Greatest videogame device (was Re: An option - Re: the beginning of the end for floppies)

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Although it was never really intended as a pure games device, I'd argue for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It is often constraint that brings out greatness - Hawking would never have become the world's greatest physicist if not for his MND forcing him to retreat into his own mind, for instance. The Spectrum offered the basics - colour graphics, just; sound, just; a fairly-generous-for-the-time 48KB of RAM; a keyboard for input. The C64 and VIC20 were /designed/ for games, with dedicated hardware for games graphics and sound. The Atari 8-bits were the same. The Speccy had none of this, not even, at first, the ubiquitous GA-Y-8912 sound chip that /everything/ else offered if it didn't have something better like the SID chip. The Speccy was the bottom of the line, the lowest-end machine in the market, but it sold millions because it was cheap, kids could justify it to their parents as an educational tool because it was a "proper computer" not a games console, and it had thousands of games titles. It also had a semi-serious BASIC and programming tools, not the half-assed efforts of Commodore and so on, without even graphics or sound commands. This wasn't a toy machine with built-in joystick ports (always a dead giveaway). It wasn't an elitist expensive educational thing like a BBC Micro, either. It was computing for the everyman. Sure, big deal, the Apple II was under $1000. In the late 1970s or early 1980s in Europe, that was prohibitively expensive; I never knew a single individual, company, school or lab who had Apples. They were vastly too dear. Sinclair gave the world the first personal computer under ?100 - nearly an order of magnitude less expensive. The Spectrum was more, I grant - but it started at ?175 or so for the 48K version, if I remember correctly. When Commodores and Ataris cost ?400 or more, this was less than half the price. *It* is what opened up computing to the masses outside of the USA with its legendarily high standard of living and high relative spending power of income. OK, some of the great 8-bit games didn't originate on the Speccy, such as the BBC Micro's Elite - but still, the creativeness, the innovation, the stretching the meagre capabilities of the machine. There was an immense variety of gameplay, far more than the stultified dull world of the consoles then or now. Programming genii got everything out of the Speccy: realtime 3D, full colour, full-screen motion and animation, all sorts. The humble Speccy had a vastly bigger variety of games, as full native apps, than any console before or since, from big companies to tiny one-man-in-his-spare-bedroom efforts. It was what started Codemasters, Rare and the like. I reckon one could argue persuasively that no other single machine had such an influence. The consoles did some clever stuff, but it was all the same sort of game, and only professionals in big companies could develop for it. It didn't interest me then and it doesn't now, really. I have an Xbox to run XBMC and a PS2 to run Guitar Hero and play DVDs, and that is all they ever do. Console games are all samey and dull to me, and always were, and the controllers are horrid and always have been. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508