The Angry Video Game Nerd is back, and he's kicking off his resurrection with a two-part series on the Jaguar. Part one offers a brief history of the Jaguar, but doesn't explore its impotent game library at any length. Instead, the Nerd talks about how the Jaguar helped loosen a very powerful advertising ankle trap: the “Bit Wars.”
Putting it simply, if you were a gamer and conscious in between the years of 1985 and 1996, you were led to believe that more “bits” in a console equals a better system. You also fell for it, at least until certain truths started to leak out from pores of the 32/64-bit system race.
The NES was a huge improvement over the Atari 2600. The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were a huge improvement over the rinky-dink graphics on the NES. 32-bit systems were capable of orchestrated audio, anime cutscenes and 3D graphics. And that's where the waters started to muddy up.
Before the 32/64-bit race began in earnest, I was going through a small obsessive fit with Capcom arcade games. In particular, Street Fighter Alpha, and (sigh) Dungeons and Dragons: Shadows Over Mystara. I thought for certain I'd see ports on the N64, because, duh, Nintendo's system was going to be the most powerful one in the console race! Why wouldn't it happen?
I posted the question on my high school's BBS and was laughed at by a lot of angry video game nerds who predated the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Storage space, development kits, costs...those meant little to me. It was all about the bits. Even though Squaresoft had thrown up its hands over the N64's cartridges and said, “Nope.” Even though Atari had long since made an ass of itself with the Jaguar.
It took a while, but I came to realise that “bits” were an advertising ruse that was even more effective and long-lived than Sega's infamous Blast Processing. The scope and vision of Super Mario 64 could never be achieved on the Playstation, but all things told, it didn't look much better than a Playstation game, and I had been bred to believe that the evolution of games was marked by its aesthetics.
The Nerd mentions how hard it was to convince his parents that a 16-bit Super Nintendo was actually a whole new experience next to the 8-bit Nintendo. At least the visual jump was evident from the start. My biggest challenge was convincing my parents that a 32-bit Playstation offered a whole new gameplay experience next to the N64. The N64 had Shadows of the Empire and Waverace; the Playstation had sprites, Final Fantasy VII, and Mega Man X4.
Problem was, I had long ago trained them to believe that “up” was the only way to go with bit counts. They weren't about to let me spend hundreds of dollars on a downgrade.
Eventually, I won. And my parents knew for sure they'd been duped when they heard the top-quality voice acting in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
Related Links:
Life Without Playstation
The Angry Video Game Nerd's House of Nintendo Horrors
Wasted Rentals, Wasted Youth: Bram Stoker's Dracula