Common Knowledge / Video Games

5 Following

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Games with their own pages

• Ace Attorney
• Elden Ring
• Final Fantasy
• Fire Emblem
• Kingdom Hearts
• The Legend of Zelda
• Mega Man
• Pokémon
• Puyo Puyo
• Shin Megami Tensei
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Smash Bros.
• Touhou Project
• Undertale

Individual games

• A-L
• M-Z

Consoles

• The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer is often referred as the "Panasonic 3DO" under the impression that Panasonic was the company responsible for the console. The 3DO was designed by a team of British engineers working for Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins and the idea behind it was it was a standard that could be licensed to any interested manufacturer: beside Panasonic, Goldstar (now LG), Sanyo and Creatives Labs all released 3DO variants. It would be more accurate to call it "The 3DO Company's 3DO".
• Sega:
  • The Sega Genesis is known for its American ads proudly touting the system's "Blast Processing", an unexplained element of its hardware that obviously made it better than the SNES. In the years since, it's often been claimed that this was marketing jargon invented to make the Genesis seem more powerful than it really was, to the point Sega has even joked about it themselves. Of course, we now know that "blast processing" was just a cool way of explaining the system's faster processor... except it really was just marketing jargon. The term originated from a Sega technical engineer trying to describe the hardware's ability of being able to draw a 256-color image through using its direct memory access controller if you meet a specific set of requirements. It was little more than a neat trick he wanted to show off (no commercial game would ever utilize the feature), and the visiting marketing representative didn't understand what he was even talking about, simply latching onto the words "blast" and "processing" from the explanation and rolling with it.
  • It's commonly believed that the famed Sega jingle was used in a lot more games than it actually was. In fact only five Sega Genesis games used it: the four Sonic games and Beyond Oasis. It was only used in one Sega CD game (and as a parody with the syllables reversed at that), three Sega 32X games, and seven Game Gear games (six of which were part of the Sonic franchise.) There were several different variations of it used in other games (Jurassic Park had a T-rex barking it out) and it's used in the intro of almost every game Sega makes today, but very few games outside of the Sonic franchise used the jingle with the original choir.
• Nintendo:
  • The original U.S. Nintendo Entertainment System model was known for occasionally having games display corrupted graphics or fail to start them at all, the latter manifesting in a "blinking screen of death." People attributed the problems to dirt/dust in the game cartridges or inside the NES itself, thus they would blow into them to clear the debris, resulting in "blowing the cartridge" to become engrained as the solution to fix a cartridge-based game/system that wasn't working properly.^note Word of advice: don't do this. Blowing on the cartridge connectors introduces moisture from your breath and risks damaging the cartridge over time due to rust, hence why Nintendo themselves would eventually add a warning on the back of cartridges by the time of the Nintendo 64. If there is dirt or dust messing with the connection, use rubbing alcohol or electrical contact cleaner with a cotton swab. However, dirt wasn't among the most common reasons for connection problems: the most common reasons tended to be either the pins in the cartridge and/or the system itself getting bent over time from regular use due to the loading mechanism, or the 10-NES lockout chip sometimes failing to recognize legitimate games. Nintendo addressed both design flaws by eventually making a second model that was a top loader instead of a forward one and completely removing the lockout chip, and a malfunctioning original model can be restored to working order via replacement parts and/or have the lockout chip disabled with relatively little effort if you have the know-how.
  • The Super Nintendo Entertainment System tends to be thought of being incapable of handling fast-scrolling platform games because of its CPU being vastly weaker than that of the Genesis, thanks to Sega's trash-talking the system while advertising the Sonic the Hedgehog series and the noticeable and frequent slowdowns in early releases such as Super R-Type and Gradius III. In reality, there were plenty of SNES platformers which had fast-scrolling playfields, including Road Runner's Death Valley Rally, Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, and Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos, to name just a few. That it tended to have slower-paced platformers than Sonic or other platformers on the Genesis was generally more of a design choice, as while the system did have a slower CPU that many developers didn't even fully utilize — the SNES supported two ROM modes of different speeds (coined SlowRom and FastRom, the latter capable of the console's max CPU speed), with the cartridges made for the slower speed being cheaper and thus used more often by developers — the SNES's architecture and several custom chips meant the two consoles were generally equal in performance, with the SNES having an edge on the audiovisual front thanks to superior graphics and sound hardware.
  • The idea that early Game Boy Advance titles used bright and garish color palettes in order to compensate for the lack of a backlight in the first two versions of the hardware. While it is true that early GBA games did use brighter colors for this reason, they were still more washed-out than many believe. This confusion stems from most unofficial emulators exaggerating the colors, with the colors also appearing more bright when played natively on subsequent Nintendo handhelds that did have backlights, such as the AGS-101 model of the Game Boy Advance SP. Later releases of the games via Nintendo's own in-house emulators (Wii U Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online) would go on to more closely replicate the original intended looks of these titles.
  • Wii:
    • It's often stated that the system was originally supposed to be called the "Nintendo Revolution", but that Nintendo was either unable to trademark it, or that selling anything called a "Revolution" would be problematic in certain parts of the world, resulting in the final "Wii" name. However, "Revolution" was never at any stage intended as anything more than a codename, just like the "Dolphin" (GameCube) or "NX" (Nintendo Switch). Video game outlets and enthusiasts simply got used to referring to it as "Revolution" in the time between the system's announcement and its name reveal, and got thrown off by it.
    • With the system often joked to be "two GameCubes duct-taped together", and its being released around the time multi-core CPUs became mainstream, this has led to a belief among several gamers that the Wii uses a dual-core version of the GameCube's CPU. The Wii's CPU is still only a single-core chip, just clocked about one-and-a-half times faster than that of its predecessor. The Wii U, on the other hand, uses a triple-core (and much higher-clocked) iteration of the GameCube's CPU.
  • The Wii U required the owner to pay an additional fee in order to play any Virtual Console titles they owned on the Wii. This is not entirely accurate. While there was a per game fee, this was in the form of a discount price to purchase a new version of the game on the Wii U Virtual Console. Your existing Wii Virtual Console games could still be played via the system's "Wii Mode" for no extra charge.
  • Nintendo Switch was an "underpowered" system from launch. While it was certainly less powerful than its main home console competition in a similar vein to the aforementioned Wii and Wii U, when compared to its fellow battery-powered handheld devices, it was actually among the most powerful at the time (hence why early sources called its technology "industry-leading"). Part of this misconception also stems from the tech savvy criticizing the use of an underclocked Tegra X1 from 2015 over Nvidia's newer Tegra X2. However, for various design and production reasons, a video game console's chosen specs and chipset are usually finalized around two years prior to its intended release, meaning the X1 was the newest option available at the time. And even if the X2 had been available, it only really differed from its predecessor in so as much as having a double-width memory bus and some other design tweaks; the wider memory bus would have addressed one of the main Achilles Heels of the Switch, but still wouldn't have brought it anywhere close to the PS4 or Xbox One in overall performance.
  • A common argument against the Nintendo Switch 2 is the fact that Nintendo can "brick" your console, essentially turning it off and never letting it turn back on ever again. Despite this argument, Nintendo cannot actually do that; at most, they can permanently ban people from going online or using the console's online features (which they also did during the Switch 1 era). Should someone buy a physical copy of a game and want to play it on their Switch 2, there's nothing Nintendo can really do to stop them. The major reasons for this misconception are Brazil being concerned about the EULA, and YouTube's abundant amount of clickbait content which focuses on negativity and criticism.
• Philips CD-i:
  • Calling the CD-i a "game console". The proper term would be "Philips CD-i players, as the term "Philips CD-i" actually refers to the optical disc format itself.
  • On that note, CD-i players were originally intended as all-in-one multimedia devices for family use, rather than game consoles. In fact, certain types of video games (namely those that required screen-scrolling) took a good deal of programming effort to make work on the hardware. Hence the prevalence of educational and non-game software in its library, and why most games for it were either FMV or single-screen affairs.