By Lucas Gardner
ljgardner@lc.edu
It was July 15, 1983. Nintendo had been working on a video game machine known as the Famicom, or as we know it in America, the NES. A most powerful machine, with a CPU power of 1.79 MHz, a GPU speed of 5.32 MHz, video and system RAM of 2 KB an internal ROM of 32 KB, eight-bit graphics, and a single CPU core.
Over seven hundred games were created for the NES. Six hundred and seventy-nine were released in America and thirty-five more were released in Europe and Australia together. Nearly sixty-two million units sold worldwide. This was the start of gaming history.
The first game in one of my personal favorite game series was released on the NES: the Legend of Zelda. Before this game was released, the term “open world “didn’t really exist. I believe this was the first open world game ever created and now because of this, we have many popular open world games such as the Elder Scrolls Series, the Fallout series, and countless others, all because of the Legend of Zelda.
The last time I picked up a NES controller, I was like nine years old. I had no idea back then just how amazing this machine was. Now after all those years, I finally had the opportunity to experience the NES again. I was hit with major nostalgia when I picked up the NES controller for the first time in years.
Of course, there were flaws that only now did I discover. The controller was not hand friendly. The corners inside the palm of your hand are rough compared to new controllers that are typically round and fit in the hand well. You don’t typically have the freedom with a directional pad as you do with a dualshock controller or joystick.
Now that I’m older I can appreciate the classics even more so than I did before, and I decided to play legend of Zelda. One thing that I noticed was this game is unforgiving. If you die you lose all your progress unless you save. Also, the controls; so simple yet so difficult.
Next, the console itself is simple it has three holes one for video the other for sound and one for the power adapter. It has two buttons: a power button and reset button, and it has a covered opening for inserting games. The graphics are amazing for it’s age, it’s not three dimensional, mostly top scroll or side scroll. I never had to worry about a game freezing or blue screening because everything was just in the game cartridge. If something went wrong the cartridge may have needed to be blown out or wiped down.
Overall this is a wonderful console. I may be a bit biased, but I still argue that this is one of the most important gaming consoles in history. If you are a gamer and love videogames, I would recommend you play one if you haven’t before.
