By: M. A. Clark
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation has just been released on the Sony's Playstation, Nintendo's prime competitor. Looking over the Playstation titles, we see several long games, such as Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Star Ocean, Mega Man titles, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the Resident Evil series, and Metal Gear. Now one looks at the Nintendo selection. It looks rather skimpy compared to the Playstation, and what they do have looks, as Gareth Hall in his article (C-Factor), like it was made for kids, not adults. Of course, Nintendo themselves, what games they do have, are extremely high quality. But do we really want to rescue baby penquins with Mario, or kill zombies with blood and gore at every turn in Resident Evil?
Being a first time buyer, ages 15-30, what would you choose? I'd go with the Playstation personally, if it was my first time to buy a system. Lets be honest. I'm a diehard Nintendo person, but in terms of games, Playstation has us beat hands downs. My brother loves Tomb Raider II, and personally, so do I. But what of Nintendo? Why can't we have a fresh series like Tomb Raider, or games like Final Fantasy that takes seventy hours to complete?
Answer: Because when Nintendo released the N64, they went with cartridge instead of CD. There is some great information and sentimentality on this subject written (again) by Gareth Hall, under "Farewell Cartridge, my old friend". I won't cover ground he has covered. What I am saying is that Nintendo, with the instence of keeping with cartridge, has made the video game world pay a great (and needless) price. Cartridges are a lot more expensive to make than CDs, and you can get more information on CDs, have multiple disks. Third party developers went with Playstation rather than N64. On the system scale, the N64 outdoes Playstation any day of the week. But on the gaming scale, we have loss many good games to Playstation. That is truly tragic. Tomb Raider II, which is one of my favorite games, I have to play on Playstation. We need new blood in us.
Zelda and Mario, the true Nintendo icons, are still holding strong. As far as Zelda goes, truly exciting things are happening. There are more Zelda games in development now than there has been released since the series' inception. And of course there is always something happening with Mario. These two are untouchable. But, classic as they are, we need other game series, series like Tomb Raider or Final Fantasy.
The Dolphin will correct these problems. It is CD-based, which is truly a godsend. Although Playstation (solely because of the sheer variety games, mind you) is beating Nintendo, lets face it, the Playstation is inferiour. Nintendo is the very definition of video games. But if they hadn't made the very smart move of going CD-based their next system, they might have turned into a company for nostalgics, and (God help us!) Playstation and its printacesser would be the ruling consol. Just as Gareth pointed out, the cute factor doesn't cut it any more. We need a balance of both. We need great games like Mario, and then we need the more mature games like Tomb Raider. Then Nintendo will be the best it ever was. Had Nintendo decided not corrected this, I believe it would have been the start of the downfall of Nintendo, which is the very cornerstone of the industy. Without Nintendo, the industry would truly go down very fast.
The funny thing is that as far as potential goes, Nintendo has much more potential than Playstation. But Playstation potential is fully developed, and its beating Nintendo because of the third party developers. But if Nintendo's potential for the N64 was fully realized, and we had as many third party developers as Sony does for their consol, there is no way Sony could compare.
For now, though, lets settle in for Zelda Gaiden when it is released. DK 64 has just been released also. For you mature people, Tomb Raider, anyone?
