![]() There was also the not-so-small matter of piracy. Retronauts' recent look at Otocky, a great game for Famicom Disk System. And that impressive storage capacity? Thanks to some innovations in cartridge design that came along soon after the Disk System's debut, it wasn't too long before carts offered far greater data capacity than diskettes - not to mention special on-board coprocessors that made possible programming gimmicks unthinkable on stock Famicom hardware. The low-cost media mostly resulted in a flood of low-quality software by opportunistic publishers. Those rewritable diskettes lacked the durability of carts. Many of the Disk System's seeming advantages proved in the long term to be weaknesses. By the time it would have migrated westward, the Disk System had become almost completely obsolete. In truth, however, its Japan-only release made perfect sense. Given all the advantages it offered, this might seem a strange decision by Nintendo. All told, more than 200 games launched on Disk System, some as late as 1992!Īnd yet, the Disk System ultimately failed to make its way outside of Japan. It became one of those most successful add-ons in history, rivaled only by the PC Engine/TurboGrafx CD and Sega CD (which, not coincidentally, patterned themselves closely after the Famicom Disk System model). Not surprisingly, publishers flocked to the Disk System. Some games allow granted players the opportunity to create and record custom content - a feature that had been available in a handful of Famicom games (including Excitebike and Wrecking Crew) through the Data Recorder, true, but became an innate feature of the hardware rather than a rare option once the Disk System arrived. Rather than force players to complete them in a single sitting, Nintendo took advantage of the Disk System's ability to record information directly to diskette to allow players to save their progress and return to their quest further down the road. We saw the first glimmers of this with The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, speedy and challenging action games set in huge, persistent worlds. A few ambitious console games had made attempts at PC-like game experiences, but it wasn't until the FDS came along that console games finally managed to break away from the arcade mold. ![]() PCs, on the other hand, excelled at deeper, more long-term game design, thanks to their greater storage capacity and rewriteable media. To that point, consoles had focused on rapid, arcade-style experiences, which they could deliver far more effectively than personal computers of the era. Finally, and by far most importantly, the Disk System helped change the basic nature of console game design.
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