Even the Big N makes some mistakes. TwitchGuru takes a look at those mistakes with Nintendo’s Ups and Downs. The article takes us back to some of the lesser remembered moments of the Nintendo’s history including the R.O.B., Virtual Boy, 64DD, FTC mishaps, and more.
What’s your favorite Nintendo mishap? I’m kinda fond of R.O.B. myself.
LSSLAVE
My favorite Nintendo flop will be when they release Mario 128 without fixing the hot coffee and the scandal that arises when Mario is *cough* Peach
What? The masses want a gangster Mario I thought!
lol on another note R.O.B is definatly cute, but I was one of the countless duck hunt owners compared to the 3 R.O.B owners >.<
Nicholas Roussos
My NES didn’t come with a R.O.B. or Duck Hunt. All I got was this black book that had a bunch of game walk-thrus.
I wrote down passcodes in it from a million games that I had played. It turned into this huge collection of game codes. Then, my brother lent it out to someone, and we never got it back. I’ve been somewhat hostile to him ever since.
David
My R.O.B. still works great. It’s really too bad that he was so cumbersome to use sucessfully in a game. Always wished I could’ve found the other R.O.B. game. I remember seeing it at Toys R Us before I got my NES/Zapper/R.O.B. set. Could never find it afterwards.
Silent K
That was a decent article, but a little bit harsh too. Does everything need to be a flop if it didn’t sell gangbusters? The virtual boy has been the poster child of all videogame screw-ups for all too long. I love my Vboy.
I had R.O.B. back in the day, but I dont know what happened to him. So 2 years ago I bought a functioning R.O.B. on ebay with all of the pieces necessary for playing Gyromite, and it works great! I forgot how much fun it was.
The other R.O.B. game from the “Robot Series” is Stack-up. The game is quite common – but R.O.B. requires a different set of plastic pieces to hold for Stack-up, its a different set entirely from those used for Gyromite – You can still find the stuff on eBay, but its starting to fetch upwards of $150 these days. The Stack-up cartridge is also one of the few original NES games that is guarenteed to have a Famicom to NES adaptor inside the plastic casing of the NES cart. Many early productions of the first NES games (like hogans alley, etc) actually used the original Famicom game board, which were then insterted into NES casing with an adaptor inside the nes case so the NES could recognise it. Later the games were changed to actual NES boards, and no longer needed the adapter in the cart, but Stack-up (im pretty sure) is one of the games that was only made from Famicom boards and was never updated to a NES board.
Anonymous
Wow, that article is way too harsh if you ask me.
I’m really sick of all this jive about “it’s Nintendo’s last chance… doom and gloom…blah blah blah…”. Doesn’t it matter to anyone that Nintendo has a like gazillion dollars in reserve? And they are the only one of the big three to consistently turn a profit on their consoles.
Heck, Nintendo could probably GIVE away their next gen console and still be in better financial shape than MS’s or Sony’s game divisions.
And how about that article devoting a paragraph to the GBA, making it sound like Nintendo can’t even get the portable market right because of the GBA redesigns. Please.
All these Nintendo haters and critics, come back and talk to me when you own a company of your own that is in the financial shape of Nintendo.
chooch
this article makes some good points but also some bad ones…first off for bad ones…n64 came out with little over 100 games in its lifecycle, ok not good at all , but i have about 11 games for the n64 that are all great games, i have also played numerous great games for the system that i dont own, not to mention nintendo introduced the now standard analog stick with the n64 that is on every single console nowadays.
also the gameboy advance is a great hand-held…in no way does it imply that nintendo is running out of gameboy ideas…in fact im susprised that they didnt call the ds a gamboy.
one part of the ariclte i did like was that the writer of the article seemed very enthused about the nintendo revolution. that was like the most posistive thing about it…and it still wasnt very positive.
???
64DD man!! A console you have to pay a monthly fee just to own and it only has like 4 games!!! That’s just plain awesome.
Anonymous
This article was more about their downs than their ups, which the haters always manage to overlook. And I agree that they had some stupid examples in there (GBA redesigns? wtf? All of the GBA redesigns have been great, and many people are clamoring for them to redesign the DS as well).
It’s like people think nobody but Nintendo has ever made any mistakes in the videogame industry, and that the only thing that matters is units sold. Last I checked, they are probably a lot happier than Microsoft’s gaming division with their bottom line. The GC may not have sold as many units worldwide, but at least it didn’t cost them $4 billion dollars to remain a major player in the market.
DeAngelo Guillory
My cousin had a R.O.B for his Gyromite game. We started playing with the spinning discs for some reason like they were tops. When he started living with us, we had a harebrained idea about building a robot of our own after seeing certain episodes of Ducktales and Chipmunks, making us take apart most of our toy robots, including a tape playing Casey all for a failed effort (well, we were mostly ages 6 up to 9. What did you expect?)
I miss you R.O.B
I believe the Stack-Up model R.O.B was used for Mario Kart DS.
Frisby
I really like N64. I have about 20 games and I have to say Star Wars racer is still the fastest racing game ever made. Mario 64 changed almost everything and one game made me a gamer for life…Ocarina of Time. Now the DD thing, I dunno, and the time I played VB at blockbuster I was a littel confused and a littel dizzy.
Nintendo came out with the NES, and I am sure that was a big risk at the time and look how it paid off. and that goes for the original gameboy that also was hard to see in certian light.
And if ROB hadnt of come around I wouldnt of had any incentive to beat the 150cc in Mario Kart DS, you know that totally bad ass gimick called the DS. You may have heard of it.
The Rev wll blow away all their mishaps. It will rule all…I hope.
Anonymous
I love R.O.B. Robot operating Buddy lol
I use to play gyromite nonstop. When i would get really bored i would put hte gyros in the spinner and get em all wound up then dump them on teh floor.
I still break out my R.O.B. here and there
Smartkat
i’m fairly new to the serious gaming world, but i’ve been watching X-play on G4Tech. I have learned a lot. I am The GC’s number1 fan!!!!! I don’t understand why it isnt more popular GC has the best graphics and controls
Rollin
*siiiigh*
Don’t become a fanboy, for the love of (my Ninten)Dog.