Innovations or icons that were due to console restrictions?

[Nintegageo | 582]

Playing Metroid and was reminded that Samus' ball was because they couldn't get her to crawl or it was easier. The morph ball is iconic.

Pretty sure Mega Man being blue was due to the NES colours as well, right?

 

Can you name other ones?

[TDIRunner | 2,744]

The boxes in Crash Bandicoot.  They were added late in the development of the game to help give players something to do in between fighting enemies.  Due to console limitations, they couldn't include as many enemies as they wanted and the levels felt "empty" until they added the boxes.  Boxes are definitely iconic to the Crash Bandicoot series.  

Edited March 23, 2023 by TDIRunner

[mbd39 | 2,025]

NES arcade adaptations such as Ninja Gaiden and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out being the way they are due to console limitations compared to the arcade. These are often far more iconic than the arcade originals.

Edited March 23, 2023 by mbd39

[Link | 2,714]

Mario has a mustache and hat because that's how Miyamoto figured out to make a distinctive recognizable face in few pixels.

[fcgamer | 4,729]

Flickering screen!

[Tanooki | 4,936]

I got a perfect duo matches in heaven and hell for this one that really not just put the seed of the industry into growth, but caused it to flourish.  Bank switching, and with Nintendo added logic circuits, memory mappers.  The most basic adding bank switching and more memory to address, to then the coveted (stateside) MMC series, and the dramatically more expansive and potent, the Japanese had freedom to use going as far as FM audio and more spec breaking limits.

2600's Pitfall used the bank switching for its verticality but little did on that system in the era, and even there wasn't the hah brain trust at atari it was activision with that.  Nintendo stuck at the limit that SMB pushed, for them overseas, it was kind of a thought to be goodbye to the system thinking the tech had aged out in 3 years about...but no, they went all in on their open format and did memory mappers.  SMB on one end, Kirby's Adventure on the other outside Japan, and within SMB again and say up to the likes of Akamajo Densetsu (VRC6) or beyond that all the way into it with Metal Slader Glory from HAL (MMC5) and Lagrange Point from Konami (VRC7.)  That VRC7 added YM FM music to the console in just one game, basically the same YM model/derivative the SMS and Genesis used, check it out on youtube for the soundtrack.

[Tulpa | 3,515]

The fog and darkness in the original Silent Hill wasn't just for atmosphere. It was to cover the limitations of the Playstation by only rendering the immediate area around the player. Resident Evil did a similar thing with the doors.

Recca managed to render a ton of fast moving sprites on Famicom hardware by showing sprites on every other frame. Contra uses a similar technique.

When Space Invaders arcade was first developed, they found the aliens moved sluggishly. As they got shot away, the machine had fewer sprites to move, and so they sped up, until the last one standing was hauling ass across the screen. Instead of correcting for it, they found it added to the challenge.

 

[Ankos | 444]

ZAS on Gameboy made use of the blurry screen to make flickering sprites look transparent instead. Not really iconic considering the game is pretty obscure, but its kinda innovative

[RH | 4,916]

10 hours ago, Tulpa said:

The fog and darkness in the original Silent Hill wasn't just for atmosphere. It was to cover the limitations of the Playstation by only rendering the immediate area around the player. Resident Evil did a similar thing with the doors.

I felt this way for Turok as well.  Man, the draw distance in that one is often pretty shallow and I'd assume part of the reason why is because "3D maths is hard!" But they made it work rather well.  You never knew if a raptor was about to jump out of the fog and bite your face off and that added to the excitement!

People dog on this, and I don't know if they invented this technique, but I actually really appreciated the way Final Fantasy VII was almost really a 2D game since all of the non-overworld areas were hand drawn backgrounds.

I really liked the aesthetic that persisted through VIII and IX for the system (as well as other SE games.)  It was a novel approach to getting around both the limitations of the system while giving the games a more artistic feel.  I'd like to see a more modern game made this way with detailed, "flat" backgrounds that are interacted with in a pseudo 3D manner.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

Would we want to count the N64 Expansion Pak?  It was planned, but the only reason it was released at the time that it was (in the specific capacity that it was) was due to RARE being unable to squash a memory leak bug in DK64 and the Expansion Pak being the only thing that would cause the game to not crash quickly.  Fun fact, the game will still crash because of the bug, bit with the Expansion Pak installed it takes close to 10 hours of the game being on/played in order for it to happen.  While RARE finally admitted this was the case in more recent years, people outside of official development circles pretty much proved this was the case due to later RARE games like Conker having better and more advanced graphics, resolution, etc., but neither requiring nor being able to utilize the Expansion Pak.

[AirVillain | 490]

On 3/23/2023 at 6:17 PM, Nintegageo said:

Playing Metroid and was reminded that Samus' ball was because they couldn't get her to crawl or it was easier. The morph ball is iconic.

Pretty sure Mega Man being blue was due to the NES colours as well, right?

 

Can you name other ones?

Literally was going to post "Blue Mega Man" when I clicked the title, haha. 

[Tanooki | 4,936]

I'm thinking maybe it should apply here if we dig into expansions and all that to an existing system, or in this case, kind of two.

Super Gameboy.

Sure it had the games itself made specifically for it, but in the bigger picture it also had hundreds more NOT made for it.  Yet it could pick or you could pick from various palettes for the games which really made them pop more than just black and white could ever do.

With the games that were made for it, some were pretty minimal and utterly lazy, but some went and did stuff unexpected having like 10 or more colors on screen such as Nintendos DK 94 which did the most on the menu maps mostly, but also Takara fighters on the fighter choice screen or even in fights would assign like 8+ colors leaving a set for the power/score/face shot bar and another 4 or more for the character sprites, flashy attacks and backgrounds too.

At the time this was huge being so used to years of Gameboy just being 4 shades of pea green/black and white.  Despite the still hard restriction of 4 shades they found ways to make more work with sneaky blending and background layer techniques by offsetting this or that or laying BG layers over each other to fake it up higher beating the restriction.

[nrslam | 476]

Commodore's screw-ups on the serial bus that caused slow disc drive access led directly to development of FastLoad, JiffyDOS, and other speed-ups.  As these were big sellers, both Epyx and CMD used the profits to fund later products. So you could make a case for saying there would be no SuperCPU if the C64 didn't have limited disk speed.

 

[DarkTone | 986]

The first that came to mind was chrono trigger. Because it was on the Snes, it couldn't show weather and magic being cast at the same time, so the weather stops while a spell is cast. 

[koifish | 556]

On 3/23/2023 at 6:28 PM, Link said:

Mario has a mustache and hat because that's how Miyamoto figured out to make a distinctive recognizable face in few pixels.

Limited visuals are also why he has overalls, so that you can more easily see his arms moving back and forth as he runs. Just think of it has it not been necessary to design him that way; Mario without a cap, mustache, and overalls would be totally unrecognizable!

It reminds me of Brian Eno talking about art forms and mediums. He said that the flaws and imperfections of a medium eventually end up defining what people like about it. So many things in this thread were done not for want but for need, and the result was often something people liked a lot and didn't see as a flaw at all. That's why I think limited systems are important. You can't hope to do anything interesting when it's trivial to make exactly what you want!

 

[Sumez | 2,967]

Simplified backgrounds when fighting large bosses due to them taking up the background layer (rather than sprites) is maybe not exactly innovating anything, but I think it's super iconic, and really helps accentuate the importance of major fights. Shovel Knight chose to mimick this behavior for a few bosses even though it didn't have to (and even uses multiple background layers elsewhere).