Nintendo Wii Video Gaming

Since the Late 70's video gaming has been a big part of many peoples lives.. We didn't have any consoles that matched the likes of the Nintendo Wii Video Gaming or XBox 360 systems. But what we had was well cool and now very retro.

Anyone who has not played on the atari 2600 console and after an hour of playing pong or space invaders with the hard to move and very square joystick; not ended up with a few blisters has not lived with a real console. How I wished i knew about surgical spirits then and how it could have hardened the skin on my gaming hands.. hee...

The real upturn in gaming came with the introduction of the ZX Spectrum and Vic 20 computers... playing the revolutionary games like 'boulder dash', 'manic miner', 'Qbert', 'Pacman' and 'Space invaders' at the time was truly mind blowing... specially after the very basic pong like games and graphics.

Nintendo's climb to fame started in 1979 when they had a lot of early success in the gaming market with their handheld products. The number of available games also enabled them get a good hold in the market.

Nintendo did experiment with a variety of different consoles and technologies in their gaming platforms. They tried the market with everything from differnet kinds of controller built into their units and even with double and single screens. The screens themselves deffered between crystal displays and black / colour LCD's.

The NES was released in 1987 and was extremely popular in japan and included games such as zelda..

The GAMEBOY was release in 1990 and subsiquently became one of the all time best selling handheld consoles. The game boy was re-released in many guises (gray screens / colour screens etc).

The SNES (or super nintendo) was Released in 1991 and came with a fantastic catalogue of games including the best selling game of all time 'Mario Karts'

The VIRTUAL BOY released in 1994 was only available in the US and Japan but was very short lived after it was revealed that is caused players to endure headaches after only 15 minutes of play. Not a healthy choice of gaming that one.

The N64 was released in 1996 and was a fantasic move my nintendo. the N64 came with tons of quality games with the top title Zelda 64 receiving the best game ever award from various magazines.

The GameCube ( I still have mine) was released in 2002 and but had relative little success due to the fact it didnt come with a DVD drive and that it was competing against the Sony PS2. Which in reality was a much better console. It looksed like nintendo had lost its crown at this point.

However in 2006 with sony limiting it sales of the PS3 to japan / asia and with a planned release of the PS3 in the US and europe of february march 2007.... Ninteno pulled a master stroke that Sony have still not recovered from...

They released the Nintendo Wii Video Console in time for Xmas 2006 and in the next 12 months the sales surpassed 10 million Wii Consoles. but more importantly the good old fashioned family gaming was back and back with a huge explosion that the masses have taken up. With games such as mario karts, Super mario galaxy and Wii Sports (all of which I do own and play with my son), the Nintendo Wii is here to stay for a long time.

No more couch potato gaming for family and friends, we can have fun using our Wii Fit boards whilst getting fit and knocking our friends out whilst boxing with wii sports and leave without a bruise...

The Atari is a classic gaming legend and is still oved by many...

Atari Pong was released in 1972 and was the first consumer gaming product that could be used outside of the video arcades.. but we had a long time to wait for the legend itself to arrive.

However in 1977 the amazing Atari 2600 console was born. the Atari 2600 was the most popular console every and is still the origional grandad of all the current consoles. the console itself must have had at least 700+ games available to play. With Defender, pacman, galaxians and Scramble my favorite of them all....

The atari 7800 didnt come along till much later in 1986 as a much imporved console that included backward compatibily for the 2600 games cartridges...

In between the 2600 and 7800 a number of intermediatary consoles/home computers were released in the form of the:  

• Atari 5200 in 1983 and contained a lot of the hardware used in the atari 400/800 home computers.
• Atari 400 was one of atari's first 6502 microprocessor home computers running at 1.79MHz and was released in 1983
• Atari 800 was also released in 1983 also containing a 6502 microprocessor running at 1.79MHz with 8K of RAM
• Atari XE was an enhanced version of the processor with 130,000 bytes of memory.
• Atari Lynx was released in 1989 and came as a handheld console with a 16 bit processor. The Lynx 2 was later released with a color 3.5 inch LCD screen.
• Atari Jaguar was released in 1994 and was the first video game system with 64-bit processing.

Atari had very very little success with the Jaguar as it severely lacks any decent games. Unfortunately this was the last of the atari range...