Nintendo might bring back cartridges and it could be big!
There are several reports that Nintendo is buying up large quantity's s of flash memory. More than they could ever use with how they currently release games and the prospect that this could be for system cartridges is too exciting to ignore. DLC straight to the game medium anyone? How about hardware upgrades via the game itself?
But wait... if Nintendo put hardware upgrades in the cartridges wouldn't that cost too much?
This is not new; Nintendo since the lunch of the NES in July 15, 1983 all the way to the end of the N64 in 2003 did this very thing. That's 20 years! And that's not counting the 3ds that still uses them! Who here is old enough to remember the wonder of the FX chip? I remember playing Star Fox in wonder how they were able to improve graphics so much on the SNES WITHOUT upgrading the system.
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Cartridges could hold as much or as little as the Nintendo wanted. The problem is that adding more storage space to a cartridge increases the cost. The size of N64 games varied from as low as 4 megabytes to as high as 64 megabytes, which is way less than the PlayStation with 700mb per disk with some games having as many as 5 disks.
Its a testament to cartridges that Nintendo still went with them with such a space limitation. I for one loved the better load times. If you've tried to play the port of Chrono Trigger on the PlayStation you have felt the frustration of an extra 3 sec load EVERY BATTLE. Right now people will download their games onto their game systems for extra speed boost but that's still HDD witch is way slower than what a cartridge could be capable of. Also I know I'm sick of using up all my hard drive space for games to make them bearable.
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I remember thinking that meteoroid prime was a marvel of optical disk usage. You would shoot doors long before you got to them to open them. This made the Nintendo Game Cube start loading the next room before you reached the door. But you can't do that in every game. Disks have so many limitations, they have one job and they just are not doing it well for modern game systems. There needs to be a change.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 did not choose to have Toshiba's HD DVD player built into their system. However Sony chose the risky but effective availability their players. When the PlayStation 3 came out with a $241.35 loss on each console sold back in 2006 Sony owned the optical disc market. Sony has been notoriously bad at marketing their superior formats. With VHS they had the smaller smother Betamax and in December 15, 1978 Sony released Laserdisc on the market 17 years before DVD with its inferior image quality.
The format war may have started again. With as much DLC that comes out for games and movies alone cartage format would make optical disk obsolete but as you have read there is so so much more we should be excited about if this happens. Streaming video services are just not that great in the quality department so someone needs to step up and start delivering more hard copies of 4k media. I for one bought a 4k TV almost 3 years ago and am still waiting while the slow stream of content comes in.
