Skip to main content

Super Power, Spoony Bards and Silverware - Dominic Arsenault ***

This quirkily-titled exploration of the rise and fall of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) scores three stars as a general popular science title - if, like me, you sit at the intersection of being interested in computing, gaming and business it's a solid four stars.

 Once I had got over a few sniggers at the idea that game studies/platform studies could be an academic discipline, about which you can write a serious academic work with Harvard referencing and everything, I found this a genuinely fascinating book. I was never a SNES user - I made the transition from an earlier console (Mattel's Intellivision) to a Commodore 64, Amiga and then PCs for gaming - but it was impossible to be unaware of it during its heyday from the late 80s.

 It seems that the SNES is generally looked back on with awe by those who were fans at the time, but Dominic Arsenault brings a more balanced view, pointing out the technical and business limitations of the product - all driven by a business philosophy at Nintendo which relied on locking players and developers into a 'walled garden'. He shows how Nintendo resisted the innovations, such as CD-Rom that were transforming gaming and how its difficulties in deviating from a 'family friendly' approach caused it pain.

 I found all the components that made up the SNES story genuinely interesting - Arsenault does a good job of covering the technology (I hadn't realised that to overcome the limitations of the SNES's cheap and cheerful processor, some of the game cartridges contained more powerful CPUs than the console), the oddities of the graphics modes and the impact of the introduction of 3D (not through glasses, but games which had apparent depth of field). Particularly interesting with a business hat on were Nintendo's tactics of using last-generation tech to keep things simple and of putting games developers through many hoops to have the honour of writing for them - as opposed to the far more open platforms that would follow.

 There were a few things that could have been better. The opening section is a little repetitive. Sometimes Arsenault seems more interested in scoring an academic point that informing the reader. We could have done with more illustrations (ideally in colour). And I think it's shortsighted to only give context from other console platforms. As it is made clear in the book, computer games, particularly once PCs became equipped to handle them, did a lot of the driving in the early 90s (think Doom or 7th Guest, for example) with the consoles scrambling to keep up. As far as potential gamers were concerned there wasn't a clear divide between computers and consoles, and it doesn't make sense to avoid the computer rivals when putting the SNES in context.

 Overall, though, despite this not trying to be anything other than an academic title, if you sit in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram like me, that combination of period game technology (just the mention of sprites gets me excited), hardware developments and the business practices of Nintendo and their rivals makes for a surprisingly riveting read.

 Hardback:  

 
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more