@Kirino @dcc @pwm @jae @sysrq @ins0mniak @j

> some people didn't go to or have access to arcades so you weren't able to see the latest and greatest light-gun stuff.

Yeah, I don't know how many people didn't have access to arcades, though; even when I was in shitty little towns, there was a mall and the mall had an arcade. (Before the internets enabled every niche, it wasn't optional, you had to go to the mall for most things.) At any rate, arcades generally set the technical standard, so if you had $0.25, you put $0.25 in the machine. The big-screen Street Fighter machines and whatnot, not just Time Crisis. I played a lot of these games on a 13" CRT.

Bigger towns, they'd do tests, basically tech demos and they could quantify popularity by counting quarters. It was some shitty VR goggle thing usually.

Some time in the mid 90s there was a fighting game that, despite using 2D sprites, did the characters as 3D holograms popping out of the table. Looked very cool, but must not have been cost-effective, since I have never seen that tech used in any sort of computer display since then.

> Mario 64 I've only ever heard good things about when people talk about it's released. If I have my history correct it pretty much set the standard for 3D platformers, right? Like it was the first and immediately perfected it.

Maybe not the first, but it was the first one that both looked and felt good, and also was fun; a lot of games looked nice but the controls were clunky. Nintendo would not allow a Mario game with clunky controls to exist, though. (Not after SML, anyway.) It really did look amazing at the time. Like, a lot of the PSX games at the time looked slightly nicer than Star Fox, but Super Mario 64 looked really incredible. On the other hand, when you've got to pay for every ROM chip in a cart but there's no reason not to use every single byte on a CD-ROM, so most PSX devs leaned into using that to their advantage, plus Sony was a lot more permissive with content. (You probably know about NOA turning all the crosses into ankhs.) So PSX games started having buckets of textures and massive levels and a lot of music and video.

Speaking of expansion slots, the PSX was supposed to be an add-on to the SNES. Nintendo was unhappy with the load times and dumped the deal with Sony, so Sony built a standalone system. The president of Sony felt like it was kind of annoying that his entire living room had only Sony logos everywhere, stereo and TV and VCR and CD and casette players and everything *except* that one stupid Nintendo logo. (Some time during the PS3 era, Sony finally lost the lawsuit against Nintendo for use of the name "PlayStation".)