.

My friends and i were more than happy with our 8 Bit micro's and besides had you seen those ST/Amiga games? OMG!!!!! fast 3D, samples, 'arcade Perfect' games etc etc, so NES never really raised an ounce of interest.


I also seem to recal Mattel being rather shocked by how 'mute' the reception to the NES from the UK gamer was, both packs (standard+deluxe) seeing £40? knocked off RRP after mere 2 months and then Nintendo taking charge/setting up company to promote+sell NES in Uk.I also used to encounter those NES coin-Op's in pubs etc around here, choice of 10? games, pay to keep playing, but again, games seemed rather old hat and out of place in a coin-op.


The Turtles frenzy seemed to save the NES bacon over here somewhat as the Nes+Turtles game bundles seemed to be great sellers.

Going back to the 'press' angle, i can recal ACE magazine slagging off the NES hardware when reviewing things like Ghosts And Goblins, Rush And attack etc, saying the hardware was fine for things like SMB, but way beneath delivering conversions like these.

So, point i'm making/question/s i'm asking here are basically, just how did the UK 'respond' to the NES in your exp? (sorry USA readers) and does the NES really deserve the position it seems to have been awarded in UK gaming history in todays media?.

I just find it bizzare the NES gets more coverage in Retro circles than the Atari Lynx or ST and are left pondering why this is.

I'm NOT a NES hater by any means, just very curious to see how things reached stage they have....

(http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/images/consoles1/NES.png)

Wasnt very popular from where I lived and general perception at the time, the hardware was already 4 years out of date by the time the UK got it, British folk were lapping up arcade conversions and Sega and Atari were the names everyone wanted to play at home, either on the Master System or 8 bit computers, the turtles nearly swayed me at the time but Wonderboy 3 convinced me thank god!

I'm from the SW of England and down here, console wise, i knew of a few Nes owners, but they were mainly parents who'd bought it for the kids as they were so into Turtles, but most either went for the MS for the SEGA conversions and of course, SONIC or went straight for the Mega Drive.

Nes seemed far too late arriving on these shores, looked dated in terms of a shoebox type casing, harsh looking control pads and games that just did'nt scream OMG, sure they were fantastically playable in many cases once you got into them, but they lacked a 'wow' factor, if you just saw them running or being played.

there were plenty of NES reviews in various magazines at the time, but then as we're showing on here, so there were 7800 or MSX or.....


Yet i never see the MSX or 7800 or even ST treated in same regard as i do the NES, which makes me question why the format gets so much coverage from publications today, when dealing with Retro (talking a UK viewpoint).Userbase was'nt that huge, so just who are they trying to appeal to, looking back at the system i wonder?.

I knew one person with a NES, my next door neighbour and he had just moved over from Singapore, which was very Americanised and the only system they had there really was the NES (and lots of pirate games!).

Compare that to the 6 people I knew with a Sega Master System, 2 people I knew with a 7800, 6 people with a 2600 and I even knew a rich kid with an imported Japanese PC Engine. At my school we all mocked the NES in magazines for its bland looking graphics, kiddie games and rubbish arcade conversions.

I do wonder just how bad the NES would have done if it wasn't for the Turtles game, which wasn't even very good. It had a short spike in sales when that came out that was then killed off when the game hit the home computers thanks to Image Works.

The sales figure for the NES in the UK was 600,000 and from what I have heard a large portion of that came when the machine was under £50 and marketed as a budget machine once the SNES had come out. In comparison the Atari ST sold 1.5 million in the UK, the Master System sold 2.2 million and I couldn't find any UK sales figures for the Atari 7800 but I found a European sales figure of 1.77 million.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"So, point i'm making/question/s i'm asking here are basically, just how did the UK 'respond' to the NES in your exp?

Of all the fellow gamers I knew at school and outside of school during that era not one single person owned a NES.

The console was most notable for its horrible flickering sprites and for gathering dust in branches of Boots the Chemist as I recall it.

Quoteand does the NES really deserve the position it seems to have been awarded in UK gaming history in todays media?.

Not at all. It was too little too late here in the UK and the vast majority of gamers here were left distinctly unimpressed by it. Hence why it saw price cuts and even then people weren't interested in it.

In my experience it's a vocal minority of Nintendo fanboys with a penchant for rewriting history who are to blame if there is any misunderstanding regarding just how spectacularly the NES bombed in this country. These cheerleaders seem to swallow the kind of revisionist pish uttered by some and propogate it across the internet. The gullible then accept it as fact.

It doesn't help that the likes of the UK's official Nintendo magazine's website publishes revisionist nonsense too. Then we have Nintendo TV adverts like the one a few years back featuring Ant and Dec with said Geordies talking as if we were all playing on NES here back in the day.

So, it's not just idiotic fanboys who are to blame for this parlous state of affairs because Nintendo itself has been complicit in it too.

QuoteI just find it bizzare the NES gets more coverage in Retro circles than the Atari Lynx or ST and are left pondering why this is.

If you're at all referring to the likes of Retro Gamer magazine then such a thing is a well known failing of the publication. Also, the magazine is sold in the USA so the disproportionate amount of NES coverage the magazine featues is quite possibly due to it wishing to expand its readership in that country.

Seems a great way of alienating the core readership if you ask me but that's merely my opinion.

I'm loving the responses so far (and DC opinion is very much welcomed and what i'm looking for here, i want the 'voices' as it were of those who lived through the NES years in UK, from areas outside my area, only way i can build up a much better picture of how the NES was seen in UK).some fantastic food for thought given by your goodselves so far.

looking at the comments and sales figures given, plus attitudes from publications like ACE/Zzap 64 and Crash etc, it's clear the NES amounted to little more than a footnote in UK gaming history, almost like the warm up act for the SNES and yet i've seen Retro Gamer (and other magazines to a certain degree) paint this bizzare picture that the NES arrived just in time, a gaming messiah as it were, that we'd grown tired, bored of our punny C64's our humble Spectrums, we were on brink of giving up on gaming etc, when i honestly cannot recal a more exciting time to be a gamer.


8 Bit scene in UK was very active, magazines just bombarding us with reports on new, exciting hardware waiting in the wings, be it the ST, the Konix MS, the Mega Drive, The PC Engine, etc etc.Sure the NES was in there, but so were the 7800, the 65XE etc etc.In the mag scans i've been sending The Laird, hell even the aging 2600 is brought into the comparisons.

Many of the magazines were suggesting to get the best of both worlds you needed a computer+console, but the NES was never pushed as the machine to go for.

DC makes a very strong case that it is indeed this need to make Retro Gamer fit in with what's expected to make it appeal to the overseas market, which i canm understand as publication has to make money to survive, but i feel does the UK gaming scene an injustice somewhat as it's giving a version of events that just did not happen, ergo it's basically re-writing history at it's whim and thus insulting it's readership on a good few levels, almost saying it's not capable of understanding a world in which the NES was'nt a dominant force throughout.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... looking at the comments and sales figures given, plus attitudes from publications like ACE/Zzap 64 and Crash etc, it's clear the NES amounted to little more than a footnote in UK gaming history

Well put, RT. That's exactly how most UK videogame mags of the time and the overwhelming majority of gamers here thought of the NES.

Quote8 Bit scene in UK was very active, magazines just bombarding us with reports on new, exciting hardware waiting in the wings, be it the ST, the Konix MS, the Mega Drive, The PC Engine, etc etc.

...Many of the magazines were suggesting to get the best of both worlds you needed a computer+console, but the NES was never pushed as the machine to go for.

Indeed. Like I said, NES was too little too late here in the UK. It launched at a time when many gamers had been playing on their 8-bit micros for some years already and were looking to a new exciting future, i.e. upgrading to a 16-bit micro in the form of an Atari ST or Commodore Amiga. Also, the likes of C+VG were featuring screenshots of games for the PC Engine which appeared to offer the then holy grail of arcade coin-op quality on a home gaming system.

We were looking to move on up into this brave new world of gaming... and there was Nintendo trying to sell us its 8-bit console with its obscenely priced games that was a Westernised Famicom from 1984. Too little too late...

QuoteDC makes a very strong case that it is indeed this need to make Retro Gamer fit in with what's expected to make it appeal to the overseas market, which i canm understand as publication has to make money to survive

Yep, it's a commercial entity owned by a publishing group, not a fanzine. It must do what it feels it needs to survive and prosper. If the core readership here in the UK don't like the magazine for this or any other reason then they're free to vote with their wallets by ceasing to buy it.

It's only one magazine at the end of the day and there's a damn sight more to the retro gaming scene than one magazine. I realise that RG is the only nationally published retro gaming monthly magazine that's widely available to purchase but I also realise that some people seem to overstate its importance in the grand scheme of things, i.e. if RG ceases to be then the retro gaming scene will carry on regardless.

Quote... but i feel does the UK gaming scene an injustice somewhat as it's giving a version of events that just did not happen, ergo it's basically re-writing history at it's whim and thus insulting it's readership on a good few levels

If I'm interpretting those references correctly then I assume you're possibly referring to the woeful 'NES Collector's Guide' from a past issue of RG. The first page of that article was quite possibly the worst piece of retro gaming journalism I've had the misfortune to encounter. Chock full of factual innaccuracies, gushing hyperbole and the very worst kind of revisionist history... written by a known Nintendo fanboy. Utterly appalling in every way and quite frankly amazing that it was green lighted for publication without having been checked over properly first.

So, returning to a theme I explored in my initial post, the reason such poor understanding seems to exist in some quarters with regard to how insignificant NES was in the UK seems to be down to a variety of factors. Namely idiotic fanboys, drivel espoused by the ill-informed on the internet, the website of the the officially licensed UK Nintendo magazine, low quality journalism in the UK's sole national retro gaming publication and Nintendo's own TV adverts here.

Young gamers in the UK choosing to enter the world of retro gaming can hardly be blamed for wrongly believing the NES to have been a popular gaming platform in the UK when faced with such a wall of revisionist tripe seemingly at every turn should they try doing a little reading up on gaming history. I find that quite depressing the more I think about it, to be honest.  :1:

Something that really sums up this revisionist nonsense for me is a post I read on RG recently when this same subject was brought up in passing.

Somebody said that he was round his friends house talking about retro gaming and his friend starting going on about how much he loved his NES back in the day, how classic the games were and how he would love to get one. He then then informed his friend, who he had known since they were young kids, that he had never owned a NES. He had in fact owned a Master System and that was what he was remembering, his friend even asked him if he was sure because he thought he had a Nintendo like everyone else!

I guess that shows just how easily people can be brainwashed by the media and the likes of those sickening Ant & Dec adverts.

2 very well written post's there by Laird and DC.

People at work, younger than myself might often bring up distant memories of a game they played years ago and stumble around trying to work out what system it was on (was it the Master system, err no C64, no...it was Amiga was'nt it?-basically going through the systems they owned, but i've never even heard the NES brought up as a format).


I was looking at old ACE article, 'Hotboxes'-basically a comparision of all the consoles avaiable/upcoming at the time, to quote from the NES 'review':

'......as an ACE reader, only appealing if your buying for a younger human being only' (and they put European sales at less than 500,000).

Now if i start to look at a few NES articles in todays press, well Retro Gamer:

Front  page feature:When Grey Mattered-How Nintendo's 8-Bit Console Helped Reignite The Industry- feature  opens with talk of how NES has recognised status as saviour of the video gaming industry (not going to comment on that just yet) it's honest enough to admit the NES had to struggle+fight here in UK, but again, i'm struggling to see just where this 'reputation' it's refered to having gained in UK is borne from.


Then my eyebrows shot up reading of  'outstanding tech specs' at start of the piece, then it details how surprising the choice of CPU for the NES was, not because it was cutting edge, but because it was knocking on in years already, MSOS 6502 was designed in 1975 and choosen because it was now dirt cheap and all Nintendo had done to it was it had it moddified, so just where were these outstanding tech specs?, but thankfully, that piece was well written enought to bury these 'blips' under a wealth of truth about how poorly the NES fared in UK, so off to a bumpy, but promising start.

But then as soon as you hit the NES collectors guide...oh dear oh dear oh dear.I honestly am loathe to quote from it on here, as i've no desire to further spread the utter rubbish passed off as fact, i'll just say that so much  was written in response to it by subscribers such as ourselves, so much ignored by the RG team and so many leapt to the magazines defence, it's gained a piece of RG history, but for all the wrong reasons.

As DC says, there is hope, RG magazine+forum are far, far from the only places to go to quench a thirst for Retro and kids these days are very switched on, very connected, so hopefully they will seek out new sources, places like here perhaps where we will give personal exp and show magazine scans+quotes  from the UK NES era to show how machine was recived and how far the truth is being twisted to suit the needs of current era Nintendo+it's followers.

Looking at issue 1 of The Games Machine, NES (and MS) looked at in 'Dust To Dust, Attics To Attics?' feature, how did the games fare then well few quotes:

Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Donkey Kong 3 and Popeye are accurate but unexciting conversions of thier ageing arcade counterparts.Mario Bros is another arcade conversion, only not so old and a lot more fun.Mach Rider is an unexciting blend of racing and shooting action.Excitebike-Even the built in course designer does'nt make it as exciting as the name suggests.......

So hardly set UK press world on fire, turn a few pages big 2-page advert for the NES from Nintendo which slags ofthe existing 8 Bit home computers (now you can enjoy the amazing 52 colour 3-D graphics of Nintendo-on most home computers, you've been lucky to get 16 colours until now.Nintendo's superb graphics give the games a convincing true 3-D feel...).


Hang on Nintendo, twice in that ad you refer to the 3-D graphics of the NES and say NES has a true 3D feel, but there's NO true 3D to the games shown, no polygons, no wire-frame 3D nothing.

Looking at issue 2, Super Mario Bros reviewed RRP £19.99 Overall 89% (game is simple to understand and therefore easy to play) but reviewer ends by suggesting game would make it onto home micro's as after all Mario Bros had. Vampire Killer (Castlevania) is reviewed on MSX cart, RRP as £18.95, overall 69%, along with Metal Gear, RRP £20.95, overall 79%, Excite Bike RRP £28.50 gets overall 52%-Very playable, it tires steadily as you play, may appeal to younger gamers


Skipping forward to issue 6, still no sign of more NES games, but MS games like Rocky, Zillion, Afterburner, Action Fighter, Alien Syndrome, Outrun all been reviewed, more MSX carts under review USAS (RRP £19.95) Overall 88% and F1 Spirt (RRP £18.95)-In short a top class MSX2 game, no score given though.Issue 7, MSX range feature+Blade Eagle+Fantasy Zone 3 reviewed on MS, Salamander on MSX (£19.95) Overall 82%, Issue 8 PC Engine to beat Nintendo-TGM explains why R-Type is tipped to make PC Eng a world beater (with PC engine-The Midget Monster) shows just how much UK mags were getting behind newer systems, still no more NES reviews, yet MS has Rescue Mission, Issue 9...no, no more NES games.....nor issue 10....


Issue 11 news: 'Millions of Nintendo's predicted, said current figures for UK NES ownership around 40,000 which paled next to many million 8-Bit micro's and at least 120,000 Atari ST's', but Nintendo's UK firm NESI was confident the NES was all set to conquer Britian and continue Nintendo's domination and ahhh the irony here, turn a few pages and TGM does an article:'What ever happened to the Nintendo?-.....But in Britian it flopped-as even it's most vocal new salesman, Luther De Gale, admits-while the Sega succeeded'


Fantastic opening start to the article, choice quote from writer: 'I've only just seen 1 (NES) in my local computer store-and i supplied it to them!'

Then from Richard Eddy: 'Look throught the window of your local computer shop and you'll see Spectrums, Commodores, PC's all your computer buying heart can desire-but n-n-n-no Nintendo.Few of the major chains stock it either.It's nearly a year since TGM started covering Nintendo games, but there simply haven't been any new UK titles-the collection stands at about 30 compared with 100 in the USA.

'Cartridge based games are released every month for the Sega....Mastertronic who are handling the UK MS sales, say there are approx 40,000 Segas in Britian and they claim to be pulling in £5 Million a year from the console'


Back on NES in UK: '....Last years fiasco, when a £300,000 TV ad campain produced by toy giant Mattel apparently failed to produce even 100,000 sales' and 'Thier (Nintendo's) console has been passed on from 1 firm to another in search of sucsess-1st to Mattel, then to US Gold's offshoot GO! and now to NESI'.


Still NO NES games for review that issue, yet MS had:

3-D Maze Hunter, Alex Kidd, Aztec Adventure and Penguin land.

Issue 12 had on front page:'The Next Nintendo-basher? The first British Games Console! The Konix Console-It's Brilliant!' and: 'Rival:Could Nintendo get blown away in Konix's Slipstream?'

Still no NES reviews though MSX cart Kings Valley II Overall 85%, RRP £19.95 or on tape MSX Elite overall 80%.

Kinda hits home when a UK magazine has more MSX games to review which offer better VFM than it does NES games.


And yet RG etc would have us believe the NES was doing the buisness in the UK, deserves more coverage than the ST? Ohh please....

TGM is really proving to be a great source of showing just how different the level of support was between the Master System and the NES in UK. Continuing from earlier issues, Issue 13 saw NO NES games reviewed, 4 MS games.Issue 14 had 5 MS games, 1 NES game, thankfully it was a good game, RC Pro-Am, Overall 85% '..fun derived from racing cute cars is unbeatable', but in same issue, PC Engine reviews appearing...

Drunken Master (63%) priced at £24.99, R-Type 2 (Overall 83%, priced at £24.99).

Master System had  Shinobi (82% and TGM Star Player Awarded), Captain Silver (49%), Golvellius (66%), Double Dragon (81%) and  Lord Of The Sword (58%).

The previous issue had seen MS versions of Thunderblade (overall 76%), Kenseiden (86%), Monopoly (64%), Miracle Warriors (40%).

So whilst the quality varied, it was clear to UK gamers looking at the 2 consoles, which was seeing the better software support and what was in future offerings from up and coming new consoles.

Issue 16 fared better for NES 2 games reviewed Top Gun (65%) but RRP of £29.95 and Castlevania 71% and review notes it was originally released on MSX as Vampire Killer and again your looking at RRP of £29.95 and this is in the very issue TGM did a 4-Page feature on the Konix Multi-system (The Power Generation) with claims of console hitting streets that autumn, priced £149 and being a 16 Bit console, it then goes onto say:

'Come this autumn, £199 (inc VAT) will buy you a multi-system and joystick, 2 games, a 1 Mb disck drive and 12 month guarantee....further games will cost you £14.99 each.'


Reference made to the NES by Konix's Wyn Holloway in the Konix article:

'The SEGA (MS) is a far better machine than the Nintendo (NES);but (in other countries)the Nintendo succeeded'.

Issue following this?

Nintendo has Gradius (76%) £24.95 'NES owners had to wait a long time for this, it's lost little of it's former glory'

MS has 2 games Rampage (58%) 'similar to previous home conversions the SEGA version lacks variety...£25 too high a price to pay for for a game with such limited interest' and Rastan (43%) 'Rastans a dwarf and most sprites are blocky with minimal animation'...

but PC Eng has:

Galaga 88 (86%) RRP £29.95
Victory Run (59%) £24.95
Vigilante (75%) £29.95
Dragon Spirt (65%) £29.95

Plus chance to win a console, ads from Micro Media with quotes from press (TGM, C+VG+Jeff Minter praising the hardware)


So the NES was seen as delivering too little, too late and too expensive a range of games by a leading UK multi-format mag.

TGM again, feature:Console Dawn Nintendo horror stories from UK developers claiming because Nintendo held all control over product and it's shipping date, serious issues had arisen, 1 claiming that despite paying Nintendo in advance for 200, 00 cartridges and packing costs, thier game was not shipped until months after it had been completed, with rumours saying others had suffered similar.

quote from further in the article:

'Other UK developers have been saying recently that Nintendo is an 8-bit machine not worth worrying about here.It's basically too late for UK software houses to get into the huge market anyway-things change fast and as usual the majority got left behind in the rush'.

Article written by Phil Harrison of Vivid Image Developments.

Reviewed within said piece Mega Drive wise:Altered Beast 87%, Alex Kidd 82% and Super Thunderblade 76%, Space Harrier 2 85%

NES had Rush 'n' Attack 81%, Super Mario Bros 2 92% and Ghosts 'n' Goblins 84%

2600 had River Raid 2 76% and F-14 Tomcat at 82%


With PC Engine having Tiger at 86%, P-47 at 68% and Deep Blue at 58%

So no-one can say TGM had any anti-Nes bias.

Another story that sprung to mind:

When I used to post a lot on Atari Age we had a thread about console sales figures and the NES came up in the discussion. I started talking about how badly it did here and how the SMS kicked its arse etc. and a big argument ended up breaking out because several Americans accused me of lying! They just wouldn't have it that the NES sold badly over here. Another member then joined in to back me up and started posting magazine scans that talked about NES sales in comparison to the SMS and these same few people just dismissed them as lies. No matter what evidence we put in front of them they just wouldn't accept that NES was anything but a global success story. It really was totally unbelievable.

That's a very interesting story there Laird and highlights a concern of mine, if certain publications continue to push this myth that we brits really took to the NES, it's going to become 'established' fact and soon as anyone say's hang on guys and girls, it was'nt quite like that, it arrived too late over here, that ship had sailed and we were bombarded by new systems (Konix, STe, Lynx, PC Eng, MD, MS Sam Coupe etc) in the news each and every month, you end facing a wall of pain as pro-Nintendo fans might 'struggle' to accept that and could end up using UK publications to back up thier view of history.


Not saying that will happen, but there's a risk maybe? at very least we've a situation where a publication seems to alter it's take on what happened, one minute saying NES struggled in UK, next that NES saved UK gaming....it cannot be both.

I've opened this thread to try and see just which version of events bears more fruit, happy to hear of events or examples where the latter version is born out.





I'm going to take a look at a few other publications, see how NES is treated there, but going by examples in my past few TGM posts, i cannot see any sign of bias, MS+PC Engine games get just as mixed scores as the NES games do.

Here's something from Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) which I suspect is precisely the kind of retarded revisionist crap Nintendo would like to have us in the UK believe,

* "It's very likely that had Nintendo not created the NES, you wouldn't be playing games today."

- Comical! All those 8-bit and 16-bit home computers plus the PC must have not existed in Nintendo's view of the world then.  :o
First off, the crash was a North America thing which had next to no effect on Europe, much less the UK, where the gaming industry powered on regardless.
Secondly, the crash in North America only really affected the console-based games industry (plus the arcades) - the gaming scene in the USA for computers still did okay.
Thirdly, E.T. may have had far too many cartridges of it manufactured but the fact that hardly ever gets pointed out is that it was still one of the top selling Atari VCS/2600 titles regardless of its poor quality.
Finally, Atari itself never went "bankrupt" as the article would seem to imply.


*"No one bought games because there was nothing good to buy, and videogaming was about to be dismissed as a passing fad."

- Yes, that's right folks, because the console games industry went belly up in North America alone that meant that every single game you played on your 8-bit home computers from 1983 onwards was indeed rubbish  :o


*"the Famicom was released in the US and Europe as the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it took the world by storm."

- Wrong again. Firstly, when Nintendo first tried launching it in a test market in the USA the system (as it then was) was totally dismissed. Only later once Nintendo had got their act together did it take off. Secondly, NES did not take "the world by storm" - Japan and North America are not "the world" last time I checked.  ::)


"by 1987 the company was at the forefront of the videogames industry, easily seeing off competitors such as Sega's Master System."

- Disingenuous once again. The Sega Master System utterly destroyed NES in places such as the UK and Brazil.


"Nowadays, videogames are not only still alive, they're stronger than ever, and have continued to go from strength to strength. But had it not been for the NES, gaming would have died out with the Cabbage Patch dolls."

- Where will this revisionist the-world-acording-to-Nintendo claptrap ever end?  :24:


Source: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co. ... tendo-nes/ (http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/12380/features/history-of-nintendo-nes/)

Quote from: "The Laird"Oh yes, you are going to bloody love this!

I was just going through some old issues of C&VG from around the time of the NES launch in the UK and first of all I found this in the news section at the front of mag:

(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/NES_zps303c846f.jpg)

Just after this was a 2 page advert for the machine, I can put this up if you like too!

But scrolling on through the magazine I found this in the hot gossip section, an absolutely rave review of the 7800 literally begging Atari to release the machine in the UK:

(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/7800_zpsfc69fada.jpg)

Also read the bottom part that gives a nice over view of the then current console scene in the UK!

Is it the 2-Page ad where Nintendo talk of NEs 52 colours. 3D graphics feel etc?

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"Here's something from Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) which I suspect is precisely the kind of retarded revisionist crap Nintendo would like to have us in the UK believe,

* "It's very likely that had Nintendo not created the NES, you wouldn't be playing games today."

- Comical! All those 8-bit and 16-bit home computers plus the PC must have not existed in Nintendo's view of the world then.  :o
First off, the crash was a North America thing which had next to no effect on Europe, much less the UK, where the gaming industry powered on regardless.
Secondly, the crash in North America only really affected the console-based games industry (plus the arcades) - the gaming scene in the USA for computers still did okay.
Thirdly, E.T. may have had far too many cartridges of it manufactured but the fact that hardly ever gets pointed out is that it was still one of the top selling Atari VCS/2600 titles regardless of its poor quality.
Finally, Atari itself never went "bankrupt" as the article would seem to imply.


*"No one bought games because there was nothing good to buy, and videogaming was about to be dismissed as a passing fad."

- Yes, that's right folks, because the console games industry went belly up in North America alone that meant that every single game you played on your 8-bit home computers from 1983 onwards was indeed rubbish  :o


*"the Famicom was released in the US and Europe as the Nintendo Entertainment System, and it took the world by storm."

- Wrong again. Firstly, when Nintendo first tried launching it in a test market in the USA the system (as it then was) was totally dismissed. Only later once Nintendo had got their act together did it take off. Secondly, NES did not take "the world by storm" - Japan and North America are not "the world" last time I checked.  ::)


"by 1987 the company was at the forefront of the videogames industry, easily seeing off competitors such as Sega's Master System."

- Disingenuous once again. The Sega Master System utterly destroyed NES in places such as the UK and Brazil.


"Nowadays, videogames are not only still alive, they're stronger than ever, and have continued to go from strength to strength. But had it not been for the NES, gaming would have died out with the Cabbage Patch dolls."

- Where will this revisionist the-world-acording-to-Nintendo claptrap ever end?  :24:


Source: http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co. ... tendo-nes/ (http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/12380/features/history-of-nintendo-nes/)

Outstanding find there, you've countered the claims well, so i've nothing to add other than it's the kinda work i expect to find in a Nintendo publication.

Looked through my Zzap 64 mag scans, found 2 NES related articles (Laird, you may well have them on PC, not sure if you copied them off the DVD i sent), but for a C64 focused magazine, NES fared very well:

1st piece, Arcade Machine In Your Home.....(which i think also featured in Crash?) you see Mattel claiming existing NES games only used 20% of machines capabilities, but since these are not from developers, i've no idea how much water these claims hold, but the staff members comments give an honest an favorable response to the NES.

Michael Dunn, Paul Summer, David Thompson all praised the NES graphics and animation, colourful, high res etc, all bar Paul Summer liked the sound chip,David Thompson hated the controllers (dreadful), Julian Riginall's opening comment-I'm Very, Very impressed.

Gary Penn-A worthy investment if your looking for virtually flawless arcade conversions.

General feelings seem to be they liked the hardware, but had concerns over what sort of game support it'd get and just how many original games it'd see, other than arcade conversions, plus high price of software and limited choice.


Much later piece:Are You console Ker-razy? NES features under Golden Oldies, hardware said to be 'graphically much better than the C64 on the Whole'-Main disadvantages listed were price and limited selection, in terms of software (only 40 or so games out at that time) and games lacked the depth of many C64 games, console seen as ideal for younger gamers.

Sorry, I'll post again once I've regained my composure from reading Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) having stated,

QuoteIt's very likely that had Nintendo not created the NES, you wouldn't be playing games today.

 :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24:

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"Sorry, I'll post again once I've regained my composure from reading Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) having stated,

QuoteIt's very likely that had Nintendo not created the NES, you wouldn't be playing games today.

 :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24: :24:

Here's my personal thoughts:

Despite Nintendo creating the NES, thankfully i'm still playing games today......

Seriousily those NES pads were so not made for my hands......

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Gary Penn - A worthy investment if your looking for virtually flawless arcade conversions.

How much crack had he smoked that day exactly? 

Did you read those scans I posted on the previous page? There is some incredibly interesting stuff there!

Quote from: "The Laird"Another story that sprung to mind:

When I used to post a lot on Atari Age we had a thread about console sales figures and the NES came up in the discussion. I started talking about how badly it did here and how the SMS kicked its arse etc. and a big argument ended up breaking out because several Americans accused me of lying! They just wouldn't have it that the NES sold badly over here. Another member then joined in to back me up and started posting magazine scans that talked about NES sales in comparison to the SMS and these same few people just dismissed them as lies. No matter what evidence we put in front of them they just wouldn't accept that NES was anything but a global success story. It really was totally unbelievable.

I suspect ROB the robot emitted hypnotic mind waves that brainwashed an entire generation of North American and Japanese gamers (plus a few dozen Brits) into believing NES was akin to the Second Coming of Christ. 

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... if certain publications continue to push this myth that we brits really took to the NES, it's going to become 'established' fact and soon as anyone say's hang on guys and girls, it was'nt quite like that, it arrived too late over here, that ship had sailed and we were bombarded by new systems (Konix, STe, Lynx, PC Eng, MD, MS Sam Coupe etc) in the news each and every month, you end facing a wall of pain as pro-Nintendo fans might 'struggle' to accept that and could end up using UK publications to back up thier view of history.

That's the real issue of concern. History being rewritten. There was quite a backlash to the aforemenioned 'NES Collector's Guide' article in RG by many folk who do actually know their gaming history. I'd like to think said publication won't commit such a disastrous faux pas again in the future. It certainly never published any sort of apology in the following issue to put things right. I'd imagine much of the core readership in the UK lost a lot of respect for the magazine following that debacle and it's certainly lost a huge amount of credibility in my eyes.

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Gary Penn - A worthy investment if your looking for virtually flawless arcade conversions.

How much crack had he smoked that day exactly? 

Did you read those scans I posted on the previous page? There is some incredibly interesting stuff there!

Think the arcade conversions he's talking of are the golden oldie types plus those of Nintendo's play10 coin-op's.They cannot have been later coin-op's as Nes versions, no matter how playable, were cut down versions.

Been going through my mag scans on DVD tonight,well ones still here, lol, just come across something that raised an eyebrow or 2, but i'll post on that in a moment...

Had a look at last few issues of TGM, looking to see how the NES had matured in terms of games released, now bearing in mind point i was trying to get across earlier that NES owners were paying a lot of money for conversions of games that had appeared on C64/Speccy etc good while before they appeared on NES, i was expecting to see a lot more original or NES exclusive games appearing at review, was'nt dissapointed in that regard, but...i was shocked by a good few games i saw reviewed:

Solomons Key 80%, going for £34-95!!!!! Reviewer said: 'Phew, this game is old-Nes version just as playable as the CPC version, reviewed 31 issues ago'.

Then there was 'Skate Or Die' (originally reviewed on C64 in issue 18, appears on NES for review in issue 32!), scores 80%, but asking price of £24-95!

But those prices looked like great VFM compared to NES only games like:

Zelda II-Adventures Of Link.Score's 65%, reviewer said 'At £40, it could, just have enough content to justify the price'.

Simons Quest scored 55%, asking price of £39-95, reviewer said 'May not have enough content to justify price'

TMHT, scored 86% cheaper at £34.95 but when i think of what i was paying for ST games which offered far more depth, those NES prices are bat shit crazy for 8 Bit games.

Last lot from TGM reviews:

All these were down as £29.99 games:

Robo Warrior 47%
Wizards And warriors 70%
Track And field 2 91% (Have to say looks very impressive in still shots).
Metal Gear 70%
Life Force 88%
Double Dribble 79%
Cobra Triangle 80%
Mega Man 83%

then there were reviews of:Ikari Warriors 57% (no price listed), reviewr says 'Long, long after the home conversions, NES I.W is too little, too late, conversion has ugly graphics and is too expensive for what it offers'.

Trojan (£24.95) 48% 'Game is 1 big cliche'

Gunsmoke £24.95 'Good conversion, highly playable'

so, based on UK mag coverage so far, i would'nt say NES saved anything or convinced anyone to stay in gaming....

Curious new piece in Zero magazine-It was reporting industry fears that Nintendo was looking at ways to secure exclusive rights to all the key future Coin-Op conversions, thus ensuring the only way to play home conversions would be on the NES, they'd insist the game was'nt converted to any other console or micro.

Looked at their review of Rush'n ' Attack, 80% score but said character animation was jerky and only had 2 animation frames for running, so hardly arcade perfect conversion time, lol.

UPDATE:Hmmn, would seem NES fared fine in Zero magazine, but no more coverage than say the MS.Other reviews were:

Life Force 91%, ranks among the elite of NES games, who cares it's taken so long to arrive?.

Ghosts 'N' Goblins 89%-Although G'N'G has been avaiable for a very long time in the states and indeed on other formats in this country, it's only just been released on UK Nintendo format.But why must Britian always be the last to get such goodies?

Bayou Billy 87%

The Simpsons:Bart Vs The Space Mutants 91%

Capt.Skyhawk 67% Gameplay lets things down badly..

Shadow warriors 87% (mentions States just about to get sequel, whilst UK only just gotten 1st game).

Gauntlet 2 (£39.99!) 83% It's all good playable fun....to be honest (it's) a rather old game.

Mega Man II 96% A dream of a game.

Robo warrior 61% In short, it's tired and worn.

TMHT Console Classic award,93%


So, after scanning reviews in 2, UK multi-format mags so far, NES:Great if you don't mind waiting ages and paying lot more for...conversions of arcade/C64 games and/or are a TMHT fan or like platformers like Mega Man seems the general gist.


Has to be said i've also seen another 8 Bit console praised in Zero, the Amstrad GX4000:

'The GX4000 is unquestionably more powerful than the 8-Bit Nintendo and Sega, but that's about it.At £100 all in, Amstrads console is going to sell and sell.Software houses are familar with the CPC format, so there'll be no shortage of good titles.It's got a good future methinks'.

Burning Rubber reviewed, score of 79%

Disclaimer:Anyone from the States reading the above GX4000 piece, NO, we did NOT embrace it, nor did it sell and sell or have a good future.Have to get this in here and now in case future Retro publications try and revise it's history as well.

:-)

It's nice to see that my memory isn't failing me and the UK mags of the time didn't drool and rave over the likes of Castlevania, Mario, Zelda, Mega Man and Metal Gear. They quite rightly pointed out there were better games around on the home computers. It's not just the hardware that people are being revisionist about these days, it's the software too.

Quote from: "The Laird"It's nice to see that my memory isn't failing me and the UK mags of the time didn't drool and rave over the likes of Castlevania, Mario, Zelda, Mega Man and Metal Gear. They quite rightly pointed out there were better games around on the home computers. It's not just the hardware that people are being revisionist about these days, it's the software too.

Just updated my orig.post and future proofed it with end piece, lol

The thing that stands out in the NES reviews, for myself so far, reviewers asking time and time again just why UK was only just getting this conversion and paying more for it.

Quote from: "The Laird"It's nice to see that my memory isn't failing me and the UK mags of the time didn't drool and rave over the likes of Castlevania, Mario, Zelda, Mega Man and Metal Gear. They quite rightly pointed out there were better games around on the home computers. It's not just the hardware that people are being revisionist about these days, it's the software too.

UK mags seemingly did not rave or drool, onto my 3rd Multi-Format mag, for NES reviews, it's RAZE:

Batman 82%
TMHT 87%
Supersprint 92%
Gauntlet 70%-You've probably played this somewhere before.
Bad Dudes 83%-Dated beat-em-up fun
Double Dragon 89%
Vindicators 65%
Spy Vs Spy 60% (seriousily? they were asking £19.99 for something i 1st played on A8?)
Days Of Thunder 81%
720 64%
Gauntlet 2 74%
Bubble Bobble 74%-Just is'nt fast enough to be playable.
Duck Tales 83% (Amiga version reviewed on same page, that gets 76%)
Super Off-Road 77%-Responsiveness of trucks very poor.
Gremlins 2 82%
Dr Mario 90% (GB version reviewd same time gets 92%)


So, no, not exactly singing to the great god Nintendo for delivering the second coming of gaming, is it?.

Onto what, 4th? UK Multi-Format mag now, still no sign of all-our Rave scores for NES games.Publication this time:ACE

Mach Rider 636
Pro Wrestling 794
Punch Out 792
Baseball 624
Top Gun 808
Castlevania 857
Goonies 673
Gradius 874
Life Force 740
Double Dribble 719
Track And Field II 813

Few more ACE scores:Batman 890
Solomons Key 790
Zelda II 901


Now moving onto C+VG's Mean Machines section:

Rad Racer, which oddly gets reviewed twice! 7/10 1st time around then jumps upto 84% on 2nd review.


*Scoring system gets 'odd' as well, things like graphics+sound still marked out of 10, but overall score is out of 100% in many cases

Pro-Am 6
Zelda 9
Punch Out 8
Pro-Wrestling 5
Mario Bros 80%
Nintendo Soccer 83%
Gradius 87%
**Super Mario II 97%, but then when reviewed in Machine Machines when it was a stand alone magazine, it was awarded 89%
Castlevania 81%
Top Gun 82%
Mach Rider 58%
Baseball 47%
**Double Dragon 83% (MS ver.reviewed alongside, gets 76%), again here new, lower score 2nd time around in M.Machines review, drops to 80%
Mega Man 89%
Wizzards And warriors 74%
**Life Force 87%down to 86% 2nd M.M review
Track+Field II 92%
Cobra Triangle 93%
Double Dribble 82%
Robo Warrior 56%
Batman 92%
**TMHT 89%-Jumps up a tad to 90% in 2nd M.Machines review
Festers Quest 56%
Silent Service 82%
Bionic Commando 81%
Skate Or Die 78%
Spy Vs Spy 84%
Road Blasters 47%
720 80%
Rescue (Aka Hostages) 41%

Black Manta 73%
Bubble Bobble 85%
Robocop 50%
Solar Jetman 94%
Blades Of Steel 79%
World Wrestling 85%
Batman 87%
Off-Road 8%
Mega Man 95%
Probotector 73%
Pinbot 90%
Snake, Rattle+Roll 94%
Bad Dudes 39%

So as Laird notes, UK press did'nt rave over things like Castlevania the away it's now claimed they did, nor did they go that crazy over ALL of  Rare's output, things like Pro-Am, Capt.Skyhawk etc scored average to good, Lot of the press loved things like NES Batman, Super Mario Bros, Zelda etc, but so far, after ploughing through 5 of the UK's multi-formats, i've failed to find anything that says the NES should be any more fondly recalled in todays UK press than the MS and after seeing so many great scores awarded to MS, ST, Lynx games etc, i'm left wondering why they are'nt getting the same degree of coverage.

NES exclusives aside, the reviews i've seen have been conversions from the arcade or the C64 or MSX.Very odd that the NES conversions are always brought up, but not so much the MSX originals.....

Closing look at scores and a few (more things) have jumped out, countless times you'd see a NES game get either a new review, or as part of a mini-review guide with a new score attached, just seen Mean Machines booklet NES review guide giving Black Manta 80% now, for example, few other scores jumped up a few points.

The NES CPU seems to be an issue when certain coin-op's were converted see Mean Machines rip into Operation Wolf 53% Slow, visually dissapointing, along with Rainbow Islands 67% ruined by slow gameplay, along with Bubble Bobble, wondering if last 2 are fault of poor coding or the hardware as C64 for example pulled off decent conversions of both.New Zealand Story gets 79%, better sound than coin-op, but far too easy to finish, Ghost's 'N' Goblins gets a mauling 55% as does Ikari warriors 48% again both fared very well on UK C64, Kick Off just as bad on NES it seems, 36%

I've yet to see a score raving about a Wizards+Warriors game Mean Machines gave the orig. 72% and Iron Sword 77%, so rather surprised to see a feature on the series in Retro Gamer a while back, did the series get unfair reviews? i've honestly never read of anyone really praising any of the games, so wonder why it was deemed worthy of coverage in RG?

Also, some very surprising scores for what i'd been led to believe were THE key games on NES by NES fans on various forums and RG articles, mentioned previous scores for Metal Gear and Castlevania, but Mean Machines rated Metal Gear at 52%, Metriod comes in at 80% and Kid Icarus at 68% not the scores i was expecting to be honest.

Boulderdash gets a 90%, Defender Of The Crown 59%-Worse than C64 Disk Ver.i wonder? (Only played ST version), Kung-Fu 72%, Marble Madness 85% (sounds better than the poor C64 version i played, thankfully), Paperboy 30%, Rygar 70 % (so better than awful C64 version), Smash TV 90%, Snakes Revenge 49% (knew that was said to be poor), TMHT:The Arcade Game 64%, Xevious 65% (I've no idea how good/bad a conversion this is, i hate the original, lol), Castelian 73% (always found the C64 version technically amazing but frustrating to play) and system seems to lack a decent Robocop game, Robocop 2 now pulling in 72%.

Sterling work, RT.

All these NES game magazine review scores plus the various comments they made regarding the NES hardware itself go to prove that those of us who've thus far posted in the thread all have an accurate memory of things as they happened those years ago.

There's no revisionist history on our part because what you've posted is history as it really happened back then. Such documented evidence as you (and Laird) have provided goes to prove that despite what certain others may claim the NES signally failed to impress the vast overwhelming majority of gamers here in the UK.

Even most of the so-called NES 'classics' failed to impress the gaming media here at the time.

Certain NES fansites, fanzines, ignorant Nintendo fanboys on the internet and nationally published print publications would seemingly have us believe differently. I'd like to think that the very vocal minority of pro-Nintendo revisionists posting on internet forums and the occasional misguided article in RG mean little in the grand scheme of things, i.e. that the majority of older gamers here in the UK remember what actually happened those years ago and roll their eyes when seeing such revisionist nonsense the same way we do here.

That said, there is a very real danger, in my opinion, of many of today's younger generations falling prey to the revisionist agenda and that dismays me. The concerns we're expressing have nothing to do with being 'anti-Nintendo' and everyting to do with not wishing for real history being revised and distorted beyond recognition by those too ignorant to know better and those with an agenda to push.

Great stuff everyone. :)

I've tried not to bore folks to tears by quoting scores without posting scans of said reviews (i don't have a scanner, plus it'd require bloody hours), but i felt i needed to post them along with comments from reviewers to.....well, just put the message out that i've not seen an ounce of this past history of the NES in UK, i had been led to believe.

Sure, the scores in publications vary, as i expected and some have changed scores in mini-review guides, but not by a margin where a great game is poor or vice versa and i've gone through 5 publications, all multi-format, to try and give a balanced look at way media treated NES, in order to prevent any possibility of 'you cannot trust X+Z they hated the NES1' type responses, i mean:Zero, Raze, TGM, ACE+Mean Machines alone, lot of reviewers there alone, factor in the article from Crash/Zzap where you've C64/Speccy reviewers praising the hardware as being a micro beater in several departments and i'd say the NES was given a very fair evaluation.


The arcade conversions, whilst graphically better in cases, arrived far too late, 8 Bit Micro owners had bought, played and moved on and thier versions were £10 or under, boasted better music in case of say the C64 version, or more playable due to running faster, in Speccy case than that of the NES versions, plus they were playing games with a lot more depth alongside the arcade conversions.

I'm not Anti-Nintendo (LOL, i'd be bloody hard pushed to be so owning GB, GBA, GC,GB Player at present and Ex-SNES and N64 owner) and niether are you (hell out of the 2 of us, you bought a Wii U) and nor is Laird (Wii owner).we are seasoned gamers who grew up in the NES era.

I'll admit i barely gave it a 2nd glance back then, but thought this thread would be chance to correct that.Yes, i was driven partly after reading so many Nintendo based articles in RG, i thought i'd really been blinkered, missed out on a lot of classics, had 'dabbled' with the NES on emulation, mainly to play Solar Jetman, see how NES versions of C64 games fared and hear Tim Follins work on the NES etc.But there was this over-riding 'message' coming from RG that the UK took the NES to it's chest and held on damn tight, i'm going to have to dig out old copies of RG and see what's said about UK reaction to games like Metal Gear, Castlevania, Wizards and warriors etc.It's bad enough the various PS2+PS3 mags seemed to think they were hip+cool talking about the original games on MSX+NES (bet writer was'nt even born when they were released), but i don't expect ANY publication to give me a version of events that never was.

Inspire me to discover a game or series or format i missed out on 1st time around, but don't p*ss on my back and tell me it's raining-any publication who takes that stance is unworthy of my time nor money, if you cannot find someone to write an honest account for an article, scrap the article.

Quote from: "onthinice"Great stuff everyone. :)

Cheers mate-Trust me, you work night shifts and you'll set your mind to questioning everything you've been reading during tea breaks.Personal gripe of mine is reading that format X was AMAZING or was loved by all, or was utter sh*te and hated by all, when i either know that's not true or have the resources to discover just what real story is.

This is a worry, found an example already of my 'concerns' over direction certain publications are taking towards NES related pieces:

The Classic Game:Kid Icarus, 2-page feature, but thing that hit me? 'What The Press Said....ages ago' Magazine quoted Nintendo Power, which just happened NOT to review it as game was 12 months old by time magazine launched, fair enough, use a publication who DID review it then and ohhh i dunno, why not go for a respected, multi-format magazine, such as Mean Machines, here i'll show you how easy it is:Mean Machines review score for Kid Icarus 68%, not difficult was it?.Why not be honest an say game recived a mixed reception?.

Going for a review from a Nintendo only publication which never even reviewed it.....



Then you've the claims that it's the games difficulty that puts people off, ohh really? so same people who perhaps enjoyed Rick dangerous back then or Demon's souls today?.


Article says 1 reason it's so underated is it's extreme difficulty puts people off and they give in before getting past the 1st few screens-so by that logic are they 'suggesting' Mean Machines based the review on the 1st few screens alone and no-one on the team could get past them?.


Article says K.I is just as wondorous and surprising as the big three NES games:Mario, Zelda and Metriod, but more deserving of it's cult status...fair enough, opinion after all, but i wonder WHY magazine never felt it worthy of  such status/coverage until the 3DS version just happened to arrive.

The Collectors Guide:NES....

WTF just seriousily WTF....

Europe had NOT been drowning in an 'Ocean of low quality software' (NES had'nt arrived yet (lol), the home micro market was NOT suffering from a saturated market of homemade releases, we were getting original games and better than NES conversions long befor Pal NES conversions arrived.

The NES did high colour, high res visuals very well yes but a stunning audio chip? I know the POKEY and SID chips must be p8ssing themselves here.

Nes hosted software of highest merit did it? look at review scores so far given, plus i left out likes of Balljacks 13% Mean Machines.

The periphals took gaming in previousily unimaginable directions? you what? a light gun? jeez no..i'd never seen such wonders prior to the Nes..it had a...disk drive, OMG...hello writter the C64/Speccy had those, plus you could connect standard CD drives up to them later in life to play games by Codemasters+Rainbow arts on.

The NES PAL libary holds an incredible amount of depth-So, where's say NES Lords Of Midnight? Bloodwych?The Sentinel? Ultima series?Wasteland? Space Rogue? it's wide range of Microprose sims? it's SSI Wargames etc?.

Long before...the Four Score you could find 4 controller ports on the Atari 8 bit Micro, oddly not mentioned in this piece.

Sorry US readers, please do not, if you ever come across this item, take it as true version of how the Pal NES is considered amongst a lot of us who love our retro.It's a neat little system, but i cannot believe what i'm reading here.....opening slags the 2600 for being dated, yet that was exactly what NES was time UK got it....

No idea how this 'article' made it to print, to be 100% fair to RG, in past they'd been more than honest when it came to dealing with the NES, 'happy' to list the flaws with NES arcade conversions like Operation Wolf, Rainbow Islands and Double Dragon, then suddenly they are unable to find a review of Kid Icarus and a collectors article like this appears.

Here is that NES advert for you, was a bit of pain to convert to a JPG:

(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/NESAdvert_zps3f07a44d.jpg)

That helps explain the mystery. Your all closet Nintendo Fans.

The History Of Excite Bike, something that left likes of TGM stone cold (58%) in with track editor, but NO, cannot mention that, can though mention how was 1 of best selling Jap launch titles, got ported, yadda yadda.So, again, all 1 sided, no downsides mentioned onto the Little-Known NES Racers section of that piece:

Mach Rider mentioned, hmnn, no sign of poor UK scores (58%, 636/1000 etc).

Rad Racer then any mention of 7/10 score, sadly no, just all praise.

If 'we' on here are happy to put down the flaws in systems we've bought (i've been vocal on downside of MCD, Jaguar etc) then i'd expect equal balance in a professional publication.Why i wonder are flaws in some NES games pointed out, but not others? no game, let alone any system 'classic' is without fault, so why not mention them? explain if they were resolved in future instalments etc?.

And..bloody hell, good or as bad as series are, devoting 8-Pages to them in 1 issue?

Complete history Of Metroid:again, became a huge hit in the west-No mention of how UK press or gamers took to it (or in fact did'nt warm to it to degree they did in the States), just the US point of view, IF RG is trying to appeal to US readership, err how about you inform rather than repeat what they probably already know, if it was a huge hit, chances are your readership bought it! what they might not know, but be interested to find out, is how the UK took to it!.

Reading:The History Of Wizards And warriors piece in RG, thinking, this will be good, considering just how the UK press scored the games (well 1st 2) 72%/74% and 77% from reviews i've read...

Hmmn 6 pages devoted to the trilogy, no sign of a 'what the press said ages ago...' box out, mentions 0.5  million sales in USA and 50,000 in Europe (but no UK specific sales figures) for Ironsword, no review scores..ahh whats this? ohh.....'following strong sales and mostly positive reviews of Ironsword....' hang on, woah, back up there, 'mostly positive'.....'mostly'..ok, fine so from who? where? what were they? US reviews? European? want to give us at least 1 publication name or a score? you've done it for other games and looks like the article has the space.No? nothing...how very bizzare.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"The Collectors Guide:NES....

...



Sorry US readers, please do not, if you ever come across this item, take it as true version of how the Pal NES is considered amongst a lot of us who love our retro.It's a neat little system, but i cannot believe what i'm reading here.....opening slags the 2600 for being dated, yet that was exactly what NES was time UK got it...

Another excellent point there RT and one I hadn't previously considered.

It's bad enough that the likes of RG (and other sources - see previous posts) have been complicit in this pro-Nintendo historical revisionism within the UK but I'd not thought of the wider implication you've just highlighted. RG is indeed also sold in North America so any otherwise ignorant RG readers in the USA would have read said appalling article and be of the impression that NES was a success here too.

As you've posted your own observations with regard to said article from RG issue 101 here's what I posted about it at the time. It's the post which led to a flurry of other folk posting of their shock at how woeful the article's claims were.

QuoteWhat's with this month's 'The Collector's Guide'?

* "Upon its US launch... the NES, refuelled the country's dying videogame industry."
- Implies Nintendo did this alone. See martyg's fine article in RG 100 for what actually happened.

* "Prior to the console's European release, gamers had been drowning in an ocean of low-quality software... while home computers began to suffer from a heavily saturated market of homemade releases."
- Seriously, just how much more wrong could both claims in that sentence be? Revisionist history at its worst or simply plain ignorance?

* "Nintendo was aware of these issues and proceeded to offer gamers the lifeline they had been crying out for."
- Does the writer know anything about what the UK/European gaming scene was like in late '86 when the NES launched here? A time when games for the 8-bit micros were truly hitting their stride and when the ST & Amiga were new on the scene. Utterly ludicrous.

* "... state of the art visuals and a stunning audio chip"
- a gross exaggeration.

* "... the revolutionary console..."
- What, the NES? Seriously?

* "If there is anything Nintendo is known for, it's innovation."
- Oh dear, oh dear, that old chestnut again.

* "The Japanese gaming giant has always known how we want to enjoy our games, years in advance."
- Another ridiculous claim largely without merit.

And finally, the 'Collector Q&A' box-out states, "The NES was a smash hit in every country apart from the UK." Oh really?

Don't get me wrong, articles in RG can be great when they show passion and enthusiasm for any particular game or system. This article at times does something quite different though. It crosses the line into the territory of rabid fanboyism brimming with unproven claims, factual inaccuracies and revisionist history. In such instances the magazine's journalistic integrity risks coming into question, imho. A major let-down in an otherwise excellent issue of RG.

At least with that final quote (highlighted in red) the clearly clueless interviewee (a NES collector) admitted that NES wasn't a success in the UK. The fact that this interview response absolutely contradicts the author's own claims (as quoted) would appear to be lost on the author... to further compound just what an appalling piece of journalism it was.

So, yes, to echo RT's well made point, any American forum members who happen to own RG issue 101 please take note of this thread! RG let loose a clueless Nintendo fanboy to pen that article and quite evidently failed in its duty to the readership to perform even the most cursory of fact checking on it before green lighting it to be published.

There was a time I took what I read in RG as gospel. More fool me. Since reading the article in question I quickly came to the realisation that the magazine is sometimes no better than the nonsense uttered by fanboys on the internet. I still buy the magazine but no longer have much faith that what I'm reading is guaranteed to be accurate any more. A permanent loss of credibility, so to speak. If that sounds overly harsh then I would point out that the very same author has somewhat incredulously been allowed to write another article since issue 101 and that (Mega Drive Collector's Guide) was an afront to quality videogaming journalism too.

Not being a NES owner i honestly only skimmed through the articles i've quoted and like DC, took the approach that what was written was pretty much 'Gospel'-Had'nt bothered with the collectors artice before, as did'nt plan to collect for NES.


But as DC points out, there is a real danger of someone from USA or elsewhere who's an interest in the UK scene, could read 1 or more NES related articles in RG and come away with a very false impression.

There was a time i could read an article in the magazine on a subject i thought i knew pretty much the ins and outs of and still find it etertaining and learnt new things on.I fear those days are not going to be arriving with anything NES related.

Prior to starting this thread i thought it was just my reading of the material, folks on here would explain how, in thier experience, whilst the wording might not be perfect, the general gist of the pieces was pretty spot on, thats how the sh*t went down, i should'nt take UK press scores so seriousily on NES, try playing NES games rather than quoting scores or worrying too much.But..having read the responses and now the articles in full, armed with that knowledge, the wording of said articles has left me with a rather sour taste.In a good few cases it's not what has been written, but whats been left out, anything that paints subject material in a less than OMG, we loved it, type light, glossed over or ignored.

That's not good, for a UK mag to act as if the west meant:well States loved it, ergo so did the UK...poor show, poor show indeed.

Just hit the motherload, scans of NES reviews from the C&VG console guide:

(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00069_zps198c7df9.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00070_zps4682ca3a.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00071_zps572e1a84.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00072_zpsd7c5b410.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00073_zps855e8e0a.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00074_zps784109ac.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00075_zpsfd2706f1.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00076_zps85307535.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00077_zpsf788fb4b.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00078_zpsd5e56f47.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00079_zps3e358a79.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00080_zps7fa67cbb.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00081_zps741273a1.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00082_zpsa2e3f015.jpg)
(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00083_zpsac16943c.jpg)(http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z280/mrkizza/comgucon00084_zpse07ffc15.jpg)

Was looking at those myself, earlier and look at some of those scores, how on earth that RG NES collectors guide can say Europe was drowning in sea of sub standard games prior to NES arriving and NES brought quality etc is beyond me.

That guide has the 1st review score i've seen of Wizards And warriors being in the 80's, lol.

Checked out some EGM scores of NES games:


Festers Quest 20/40
Op.Wolf 25/40
Q*Bert 18/40

Iron Sword 29/40

So seems some US press rated NES games similar to UK Press eh RG, lol!

Few more from RAZE

They did'nt go too much on Cpat.Skyhawk either, saying it was'nt an original game, just composite of elements from 3 classics (Stargoose, Afterburner+Elite)-not sure i'd call Stargoose a classic myself, but there you go-also, game suffered from too much repetition. Overall 68%



They did love NES Defender Of The Crown though, said it was more playable than the Amiga original, sound almost as good, just surprised it took so long to appear overall 86%

Great scans from C+VG there, Laird.

So, yet again some of the so-called NES 'classics' that much of the gaming media of today constantly worship and the fanboys scream 'hater!' when one dares to post an opinion that's contrary to the hive mindset were just as I/we remember them being.

Balloon Fight - 74% - "a bit dull after a few games"
Castlevania - 80%
Donkey Kong - 45% - "isn't a bad arcade conversion... not enough in it to sustain interest"
Donkey Kong Jr - 46% - "what a stinker!"
Ice Climber - 58% - "laughably simplistic"
Kid Icaraus - 68%
Legend of Zelda - 86%
Metal Gear - 52% - "not a game to put high on your shopping list"
Metroid - 80%
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles - 86%

Sure, a few games were rated highly but the vast majority, including a number of the, ahem, NES 'classics' failed to score 90% or above with some of them falling well below that benchmark.

Once more, this is exactly how I remember things to have been back in the day. A console released here that was too little too late with a handful of decent, albeit mostly rather simplistic, games in its obscenely priced games library.

It was no surprise at all that the NES bombed so spectacularly in the UK and numerous other European countries. The only real susprise, imho, is that it managed to do so well in the USA.

I've spent good lot of time trawling all the multi-formats i have here, in order to paint the NES reaction as i'm calling it, at the time from UK press, thinking was the more sources, the more balanced the picture....

Evidence is simply there for all to see, UK press did not go mental when games like Metroid, Castlevania, Wizards Ad Warriors, Kid Ic., Excite Bike hit, things like Cpt Skyhawk split reviewers and the general feeling of conversions to the NES are:

Why has it taken so long to appear?, Why's it so expensive and..it remains playable despite the NES hardware :-)

Quote from ACE review of Rush 'N' Attack on NES: 'Good, Tough arcade conversion, that does'nt suffer from the NES's naff graphics'.

I had just 2 NES owning buddies as a nipper, and not many more owned a SMS. Most of my mates didn't enter console ownership until the MD and SNES era. And totally missed out on the majesty of PCE. Fools.

Quote from: "Crusto"... Most of my mates didn't enter console ownership until the MD and SNES era.

Precisely. The example you've given of most of your friends' entering the world of console gaming first with Mega Drive then SNES is entirely representative of the general experience in the UK back then. Most folk had stuck with their 8-bit home micros or had moved on to the 16-bit ST or Amiga by circa 1990. Only a minority of those bought a Sega Master System and a tiny fraction of them bought a NES.

Once the Mega Drive arrived on these shores things began to change quite dramatically with vast numbers of gamers moving away from home computers toward Sega's 16-bit console. The ST and Amiga continued being popular as gaming platforms for a while longer but eventually ebbed away in the face of Mega Drive, SNES and PC. The NES simply didn't come into the equation at all for the vast overwhelming majority of gamers here.

I had numerous friends back then who owned an ST or Amiga plus a Mega Drive or SNES. Not one of them owned a NES... because hardly anyone here in the UK did given that its sales were so abominably low.

Been messing abart :-) with a NES emulator since creating this thread, wanted to get the mag research and fellow posters views across 1st, before i posted on my findings, plus never sure how spot on emulation is, would assume NES would be easy enough to reproduce, anywho for what it's worth:

Impression of NES seems to be it had better sprite definition than C64 and the extra colours on screen when used, could make a lot of difference, things like Bionic Commando, Alien 3, Narc, Alien Syndrome looked lot better than the C64  versions i played, but we are talking tape VS Cart as well, so guess that's a factor.Batman, tricky one as looks great, but it's running off enhanced cart on NES, not stock hardware.

Audio though, now bearing in mind what that collectors article in RG said about the sound chip, i'd say it's easily better than the Speccy or MS chips, in places as good as the A8 Pokey, but it's NO C64 SID chip.

Really missing the SID music from Follin in Bionic Commando, Hubbard in Commando, etc.Arkanoid  and Ghost's and Goblins were others  i so wanted the C64 music playing.Did like Alien 3 music though.

Nes seemed very good at doing static screens, ie title pages, intro's etc, but then again i guess 52 colours on screen helped as did the memory avaiable on cartridge, hard pressed to cram all that into a C64 tape based game, without multi-loads.

Will delve a little deeper, so far? seen nothing that would have drawn me away from the C64, was more than happy with it, eyes set firmly on the ST, plus even on emulator, noticed lot of sprite flicker in cases (where i had options to reduce this turned off) read of this issue in good few NES reviews as well, so wonder just how much of an issue this was on the system?



Ohh and wtf happened to Boulderdash on NES? Where's Rockford from the A8/C64 games?.

Been looking at few old issues of Gamestm (Retro section) things like:

NES Metal Gear advert from USA, Mega-Man Family tree, Castlevania series collectors guide (they describe NES original as having stiff controls, garish colours) and Castlevania II (aged badly, but important jewel in Castlevania Crown) seem to suggest again, that these were games 'we' went ape for over in UK, which we honestly did not, as quoted review scores have proven.

By all means put the ads/features in there, but please explain the reaction they had over here at the time.All i ask for is balance.

NES emulation is spot-on from what I have found.

The NES sound chip is pretty decent, it's especially good at playing samples/digitised speech for a system of its age. My only problem with it is that it sounds a bit plinky plonky a lot of the time and doesn't seem to have much bass. I am not going to compare it to SID because I honestly never thought SID was all that amazing.

Interesting you mentioned about the extra hardware in the Batman cartridge because this did pretty much become the norm for NES games. Most of, if not all, the more advanced NES games featured extra hardware on the carts be it mappers, extra RAM or Konami sound chip. This is another thing that annoys me when the NES fanboys start crowing about certain games and how they were so much better than anything on the "crappy" 7800. There are only a few 7800 games that have extra RAM on the cart and a couple with POKEY chips but it was never exploited anywhere near as much as it was with the NES.

Lots of great discussion in this thread.

I'm not a big fan of the NES (flicker!), but if you're browsing games with an emulator it looks like you've missed a few of the classics like Contra/Super C (Probotector), Lifeforce/Gradius, Punchout!, RC Pro Am 2, River City Ransom, and Blades of Steel. There wouldn't be many games on my personal list of NES favorites, but those would be most of my top 10. Looks like many of them scored well with UK reviewers too?

Played Contra previousily, great game (sprite flicker aside), Same goes for Lifeforce, not keen on sports games or racing little cars on any format, so i passed on these.Did try a few others though, plus found something i was not expecting on Family friendly Nintendo!!!!

Ok so tried:Platoon-increased colours helped create great jungle scheme, but the sound chip was shi**ing the SID track out, took away a lot of the atmosphere, did like the intro scenes though.

Robocop 1+2-are they F-ing kidding me here? wretched main sprite, awful music on both, give me the Speccy original or even C64 orig.anyday.Robocop 3? assume by SID track NES trying to play (not bad actually) it's a C64 port? never played C64 Robocop 3, just know of the music.

Predator-errrm, awful, no idea what to do, mind you found the C64 orig case of great visuals, but poor, over-rated game.

Rambo-Green Beret affair it looks like, not even decent music to save it, which i had on C64 Rambo (different game again though).

Skate Or Die-Got as far as the title screen music-adding speech to it might be technically clever, but bravo, you've just slaughtered a classic SID track!


and of course, i HAD to check out:

Porno Island (1997 Porno Games) not an official release i'd guess :-) Wonderboy but with Ron J. as main sprite? throwing meat 'n' 2 veg at snails etc with f**k me on their shells? blimey!....

Quote from: "The Laird"NES emulation is spot-on from what I have found.

The NES sound chip is pretty decent, it's especially good at playing samples/digitised speech for a system of its age. My only problem with it is that it sounds a bit plinky plonky a lot of the time and doesn't seem to have much bass. I am not going to compare it to SID because I honestly never thought SID was all that amazing.

Interesting you mentioned about the extra hardware in the Batman cartridge because this did pretty much become the norm for NES games. Most of, if not all, the more advanced NES games featured extra hardware on the carts be it mappers, extra RAM or Konami sound chip. This is another thing that annoys me when the NES fanboys start crowing about certain games and how they were so much better than anything on the "crappy" 7800. There are only a few 7800 games that have extra RAM on the cart and a couple with POKEY chips but it was never exploited anywhere near as much as it was with the NES.

It's the SID music i miss on a lot of the C64-NES ports or Software Creation/Elite versions done by others on NES.

Thought only NES Batman had enhancements on cart till i read your post, looked into it and woah...so as soon as developers said they were running out of room on NES carts Nintendo (and others) came out with enhancement chips to increase memory and take strain off CPU and do bank switching etc? no bloody wonder NES games are packed with opening scenes etc, so to properly compare a C64 game to a later stage NES game, i'd have to be looking at C64 examples like Ocean's: Battle Command-128K? cart, data continually being pulled off it or Navy Seals-lush backdrops+Sprites, intermission scenes etc...

Cheers Laird that puts entire new perspective on things.....

Quote from: "tomwaits"Lots of great discussion in this thread.

I'm not a big fan of the NES (flicker!), but if you're browsing games with an emulator it looks like you've missed a few of the classics like Contra/Super C (Probotector), Lifeforce/Gradius, Punchout!, RC Pro Am 2, River City Ransom, and Blades of Steel. There wouldn't be many games on my personal list of NES favorites, but those would be most of my top 10. Looks like many of them scored well with UK reviewers too?

Looking at the Mean Machines magazine of the games listed that they have on the site archive I see,

Probotector - 73% - "slightly ropey control method... It's fun at first, due to the fact that you can get pretty far into the game, but once you've completed it, it all gets rather predictable... this really can't be recommended"

Life Force - 86% - "retains almost all of the major ingredients that made its arcade parent so enjoyable. The graphics and sound are as close as one could hope for"

Blades of Steel - 79% - "the graphics, although a bit flickery at times are for the most part well-detailed with decent animation. Lastability is perhaps questionable"

Source: http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/format ... system.php (http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/formats/4/nintendo-entertainment-system.php)

So, yet more so-called NES 'classics' that were no such thing here in the UK.

Gwaaaaaaaaaaaad! now this is exactly the kind of paid for, utter claptrap i'm talking of featuring in 'todays' UK press:


Gamestm-Promotional Feature-Back In The Day.....A look back at the decade that taste forgot.

A tie-in with the Nes themed GBA SP and 'NES Classic' games.

According to this, those of us growing up in the 1980's watched things like:Thundercats, danger Mouse, Dungeons+Dragons, Battle Of The planets, the Moomims (Guilty as charged there!), rentaghost and Knight rider (all fair cops guv, watched and fondly recal..)

but THIS piece: Flashback-a Quality Slice Of retro Gaming:

'The best thing about the 80's? The advent of home gaming, thanks largely to the Nintendo Entertainment System'

Here we go again, the NES saved the 80's for us gamers!!! If your going to tell a lie, make it a good one, but this is utter bollox.

It goes onto mention: '8 classic games from the decade that nostalgia freaks won't let you forget'

Super Mario Bros:'Put simply, Mario was the gaming icon of the 80's.....the most perfect platform adventure of his time-If not all time'

And the UK press agreed did it Nintendo? did it Fuc......


Donkey Kong, Excite Bike escape my anger, but.....


Ice Climber 'There's no doubt this is another classic Nintendo platformer'-well, yes, there is doubt, we've just proven that with review scores.Next......

The Legend Of Zelda 'Undeniably the greatest adventure game of it's time...Zelda set the standard then and the franchise sets the standard today!'.

Bomberman-well, no mention of huge number of formats it's appeared on, other than the NES....

Pacman-well, here they have had to admit it's appeared on countless other systems.

Xevious-slagged by UK press, oddly not much said about.

The irony here? in same section this appears in:

Clash of the titans looks at C64/Speccy and CPC versions of Gryzor-so we clearly did'nt need a NES to play that! ohh and there's the advert (1987) and the prices (£7.95+£8.95) and how much was NES version?

Classic Machine..is it the NES? Noooo it's The Atari Lynx 5-page feature.

Advert for Outrun (Sega-various home formats) 1988.

Head Over Heels in love with RETROlook at retrospec, updates to games we were playing in the 80's like Head Over Heels, Skool Daze, Chuckie Egg, Sabre wulf, Trial Blazer, Deflector, Jetman, Highway Pursuit, exolon, Cybernoid II etc

Greatest retro Game Ever..is it Super Mario Bros? nooo, it's Sega's Outrun arcade 1986, overall 96%


Or Gunfright CPC 1986 Overall 86%

Machine of the month awarded to...NES? No Atari Lynx lol....


Sooo remind me again Nintendo, just what the NES did for us exactly in the 1980's here in the UK?

That's quite frankly appalling, RT. Exactly the kind of revisionist nonsense we've exposed from numerous different sources in this ongoing great thread.

So it's not just RG from the current Imagine Publishing stable that have been guilty of publishing such utter nonsense because their gamesTM magazine has committed the same offence too. Interesting... to say the least.

The gamesTM article you've quoted from reads like a Nintendo puff piece. Shocking stuff.

Is the name of its author provided as I'm now wondering if it's the same clueless individual responsible for the aforementioned 'NES Collector's Guide' from RG 101?

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"Looking at the Mean Machines magazine of the games listed that they have on the site archive I see,

Probotector - 73% - "slightly ropey control method... It's fun at first, due to the fact that you can get pretty far into the game, but once you've completed it, it all gets rather predictable... this really can't be recommended"

Life Force - 86% - "retains almost all of the major ingredients that made its arcade parent so enjoyable. The graphics and sound are as close as one could hope for"

Blades of Steel - 79% - "the graphics, although a bit flickery at times are for the most part well-detailed with decent animation. Lastability is perhaps questionable"

Source: http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/format ... system.php (http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/formats/4/nintendo-entertainment-system.php)

So, yet more so-called NES 'classics' that were no such thing here in the UK.

If you look at my reviews on this very site you will see that reviewed both Life Force and Blades Of Steel. I thought Life Force was a pretty good conversion albeit quite flickery and gave it a 7. Blades Of Steel got an 8 from me though, probably one of my favourite NES games.

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/index.php?page=nes (http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/index.php?page=nes)

And as RT mentioned Ice Climber again, I gave that 9/10 and proclaimed it one of the best games on the system. For me this game doesn't get mentioned as much as it should, the platform games you always here about are Super Mario, Kirby and Megaman. I personally think Ice Climber is much more fun than any of them.

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"That's quite frankly appalling, RT. Exactly the kind of revisionist nonsense we've exposed from numerous different sources in this ongoing great thread.

So it's not just RG from the current Imagine Publishing stable that have been guilty of publishing such utter nonsense because their gamesTM magazine has committed the same offence too. Interesting... to say the least.

The gamesTM article you've quoted from reads like a Nintendo puff piece. Shocking stuff.

Is the name of its author provided as I'm now wondering if it's the same clueless individual responsible for the aforementioned 'NES Collector's Guide' from RG 101?

I'd wager it's a paid for piece by Nintendo that's put in the form of a Gamestm feature (Microprose used to do silmilar years back with ahem, reviews..of Airborne Ranger etc) so i'll give them the 'honesty' bonus as marking it as a promotonial piece, not some hey we've this feature on a NES classic, that just happens to be in an issue when a follow up is out on Nintendo's latest handheld...unlike some i could mention....

But you've got to laugh, Nintendo pay lord knows how much money on a full 2-page advert, proclaiming they saved the 80's for gamers in UK and it's buried in a section where every other feature proves just how wrong on an epic scale the claims are.




b

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"That's quite frankly appalling, RT. Exactly the kind of revisionist nonsense we've exposed from numerous different sources in this ongoing great thread.

So it's not just RG from the current Imagine Publishing stable that have been guilty of publishing such utter nonsense because their gamesTM magazine has committed the same offence too. Interesting... to say the least.

The gamesTM article you've quoted from reads like a Nintendo puff piece. Shocking stuff.

Is the name of its author provided as I'm now wondering if it's the same clueless individual responsible for the aforementioned 'NES Collector's Guide' from RG 101?

I'd wager it's a paid for piece by Nintendo that's put in the form of a Gamestm feature (Microprose used to do silmilar years back with ahem, reviews..of Airborne Ranger etc) so i'll give them the 'honesty' bonus as marking it as a promotonial piece, not some hey we've this feature on a NES classic, that just happens to be in an issue when a follow up is out on Nintendo's latest handheld...unlike some i could mention....

But you've got to laugh, Nintendo pay lord knows how much money on a full 2-page advert, proclaiming they saved the 80's for gamers in UK and it's buried in a section where every other feature proves just how wrong on an epic scale the claims are.




b

Would you care to clarify whether said gamesTM article is a Nintendo advert or advertorial or whether it's a normal article in the magazine written by one of the magazine's staff/freelancers?

Only asking because I'm a little confused by what you've said.

:-) it's a confusing piece.It's written and presented as a feature in said RETRO section of Gamestm, has 'Gamestm promotional feature written in 'small print', no writer named, but it's written in a manner as if it was a 'normal' piece, ie here's another chunk of it...


'in celebration of Nintendo's latest rose-tinted venture, it's time to look back at what made the 1980's so good (without using the term 'skill' once-honest)'

then under the Toon Time-Your life in pictures:
'so, we'll just give you what are, in many peoples opinion, the top 5 80's cartoons.Please don't send in your top five's though-this top 5 is skill, and we'll here no more about it' then devotes good 3/5 page to said cartoons etc.

to me it smacks of a very clever, paid for piece, disclaimer at top in far smaller text than main body headline text, written as if Gamestm just happen to be looking back at the 1980's (hence the cartoon+TV show stuff, day-glo laces etc), but it's clear Nintendo have paid for those 2 pages, which would other wise been used for 'normal' adverts.


Kinda stealth marketing, it's an advert, but we'll fool you into thinking it's a magazine feature (and legally we have to make note it's a promotional feature rather than a vanilla type feature).written as if from the 3rd person, just looking at Nintendo's range rather than 'our range of...'


it differs from the NES Classic ranges ads i've seen in earlier issues of RG, never seen a promotional piece like it elsewhere, so i'd guess it's a joint-venture between Nintendo and Highbury Entertainment, ie Nintendo told Highbury what they were after, Highbury's art dept etc came up with the feature.



the please don't send it...bit, very clever, makes reader think it must be from Gamestm, but they clearly want nothing to do with it (other than get advertising revenue for the 2-pages, last thing they want is people responding to them about it).

@Laird:how do you get on with the controls in Ice Climber? only ask as reader reviews i've read online seem to say the forward jump aspect is heavily flawed and leads to frustration.Plus lot of folks find game soon becomes tiresome and these are from NES sites....

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper":-) it's a confusing piece.It's written and presented as a feature in said RETRO section of Gamestm, has 'Gamestm promotional feature written in 'small print', no writer named, but it's written in a manner as if it was a 'normal' piece, ie here's another chunk of it...


'in celebration of Nintendo's latest rose-tinted venture, it's time to look back at what made the 1980's so good (without using the term 'skill' once-honest)'

then under the Toon Time-Your life in pictures:
'so, we'll just give you what are, in many peoples opinion, the top 5 80's cartoons.Please don't send in your top five's though-this top 5 is skill, and we'll here no more about it' then devotes good 3/5 page to said cartoons etc.

to me it smacks of a very clever, paid for piece, disclaimer at top in far smaller text than main body headline text, written as if Gamestm just happen to be looking back at the 1980's (hence the cartoon+TV show stuff, day-glo laces etc), but it's clear Nintendo have paid for those 2 pages, which would other wise been used for 'normal' adverts.


Kinda stealth marketing, it's an advert, but we'll fool you into thinking it's a magazine feature (and legally we have to make note it's a promotional feature rather than a vanilla type feature).written as if from the 3rd person, just looking at Nintendo's range rather than 'our range of...'


it differs from the NES Classic ranges ads i've seen in earlier issues of RG, never seen a promotional piece like it elsewhere, so i'd guess it's a joint-venture between Nintendo and Highbury Entertainment, ie Nintendo told Highbury what they were after, Highbury's art dept etc came up with the feature.



the please don't send it...bit, very clever, makes reader think it must be from Gamestm, but they clearly want nothing to do with it (other than get advertising revenue for the 2-pages, last thing they want is people responding to them about it).

Sounds like an advertorial to me, albeit one of dubious intentions in how it seemingly seeks to present itself as a legitimate piece of journalism written by gamesTM magazine itself... legalese small print excepted.

Now you've established that Imagine Publishing engage in such business arrangements with Nintendo I'll now be on the look out for similar such legalese small print in RG magazine from now on to have an awareness of whether the article I'm reading is by the publication itself or a trumped up Nintendo advert.

*It was in Gamestm when they were published by Highbury Entertainment-a wholly owned subsidary of Highbury House Communications PLC

Phew, legal bit out the way, LOl


No, honest to god it's the 1 and only Ninteno 'promotional piece' (aka advert) i've ever seen presented this way, the normal NES classics ranges ads just had some 80's spoof thing (Kiss look-alikes etc), nowt like this.

Did'nt do Gamestm any favours in my eyes!.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"*It was in Gamestm when they were published by Highbury Entertainment-a wholly owned subsidary of Highbury House Communications PLC

Phew, legal bit out the way, LOl

Ah, thanks for that important clarification. That renders my concern no longer valid.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"@Laird:how do you get on with the controls in Ice Climber? only ask as reader reviews i've read online seem to say the forward jump aspect is heavily flawed and leads to frustration.Plus lot of folks find game soon becomes tiresome and these are from NES sites....

I don't have a problem with it. Sure the game is a little repetitive but in the way Bubble Bobble is, it's so much fun you don't really notice. Especially in 2-player mode.

If you want a comparison of the NES with the 7800 then have a look at this thread:

http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/http:/ ... ic.php?t=1 (http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1)

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"@Laird:how do you get on with the controls in Ice Climber? only ask as reader reviews i've read online seem to say the forward jump aspect is heavily flawed and leads to frustration.Plus lot of folks find game soon becomes tiresome and these are from NES sites....

I don't have a problem with it. Sure the game is a little repetitive but in the way Bubble Bobble is, it's so much fun you don't really notice. Especially in 2-player mode.

I don't want to go off-topic here, as the gist of my thread is about how the NES was treated in it's prime, not how it's viewed by todays gamers (although i've been 'guilty' of that on my comments about games i tried on emulation, but i badly want to regain the original focus of thread), reason i asked about the controls were from the fact reviews i've read when it was released in UK at the time seem to stress this and the fact game soon sucumbs to repetition, is reason it scored the way it did back then and was in no way seen as a NES classic to the UK press.

Plus as mentioned that Gamestm 'article' makes out there's NO doubt it's a classic, when it seemed in fact to be a Marmite game back then, hence not many talk about it now.

A NES VS 7800 and or C64 could make for a very interesting thread on it's own, but not sure how fair it would be as NES carts featuring extra memory etc would have a distinct advantage, but that's a debate for another day.

What i'm attempting to draw attention to here, is just how modern media  are happy to falsely protray a series of events just to satisfy it seems the need to make a publication suitable for todays US market, the fact is that review scores from original UK NES release era are ignored because it would go again'st the grain, adverts are dressed up to look like magazine features and things like the fact NES carts were soon beefed up, is just glossed over and in fact seems a taboo subject in these articles.


There's something amiss in the print industry these past few years, i'm going to continue digging and posting 'finds' on here, hopefully to get further discussion going and i welcome the finds of others.

I'll look forward to your findings. I've never really looked into it before but now youve made me aware its pretty obvious theres some selective journalism going on in terms of the NES.

Quote from: "Crusto"I'll look forward to your findings. I've never really looked into it before but now youve made me aware its pretty obvious theres some selective journalism going on in terms of the NES.

I'll be 100% honest, when i started digging, i thought, possible 'danger' thread would appear too anti-NES or look like cheap pop at RG articles etc or trainspotters award for quoting old mag scores (yawn), but then further i 'researched' the clearer the picture became.Metroid/Castlevania/Metal Gear etc were just not getting the reception i expected, Wizards And warriors seemed niche at best, Rare's output recived mix reviews, so i just could'nt figure out why UK mags of last few years were devoting so much space to making the format appear far better recived than it was in UK.

That 'Adverticle' as i'm calling it Gamestm, honestly did shock me, never seen anything like it promoting a NES range now on handhelds, anywhere else and i read an awful lot of mags. :-).


It's just proven to be a driving force now, i need to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.I've moaned at 'stunts' pulled by EDGE and Zzap 64 in the past, but this.....hmnnn.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"A NES VS 7800 and or C64 could make for a very interesting thread on it's own, but not sure how fair it would be as NES carts featuring extra memory etc would have a distinct advantage, but that's a debate for another day.

There is one, I already linked it for you.

Looking at quote from Ghosts 'N' Goblins reviewd on NES in ACE:

'The trouble with the Nintendo (NES), is that despite it having a libary of coin-op conversions far larger than any other console or computer' the machine lacks the graphical power to emulate them effectively' -it then goes onto describe how NES lack of grunt is'nt an issue for games like the Mario series designed with NES confines in mind, but when Nintendo were looking to secure as many newer coin-op's to NES as they could, the NES just did'nt have the power to do them justice.

so get impression it was seen as a double edged sword by lot of UK press...

Just had to update thread with these, yet further proof of how UK press reacted to NES games to start with, these from Game zone:

Addams Family 2/5 'all the sparkle of a week old kipper...poor graphics....one of the worst control systems..worst playability you could hope to see'

Bad Dudes 2/5

Bionic Commando 2/5 'Ker splat, ker pow, what a load of crap'

Californa Games 1/5 'It's got poor graphics, annoying sound...'

Double Dragon 2/5 'below par beat em up, with poor graphics and frustrating gameplay'

Donkey Kong Classic 2/5

Double Dragon II 1/5 'Not quite as good as the original, if that's possible'

Duck Hunt 1/5 'crap and ideologically unsound too.Nice one Nintendo'

Iron Sword 3/5

Kung Fu 2/5 'Nothing special'

Maniac Mansions 2/5 '....Nearly £60 for a game is just not on.M.M is placed firmly in Nintendo rip-off land'

Metal Gear 2/5 'Nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing worth playing'

Paperboy 1/5 '...almost unplayable'

Probotector 3/5 'Not really worth the price'

Robocop 1/5 '..a real stinker'

Ski Or Die 1/5 '..let the boredom begin'

Solstice 2/5 'hmmn.a pale version of Cadaver...Not much good at all'

Track And Field 2 2/5 'Not very interesting'

Wizards and warriors 2/5 ' Poor sword and sorcery adventure'

Lol and some say the NES saved UK from poor quality software?

Now few quotes from ARCADE magazine looking back at NES history in UK:

'Mattel was unceremoniosly dumped as Nintendo's distributor in the UK, after a particularly poor performance.The NES had died a Saturn-styled death in UK, and no new games had been released since the machines debut.This left the Sega Master system to steal all the glory'


And from:'The Dominination Game' feature on console wars through history-

The early console years-Sega Vs Nintendo:winner-No Score Draw

'Although the NES had done fabulously well in Japan and the US, in the UK, where home computers were all the rage, interest in consoles was small'



So if ARCADE could paint a true picture, why have magazines since then struggled to follow suit?.
 

UPDATE:

Few more Game Zone scores:

Capt.skyhawk 1/5 '...the worst gameplay you are ever likely to see'

Smash TV 1/5 ' Oh dear oh dear oh dear.a very, very poor version of the arcade smash.Truly awful, truly boring'

Wrestle Mania 1/5 'One of the saddest games i have yet seen'

Some eye opening magazine review scores from back in the day there and props for posting them, RT.

Yet more indisputable evidence from the era that those in the UK were left distinctly unimpressed by the NES and many of its so-called 'classic' games.

Just imagine if I or someone else were to post comments such as some of those from that magazine on a typical UK-centric gaming forum today. There'd be a flood of UK-based Nintendo fanboys coming out of the woodwork calling that person a troll and screaming that the games in question are stone cold 'classics' like it were an accepted fact.

whatever folks might think of the reviewer, i have to say i admire his or her honesty, lol.

I'd welcome any one coming onto here from another forum saying Game zone was Anti-NES as this is the same publication who awarded Mega Zone awards to NES:

Mega Man II, New Zealand Story, Solar Jetman, Starwars, Super Mario Bros 3, NES Golf, Mega Man III,  etc


But reviewer differences of opinion aside from various mags, there is simply no escaping the facts that in what-7 different multi-format magazines, reviewers in the main were not thanking the NES for delivering the quality, nor annoucing it's games as future classics, but simply left cold.

Sad thing is, despite the now over-whelming evidence of how NES software was recived in UK, along with the sales of the NES, todays press etc will still paint the NES as this UK saviour, which is just laughable and yep, i'd be called a troll and much worse, just for trying to present the evidence in response to a genuine question as to why a series of events is being spoken of as gospel, when there's not a shred of evidence to suggest the events actually happened as described.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... there is simply no escaping the facts that in what-7 different multi-format magazines, reviewers in the main were not thanking the NES for delivering the quality, nor annoucing it's games as future classics, but simply left cold.

Quoted for truth. Well said, RT.

This thread is nothing to do with ragging on Nintendo and/or the NES albeit I'm sure idiotic fanboys would see it otherwise. The thread is about what you outlined in the OP, no more no less. It's one of the finest threads I've seen on an all-platform gaming forum, tbh.

Thank heavens that places such as RVG exist where rational evidence-based discussion can be had without it being derailed by moronic fanboys. 

QuoteSad thing is, despite the now over-whelming evidence of how NES software was recived in UK, along with the sales of the NES, todays press etc will still paint the NES as this UK saviour, which is just laughable

Not to nitpick but it's only elements of today's retro gaming media that have acted so irresponsibly. I'd imagine there are a fair number of fanzines, websites, blogs, etc, out there that do actually know their arse from their elbow.

Quoteand yep, i'd be called a troll and much worse, just for trying to present the evidence in response to a genuine question as to why a series of events is being spoken of as gospel, when there's not a shred of evidence to suggest the events actually happened as described.

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to such people. I like to remind myself that it's usually only ever the same very small vocal minority of window lickers who endlessly bang on about such things while the majority of folk roll their eyes at them.

I'd have been just as happy to start a thread called:The Atari 8-Bit range in the UK, what really happened? (and same applies for say Sega Saturn in UK or any other format that did'nt fare as well as might of been expected), had certain areas of the press etc decided to re-write the history so it suited a marketing push for sales in the USA or settled a 'debate' on an internet forum (thankfully as you say, here we do discuss and debate issues and offer up thoughts and personal exp.).

Simple facts are that in the publications and other forums i read, history has been re-written and it stinks.There's no real need for it, Nintendo did exactly what others had done, launched a hardware platform when it decided time was right, which was in fact a poor decision as they should have done it lot earlier, that's no real reflection on the hardware or people who bought it.Likes of Arcade etc you can often see talking about say the Atari 7800, fantastic machine, Atari released it years too late and made mistakes with it.NEC's PC Engine, UK was hyped up for it's release, sadly never happened.

Sega, well you could fill a forum on what's been said about MCD, 32X, Saturn etc, yet media keen to continue the myth it was rubbish at 3D, when we've proven it was'nt, just as we have continued to prove that if you look beneath the flaws of the Jaguar, you'll find a powerful system for it's era, with some cracking games.Ditto the 3DO etc.

with the Lynx review's look back, we've proven that the machine was liked by the UK press, yet it continues to be starved of coverage compared to certain other formats in select publications, ohh you'll see the odd feature here, small review there, but drop in the ocean.


Your not nitpicking, far from it, in reality past few months i've drastically cut back on publications i buy, sites i vist, so i am guilty of having a somewhat blinkered vision.

My 'research' for this thread has thrown up more questions than ever and i'm left wondering wether this state i've found key publications in, whom are keen to push a myth basically and turn lukewarm games and series, suddenly into all-time classics and gloss over sales of a format, started out as a slow trickle over time or it was a change in policy brought on by need to seek out new markets?.Guess i'll never know, but next time i read another NES based article, i'll be going in with eyes wide open, where as before i just viewed it from bleary, disinterested eyes.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... Simple facts are that in the publications and other forums i read, history has been re-written and it stinks.

It sure does. I don't recall witnessing anywhere near this degree of revisionism for other consoles and/or brands either which, imho, makes it all the more remarkable.

Sure, the likes of Shenmue (DC) and NiGHTS Into Dreams (Saturn) are often lauded as being so-called clasics when several gaming magazines of the time thought them merely very good but not necessarily great. But I don't see the likes of Altered Beast (MD) and Sonic Adventure (DC) now being held up by numerous sources as now being so-called classics so, imho, the degree of revisionism for other brands doesn't seem as pervasive as it is for NES games.

(I realise I solely listed games for Sega consoles there but I could just as easily have listed games from other brand consoles or computers too)

Quote... i'm left wondering wether this state i've found key publications in, whom are keen to push a myth basically and turn lukewarm games and series, suddenly into all-time classics and gloss over sales of a format, started out as a slow trickle over time or it was a change in policy brought on by need to seek out new markets?

I'd say it's a combination of factors at work such as, but not limited to,

* Some lazy and/or ignorant UK gamers forming their opinions based on having read mostly US-based websites and/or Nintendo fansites, blogs, magazines, etc

* Lazy journalism that essentially is an extension of the above, i.e. lazy and/or ignorant people having been given a more visible platform to state their factually incorrect tripe to a wider audience... thus creating a vicious circle where some of those reading it become part of the group outlined in the above bullet-point

* Nintendo fanboys being allowed to push their opinion stated as fact drivel without challenge

* Bigging up Nintendo IP to attract more custom from the legions of Nintendo fans worldwide, i.e. having a Nintendo-related article seems to pull in more customers which equates to increased revenues

* Bigging up Nintendo IP to keep the advertising revenues ticking over. While we don't know for a fact (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) if Nintendo are complicit in these sort of shenanigans it's certainly something that a great many other games publishers have been complicit in over the years. Given the dubious nature of the aforementioned advertorial published in the pages of gamesTM it does perhaps make one pause for thought

* Nintendo itself being complicit in propogating what essentially amounts to lies (see referenced evidence of this in this very thread)

* Nintendo perhaps having a more, ahem, committed fanbase. Call it a pet theory that due many of Nintendo's IP being of a childish nature it seems to attract the blind loyalty of the more childish and simple minded of adults. That's not the same thing as saying all Nintendo fans of an adult age are all simpletons before anyone tries twisting my words, lol!

All of the above, plus other factors too that didn't spring to mind at the time of posting, would seem to have combined so that 'trickle' has gained momentum over the years to become what is now closer to resembling a torrent. The most obvious example of this I've noticed is the 'Nintendo/NES saved videogaming' tripe that anyone with an ounce of sense knows to be a nonsense. In that particular instance I suspect that interpretation of gaming history was likely first propogated by certain US-based NES/Nintendo fanzines and fansites and it's now been repeated so many times by other such ignorant folk that it's become a received wisdom among a great many gamers, i.e. something they accept as fact when it's very much not a fact.

Two more quotes I've found on the website of Official Nintendo Magazine (UK) in relation to the NES,

QuoteIt succeeded because - unlike what had gone before - the games were great

... No one bought games because there was nothing good to buy

Sources:
http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co. ... tendo-nes/ (http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/12380/features/history-of-nintendo-nes/)
http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co. ... es/?page=7 (http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/43243/best-selling-nintendo-consoles/?page=7)

Oh dear, oh dear.  :24:

@DC you've managed to say what i've had bubbling along in my head for a few wks now in 1 single, well written post there, so my proverbial hat is tipped to you at this moment.

I have witnessed a degree of revision before in magazines, usually in features where they look back at reviews, adjust scores slightly or in case of EDGE-admit they scored GTA 3 and Gunstar Heroes far too low and in the case of Jaguar AVP, whilst at the time they stood by the 4/10 score, they made amends in the (superb) making of feature and then there was Off.Playstation Magazine who were honest enough to say they vastly over-rated Tomb Raider:Angel Of Darkness, but i've yet to see EDGE re-writing the history of the Jaguar or the 3DO in any of the features where the formats are brought up and whilst i'll see numerous people who own or owned the consoles more than happy to sing the machines praises for what games they really delivered on at the time or have sprung up in homebrew, for newcomers to the formats to have a good idea what to look out for, i don't see them 'glossing over' the hardware (or corporations behind them) failings.

Same with the Saturn, realms of text been put down on how it ended up as it did, how SEGA had a chance to use a different chipset, what was going on behind the scenes etc also how they released 2 versions of Daytona USA in attempt to rectify the mistakes of the 1st, but no-where do i see it written that Saturn Daytona USA was a classic conversion.

History of Commodore VS Atari:16 Bit wars onwards often discussed, proved from magazine articles at the time that even Amiga press were keen on the Falcon hardware, yet nowadays Falcon seen as huge flop by Atari, Atari's mistakes laid bare for all to see, yet Nintendo 8 Bit era, location UK.....different story.

The contributing factors you've listed i honestly do think have led to where we are now-It's like a salvo has been fired:Nintendo's marketing dept taking an agressive stance to push the idea that NES=huge in UK in it's adverts, just by clever window dressing and text giving the impression, after all if no-body questions it, why would they change it?

Magazines using freelancers who are either pushing personal bias on a format they had or just not doing the research, more interested in ensuring they've hit max word count allowed rather than historical truth and again do they honestly care if 1 or 2 people on a forum speak out on it? they know editorial staff will leap to the blanket defence of anything written in magazine.

An active pro-Nintendo userbase in certain forums online and people new to Retro see all the talk of NES being such a saviour to the UK, think, well seen it said on X, Y and Z, it must be true.....

And because so few of us have spoken out on it, the myth becomes a legend, internet fact, why research? everyone knows.....

Saturn was rubbish at 3D, underpowered/PS2 was massively more powerful than DC/Jaguar only has 5 good games/The N64 was a failure/The SNES was such a powerhouse, look at MODE 7, lets see MD do that..../MCD had no good games etc etc, now the NES saved UK gaming has joined those.

No-one seems to think to look at what a failed system like Saturn or Jaguar did well or wonder why these powerhouse consoles like the SNES needed extra chips in cart to really make use of MODE 7 or why PS2 games did'nt look like the leap from 5 Million Polygons to 66 Million etc nor look like Toy Story or T2 and if you spoke out on a magazine forum? crush the unbeliver....or who cares? yeah, who cares your happy to sit back and let a lie be told about an era you grew up in, lets all just not question anything, let the choosen media and it's followers dicate how history should be versed from now on....ahhh the blanket of ignorance, ohh how sweet and soft thy are....



It's got to the point where often the readership know more about a game or piece of hardware that's had an article written on it, that franchise was'nt huge, that was'nt how hardware worked or a rival does all that and more, why's that not being praised? where's coverage of...? it was huge in the day.


Then you think, ahhh, clearly not looking to appeal per say to UK market, nor give honest picture to US readers, they just want sales figures, projected sales, market saturation etc etc....

And i just viewd those links, bloody hell, so according to the gospel of St.Nintendo staff writer:

Basically because of the crash in the USA, no-one bought any games on any platform, in fact people just stopped buying anything that was gaming related and said that's it, out damn spot and cast gaming from their lives the world over, storm clouds gathered, women openly wept in the streets, darkest of times yadda yadd until the NES was created and there was light and much merriment.

Video games (of which there would have been none were it not for the NES) =NES, SNES+Wii U, so...what does he class the N64, Game Cube and Wii as then, let alone the GB and DS range. Ohh and tut, he's missed out the following:

Without NES there'd be no:Power glove, Rob, U-Force, N64 Bulky Drive, Virtual Boy, crap SNES light gun and hello? who's this?????? why there'd be NO Playstation after all, had NES not 'saved' gaming, Sony would'nt have bothered making a soundchip for the SNES and then signing up to do the CD drive for it and Nintendo would'nt have a partner to f*ck right up the backside and thus create the very monster that we have have today, praise be to Nintendo then.

The NES might have seen off the MS in USa etc, but it did'nt globally.

If as article claims everyone went bankrupt during the 2600 era, how come likes of SEGA, ATARI, Commodore etc still had money for R+D for the consoles and computers that followed those of the 2600 era?

Metroid-One of the largest games ever created, followed by line about how you can complete it in under an hour, classic!

Duck Hunt is NOT the game most people think of when you mention light guns, sigh....

I was just reading that article (//http) too, oh dear!

I loved this bit:

QuoteA number of other peripherals were released for the NES, most popular of all being the NES Zapper, a lightgun that made games such as Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley the stuff of legend. An interesting title, The Adventures Of Bayou Billy, contained three different styles of gameplay - a side-scrolling platformer, a third-person driving game and a shooting section that let you use the Zapper.

WTF! Hogan's Alley is the stuff of legend now is it? And Bayou Billy contained 3 different styles of gameplay - erm so what? Star Ship on the Atari 2600 (1977) did that too 

I also managed to find one of the topics from Atari Age I was talking about

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/166584 ... -of-world/ (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/166584-nes-vs-master-system-sales-rest-of-world/)

Just read throught that Atariage thread, LOL, looked like the NES fanboy was clutching at straws there when presented by facts (ie graph of sales, quotes from book Game Over), really sad when best response he could come up with was poor scorn on way graph was drawn, wording used (British humour clearly going straight over his head) and book title, strawman defences here, you cannot believe anything this person said look who they worked for (err Nintendo, so guess they have insider knowledge or am i to group Nintendo into same semi-evil class as quotes from ex-E.A coders?).

The marketing line:Now your playing with power had me chuckling, it was the very lack of power that UK reviewers moaned about in NES arcade conversions.....

Plus again, all these 'amazing' games Nintendo sent with the NES to rescue us from the dire straights we were in, lets 'ave a looky 'ere...bearing in mind, according to the sermons of Nintendo sites, companies had gone under drowning us in sh*te....


Righty then, NES had arcade conversions:so did the 8 Bit micro's over here and as did the Master system, so we are clearly meant to ignore facts that the micro's had the conversions in the UK long before the NES and often boasted far superior audio (on C64 at least) to the NES, plus NES had C64 conversions of OCEAN games etc and SEGA's arcade games (but..Nintendo said no-one was gaming, so who was playing in the arcades? lol).


NES had Capcom support, indeed it did, but then Capcom licensed out titles for conversions to 8 Bit micros here in UK, hence we saw:side arms, Forgotten worlds, Strider, Last duel, Tiger Road, Commando, LED Storm, Black tiger, Bionic Commando etc etc


Nes had a Light Gun OMG!!!! you mean just like the MS, the C64, the Speccy etc.

Meant to add:as well as UK developers ignoring the NES as it arrived too late, there was an attitude of why should we support Nintendo, when Nintendo has NO intention of supporting us (UK industry), it just wants to control all aspects of the game and that's not how we do buisness.

Also, going back to NES to the rescue-IF UK developers were churning out so much crap, how come one of the developers responsible for some of the (claimed) flagship games on the format, was British and had started out making games on the Spectrum? refer of course to Ultimate..or Rare.

No Ultimate, no Capt.skyhawk, Pro-Am, Solar Jet Man, Cobra Triangle, etc etc

Found the only surviving copy of a fanzine a good friend of mine did, towards back is the 'Retro Zone' section and...ahh-ha it's about a NES Zapper game, 'To The earth', now reading it (bloody hell Andy! were you this much of a NES fanboy? yikes...  :-)   ), few things jumped out:

'...and is perhaps the only Zapper game that does'nt sell itself on novelty alone-there's solid gameplay at it's core!......In fact NMS gave the game 80%.Not an amazing rating i know, yet it was the highest a Zapper game ever recived in a review'.

Now, if good old Andy, bless his NES loving cotton socks can be honest enough to make note that not only is a NES Zapper game of his is: not that much of a classic, recived at best a good score and was highest a game of it's type recived from what went on to become Official Nintendo Magazine, then how on earth can Nintendo sites etc claim that Duck Hunt, Bayou Billy and Gumshoe were all time classics?

from Gamestm's Year In Review:1984:

'Though nobody was making very much money, 1984 was a fantastic year for the MILLIONS who were still playing games.There might not have been as many of them, but the few that squeaked out were more innovaitive, interesting and deep than ever before'

Notable releases:Elite-The grandfather of sandbox games.

Pitfall II-Despite the state of things, Activision still belived there was a viable market for console games in 1984 and proved this by releasing what might be the most technically impressive game for the Atari 2600'


See the above Nintendo marketing dept? read and understand the words, the meaning? the industry was suffering yes, but surviving none the less.People did not just abandon gaming en mass, companies like Activision did not release more crap and nothing else or go under, we were NOT drowning in awful software, hell Elite was even converted to the NES.

The article also reports that:

-Commodore CEO Jack tramiel was boasting of selling 1 Million C64's and 2 Million Vic-20's in 1983

-Broderbund created what's thought to be the 1st real-time strategy game, Ancient Art Of War in 1984

-Lucasfilm games released it's 1st 2 titles:Ballblazer and Rescue On Fractalus.

-Ultimate Play The Game released Knight Lore.

-As well as Pitfall II Activision released H.E.R.O

So it's insulting to suggest the industry need saving with the NES and gamers were in danger of quiting as nothing of worth was released.

Double whammy in same issue of Gamestm as the 1984 piece, NES gets a 'Conversion Catastrophe' for..Shinobi:

'...a title screen with a headshot of Joe that looks so goofy he makes Mario look like Marcus Fenix..'

'Apon beginning the 1st stage it becomes clear that there only ever seems to be about 4 colours sharing the screen at the same time, and most of the boss fight sections don't even bother with background graphics at all'

'...which portrays Joe as some kind of dead-eyed, goofy idot, stood in front of some pink squares'

'the music sounds as if it's being conducted by a clown and played by a hearing-impaired orchestra using different makes of doorbells and alarm systems'

Ironically they recomend the C64 port over the NES version.

They are not wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNf1j_UVRug (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNf1j_UVRug)

Altered Beast is an embarrassment too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTTR9zEU-I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTTR9zEU-I)

Hmmmn, now this IS'NT from a Nintendo Promo.advert dressed up as a Gamestm article, but in fact a proper Gamestm piece:

25 Years Of Zelda:A Legend In The Making:


'The Legend Of Zelda NES...1987 US/Europe: '...the original Zelda was a revelation in the 80's and continues to have an influence on the entire medium'

Zelda II:Adventure Of Link-described as 'The black sheep of the family' but curious nothing said of the review scores.


Sounding awfully familar to THAT promo. advert for the NES classics range on GBA, so wondering further still, who worded the ad.Gamestm or Nintendo.....


But in fairness to Gamestm, this from the 'what Happened Next? part of the Year In review:1982-E.T Atari 2600:

'Reports of the games industry's death were greatly exaggerated , however, it merely switched it's focus to home computers for a few years, while SOME developers returned to consoles with the advent of the NES in 1985'

Again, see Nintendo?t he industry was not about to die, publishers switched focus in cases yes and moved away from consoles for a few years, but people were still buying and playing games in the years before NES hit USA'

Quote from: "The Laird"They are not wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNf1j_UVRug (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNf1j_UVRug)

Altered Beast is an embarrassment too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTTR9zEU-I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDTTR9zEU-I)

Bloody'ell.Watched Shinobi 1st, then Altered Beast, all i can say is...

If the Nintendo flock want us to believe the NES saved us from a wave of dire games here in the UK, take me now O'lord, i'm ready.....


:-) these pair are utter turds...

From Gamestm 'Crash And Burn' feature:

'Nintendo had already tried to break through the cultral East/west Barrier at great expense and finally managed it-as Nintendo of America teetered on the edge of bankruptcy'

Yet Nintendo sites claimed it was other developers who went under, curious to read Nintendo themselves damn close to going under in terms of US side of the buisness...


Tom Sloper designer of Spike+Bedlam on Vectrex: 'I knew Video Games were'nt dead.The genie had been let out of the bottle...people had learned that it was possible to interact with thier TV's.There's no way the future would not include interactive television after that'

So again, industry would have survived NES or no NES.

(Another) example found of why i'm struggling not to be cynical when it comes to magazines glossing over the NES history in Europe for fear, it seems, of not getting advertising revenue:

Gamestm (again) front cover is gold, The Legend Of Zelda:The Wind Walker.Feature:The History Of Nintendo, basically the entire RETRO section of the magazine devoted to Zelda/Nintendo, advert for Windwalker on page before it, then 1st bit of feature covers the start of Nintendo in video gaming terms, then moves onto history of Zelda games,  etc etc...you then find the NES as this months' classic machine' 4-page feature, lot of details on Jap launch of the Famicom, similar for details on US launch, so Europe going to get similar detailed break down? err no..it simply states:

'...and a year later the NES was launched across Europe'.

Bloody'ell Gamestm, you might as well have ended that piece with: 'and all the little boys and girls who were playing video games at that time lived happily ever after'

Just what is it with this reluctance to just openly put in print how the NES struggled in UK etc compared to USA/Japan?


Then there's things like THIS:

They Live-Classic Feature looking at Cubic Lode Runner on Game Cube, Gamestm blurb talks about NES Classics etc, opening line:


'lode Runner first appeared on the NES in 1984 and was Hudson's debut on the machine'


Just a tad miss-leading that wording, as Lode Runner FIRST appeared on:Apple II, Atari 8 Bit Range, Vic-20, C64 and IBM PC etc in mid 1983! so the NES classic was a port.

MSX even had a version, licensed and name changed to Kings Valley, but like Metal Gear and Castlevania, Lode Runner did'nt 1st appear on NES.

Another article that ignores the NES' failure in the UK and Europe as a whole:

http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-i ... rld-part-1 (http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-impact-gaming-world-part-1)

Quote from: "The Laird"Another article that ignores the NES' failure in the UK and Europe as a whole:

http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-i ... rld-part-1 (http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-impact-gaming-world-part-1)

And the technical issues that early NES  model hardware had....sigh.

Good to see The One had NO issues saying it how it happened, THIS from a feature on the Mega Drive of all things:

'...following Nintendo's recent domination of the Japanese and American software scene with it's technologically archaic 8-Bit console and it's failure to repeat this performance in Europe'.




And THIs from Gary Penn's Zap! Console! And Pop! article on the rise of the console in USA and Japan:

'....but what of the UK? Wether Nintendo will abandon all hope of entering the aging NES here following it's failure to generate sufficent enthusiasm remains to be seen'.


Ohh and i did find thoose Microprose adverts for games written as a 'review' that i brought up when talking about Nintendo's NES classic 'ad' in Gamestm:

Big differences here though, 1 i found was:single page, advertising Pirates on ST+Gunship on Amiga, advert made clear it was a PROMOTIONAL piece , not part of The One.they were done in same layout/format that Microprose used for it's existing adds, NO scores given or reviewers named (thus very different to layout The One used).

New approach to the old subject (and with hindsight, should have looked into this from the start):

Going to do it as follows:Nintendo NES article or quote-number of Nintendo adverts in that publication/issue-Is qote honest about the NES/UK or does it gloss over or re-write history?.


Just pure curio.interest on my part of course, not suggesting anything sinister, just thought it'd be worth looking into, maybe putting claims that have been doing the rounds for years about reviews scores in realation to adverts etc, never seen anyone do any real looking into of such, so thought why not.right, legal disclaimer done, lol...



So:Gamestm, Retro section, year in review 185:

'1985 may have been the year that the Japanese began to take over, mostly thaks to Nintendo and Capcom, but the British gaming industry was still going strong on C64 and spectrum.The NES was virtually irellevent here, even after it's 186 UK release'

No Nintendo adverts, but Gamestm do devote 2 pages to Super mario Bros, but nothing said of UK reaction bit odd, but ok....

Conversion Catastrophe is Kung-Fu Master on ZX Spectrum, NES is said to be the system to play it on.Reads fair enough, NES arcade conversions been slamned by Gamestm in past, so, so far so good.

And....we see a 6 page feature on:Backtracking:History Of Metroidvania, but this relates to term to describe all manner of freeform side-scrolling adventures inc Parahoh's Curse (8 Bit Micro's), Brain Breaker (sharp X1), Cross Blaim (MSX), Sacred armour Of Anttiriad (8 Bit Micros0, Code Name Droid (BBC), Zillion (MS) etc.

Castlevania II Simions Quest on NES is mentioned, but NO mention of UK press scores only to AVGN ensuring a generation of internet kids now think game is unplayable, this is wrong etc etc, well Gamestm, thanks to publications like yourselves and others, there's a danger of a generation of magazine reading kids growing up very confused as to just how the NES fared in UK as your articles are 1 moment honest, the next painting things in a very different light, so pot and kettle here?

Oh and we do see an obscure game mentioned, Euphory on Sharp X1 (1988) where you play as brother+Sister looking for cure for mothers illness, so 1 there for the Damsell In Distress thread, lol.

Nintendo struggle to admit defeat in the UK press:

(http://i.imgur.com/iwFhVNQ.jpg)

Hardware supplements and promotional video's i've seen many of over the years:ATARI did drop out supplements on Jaguar in EDGE, Ultimate Future Games, I've still got the Playstation 1 videotape, few others, 'advertising features' dressed up as reviews/magazine features, again Microprose, Nintendo, good few others done it.Doctored screenshots, review scores not matching review text, numerous examples through out the years.....


But when your talking about magazines or websites re-telling events of history to paint a format in a different, more favourable light, i have to ask the question:

Has the magazines Editorial integrity been compromised?.By all means detail events using information given to you by a 3rd party, but to seemingly willfully and deliberately 'pull the wool' over the eyes of your readership, in order to further a 3rd parties commercial interests is crossing over a very solid line, in my eyes.

Soon as you do that, even if it's a 1-off, your firmly into the realms of blatant propaganda and you've lost the trust of your readers.

I would love to know to what degree RG and Gamestm retained Editorial control over what appeared in the features and 'adverts' which i've disscussed on here, it'd answer a lot of fears and concerns, by all means use a magazine to explain to new customers what your company can offer up in terms of games they've missed out on, but to re-write history has left a sour taste in the 'mouth' of this reader.

Quote from: "The Laird"Another article that ignores the NES' failure in the UK and Europe as a whole:

http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-i ... rld-part-1 (http://www.syfy.co.uk/blogs/nintendos-impact-gaming-world-part-1)

Decent find there.  ::)

QuoteNintendo also made radical change by using gamepad controllers instead of the arcade style joysticks. Adopting the same design used in their Game & Watch handhelds, the 4 way directional control pad allowed for precise and easy manipulation with one hand as opposed to the two handed joystick.

More fanboy drivel stating that folk commonly use a joypad by holding it only one hand. Utter fail.

And yet, despite the fact it's a UK-based site, there's not one mention of how well the NES performed commercially either in the UK or in Europe as a whole. Yet another Nintendo fansite the conveniently glosses over such information by referring to the console's success in the USA as if that were in any way representative of how it sold in the rest of the world. Risible.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"(Another) example found of why i'm struggling not to be cynical when it comes to magazines glossing over the NES history in Europe for fear, it seems, of not getting advertising revenue:

Gamestm (again) front cover is gold, The Legend Of Zelda:The Wind Walker.Feature:The History Of Nintendo, basically the entire RETRO section of the magazine devoted to Zelda/Nintendo, advert for Windwalker on page before it, then 1st bit of feature covers the start of Nintendo in video gaming terms, then moves onto history of Zelda games,  etc etc...you then find the NES as this months' classic machine' 4-page feature, lot of details on Jap launch of the Famicom, similar for details on US launch, so Europe going to get similar detailed break down? err no..it simply states:

'...and a year later the NES was launched across Europe'.

Bloody'ell Gamestm, you might as well have ended that piece with: 'and all the little boys and girls who were playing video games at that time lived happily ever after'

Just what is it with this reluctance to just openly put in print how the NES struggled in UK etc compared to USA/Japan?

Great point there, RT. That's precisely the kind of warped retelling of history we're talking about and that's witnessed so often these days.

I can only assume that either such sources employ pig ignorant writers time after time after time or are in fear of upsetting Nintendo and thus risk losing out on future advertising revenues.

I've reached the point now where i've read just 1 too many glossed over version of events, sat there reading of a past i know did not happen, i'm feeling that the magazines i've paid for are trying to tell me, no, you are wrong, you memory hazy, here, let us explain how it was...

I want answers, some idea of the 'gameplan' here, i feel insulted as a reader.the internet bad enough, but publications should be carrying out better research, they have a 'duty' to inform, not to re-write.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"I've reached the point now where i've read just 1 too many glossed over version of events, sat there reading of a past i know did not happen, i'm feeling that the magazines i've paid for are trying to tell me, no, you are wrong, you memory hazy, here, let us explain how it was...

I want answers, some idea of the 'gameplan' here, i feel insulted as a reader.the internet bad enough, but publications should be carrying out better research, they have a 'duty' to inform, not to re-write.

I suspect a major part of the problem is that certain magazines employ people who claim to be knowledgeable about the topic in question. An article being penned by someone with a passion for the subject matter.

Sounds fine in theory doesn't it? However, the results don't always go to plan it seems. What has tended to happen on admittedly rare occasions is that a writer with said passion has also unfortunately tended to be a fanboy too. Consequently we are fed wholly biased revisionist history because the writer, due to his blinkered fanboyism, is incapable of writing in an objective manner.

Hence the existence of the atrocity that was the aforementioned universally derided 'NES Collector's Guide' in RG 101, for example. An article penned by a known Nintendo fanboy brimming with factual errors and pro-Nintendo revisionist history that somehow found its way past the editor's attention and made it in to print.

It's bad enough reading of such revisionist nonsense on the internet and prior to RG 101 I used to think RG magazine was a cut above that sort of thing. The kind of national publication that prided itself on having a professional approach that was a welcome change to the amatuerism of the internet at its worst. More fool me. 

Very good points there and i'd say:

Again, i'm left wondering just what the selection process is for an article in a professional publication these days, as standards seem extreme.On the one hand subject material clearly given to experts in their field be it ATARI systems, PC games etc etc and this is reflected in the articles, on the other you see a professional troll piecing together the bile he's posted online in past few years, cobbling together a 'greatest rants' piece and throwing it in, job done, or an utter disgrace of a collectors piece that re-writes history to the degree you could use it as the biasis for a script for a parallel Earth sci-fi movie.

As a subscriber i'm torn, i don't want to read more rubbish so tempted to say F-this, not worth my time and money (as i did with Gamestm), but then i'm thinking i really loved the ST piece, Realms Of The Haunting, Laser squad etc etc, if i cancel, i'll miss future items like this, but then i'm raging at what passed for (another) Nintendo piece that has'nt got me interested in games i missed, or a def.article that's just crap.

RG seems like 3 steps forward, 2 back, put a blindfold on the reader, spin them around till they are giddy and then ask them to jot down what they recal of history before saying WRONG!!!! here's how it was.

Mentioned in past how MICROPROSE would do certain adverts in the style of a review, just found 1 in old copy of ACE, for Microprose soccer:

Top of page has ADVERTISEMENT in big letters, so there's no mistaking it for a regular review from ACE, plus ACE scored out of 1000, gave a PIC curve etc here, rating out of 10 (which they give graphics 8 sound 7, strategy 9, playability 9 overall 9 LOL), but they then also include REAL review scores/quotes from C+VG, Zzap and TGM, so reader left in no doubt it's a promotional piece.


Just very curious to note how vastly different it was then (May'89) to a far more recent attempt by Nintendo in Gamestm, same style of advert, but very different approaches....

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Just very curious to note how vastly different it was then (May'89) to a far more recent attempt by Nintendo in Gamestm, same style of advert, but very different approaches....

I had a phone conversation with someone from Imagine Publishing not so long ago and they were practically giving away their gamesTM magazine, lol. I declined the opportunity as the magazine just doesn't appeal to me on account of the internet already provides a vast wealth of current-gen games coverage for free and because its 'retro' section for retro gaming generally leaves much to be desired, imho.

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Just very curious to note how vastly different it was then (May'89) to a far more recent attempt by Nintendo in Gamestm, same style of advert, but very different approaches....

I had a phone conversation with someone from Imagine Publishing not so long ago and they were practically giving away their gamesTM magazine, lol. I declined the opportunity as the magazine just doesn't appeal to me on account of the internet already provides a vast wealth of current-gen games coverage for free and because its 'retro' section for retro gaming generally leaves much to be desired, imho.

Nice mate.When i cancelled my sub, they were very keen to find out just why i was leaving, sounded like they were reciving a high volume of calls doing just the same, they tried to do me a deal, extend sub to Gamestm at cheaper rate, i said sorry, it's just Edge-Lite these days.

In the old days, it's retro section often put Retro Gamers to shame in places. They had interview with Saturn coder of Doom long, long time before DJ did his original piece on Doom, Saturn coder talked of how he was told to just port it as best he could from PS1 (hence passwords work on Saturn version) and it ran so poorly etc.Skip forward to RG's Doom article and same Saturn version, not Jap saturn version, was praised.

(https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/993028_262391373903962_1988608707_n.jpg)

Quote from: "The Laird"(https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/993028_262391373903962_1988608707_n.jpg)

On first glance I thought the 'mother' of the 'family' was Cilla Black! Then I of course realised it couldn't be on account of said person being British. 

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"

Quote from: "The Laird"(https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/993028_262391373903962_1988608707_n.jpg)

On first glance I thought the 'mother' of the 'family' was Cilla Black! Then I of course realised it couldn't be on account of said person being British. 

My thoughts? 1)Console does'nt even appear to have a power cable going to it and 2)Is that not a 1-player game going on there? so why are both brats holding the pads? lol

Plus, know i've only just woken up but thought you'd posted pics from a photoshot for future RG magazine front cover there, lol

That is a young Killbot in the yellow on the left 

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"My thoughts? 1)Console does'nt even appear to have a power cable going to it and 2)Is that not a 1-player game going on there? so why are both brats holding the pads? lol

Well observed, RT. Too funny!

QuotePlus, know i've only just woken up but thought you'd posted pics from a photoshot for future RG magazine front cover there, lol

On the subject of RG magazine and Nintendo I just found this article on Imagine Publishing's very own website regarding the (latest) Nintendo-themed RG magazine cover of RG 51 -
http://www.imagine-publishing.co.uk/news/82/retro_gamer_partners_with_nintendo_for_exclusive_zelda_cover (//http)

Choice quotes include,

QuoteRetro Gamer partners with Nintendo for exclusive Zelda cover

QuoteImagine Publishing joins forces with videogames giant to celebrate one of its most cherished gaming franchises.

QuoteWith Phantom Hourglass currently riding high in the DS charts...

Nice plug for a then current-gen game there.

QuoteRetro Gamer has been able to join forces with Nintendo...

My god, that's the third time they've stated such a thing. Wasn't once enough?

QuoteEditor Darran Jones said of the collaboration: "I'm incredibly pleased that Nintendo was so willing to collaborate with us on such a beautiful cover, and it proves that Retro Gamer occupies a respected and unique place in the UK gaming press."

No surprise there regarding him being so gushing. Not sure a publication which features paid for advertising from Nintendo and has Nintendo advert banners on its forum going the extra mile of featuring Nintendo IP on its front cover again 'proves' what the editor would like to imagine it does though.

Quote"Retro Gamer was the natural and obvious place to celebrate the history, story and passion behind one of the world's best loved gaming series," continued Nintendo's Senior UK Manager, Robert Saunders. "The team at Retro Gamer have created a fantastic cover that really captures the character and theme of the games in a creative and original way."

Given that RG is the UK's only monthly retro gaming magazine available in high street stores I'd say the hyperbole of that opening statement to be rather self-evident.

Further to that we were also served up RG 90. Here's the press release taken from Imagine Publishing's site detailing it - http://www.imagine-publishing.co.uk/upload/press/2011_05_27_retro_gamer_partners_with_nintendo_for_legendary_issue.pdf (//http)

Some quotes,

QuoteRetro Gamer partners with Nintendo for legendary issue

QuoteImagine Publishing and Nintendo partner to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Legend Of Zelda franchise

Another RG Zelda cover, the very same language recycled from the RG 51 article then.

QuoteIn yet another creative masterstroke, Retro Gamer has joined forces with Nintendo to...

'Yet another'. Quite. Does the publication 'join forces' with other games publishers quite as often?

QuoteThe issue itself, meanwhile, not only contains huge features on Ocarina Of Time, Four Swords Adventures and the original NES classic, but also includes esteemed developers such as John Romero, Julian Gollop, Peter Molyneux and David Braben commenting on the hit N64 game

So not content with the one big splash and front cover on Zelda they had 'huge features' on two other Zelda games too.

QuoteFirst released on Nintendo's N64 in 1998, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time has gone on to become one of the most highly regarded videogames of all time and has resonated strongly with any gamer who has played it

No qualms with the opening statement of Zelda worship as the game in question regularly ranks highly on 'best games ever' features on the internet... admittedly mostly on USA-based websites but I digress. The 'any gamer' comment is utter nonsense though as, shocking as it may be to RG and Imagine Publishing, not every single gamer in the world is a Zelda fan. That statement is completely lacking in objectivity and sounds more like a Nintendo advert.

QuoteWith the imminent arrival of Ocarina Of Time 3D for the 3DS, and the fact that the franchise itself is now a venerable 25 years old, there has never been a better time to celebrate Nintendo's most legendary hero.

Ah, a plug for a current-gen rehash of the game then.

Quote"Retro Gamer was the natural and obvious place to celebrate the history, story and passion behind one of the world's best-loved gaming series," said Nintendo's PR Manager, Lewis Digby. "The team at Retro Gamer have created a fantastic cover that really captures the character and theme of the games in a creative and original way."

Different Nintendo PR guy, same message as in the above article for RG 51. Worrying.

Quote"It was a lot of hard work, but I'm delighted with the delivery of this fantastic new cover," commented Editor Darran Jones. "Our strong relationship with Nintendo has enabled us to create a truly iconic cover that perfectly captures the spirit of the original game."

A 'strong relationship with Nintendo' indeed.

Outstanding find there DC and bloody good points!.

WTF is all the talk of 'able to join forces' it's not like they were trying for a baby or was it a Vulcan mind-meld, your thoughts are mine....your front cover, paid for/free advertising for us :-)

Plus, just who else was in running to do a front cover like that? Gamestm? Edge? both feature Retro, but are mainstream multi-format magazines, so are not going to be looking to put a cover like that out are they?.

P.R statement should have read:Nintendo are incredibily thankful there is still a dedicated Retro publication going, in a time when so many consumers now turn to the internet for all their daily entertainment news or download magazines for easy reading on tablet devices'.


Such a beautiful cover-there i read, lot better than the one we had planned.

I honestly do worry about these covers that come from strong partners-Ex-EDGE staffer went public a while back, claiming Rockstar would provideexclusive art for front cover of Edge, but only on grounds the GTA series etc scored a minimum of 9/10.Now of course these are claims from just 1 person, but when you read review texts in games like GTA4 and it's DLC they often seem to suggest a lower score than number sat at bottom of the page....gets the mind starting to wonder.


'Collaborate' blimey, not a word i'd personally use Mr Jones, the image of a certain occupied country not far from here during WWII springs to mind........

The subject of Nintendo themed covers been brought up on RG forum in past, by customers asking just why there were so many, so often.Will pop over and check who said what.

There was a very interesting thread on RG asking if there was too much Nintendo coverage in the magazine, sadly locked after only 7 pages, so a much wider % of forum and magazine readers never got a chance to put their views across.Not going to dwell on who said what as thread is there for all who want to see it, nor am i going to post a link to it, as that's not the focus of this post.


Few things did jump out:

For a magazine editor to say 'We can't help history' is very true, he/she, you or i cannot 'help' history, but what any of us can do is report truthfully just how history unfolded and as we've discussed here many, many times the NES floundered in UK, yet todays publications and Nintendo adverts placed within them, seem to want to do more than just 'suggest' this was'nt the case or gloss over the UK (Gamestm pieces just going as far as to give a UK launch date for NES and then moving swiftly on).To me that's insulting your readership among many other things.....


Nintendo themed covers sell like 'gangbusters', now sadly i'm of the age where i've no bloody idea what 'gangbusters' are, nor how well they sell, but i'd asume a more suitable phrase for O.A.P's like myself, would be 'hot cakes'?.

So from a commercial point of view i fully understand any publication needs to go with the cover/s that will ensure maximum market penetration, in order just to survive, let alone grow, but rather than give some vague phrases like gangbusters, how about treating your readership like grown ups? it'd been a simple thing to say take ABC sales figures or similar (not sure just who likes of Edge/Retro gamer/Gamestm etc use) and say here's figures for issues with say 8 Bit games on front cover, notice the dip? now here's figures for Nintendo themed covers, notice the surge?

That way, even if i was'nt a fan of the covers, i'd fully understand why they they were used so often, as it stands, everything is as vague as a MS Xbox One P.R annoucement!

'Most editors have nothing to do with the readership'-No problems beliving this, seen so many publications over the years loose subscribers and news stands sales as they are so out of touch with the readership, but then that just throws up the entire issue of just who do they feel they are designing a publication for, if not the readership? who's it 'pitched at'?.

Many years ago, friend of mine, was running a multi-format fanzine, contacted Playstation Plus magazine, said why do you constantly need to mock the Saturn? i own both and likes of Virtua Cop 1+2, VF 1+2, Sega Rally, Panzer Dragoon Series, Gun Griff.etc stand alongside the finest PS1 has to offer, yes Daytona USA was poor, but it could work very well on PS1 as shown by Burning Road ( a clone), you really need to own both machines it seems-They just shot him down, called him a fanboy, acted like kids etc, so he stopped buying magazine, magazine did'nt even last out the PS1 era, so by being so out of touch, rude etc they lost sales and went under, same situation in years since.


People across the board can say punters are whingers, don't realise how much goes into a monthly publication etc, but at the end of the day, it's really quite simple-they've bought or paid for advance for a publication, of course they are going to want to voice their opinions, perhaps if they were treated more as adults, given some basic sales figures then they'd have a greater understanding of actions taken etc, if they feel they are'nt being listened too or feel they are going to be spoken down too, they loose interest, move on and along with advertising revenue, subscriptions are life blood of publications.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Outstanding find there DC and bloody good points!.

WTF is all the talk of 'able to join forces' it's not like they were trying for a baby or was it a Vulcan mind-meld, your thoughts are mine....your front cover, paid for/free advertising for us :-)

Cheers, RT!

Precisely. Just how many times were they content to announce that particular point?!? Why on earth be so proud of such a thing anyway? Surely the readership would prefer to hear about the magazine's content first and foremost rather than it being impressed on them of the publication and its publisher having 'joined forces' with a games publisher? As a reader, history has told me to be wary when I hear of such close relationships between purportedly independent games mags and games publishers.

QuoteP.R statement should have read:Nintendo are incredibily thankful there is still a dedicated Retro publication going, in a time when so many consumers now turn to the internet for all their daily entertainment news or download magazines for easy reading on tablet devices'.

Quite why a games magazine is proudly quoting a PR manager of a games publisher to help promote the publication in the first place is worthy of comment in itself, imho.

QuoteP.R statement should have read:Nintendo are incredibily thankful there is still a dedicated Retro publication going, in a time when so many consumers now turn to the internet for all their daily entertainment news or download magazines for easy reading on tablet devices'.

Quite. It's Nintendo who should be most grateful, not the magazine. The RG/IP repeatedly fawns over Nintendo in both those webpages is cringeworthy.

QuoteI honestly do worry about these covers that come from strong partners-Ex-EDGE staffer went public a while back, claiming Rockstar would provideexclusive art for front cover of Edge, but only on grounds the GTA series etc scored a minimum of 9/10.Now of course these are claims from just 1 person, but when you read review texts in games like GTA4 and it's DLC they often seem to suggest a lower score than number sat at bottom of the page....gets the mind starting to wonder.

Indeed. History shows us that such skullduggery has occurred in the past with print-based videogaming publications and with some of today's internet-based videogaming sites. RG itself has shown the readership in past interviews featuring in the mag' that such corruption took place back in the day when the 8-bit micros ruled the roost.

Quote'Collaborate' blimey, not a word i'd personally use Mr Jones, the image of a certain occupied country not far from here during WWII springs to mind...

His use of that word plus him having stated 'Our strong relationship with Nintendo' makes for uncomfortable reading. As a reader of a purportedly independent magazine of any subject nature I would be concerned to learn of such close ties existing between it and a leading industry figure. More so when that very same industry figure also pays to advertise in said publication and on the publication's official internet forum. RG/IP are presumably not concerned with this image that they're presenting to the public.

Quote from: "The Laird"(https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/993028_262391373903962_1988608707_n.jpg)

Why is she not even looking at the TV? Just kinda scarily looking behind, what's there I wonder?!

Quote from: "AmigaJay"

Quote from: "The Laird"(https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/993028_262391373903962_1988608707_n.jpg)

Why is she not even looking at the TV? Just kinda scarily looking behind, what's there I wonder?!

Miyamoto with a gun forcing them to play it? 

As any UK C64 owning, Zzap 64 reading person could probably tell you, the line between publisher and magazine reviewer or Editor etc, often got a little tangled, It was 1 thing to not only review, but score highly games based on unfinished code (Op.Thunderbolt, US Gold, Sizzler on C64, yet retail game very different and of poor quality), but sometimes it was a concern of just where the loyalty was focused.


Newsfield Publishing Ltd owned software house Thalamus and prior to and after the releases of Hawkeye and Armalyte were happy to have some very subliminal advertising used in the pages of Zzap 64, which is fine, but when you read, years later in interview from Ex-Zzap 64 staff writer, that yes, there probably was 'pressure from above' to score Hawkeye so highly (giving it the mags highest award, fabled Gold Medal) and that on reflection, no..it did'nt deserve such a rating, you start to wonder about the industry as a whole.

Espically since then it seems as print revenues have declined, the lengths publications will go to ensure they continue to get advertising revenue seem to know no bounds, be it EDGE airbrushing up Xbox shots, or admitting it reviewed a key game on a platform in a hotel room, had strict time limit, P.R person in room next to them etc (something similar to how SEGA in later years 'invited' reviewers from likes of Mean Machines down to SEGA H.Q to 'review game, rather than send review copy of game out), something starts to smell a little off and folks get wary, vote with the wallet.

There are numerous examples you can call on over countless years, but the core things remain-you start missleading your buying public and pretty soon people will start asking questions, looking deeper and many will findthemselves unwilling to pay for false information and up and leave.I cannot say just what % as magazines these days might claim to be a 'best seller' but release no figures to give an idea of just how many units you need to be number 1.

I know in terms of music sales, UK Top 40 saw a rapid decline in just how many a number 1 single needed to sell to get to top spot, i'd guess with so many publications no longer in print, the competition in terms of physical media rather than digital copy when talking of magazines makes it pretty straight forward.You might be number 1 selling magazine in your area, but if you were talking about Trout Tickling and yours was the ONLY copy of a magazine that was 100% devoted to trout tickling and you sold out the limited numbers you supplied to or newsagents wanted each month, then it's not a huge achivement really..now had you:Trout Tickling monthly, Tickling Trouts and Fish Fondler...all fighting for same market each month, it'd be a different story-guess this is why publishing groups hide monthly sales figures and get staff to make meaningless claims, sounds great, no substance too them though.

It all sounds very 'fishy' to me, RT. 

Well, having looked at how various multi-format magazines in UK rated the arcade conversions to NES along with these 'classic' NES games Nintendo can be seen to be raving about these day's along with it's partners, i've just found a N.M.S 'Game Index', so lets see how a Nintendo specific magazine rated some familar names:


Hogans Alley 60%
Ikari warriors 48%
Kid Icarus 68%
Iron Sword 77%
Mach Rider 36%
Metal Gear 52%
Metriod 80%
Paperboy 30%
Rainbow Islands 67%
Road Blasters 48%
Wizards And warriors 72%
Xevious 65%

So come on Nintendo and 'partners' you really, honest to god, just have to stop these claims about how NES games were regarded in UK as even Nintendo specific magazines did not rate them anywhere near your claims.your just making yourselves out to be utter fools here, it's bad enough seeing the old New From Nintendo 1 page ads, advertising the latest NES releases in old copies of say Mean Machines, with slogan: Nintendo (i.e NES) The worlds Number 1 game system-Parts of the world, yes, but over here? hell no.


Oh and i can kinda answer my own earlier question:Mean Machines issue 17, talked about how a previous issue, the 'Xmas special' had been UK's biggest selling games mag during that period, shifting as it did 100,000+ copies, i'd love to see todays publications like Edge, Off.PS3+360 magazines, Gamestm,Retro Gamer etc etc throw out some numbers, be interesting to see just how much the printed media has declined over the years now things like broadband and tablets are so common place.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Well, having looked at how various multi-format magazines in UK rated the arcade conversions to NES along with these 'classic' NES games Nintendo can be seen to be raving about these day's along with it's partners, i've just found a N.M.S 'Game Index', so lets see how a Nintendo specific magazine rated some familar names:


Hogans Alley 60%
Ikari warriors 48%
Kid Icarus 68%
Iron Sword 77%
Mach Rider 36%
Metal Gear 52%
Metriod 80%
Paperboy 30%
Rainbow Islands 67%
Road Blasters 48%
Wizards And warriors 72%
Xevious 65%

So come on Nintendo and 'partners' you really, honest to god, just have to stop these claims about how NES games were regarded in UK as even Nintendo specific magazines did not rate them anywhere near your claims.your just making yourselves out to be utter fools here, it's bad enough seeing the old New From Nintendo 1 page ads, advertising the latest NES releases in old copies of say Mean Machines, with slogan: Nintendo (i.e NES) The worlds Number 1 game system-Parts of the world, yes, but over here? hell no.

Excellent finds there, RT.

So even Nintendo Magazine System magazine thought numerous, ahem, 'NES classics' to range from woeful to mediocre with only Metroid having scraped a review score 80% or above from the list provided.

Don't forget that RG magazine Nintendo evangelist Paul Davies is a former editor of that Nintendo Magazine System as it states proudly on his column's page each month. I say 'Nintendo evangelist' on account of him finding it impossible most months to not big up Nintendo in his column or plug a current-gen game by Nintendo there even though it's allegedly a retro gaming publication. This is the guy who also stated in his column that the ZX Spectrum's finest achievement was to 'pave the way' for Nintendo's NES, lest we forget.

LOL, probably guilty of having too much time on my hands, but i'd rather be guilty as charged there than openly spreading the myth of just how well the NES and it's games were recived in the UK, which so much of todays media seems happy to do.

What adverts and articles describe as all time classics, highly regarded, outstanding conversions, groundbreaking etc clearly were not seen as such by UK press, from multi-formats to Nintendo specific magazines, other formats had earlier, superior versions of the same arcade games and they were far cheaper and the NES exclusives did not have the impact they are proclaimed to have made.


Now given this information is so freely avaiable online with sites like here posting up review scans and scores from magazines of old, just who are they trying to fool and do they think the readership ignorant or what?.If you claim in a feature or advert that a game was highly rated at time of release, then show us the scores it achived, if you say it or a publication was a 'best seller' then print the sales figures, other magazines, games happy to do so and if you don't? it's clear it's smoke and mirrors crap.

People are no longer restricted to reading just what the advertisers or magazine article wants them to believe, information is only a mere goggle search away, yet still the claims go on.

Right, asked for circulation figures to compare todays best selling with mags from say 16 Bit Console era, best i've found so far is EDGE advert claiming to have 150, 270 regular readers a month.Interesting they say regular readers, not EDGE shifts/sells 150, 270 a month.

If 1 person lends his copy out to mates or there's a copy sat on a waiting room table or people pick up and glance through at newstand, you've gained 'readers', but why won't publishers give actual sales figures these days?

From EDGE  Issue 124, article 'Public Revelations' where EDGE looks into the realationship between P.R people and the gaming press:

'we heard that Nintendo was going to have a big launch for the GBA SP-But not from them.when we called to enquire they admitted it was going on, but said the event was not for the specialist press-as far as we could make out, it was crap celebrities who used to be on Eastenders and tabloid jurnos all piling into a bash with booze, complimentary SP's, dinner and no specialist press.One of us was in the area and even tried to talk his way in, but failed.soon after, the specialist press was sent a release retrospectively aleting them to the launch and asking them to cover the celbrity-studded event in their magazines and websites.How we laughed' Anon

IF P.R dept at Nintendo were 'happy' to resort to tactics like that, no wonder i'm reading revised versions of history of NES in UK. if games jurnolists are considered a lower priority than tabloid jurnos then it's clear they must be happy to get the scraps from the table, lol.

Seems Nintendo was holding a grudge over past coverage of their systems. Are newspapers, magazines and tabloids still as big in the UK as they once were?

Just found this in my scans from The One:

(http://i.imgur.com/iss1r1f.jpg)(http://i.imgur.com/M7Mv3VI.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/PmWeSG1.jpg)(http://i.imgur.com/L0YA6vR.jpg)

Never tried the cereal. Wonder if it was any good? Almost missed that snippet about the Lynx. Nice scans!!!!

An interesting quote in that article about Nintendo's "'failure to generate sufficient enthusiasm here" with their hyping of the NES. The magazine even seems to express doubt about Nintendo's (then) future hopes of commercial success in the UK such was the lack of enthusiasm here for it.

From Edge p2 of a feature on Emulators (this from good few years back)

'...NES game libary is loaded with timeless, glorious, seminal gems in exactly the same way that the MS libary is'nt'

Hmmmn....

Anywho, feature does point out that European NES owners were denied some of the finest NES had to offer such as Jackal, Mag Max and Tiger Heli-Never played any of those.any good on NES?

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"From Edge p2 of a feature on Emulators (this from good few years back)

'...NES game libary is loaded with timeless, glorious, seminal gems in exactly the same way that the MS libary is'nt'

Hmmmn....

Anywho, feature does point out that European NES owners were denied some of the finest NES had to offer such as Jackal, Mag Max and Tiger Heli-Never played any of those.any good on NES?

WTF?! 

So they are trying to say that games like OutRun, Afterburner, Sonic The Hedgehog, Double Dragon, Alex Kidd (any of them), Chase HQ, Operation Wolf, Columns, Street Fighter II, Space Harrier, Golden Axe, Shinobi, Choplifter, Renegade, Phantasy Star and Dynamite Heddy are not classic games. Yeah ok Edge . . . . . . . .

Quote from: "The Laird"

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"From Edge p2 of a feature on Emulators (this from good few years back)

'...NES game libary is loaded with timeless, glorious, seminal gems in exactly the same way that the MS libary is'nt'

Hmmmn....

Anywho, feature does point out that European NES owners were denied some of the finest NES had to offer such as Jackal, Mag Max and Tiger Heli-Never played any of those.any good on NES?

WTF?! 

So they are trying to say that games like OutRun, Afterburner, Sonic The Hedgehog, Double Dragon, Alex Kidd (any of them), Chase HQ, Operation Wolf, Columns, Street Fighter II, Space Harrier, Golden Axe, Shinobi, Choplifter, Renegade, Phantasy Star and Dynamite Heddy are not classic games. Yeah ok Edge . . . . . . . .

Yep.I could'nt quite believe what i was reading either.

Well, word just hit, apparently in 'grand scheme of things' UK means nothing, on a global scale in terms of the NES.

Coming from a publication that in past has been very 'eager' to claim just how popular it was over here (it was'nt) and how much of an impact a UK developer had on it's range of games (Rare) in terms of quality and innovation, i feel a Monty Python moment coming on...



www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso (//http) 

Each to their own and all that, but question has to be asked:

If it's a UK publication trying to appease or appeal to the 'global' market, the Speccy coverage or cult UK games with a very British sense of humour, is going to go wayyy over the heads of the rest of the world (things like:wanted Monty mole being based around UK Coal strikes), so pointless putting so much UK based coverage of games/any hardware platforms in, if they had such a limited impact in this 'Grand scheme Of Things', but it would explain the re-engineered history of the NES in UK....

Basically, we need sales figures here.Those for UK, those for rest of the world, who's are up, who's are down and just who the percived target market is.Otherwise publications like Retrogamer, Edge, Gamestm are just going to continue to appear as lacking direction and facts and the UK userbase alone going to start thinking:you know what? this is a mess, not worth my time and money.There's no focus any more.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Well, word just hit, apparently in 'grand scheme of things' UK means nothing, on a global scale in terms of the NES.

Coming from a publication that in past has been very 'eager' to claim just how popular it was over here (it was'nt) and how much of an impact a UK developer had on it's range of games (Rare) in terms of quality and innovation, i feel a Monty Python moment coming on...



www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso (//http)

Oh dear, oh dear! From all I'm hearing it does seem as though the publication in question has dropped yet another clanger in relation to the NES this month. I've been told that the article in question was written by the very person who penned the infamous 'NES Collector's Guide' and equally poor 'Mega Drive Collector's Guide' of past issues so colour me unsurprised that this latest effort is already attracting much criticism. In fairness though, it seems to be the poor choice of associated wording present on the front cover that's come in for most criticism thus far.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"... the UK userbase alone going to start thinking:you know what? this is a mess, not worth my time and money

I recently cancelled my subscription to Retro Gamer magazine largely as a consequence of its poor quality so hearing of this latest faux pas I feel reassured that I made the right decision. I may have a look at the article in question next time I'm in a WH Smith to see with my own eyes what all the commotion is about and brace myself for much rolling of the eyes, lol!

As for the attitude of the publication's editor to the feedback of paying customers, well, I don't think such a thing comes as any surprise. I won't comment on that matter any further though because we certainly don't want this very fine thread being derailed by talk of the likes of him.

Quoting the relevant part to this topic from a post of RT's elsewhere on the forum in the Retro Gamer issue 118 thread,

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Nes A celebration.Should'nt that read: Yet another celebration and if your from UK, you might as well not read as it won't reflect your version of history?.

Oh dear, oh dear. Will it never end? 

Firstly, the '30 years of NES' is factually incorrect from the get-go because the thirtieth anniversay of NES will be in February 2016... or October 2015 if one classes the limited test marketing launch of NES in New York City during late 1985 as the launch date. Referencing the launch of Famicom to somehow equate with the same thing as the launch of NES is misguided and only serves to rank Retro Gamer magazine alongside the websites that are currently doing the same thing as a desperate headline-grabbing attempt to pull in the punters.

From the wording of your post it seems RG think its core readership (that'll be in the UK then) are to join them in 'celebrating',

* the thirtieth anniversary of a Japan-only console (Famicom), or
(no problem with that per se but I expect the article is mostly about the NES, not the Famicom)

* the thirtieth anniversary of a console that was released in late 1985 (or early 1986 for the full launch), or
(meaning the magazine is therefore celebrating over two years too early)

* the thirtieth anniversary of a console that was released in Europe in September 1986
(meaning the magazine is therefore celebrating over three years too early)

Also, the NES was a commercial failure in the UK despite Nintendo's repeated attempts to try making it succeed. So why does this magazine with a majority UK readership deem that those in the UK would wish to 'celebrate' the anniversary of a product that bearly anyone here gave a damn about? That doesn't make sense, surely? By all means have it featured in the magazine's 'Minority Report' pages as another failed obscure retro console but it doesn't make sense to 'celebrate' a product that was so unpopular.

So now that's the flawed premise of the article dealt with, onto other matters...

QuoteI say that as early line: 'For many players it represents their 1st ever taste of videogaming'-sigh, it's like the arcades, ZX81, 2600, Game and Watch, countless LCD hand helds, Speccy, C64, Amstra, entire A8 Micro range, MS, schools having the BBC Micro etc etc never happened, ever (and here's a mere footnote on how it struggled in Europe).

That specific quotation you've referenced (highlighted in red by myself) there should trouble any free-thinking person who actually gives a damn for history being recounted in a fair and accurate manner.

The publication in question has past form in this regard (RG issue 101, see earlier in thread) and its editor is on record as saying "I... pride myself on the magazine's accuracy". I shall leave it to those reading this to decide for themselves what to make of such instances.

Yet again we have a UK-based media source referring to the NES as though it was once was the gaming system of choice worldwide when anyone with a knowledge of the facts knows it was no such thing.

Why not instead say 'For many US gamers the NES represents their first ever taste of videogaming'?
Is it really so difficult to say that or did the publication once more let a Nintendo fanboy pen another Nintendo-related article and not bother to proof read it before committing it to be published? The way the article has worded it is to imply the NES was an unqualified global success... which is not only incorrect but it also perhaps has the appearance of being disingenuous when viewed in the context of claims made in past issues of said publication.

If the blunder was a one-off then perhaps it could be dismissed as having been a genuine mistake but this is not a one-off. The magazine in question wilfully continuing to present NES the way it does (and as frequently as it does), when it supposedly 'prides itself on its accuracy' seems most peculiar to me. One could be forgiven for wondering if there's an agenda being served...

I'm really starting to question just what's going on at RG towers here....the magazine head and indeed publisher website are happy to tell me they take pride in the articles they produce, that they are well written, factual and i won't find the likes of them anywhere else, yet this 'celebrational piece' on the NES, is as DC rightly points out, anything but factual, as timing is years out, is yet another 'NES:How it saved the industry' type piece which to me is not written for the UK market as it applies a thick layer of 'gloss-over' paint to fact that for so many of the UK gamers, we are left scratching our heads, not celbrating the NES, as it was not our 1st gaming experience, far from it and many of us only ventured onto it in order to try and work out why it gets so much coverage.

I was playing a lot of Nintendo Game And Watch games, as were my friends (and how i wish i'd kept them) for years, so personally i'd be looking to celbrate them for the impact they had, so many of us had them, yet the NES? not even a drop in our gaming ocean.

The European failure of the NES, whilst mentioned, only saw a few lines, Castlevania was'nt even a NES only series, MSX had it in terms of Vampire Hunter, Bionic Commando saw release on European 8 Bit micros, Wizzards and Warriors never hit it big with UK press, let alone gamers and no mention of fact that Nintendo tried twice to conquer Europe? the piece reads as if Nintendo was'nt that interested in European market, yet as we've mentioned in this thread and others it clearly was other wise it would'nt of had 2 cracks at the market.No mention that it was 1st given to Mattel to handle...and this is supoosed to be a factual piece?


I too am left wondering just why RG magazine constantly produces NES articles in way it does, time and time again page after page devoted to USA and Japan side of the NES, no mention of how UK press scored NES games, choice of 3 covers, 2 of which were NES related.

Yes i've seen poorly done pieces on the NES in Gamestm+EDGE, mentioned them before on here, but RG..man alive, it's just drowning in NES alt.history and is honestly openly insulting to UK readership-The people behind issue 118 cannot say ohh we were limited in space, hence the footnote on Europe or we wanted to mention...but could'nt UK Press ratings for games (something they've been coy about in each and every NES article i've read).

Surely an editor looking for new goals could do a flipside feature on the NES, how it was recived in UK, by gamers and Press, hell aim it at your US readership, say you might be surprised to read this but, here's how UK press viewed games you guys love, it'd be the new slant on old subject the Editor claims so often you'll only find in RG, if not that at very least find some new people to interview, great as they are, it's same coders popping up in the magazine time and time agaign, Ste Pickford, great coder and joy to read, but how many times have i read interview with him on various hardware now? (plus sorry Ste, but Nes games were fast and responsive? you've clearly never played Joe And Mac on NEs for starters!!!!!).

For the love of god RG, if your going to do another NES piece anytime soon (and given track history...) at least get someone to do it who can present it as balanced, factual and offer a fresh view on a tired and worn subject and bloody hell, branch out from your pool of 'coders still willing to talk to us'.It's laughable to see the claims made for RG:

Best selling:The publisher has never released actual figures and anytime anyone has posted figures for an issue on RG forum, ed pops up saying:Your way off the mark, it sold much better.Did it? well back up that claim then...just how many did it sell? Nintendo covers sell like 'Gang Busters'-right, step back, just WTF does that mean, don't give me slang terms, what are the figures?Live publishing were happy enpough to give figures for RG when it was under their wing, which current RG editor went on record to dispute at 1 point saying the claimed 20,000 sales for 1 specific issue was a 'bizzare rumour', yet Lives own figures showed it was a 20,000 print run which all copies were sold.

One minute the editor says 'A magazine like RG is always going to be mega niche' and ....'As long as it remains profitable to make, the magazine will continue', next it's a 'best seller' and depending on cover, it sells like a 'gangbuster'.

Does it feature NES articles you won't find elsewhere? does it hell, i still recal the Zelda feature it did with 'Zelda:Family Tree' part coming straight from Gamestm, ohh sorry, 'borrowed' from Gamestm....

Mind you that was'nt as sad as seeing it's 'History Of GTA' feature turning up on a free booklet on front of PLAY magazine months later.

So no, you will find it's features, interviews, you name it, in other publications and online, you'll just be hard pressed to find so much NES coverage, so often elsewhere appears to be more truthful line.


 

I'd be surprised if you see anything NES related for the next few months.

However the SNES is gonna get some awesome coverage every month until DC's head explodes

Quote from: "jdanddiet"I'd be surprised if you see anything NES related for the next few months.

However the SNES is gonna get some awesome coverage every month until DC's head explodes

And then it'll start again?.Honestly i've had from RG alone enough poorly written NES coverage to last 10 lifetimes, sick of the bloody thing.It's not driving me to try out NES games, exact opposite.NES related pieces need to be put out to pasture until someone can write a new take on them and make it far more balanced.

How magazine can (going from past issues) devote 6 pages to a cult series like Wizzards And Warriors and still gloss over fact UK review scores were average or use a Nintendo Power quote as a means of a review 'score' rather than an actual UK Press review score, just because said UK review (mean Machines) gave it 68% which i'm sure Nintendo would'nt want people to be reminded of when they are trying to promote the franchise again, again take pride it being impartial, is beyond me.


As for future SNES stuff, i can only pray by now head man at RG has worked out/researched exactly what Mode 7 is...or i honestly fear for future articles.

A comment Laird made in RG Issue 118 thread got me thinking back to this thread:

Laird mentioned how the NES article in said issue was meant to be a celebration of the NES history, so it was understandable it was written way it was, now not going to rake over differing views between Laird and myself here, but i'm left wondering just why it was written in a gloss over the flaws type manner, when articles i've seen in other publications which look at the history of a company/publisher are presented in a warts n all manner.

Thinking most 'recently' of a feature EDGE did on history of Rare:the console years.Very well written, presented in a look back at the games, with interviews with people behind them and what stood out most was just how open RARE were in admitting in hindsight where they went wrong:

Things like Wizards And Warriors being '...the game with the worst jump animation, ever!' and Battletoads: 'In hindsight we wish we'd made the 3rd level easier'

They were more than happy to describe how NES games were designed to 'fit' within hardware limitations, how with Battletoads a lot of the level design came about by a desire to really push the hardware, but they were'nt afraid to look at themselves in cold light of day and admit things could have been done better.


So if Rare themselves are clearly very happy to do a warts n all interview, again i'm left wondering just why it's been that past features in publications like RG+Gamestm have had a far more selective approach.Only positive review quotes used etc.

All in all it made for a very interesting article:

DKC came about because Nintendo had seen Aladdin on the MD and wanted a game on SNES that looked better...they wanted Diddy Kong to basically be Donkey Kong, but in a nappy.....

Nintendo after pushing Rare to do Goldeneye, then sent them a letter saying they should cancel the project as game had missed the film release, home release and BBC film at midnight release.....

Grabbed By The Ghoulies was as Rare put it 'very much a game aimed at the Game Cube market and suddenly it was on Xbox, a very different market' (and again here they admit that if they'd spent a bit more time on game, it would have been more in line with what Xbox market wanted'


Kamecowas a painfull process-starts out as G.C project, then Xbox so she went from Elf to Fairy, but no matter how they tried to disguise fact she was a Fairy, you were still pitching a game with a Fairy in it to a market that just wanted to shoot things and they say: 'In hindsight it probably would have been best to scrap everything and start again'.


By being honest with readers, i find articles are a lot better for it, i keep reading as it's presented in a manner where more i read, more i learn about the games, the development process etc etc.

So i feel there's no reason you cannot celebrate something without giving equal balance to what went wrong as well as what went right.


EDGE can be so far up it's own arse at times, but likes of RG+Gamestm could learn a thing or 2 when it comes to covering same old hardware and developers/publishers.

This is great reading! I never knew, since U.S. magazines would never share more then snipets.

Maybe someone can start post about the - The Snes and the UK - what really happened?

Quote from: "onthinice"This is great reading! I never knew, since U.S. magazines would never share more then snipets.

Maybe someone can start post about the - The Snes and the UK - what really happened?

:-) Much as i'd love to start said thread, after i've opened cans of worms on Nes and UK and Snes Mode 7:what's so special? i fear i'd be called even more names, lol

Quote from: "onthinice"This is great reading! I never knew, since U.S. magazines would never share more then snipets.

I'd be happy to photocopy said article and said it onto you if you'd like a read?

Sounds great! I think the Nes and UK and Snes Mode 7 are great topics.

Quote from: "onthinice"Sounds great! I think the Nes and UK and Snes Mode 7 are great topics.

Much appreciated.Glad 99.9% of the good people on here can see what the topics were created for:Intelligent debate etc, rather than think i've some hidden anti-Nintendo agenda (yeah fuck Nintendo, the company who's Snes, N64, GBA, GB, GB Micro, G.C, GB Player, Game+Watches i paid for, along with carts for them where it applies :-) ).


I'll happily chat about anyones product i've invested time and money in over the years, but it'll be warts'n' all look, as it often amazes me to see companies walk straight into the very trap that killed off competing hardware, 1 generation later.Never quite seen an industry like it, where same mistakes are made and publications don't want to seem to mention them when looking back at what became of them.

Having just read a post in the RG 118 thread this seemed the logical place to post some thoughts in reflection.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"Found that Nes Joe+Mac review i brought up in response to Ste Pickfords absurd claim about Nes games being fast and responsive.From gamezones review:

'..firing weapons seems to take him (joe) about a week-you can press the keypad, go out and make a cup of tea, and come back to see the stone-axe or whatever, missing the mark by miles.To some extent you get used to this, but in the end i found it terrifically frustrating.Posting your instructions to Joe would probably take less time.'

But, but , RT, that simply cannot be correct! The NES article in the current RG informs the readership that,

QuoteNintendo had clearly taken note of the many mistakes made by others. The company was notoriously strict about the quality of software on the NES, concoting the now famous 'Seal of Quality' which reassured gamers and their jumpy parents - that the expensive that they were buying weren't going to end up as landfill shortly after purchase.

So are we to trust in the words of Gamezone magazine or that of Retro Gamer magazine because surely they both can't be right?

Oh, wait, what this I see in the same article,

QuoteBy imposing such draconian limitations of publishers, Nintendo wanted to ensure that NES software was of the highest possible standard (although there were plenty of stinkers on the system)...

So RG is telling its readership that Nintendo were "notoriously strict" about wanting to avoid making the "same mistakes as others" but then inadvertently informs us that Nintendo did in fact make some of those same mistakes that the much vaunted (by Nintendo cheerleaders, at least) Seal Of Quality was intended to eradicate. So, that cheap shot at Atari (the "landfill" comment) was something Nintendo was familiar with too given that RG, accurately in this instance, stated there were plenty of rubbish games on NES too.

Seems a bit of a confused mess to me. On the one hand the article is seemingly so desperate to big up the NES but then, in a half-arsed attempt at providing some balance to the hyperbole, contradicts itself without caring to explain why Nintendo failed in what it set out to achieve. When I say 'failed' I'm of course referring to the quality of the games as opposed to how successful the Seal Of Quality was in the USA as a marketing tool to help sell NES and its games.

While this NES article (yes, another one in this UK publication) that's masquerading as a Famicom article is infinitely superior to the woeful and deservedly much derided 'NES Collector's Guide' from RG issue 101 there are still a catalogue of issues present.

I find it frankly bizarre that, recent Sega Master System and Mega Drive articles penned by notorious Nintendo fanboy Adam Buchanan aside, this particular magazine generally seems to be capable of writing about other brand consoles in a fair and accurate manner but then seems to lose the plot each time it covers the NES. Most peculiar. 

well, whilst i've (sadly) far from a complete collection of Gamezones, they did at some point split the magazine into 2 seperate publications, 1 dealing with Sega hardware and software the other Nintendo...so i'd say they gave unbiased reviews.

That issue alone had: 2-Page Dr.franken (GB) preview, 3 page look at the 'Work Boy ' device for the GB, 2 page review of Turtles II Nes (80%), 1 page review of Totally Rad, Nes (83%) etc etc...


Whilst Elite's advert (in same issue as review) for Nes Joe And Mac does indeed bear the 'Original Nintendo Seal Of quality' badge and reviewer gave game score of 82%, the slow speed is made good note of as a warning to buyers, just as it is in the Totally Rad review ('..there are a few moments of dreadful slow-motion action, Jake's animation is wobbly...when he's running he seems to have about 2 frames of animation to his name...who rememembers Mr Ben?), as it was in other Nes reviews in other issues of Game Zone i.e F-15:'...never really gives a sensation of flight or speed'-which i'd consider key for a game based on a jet fighter myself or Mega Man III '....the odd slow motion effect rears it's ugly head' or The Addams Family '...in the end, my main complaint is the speed....the game remains sluggish' and so forth.

Maybe it's as simple as this:

Game Zone had at it's disposal:the Nes, GB,GC, Lynx, MS, MD, PC Engine and SNES, so it was well aware of what other systems were capable of be they 8 or 16 Bit, yet the writer of the Nes articles that have 'graced' the pages of RG had the Nes and the Nes only as a child and thus the poor mite honestly knew no other?.

Do find it odd when a publication takes on work from someone who knew nothing but...the system he or she wrote on.How can it be a broad canvas, a wide view when they have in effect been wearing blinkers?.If your writing for a format specific magazine, i could over look it, but when your putting it in a publication which covers so many formats, strikes me as naive at best and assumes your readership either won't notice or mind, which judging by feedback left on publications own feedback threads, would so often appear to be anything but the case.

On the bright side, lots of good information has been shared about why the system failed in the UK.

Quote from: "onthinice"On the bright side, lots of good information has been shared about why the system failed in the UK. :1:

:24:

Quote from: "onthinice":24:

Palpatine "Good" (//http)

 

:21:

To be clear here (as i know i rant a lot on the Nes and UK press coverage angle).

All i'm asking is that any time the Nes is looked at by UK publication it gets fair, unbiased coverage.Yes i know UK does'nt equal all of Europe, but that's no excuse-if anything all that proves is that so far no-one has had the good sense to write an article offering a new slant on a now very over exposed format, a piece on just why it fared so poorly in UK compared to elsewhere i would of thought would have made for the ideal article-but guess here it's not the sort of thing Nintendo UK would be keen to see in print?

Short of staff writers/people submitting the right articles? sorry, don't buy into that,whilst numerous times i've seen RG magazine editor turn to (various) forums for 'help' with an article be it Nintendo, Atari or whoever based, i've also seen people offering to help: case in point here old Atari Age thread had an offer of help from ThomH to RG, saying he had 3 years exp.as a writer and editor, was a Lynx homebrew coder had done a Mode 7  demo etc etc, seemed the ideal person to do a Lynx feature and yet the editor never even posted back (and later admitted on his forum he honestly was'nt sure what Mode 7 was !), which i found quite sad.

It's basically as easy as eating Pancakes:UK publications:If you insist on printing the same, rose tinted specs, alt history of the Nes and UK, with absurd statements from the writer and industry folk like 'me again' Ste Pickford (seriousily, sure he's a great guy, but F-me am i sick to death of seeing him interviewed, find some new people to interview!!!!), then it's no good moaning or making up claims about people, when we, the paying customer, kick off...


As long as you continue to put out unfactual, fanboy driven pieces (and i don't give a tinkers damn in what manner they are 'presented'), 'we' will continue to post factual corrections backed up with far more research than went into your articles.Ball in soundly in your courts.We are'nt paying for fanzines here, not trolling, not getting personal, just sick of what we are seeing.

Bottom line is:in todays information driven society, mere posters like ourselves should'nt be the ones putting out the facts, correcting glaring errors etc.

If your writing for a publication just because there's no-one else to do it, then ditch the article or feature until you can find the right person, if your just looking for your name in print, try any of the UK talent show crap that's served up on tv these days or Big Brother or anything else but writing for a professional publication.Gamestm used to have superb Retro section and decent mainstream articles, it decided copying Edge was way forward, quality went south.RG i used to love reading (errors and all), now copies sit unread for months more often than not, Edge, yeah reviews up own arse but it's Retro features (Makinfg Of's.....) 2nd to none, yet now stopped.

Give us honesty, fresh slants, new interviews, don't just reheat the same old and have your publisher crow about having world class features (which you won't find anywhere else) as the punters, yes we few, will see straight through it and moan like feck as we're paying for it.

Back on topic:

If you took any C64/Speccy/CPC magazine from say 'Winter 1988' you'd see reviews, previews,tips/cheats, adverts etc for the following coin-op conversions:

Buggy Boy, R-Type, Afterburner, Operation Wolf, Roadblasters, Salamander, Thunderblade, Road Runner, Combat School, Gryzor, Bionic Commando, Pac Land, Return Of The Jedi, Tiger Road etc and then there were the clones/inspired by type games (Katakis, Slayer etc copying R-Type, 1st to point where it was withdrawn and re-coded after legal issues, Great Giana Sisters-withdrawn as blatant SMB clone, Overlander-elite's Roadblasters clone again hit by legal battle).These are just the arcade conversions let alone the original games coming out.All could be had for under £10 on tape

Then if you wanted to spend a bit more, compilations with 6 or lot more games on were everywhere and looking at arcade games alone, you'd find Express Raider, Gauntlet, Kung-Fu master, Rygar, Solomons Key, Commando, Ghost's 'N' Goblins, Bomb Jack, 1942 etc etc and compilations started at just under £10, went up to £25, but who was going to pay the price of a single Nes cart for a graphically tarted up, if lucky, 8 Bit version when they finally turned up?.

It just was'nt going to happen.People like myself had picked up the arcade conversions we wanted, played'em to death and moved on.In good few cases we'd still load'em up just for the Rob Hubbard (Commando) or Tim Follin (Bionic Commando) music on C64, but they were pretty much done and dusted.we could'nt believe Nintendo were passing off titles like these as 'new' and exciting releases.

this is why i continue to struggle to read in any publication that the UK was just sat here waiting for Nes to arrive and with it the arcade conversions etc.we already had them and more!.

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"To be clear here (as i know i rant a lot on the Nes and UK press coverage angle).

On the occasion that such abysmal articles are published on websites and in print publications then they deserve to be flagged up. I don't see it as ranting at all because if such media sources knew their arse from their elbow then there'd be no need for this thread.

QuoteBottom line is:in todays information driven society, mere posters like ourselves should'nt be the ones putting out the facts, correcting glaring errors etc.

Ain't that the truth! I'm no NES 'expert', I'm just a longtime gamer who remembers history as it happened and so I consequently take exception when I see what smacks of a pro-Nintendo revisionist agenda appearing in the videogaming media of today. It has nothing to do with me being 'anti-Nintendo' (an accusation commonly leveled by the hard of thinking) because I'd feel exactly the same way if it were the likes of Atari or Sega instead.

It really does come to something when I as nothing more than a longtime gamer, i.e. not someone who's a games industry veteran, only have to glance through the likes of the many NES articles referenced in this long running thread and can immediately upon first reading pick out so many factual errors, instances of fanboy bias and distortions of historical events. I'm no 'expert authority' but why is it that I so often have a better grasp of gaming history, often without the need to consult verifiable sources to check out facts, than the people who are employed to write the articles highlighted in this thread?

It staggers me that large, well established websites and magazine publishers pay these people for such poor quality work. That such dire articles keep on being published by websites and print publications leads me to deduce that the editorial processes and procedures in place at such organisations must be severely lacking in rigour or that those in charge don't know their arse from their elbow either. It's a sorry state of affairs whatever the explanation.

A good number of people I speak to also see it as a running joke in how certain sections of the gaming media seek to present history in a way it simply never happened. When it can be determined that the mouthpieces who are guilty of peddling such myths also, by happy coincidence,  happen to be on the receiving end of advertising income paid for by the very same corporations that they're seeking to present so very favourably then it's only natural for one to be suspicious of just what kind of agenda is being served.

If the recent Nes articles (and i started this thread at start of May this year, yet still they keep coming in at a rate of knots....), then i fully expect to see future articles in publications 'adjusted' to suit....


So, any GBA article will totally gloss over the lack of backlit screen on the original model (which i own), no headphone socket on the SP etc....


The PS3 articles should be a bloody steal:totally ignore any quotes from say Gabe Newell (Valve) where he basically tears the hardware a new one and instead will feature his later quotes (Portal II era) where he gushes with praise about PS3, PSN etc etc, there'll be no mention of Activision threatening to drop PS3 support unless Sony drop hardware price, the PSN hack will get a mention, but mere one..nothing will be said about the internal clock glitches etc etc.

The Xbox 360 will be praised to the nines, not a damn thing about locking away something as basic as  I.E behind a paid for wall, the E74/3 Red Ring fiasco, yeah, it happened, people dealt with it...that'll do.

Game Cube one should be a dozy as well.......

... and PS2 will be one day presented by the more 'challenged' elements of the gaming media as having been akin to a golden age of gaming! 

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"... and PS2 will be one day presented by the more 'challenged' elements of the gaming media as having been akin to a golden age of gaming! 

Just remember...66 Million Polys Per Sec...or it did'nt happen.

:-)

Thread bump:

Very sorry to who ever wrote the 'Wizards And warriors' article in past issue of RG magazine, but it's honestly a fallacy to claim the games were well recived here in UK, adding the already average at best scores so far in this thread, Zero's review of the 1st game on Nes:

67% 'Levels get very tedious...it's all too easy to be knocked from your perch and fall to your doom...graphics and sound are passable...'

Not exactly a classic in the making in that reviewers eyes.....

A new article about ROB, aka Famicom Robot, and the NES that's ripe for mentioning here -

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/432327/features/history-lesson-rob/ (//http)

Penned for CVG by Matthew Castle, Associate Editor, Official Nintendo Magazine (UK).

The usual fare of 'conveniently worded' NES revisionism that refers to NES in "the West" when what they're actually doing is discussing the console's success in North America alone and doing so in a manner which may well be interpretted by those otherwise ignorant souls to be representative of how Nintendo's console sold in the UK, the Continent of Europe and much of the rest of the world. Precisely the kind of misrepresentation we've noted in numerous other articles quoted and/or linked in this fine thread.

My personal favourite humbug from the article are these two zingers,

Quote...the realisation of the NES' greatness

One can only assume said Official Nintendo Magazine employee is referring to the one man and his dog who actually bothered buying a NES here back in the day.

QuoteThe infamous 'videogames crash' saw consumers fall out of love with the many shoddy titles flooding the market, leading to a flat-lining of game sales.

Deary me, it's straight from the Adam Buchanan school of NES revisionion ('NES Collector's Guide' article, Retro Gamer magazine issue 101) with that flatout wrong description of the UK gaming scene having been in a parlous state back in 1986/87 and how the sainted NES apparently rescued us all from such woe and misery.  :-

I read this C+VG article with my 'heavy-bias' filter firmly engaged, as soon as i saw who wrote it, i knew it was going to be heading just 1 way and 1 way only and in fairness, writer has done it with a sense of humour etc but even so....

It just makes far, far too many sweeping statements and reads as if it's aimed at the USA not Europe in any form, so i'm guessing it's done too please certain quarters.....

ROB did not 'massively affect the course of history', let alone gaming history, if it had, why has'nt the concept been dragged up again using newer technology the way motio control, 3D, Home V.R etc have been? why did'nt others like Sega, Sony or Atari come out with their own versions? (after all as the Nintendo faithful would have us believe, Nintendo invented everything gaming wise for others to copy...)

'Gaming in the 80's was hovering around the 2 mark'...was it? was it really?.No, of course it was'nt as we've covered to point of stagnation on here time and time again, yet here's that myth rolled out yet again to a generation who've no idea what a bit is, let alone 8 bits..that 80's gaming was a dark, desolate wasteland, much wailing and gnashing of teeth, who would save us? then Nes arrives and behold! we are saved.


Turtles, SMB 3 and Rare probably did a damn sight more to affect the history of the Nes here in UK and elsewhere than a mere novelty robot, but that does'nt make for such a good story to filler a web page does it?.No angle for them to run with there....

And is the writer honestly saying that by putting in a robot toy like ROB, your average consumer was suddenly 'blinded' to fact it was, gasp, a video games console?.

'Gee look mom! look at that cool Nintendo console, it has a control pad, games are on cartridge, it plugs into the TV, it has a light gun, just like every other games console out there, can we buy it? please mom, please!!!'


'Don't be silly Tommy, why that's no console, look there's a robot in with it, we've bought you countless robots in the past, you never said they were consoles and you don't play with them any more, no, you just left them on the floor, now they are in the closet along with your other toys (and ironically where Tommy ended up as he struggled with his sexuality.....too much? ) your far too old for toys now Tommy'.


Not my most serious post, i'll grant you, but it's got to such absurd levels the way the history of the Nes is now reported, only way to counter it is to talk as much cobblers as they are claiming.

Top post there, RT!  ::)

Quote from: "DreamcastRIP"Top post there, RT!  ::)

I know i tend to 'bang the same drum' each time the Nes/UK gets mentioned in todays press, but it's really little more than a frustrated cry about how poor UK reporting has become.

Sure, it's reaching a global market thanks to the internet, so was BBC World service thanks to the radio broadcasting system, i did'nt hear them thinking, f**K it, lets put out any old shite, did you?

Basically UK Press:grow a pair will you?

There's no shame in admitting that you know what? over here Nes arrived delivering too little, too late.Am i supposed to believe we, as a nation are ashamed now to say that whilst USA suffered a crash, good old blighty etc was in it's prime as an industry, churning out classics from so many software houses, now sadly no more.

Yes, the UK was actually bloody good at making original, innovaitive games once, hard as that may be to accept in todays market place, but like sh*t, it happened!!!!

When i look back at Japanese press, things like 'Game Labo' and it's editor, Suzuki Norimichi, being so proud of his original and editorially independant magazine (no idea if it still exists, but i'm going to mention it for what it stood for), which did not rely on P.R releases, adverts from companies and was'nt afraid to cover taboo subjects like how to modify hardware (High Res mode for the SNES anyone? over-clocked GB?) for fear of adverts dissapearing like snow before the sun or exclusives no longer being offered...


His mantra:If a project is feasible-we publish it.If it's a reality-we'll show it.


Why is'nt there more about the reality of the UK gaming scene during the 80's., rather than looking at novelty crap for a console that made little impact over here?.

I love this thread, very informative if not a tad to factual for me lol.. I am a dreamer more than most and have never believed the NES to be what some of the press state.. BUT regardless of all that we should embrass a system that clearly was very successful around the globe.. 

Why? It was shit

Perhaps, but thats not everyone's opinion and obviously we want to cater for all to have their own opinions..

 

Oh dear!

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/218152-so-the-nes-did-all-these-to-save-gaming/ (//http)

 

I hate the way the NES is portrayed as a savior of gaming, especially as we were blissfully unaware of a "crash" because we were all to busy enjoying out 8bit computers.


But do you know what pisses me off just as much, people who use this skewed viewpoint to constantly call the NES shite or rubbish. The Fanboys claiming it saved gaming is not the machines fault and hating on a machine because ot that is just as pathetic as the view that it saved gaming. Its a great machine and has great games.

there are some of those people on here who will not allow a good word to be said about the NES simply because they hate this biased viewpoint.

In the US, given that we did have a crash of the video game industry, Nintendo with its NES has always been perceived as the savior of the video game industry.  The NES managed to successful where every other system failed in the US, so it is not hard to see people have this perception.  As far as I am concerned, Nintendo revived the video game industry in the US.  Clearly Nintendo did something right in that market.  I was not aware of how different things were in Europe until I became more involved in forums, so I can see how people not from the US would see the notion of the NES as a savior of the video game industry as some sort of joke.  After all, the system was not successful in every market (certainly not in Europe, where the SMS became "it").  I think that had Sega been the successful company in the US, instead of Nintendo, the SMS might have been perceived in the way the NES is perceived.

The thing is the NES hardware isn't particularly impressive, it suffers from muddy colours and terrible sprite flicker for a start. It was let competent than it's rivals from a technical perspective but was certainly better supported from a software perspective. There is no doubting the NES has some amazing games, it bloody well should do given how many there are, but is it a good console from a technical/hardware perspective - no, not really.

Yep, it may not have the best hardware but it did have great marketing in the US.  We've discussed this before.  Though the SMS has better hardware, its marketing was lacking in the US market.  It, therefore, did not do so well.  Goes to show that having good marketing is sometimes more important than having good hardware.  Sega obviously realized this (good marketing) when they launched the Genesis. 

Quote from: "TrekMD"Yep, it may not have the best hardware but it did have great marketing in the US.  We've discussed this before.  Though the SMS has better hardware, its marketing was lacking in the US market.  It, therefore, did not do so well.  Goes to show that having good marketing is sometimes more important than having good hardware.  Sega obviously realized this (good marketing) when they launched the Genesis.

Yep, very true. It's actually quite rare that the best system has won a console or computer generation - it's nearly always the best marketed one.

My general impression is that the NES wasn't a big sales success in the UK.  In comparison, the Master System seemed to sell like hot cakes.  I didn't know anyone who owned one, but I knew quite a few Master System owners.  I can't seem to remember a lot of advertising for it - again, compared to the Master System.  I don't know if that affected it? 

In contrast, the SNES seemed very successful.  I do remember lots of advertising for that.  There was the whole Mario Kart and SF: II stuff.  I knew quite a few SNES owners - although funnily they had never owned a NES beforehand. 

To be honest I was still fairly young when I got a NES, maybe 11/12yo, but I loved it. It was my first games console, we had a ZX Spectrum 2 before that, but when I got my NES I was in awe.  Now granted it had its flaws and I was the first kid on my street to get one (think within 3 to 6 months there were 3 of us who had one), so I didn't play many of the games at first but the ones I did have, I played to death.

As I say I'm not delusional enough to believe it was the best system of the day but for me personnally, I thought it had the best games of the day. And that is why I hold the NES in such high regard, don't get me wrong though I have spent many an hour arguing this with my friends who are Sega fans. But for me SMB3 is the best platformer ever on an 8bit machice, Zelda is the best RPG/adventure game and Mega Man 3 is second only to Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Now as to the high demand for the games and console these days, I think is mainly due to two types of "collectors" (I use the term collectors loosely for a reason), partially because of people who never played or owned the games and console the first time round. A lot of my friends for example want a NES because they had a SMS or an Atari or an 8bit computer the first time round and want to play the classic games they didn't get to play originally, which is great and to be encouraged. The rest is due the to people reading stupid articles online or in the newspapers on how much your old stuff is worth, not once mentioning in said articles that to fetch those nose bleed prices they need ro be mint and even then it is over inflated, who think if they buy a NES and some of the well known games it's an investment for their retirement or some crap. This then pushes the prices up and then other stupid people see how much these things go on eBay and start to snap things up too in the hopes of making a profit. Now I know this isn't just an issue on the NES but I think it's most prominent on that console and this then causes a domino affect that makes life for people like us, who collect or people who genuinely want try the games out and play them, really difficult.

Jeremy

I can honestly say there is at least one good game on almost every single machine from the ZX81 to tha Acorn Archimedes A3010/Falcon/Amiga AGA era as far as UK gaming scene was concerned. I lived through all those machines. Also, let's be honest here the most innovative games came out of Europe (many from the UK) at the dawn of the home computer era.

If you go from a ZX Spectrum to the NES technically you will be wowed, but from a Commodore 64? The NES may have more colours on screen but the sprites are less sophisticated to those on the Commodore 64 and sound on the Commodore 64, and the talent that pushed the SID chip to its limits in EU/UK is nowhere to be found on the simplist type sounds and musical arrangements of NES. The soundtrack to Rambo on a Commodore 64 is almost identical to the musical score of the movie!

The trouble with the NES, as far as the EU and UK goes, was that it cost too much for the games and they certainly were not up to the absolute best systems like the Amiga/Atari ST or even ubiquitous C64 in either ultimate sophistication or even game design originality. You have to consider diversity of the catalogue where you have stunning adventure games like The Pawn with an almost artificial inteligence style of parser inside the game (based on ELIZA) to things like SWIV on a C64 (as good as an NES vertical shooter).

It is very disturbing when BBC, Challenge TV and Channel 4 seem to think the NES was the big seller and also the hot bed of innovation because to be quite frank the USA and Japan were well behind the UK game designers. These progams are made by people who have no clue, probably were not even alive when the Amstrad CPC came out let alone understand why more copies of Harrier Attack (awful game) by Durell Software were sold than Mario 3 on the NES in the UK. Like carpentry retro gaming experience is a dying art and most programs on the subject do relate to outside the EU.

Zelda the best RPG on an 8 bit platform game? Erm no that would arguably be Times of Lore on the Commodore 64, more sophisticated game and presentation and 75% cheaper.  It is very ignorant to make blanket statements like that when clearly you are not qualified to comment on the subject matter and shows ignorant attitude to say as such.

Also true innovation and originality, like Little Computer People on C64 for example, was the sole preserve of cassette and disk based home computer software (NOT IBM or Apple) with no lockout chips or restrictive contracts and expensive preorders for cartridge production affecting the bravery of a developer to initiate such unusual game projects. This shows in the diversity of the EU/UK 8 bit and 16 bit game catalogue for home computers compared to the boring been there done that carbon copy games of NES. Almost all of the games were platform games, got a movie licence? Let's make a platform game out of it!

Let's not forget very few arcade games came out for the NES because the best ones were from SEGA in the mid 80s.  Buggy Boy was an awesome game and whether you had an Amiga, ST, C64, Spectrum or CPC you could have bought it. If you had an NES then you're screwed. Rad Racer is the only NES driving game worth playing. See what I mean about diversity?

£40 for a cartridge was a lot in the 80s and the deluxe set was £150. Even CVG admitted that a used Commodore 64 with stacks of awesome games was a far better proposition even in 1990 for people who couldn't afford either an Amiga or Sega Megadrive than the underwhelming NES. See the review in CVGs complete guide to consoles (red one).

You can like Excitebike on NES as much as you want but is it 20x better than the £2 classic BMX kidz on Commodore 64? No it is not. So there is your answer why it didn't sell here. Games were just better and people making them better were here on this side of the Atlantic. In the USA the home computer games were dominated by terrible CGA/EGA PC games and all the best games were from EU/UK and shipped back there by the mid 80s. Very few decent 8 bit games were being produced in the USA at the launch of NES and almost zero Amiga/ST games worth mentioning.
 
It certainly didn't have the best games of the day.  To say Zelda is the best 8 bit RPG shows ignorance in the extreme, ToL plays better, looks better, sounds better and cost four times less. Let me guess you never even heard of it though.

There are 100s of RPG and platform games on all the popular 8 and 16 bit computers we used in the UK but I can tell you right now there is not a single game like Rescue on Fractalus on any Nintendo console. On the Atari home computers in the mid 80s this was a stunning achievement, realtime fractal landscape 3D shoot em up. Yeah not many NES fans even knew this was possible,
 
Even Donkey Kong on the C64 is better than NES, it has ALL levels too and you can use any controller with D9 connector but on the NES you HAVE to use bespoke plasticky joypads from Nintendo.

The thing to remember is here in the UK gaming started for most of us on something like the ZX81 or VIC20, possibly an Atari 800 if you were rich. Then came the epic battle on a scale of SNES vs Megadrive of ZX Spectrum 48k vs Commodore 64. Even during that battle the big buzz in the UK and Germany was the soon to be released Amiga (which they took 11 months to release in the UK after the US launch of Amiga 1000), and in France the Atari ST (absolutely huge scene there with the best magazines being in French).

The Atari ST really does not get any press at all in retro gaming terms despite selling 10 times more than the NES in the UK, sad because to be honest it was capable of arcade perfect ports of Ghosts n Goblins or Commando and only cost £299 which is dirt cheap for something more powerful than a $4000 PC EGA computer Americans bought to go with their NES in the mid 80s.

I don't care how many damned NES platformers you shove in my face because real innovation came from games like Defender of the Crown and Rocket Ranger on the Atari ST and Amiga first. The first 100% 16bit arcade machine quality games that even a SNES would have trouble replicating with it's slow 65C816 8/16bit 3.5mhz chip like Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Super Stardust kept Europeans entertained. Mortal Kombat had no green blood tampering and well games like Battle Squadron and Sword of Sodan are just better on Amiga than Megadrive.  Amiga's Mega Typhoon is NOT possible on a SNES and yet we are talking 1985 machine here, which is when the low brow NES came out. It was too weak 

The future was Amiga, and a 1986 arcade perfect port of Marble Madness proved to me I had made the right choice getting a used Amiga 1000 in early 1987 from my Doctor (who was selling it to get an Amiga 2000!!)

So you see the NES was technically underwhelming, highly restricted catalogue of games, terrible controllers (the Sega 6 button Megadrive joypad has far superior D-pad for diagonals and less plasticky shiny buttons than either the SNES or NES) and it was just never going to live up to the epic soundtracks of C64 or Amiga games. For this reason in the UK actual retro gaming is as follows.

Atari VCS vs Colecovision OR ZX81 vs VIC20 vs a hundred other early 8 bit computers like Oric 1 etc
ZX Spectrum vs C64 vs Amstrad CPC
Amiga vs Atari ST
SNES vs Megadrive

And then Playstation proceeded to destroy Sega and almost bankrupt Nintendo (who only survived from profits of all those horrible childish pokemon games for Gameboy/GBC while N64 died a slow agonizing death in the EU)

I would like to say a big thank you to all the members who trawled through magazines to find the truth, the UK was one of the most innovative places for game design or even the advancements like the mood set by sound (who can forget the sinister atmosphere of Forbidden Forest on the Commodore 64?) From the time of the VIC20/ZX81 to Amiga vs ST. Games like Shadow of the Beast from 1989 which ran on a stock 1985 Commodore Amiga 1000 can not be replicated at all on either a Megadrive or SNES in the 90s so the NES just fell short of being worth buying into due to the cost of cartridges and low end technology inside the machine.

If you haven't played £10 Times of Lore on a £99 Commodore 64 in 1989 how can anyone say Zelda on NES is the best 8 bit RPG? You can't and it proves that people who champion these machines have no idea of the best games of the time.  £20 Gauntlet, Commando, Ghosts n Goblin on the £299 Atari ST from 1985 are all excellent arcade quality games. The NES is of no importance, it's the Hannah Montanna of games consoles, only good if you need something to keep your door open until you can be bothered to re-hang it 

Had UK software companies exercised quality control and not released badly coded conversions like Out Run/Turbo Out Run/Power Drift for the Amiga the Megadrive would have had a harder time but the reality was by this point we were all working and were fed up of badly coded technically bad arcade conversions for £25 and were happy to pay £50 to play the best possible version that could be implemented on a Megadrive. If you don't believe me go and count the number of colours on a screenshot of Gauntlet 2 on the Amiga...yes only 16 not 32 or 64, and yet with proper quality control it should have looked identical to Gauntlet IV on the Megadrive. This is why the NES failed but the Megadrive got a foothold. Blame US Gold and Activision's terrible quality control.

Wow, that was a great read fella 

Agree, a great read.

I agree the C64 version of games had the better ports but load times and overheating power bricks caused plenty of lost game time. Had a friend who played Pirates so much on his C64 that he finally had to buy a small house fan to cool the Commodore 64 power brick to keep it from overheating, always called the power supply a brick for its size and weight.

For me in the States, the NES was a must because my C1541 was wearing out. My thought was the 1541 II was good but not worth the investment over the original. The 1571 was out of stock when I had extra money and in stock when cash stripped. I was tired of load times from a noisy disk drive and the NES had all the same ports. Maybe watered down but games were easier to jump in to and play. Another reason for choosing the NES was my age, growing up brought other issues which meant less time for gaming so consoles were the better choice.

I am a Sega fan but even ports for its 16-bit were watered down. Buck Rodgers was still better on the Commodore 64. Pirates had better graphics over the NES and C64 but lacked something compared to the Commodore version. One plus with 16-bit as well was load times were minimal and usually just at the title screen.

Not trying to knock the C64 and not much knowledge of the later computers mentioned but did load times ever become a complaint in the UK?

Quote from: "MadCommodore"It certainly didn't have the best games of the day.  To say Zelda is the best 8 bit RPG shows ignorance in the extreme, ToL plays better, looks better, sounds better and cost four times less. Let me guess you never even heard of it though.

What I gather from your comment and username is that you are quite bias towards consoles.

Had you actually read my post properly, you would have seen it wasn't ignorance that made me write that sentence but personal opinion; I know the insanity of one's own opinion!

Just to clarify, I have heard of Times of Lore, I have even played it. Though that was a long time ago and not very in depth, to say it is the best RPG is as you call it "ignorance", what about the Ultima series or Wizardry or the early SSI games  like The Wizard's Crown?

I don't claim to be suitably qualified on this topic or on others within our hobby but this post is about the NES, in a thread about Nintendo hardware and my comment reflected my experience and personal opinion on such.

Jeremy.

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Great thread so far, be nice though chaps... Opinions are just that, we are all allowed them..

Never played Times of Lore, never been a huge RPG fan and I guess I always assumes Zelda to be the finest example of one of those types of games.

I was discussing this topic with a friend at work, who also collects retro video games.

He is by no means a Nintendo fan, especially the NES and SNES but he did make some interesting points. Firstly, even though the NES came late to the UK compared to the Japanese and US markets, it still had a huge impact on UK gaming. It helped cement competition between formats for a lot of youngsters, yes there was the Spectrum vs. Commodore arguments but it paled in comparison to the school playground arguments of Nintendo vs Sega. Whether you were in the Sonic camp or Mario camp had quite the impact on playground politics.

Secondly the UK home computer scene, though brilliant and innovative, was going through its own crisis, over saturation of licensed games and bad ports meant that sales were beginning to suffer. Yes there were still good games coming out for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum but they were few and far between at this stage. Not to mention a lot of the great UK developers were getting poached by US and Japanese developers and publishers which certainly wasn't helping the UK home computer scene.

Thirdly, the NES and also the SMS were dedicated gaming machines. No longer did you have long waits while your favourite Dizzy game was loading, you simply slotted the game cartridge in and BAM! You were transported away to wonderfully new gaming world to explore. Even for the most dedicated computer fan this was something to behold and for me personally, who went from a ZX Spectrum +2 to a NES it was miraculous.

Finally, not specifically just in the UK but it is undeniable that without the NES or more importantly the Famicom (the NES was essentially a repacked Famicom), we wouldn't be playing games the way we do today. Console gaming would not have progressed the way it without the innovations the NES showcased. The D-Pad? Start and Select buttons? Not to mention others, yes other companies developed these further and in some cases improved on them but without Nintendo we could still have to deal with horrible pads like the Atari 5400 controller.

Some people have compared the NES to the Sega Mega Drive or the Amiga or Atari ST but personally I feel this is unfair, yes the NES came out in the UK near the end of the 8-Bit era but to compare it to these 16-Bit machines is similar to comparing the PS1 to the XBox. They were different generations of machines and would obviously be better in graphics, sound, etc.

Now these are just personal opinions and experiences of myself and my work colleague but after re-reading a lot of the comments on this thread I feel someone needs to make a counter argument to the mostly negative, though excellently made points thus far.

Jeremy


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The way I remember it was the C64 Spectrum and Amstrad CPC464 etc had the majority of the gaming market in the UK. I already owned an Amiga before one of my mates got a NES. And Sega's master system was better known in the UK.

Yeah that’s more or less the reality of what happened. There will always be slightly different versions of events but those computers ruled back then.


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