Ah ... a good argument ... excellent!
Do these two not qualify as different consoles, then?
Nope ... of course they do.
As do the Corolla vs Camry, or in the case of my argument, the Toyota Tacoma vs Toyota Tundra (1/2 ton truck vs 3/4 ton truck).
You choose your basic "capability" (i.e. console generation), but yet you still have "options" within that "capability" (i.e. console generation) that effect what you can haul (i.e. play).
I'm sorry if that was a unclear to those many (most) folks that haven't actually either owned a truck, or had to figure out how to make the darned thing pull a small mobile home (caravan to Brits) behind it.
I have a very hard time believing that you're not giving any consideration to which of each company's multiple product lines is best for you.
Nope, I am ... which is why I consider the CD-ROM2/Super CDROM as part of the
same product line as the PC Engine.
Have I misunderstood you?
We may be getting caught up on semantics!
I very much support thinking of the PCE-CD hardware as an expansion of the Hucard system. I'd say the same for the Mega CD.
This whole thread started because of confusion over the games more than the systems. Are PCE-CD games PCE games? Are Mega CD games Mega Drive games?
1) Definitely "yes".
2) "yes" ... but only because Sega really, really, really, wanted sell the Mega-CD as an add-on and not as a different console (which it 90% was), and so crippled it by making it output its video through the regular Genesis output, requiring all the DMA nonsense.
They didn't even bother with that silly sham when it came to the 32x.
That's fascinating and all, but I would suggest thinking back to the Japanese guy in 1992 choosing between a Super CD and Mega CD.
I don't believe his choices are really that profoundly different from his perspective as a consumer and gamer.
You're right ... that's the difference between "reality" and "marketing", which is why the marketing folks get paid so well for selling their souls!
I'm more interested in the technical truth and the thinking and reasons behind it than I am in how the end-product is positioned to the "great-unwashed" in order to get them to buy it.
If you want to count all games with "Blast Processing" as a separate "collectable" category just because the adverts told you that Sonic was something "special", then go for it.
I'd prefer to look at it all from an "academic" or "industry" perspective, rather than an "advertising" perspective.
Is the PCE a game console? No, seriously, is it a game console?
If you want to say it exists as its own weird PC-hybrid thing, then that's fine. You listed lots of good reasons to do so.
But if it is a game console, then I see nothing unfair about breaking it down on the same terms as other consoles.
Yes, it is a "game console", at least in my experience and in hindsight.
But do you know what that meant exactly to NEC's executives "at the time"?
They certainly didn't market it or really treat it like Nintendo or Sega did.
They had very different relationships with developers ... much more like a home computer manufacturer.
They let Hudson take a huge portion of the royalties, almost as though they were just licensing the technology (a bit like 3DO later on).
There's a deeper story here, and I don't think that it's been fully told, yet.
Whatever it is ... the relationship between Hudson and NEC is totally different to how Nintendo and Sega behaved at the time, and trying to look back on the history of the PCE in the same terms as the NES/SNES/Master/MegaDrive is an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to just how revolutionary the PCE was at the time that it came out, or its place in history as the very first CD-ROM game console.
One of the core ideas of a console as I see it, and as I think the layman sees it, is that if you have it, you should be able to play all of the games for it. Uniformity and standardization are key. In other words, if someone has a PC Engine but cannot play a PC Engine game, then it's actually not a PC Engine game, or he doesn't actually have a PC Engine.
That "idea" doesn't work, even for all the Nintendo machines.
You're fine for the NES and SNES, which bumped up the cost of every cartridge by putting special chips on board, but you've got the RAM expansion requirement for the N64, and then you've got the MegaCD, 32x, SATURN RAM, etc requirements for Sega.
There's a
long history of requiring "add-ons" to be purchased in order to play certain console games, from those early RAM add-ons, to light-sensor guns, to mice, to Nintendo's Wii-Plus controller, or Sony's Move, or Microsoft's Kinect.
Now we're just about to enter the era of the PlayStation VR.
That doesn't seem like a good way to start a lesson to me. Is it the best choice we have to teach PCE history?
...I guess it could be.
"The truth is complex" beats the heck out of "Here's an artificial arbitrary line" IMHO.
But I don't like it, and when people ask me to talk about the PCE library/libraries, one of the first things I'm going to do is say that there are Hucard games and there are CD games. To me, anyway, this division is one of the defining characteristics of the PCE.
It's one of the simplest ways of describing things to folks at a party that have little knowledge, and uncertain interest, in the subject.
But by the time that someone has bothered to come to this forum and actually spend their money to buy a machine ... then I hope that we can help them enter a "bigger" world where shades-of-grey exist, and everything is much less simple, and much, much more interesting!
