Retro Arena: 8-bit consoles

[samanosuke]

Oh come on, as if PCE isn’t going to win this at a canter! I expect NES/SMS to fill spaces 2 & 3 although I think the Vectrex deserves a mention.

[Cepp]

Yeah, I think if I'd known about and owned a PC Engine when it was current I'd have a lot more affection for it than I do. I'm looking forward to trying out a bunch of games on it when the mini comes out next year (and it hopefully gets hacked).

[DeathAdder]

NES / Famicom is my favourite
Master System is second

Third is the Videopac, or Odyssey. For the time, there were some great games, whose ideas surprisingly don't seem to have been copied. The Pacman game had a level editor, which was brilliant fun.

But my favourite was Dambusters, a Breakout clone. It was two-player, or one v the CPU. One person controlled the paddle, and another controlled little men who tried to rebuild the wall. One of my all-time best games.

I only tried a PC Engine decades later. Had I played it at the time, it might have made my list.

[buzz909]

I'm choosing 1. Intellivison and then 2. Vectrex because they are the only 8 bit consoles I've ever owned. When I was a kid I loved the overlays on Intellivision controllers - even though pressing the fire buttons destroyed your hands

3. NES because I played Super Mario Bros a lot in Dixons.

Is it really fair to compare the Atari 2600 to something like the PC Engine? Everything above the Famicom in that list is its own seperate generation imo.

Yes PC Engine is definitely '16 bit'. As an example the Intellivision isn't on that list because it has a 16 bit CPU but a 16 bit processor makes almost no difference in terms of power. It's all about the graphics chip and then clock speed. To me '8 bit' and '16 bit' aren't literal categories. They are just convenient ways to categorise consoles in terms of generation and power.

[Cepp]

Is it really fair to compare the Atari 2600 to something like the PC Engine? Everything above the Famicom in that list is its own seperate generation imo.

Anyway, the NES is the best of the bunch. Nothing else comes close. Mario 1 and 3 are perfection. Faxanadu, Quantum Fighter, Kickle Cubicle, Shadowgate, Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, Ninja Gaiden, Power Blade... the list just goes on and on. There's so much variety and so many games looked, sounded and played great. It's the king of 8-bit systems in my book.

After that it's the SMS and then the PC Engine. The PC Engine has a better library but I'm just more fond of the SMS. It was the first system I played and I still love the games, even if most of them are a little janky.

-edit
Add the SG-1000 and Vectrex to that previous gen list as well.

I will say that the Vectrex version of Pole Position is ****ing incredible. Almost makes me want to buy one just for that!

[JazzFunk]

PC Engine. All it took was seeing Bikkuriman World on display in a computer shop back in 1989.

I'd literally only played Wonder Boy in Monster Land in a Bridlington arcade a few weeks prior and had fallen head over heels and to see an arcade perfect kinda version blew my astonished mind.

Spent about eight months saving my paper round money up and ended up buying an import PCE w/TV modulator for a bit under £200 from a company in the back of C&VG called 'PC Engine Services' iirc (never received that Chan & Chan, boys...)

I was gonna get a NES (purely for Trojan) but I held off when I saw those awesome PCE screenshots in C&VG. Glad I did but at the time I was the only kid in my school who had one, which was a git if you wanted to boz some games.

That's the worst thing. It was incredible, it could've been MAHOOSIVE over here with the right marketing!

[Team Andromeda]

Master System .Never liked the rest, sorry

[vanpeebles]

Why such a random collection?

[importaku]

Hmm now this is hard as the pc engine & famicom are 2 of my fave consoles, i'd say for me famicom is my fave extremely closely followed by pc engine then probably vectrex as my 3rd but thats mainy because those are the 3 i have mainly played. Never really thought much of the 2600 even when playing ones at my friends houses the games just didn't click even as a kid. Although it would be interesting to actually visit some of these machines via emulation to see what their librarys are like as some i have never played on in any form.

[paulus]

For me its got to be PC Engine first (small, powerful & mostly arcade perfect games), then NES (large & ugly but has Zelda, SMB's, Master Blaster, Donkey Kongs 1-3, etc) , Master System third with Sonic, Wonderboys, Shinobi's, etc)

[Leon Retro]

Here we have a collection of popular 8-bit consoles. Choose 3 that you like the most.