Agreed. It's an extremely active forum, with a lot of emphasis on Nintendo stuff in general though, not just SNES.
However, despite that more general focus I'm sure you would find it the best place to reach SNES specific folks.
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Trivial. Who cares? They may be ignorant about the hardware but let's face it. People just bash the SNES in technical terms because they compare it to 16-bit systems of its time. If you look at it as merely a souped-up NES then the lack of processor speed and other factors becomes nil. NES was a technically limited system that had a great library, as did Master System. The fact that SNES was not as much of a hulking beast in this regard is ironic coming from a retro community that often lives by the mantra, "Graphics don't make the game". Sure, many of the more CPU intensive games performed better on Genesis, but for stuff that was designed with SNES in mind, there was plenty to do it justice. That could be said about PS2 hardware as well. Maybe it's not always right to view everything in terms of its era but by its own merits instead.
NintendoAge sucks because you can get banned for calling out reseller and VGA bullshit.
Genesis does what Nintendon't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6nQsb3nfwE
That's a pretty good remake! I was going to subscribe to his channel but I just noticed that he hasn't uploaded any videos for the last 4 years! Too bad!
Wow! That's terrible! I don't subscribe to any other forums so this information is news to me! I generally pop in once in a while as a guest on some of the popular forums. I'm quite appreciative that SEGA-16 allow a vast and diverse array of opinion. At times it makes for a lively discussion.
I am quite shocked that some people approve of this Video Game Authority grading scheme and what is even more shocking is that people are willing to pay 3 to 5 times more for a sealed copy of a game compared to a used copy. What is even more surprising is that the buyer has no intention of ever opening the game! How idiotic! How can one appreciate a game without ever playing it? Does the owner derive pleasure by simply gliding his or her hand over the cellophane wrap never to examine it's contents? If you do that, you're dumb with a capital "D"! :p
Checking the seam of the plastic wrap doesn't validate that it has not been resealed either. The process of repackaging an item can be duplicated. This issue was brought to the forefront when I purchased a few videogames on Amazon Canada. The prices were fair but the sellers advertised that the items were brand spanking new. When I recieved the items in my mailbox, I discovered that in some cases the manual was missing or the video game itself showed signs of wear. I instantly contacted the sellers and got a full refund. These isolated instances made me wonder whether the sellers expected that I would never open the sealed game. It also made me wonder what's actually happening behind the scenes with these so called VGA graded games being peddled on ebay or other places online. If you purchased these sealed copies of video games, how do you know that it's contents are bona fide and true?
I don't like the site layout of Nintendoage. It's one reason I've never joined that forum and have only lurked there occasionally.
They could stand to learn a thing or two from the layout of this site or Atari Age.
The closest SNES equivalent to Sega-16 is SNES Central. Even then, Evan needs to put more emphasis on writing articles.
NintendoAge is very different from Sega-16, in that it does not have reviews, features or other such articles simply posted on the site. It has an e-Zine but it's far less accessible and only occasionally updated. People always ask questions that are answered in the e-Zines because they have to be downloaded and sifted through for information, rather than just search the site. It does have a sizable database that gets looked at every now and then, only the NES section is largely complete though.
The NintendoAge forum is quite a bit different from Sega-16 too. It's far more active for one, being frequented by collectors, resellers, speculators and other characters only interested in values of old games. The market sections are perhaps the busiest, out of every other part of the forum. If you bump your selling thread there, it will be buried to at least page 3 after a normal day. As others have said, the collector aspect is the worst part of NintendoAge. They are pro-VGA (game grading), pro-flipping (buying for profit), pro-reproduction carts, yet despise bootlegs of valuable games and being flipped and anyone who speaks out against VGA. NintendoAge, in an ironic twist of the high prices they hate, are among the biggest contributors to those prices. NintendoAge gets a ton of traffic, largely visitors with no accounts or no-post accounts. NA along with YouTube and certain non-YouTube personalities are the driving forces behind the insane prices of NES and SNES games.
I really like this summation and feel it's spot on.
If you wade through the sharks:D there's an island of some true Nintendo fans who do want to talk about games. I joined SA early and I automatically joined NA (they fixed that glitch) but I found myself not caring about the average thread being made at either.
Both give you badges for completing various game collections. I had a complete US Saturn set once, long before SA (maybe not) and it wasn't to get a badge. Like I want to impress a bunch of people by having a bunch of badges. Those people who couldn't get a complete set cried so they started making sub-sets so that those who have every Mario or Mega Man game could get a fu(k!ng badge.
It's funny how the way to tell a "true gamer" nowadays is by whether they own a Everdrive or not:p I own 2 and if I buy something else it'll be a SD2SNES.
I too enjoy the Nintendoage site for various reasons. You get help quick, learn a few interesting things every now & then, and the people are friendly.
Also the market in the FS thread over there is quite good to sell and buys things right away. You bastards almost never take up any of the things I have for sell. I was selling a boxed Mega Man X2 for only $118 for god sake and there was no interest here. Yeah, yeah this is a SEGA site but it was still a good deal for anyone.
There's just a couple of things I hate over there like the VGA show off thread which I consider a waste of time and money. Also the people can be more easily offended there than here. This is one of the reasons I like SEGA-16, it isn't as censored and are able to speak more freely.
I would love a Mega Man X2, but who cares about flimsy, ugly, torn up cardboard? The reason it sold there is because there is where Nintendo gamers collect cardboard. Even if it was a good deal, it wasn't to many of us who have a great SNES collection, but cart and manual only. NintendoAge has the folks who like them, and good for them, they're not hurting anyone on that, but sell a good deal on cart only and we're talking.
I don't collect cardboard boxes, so I wasn't interested. In fact, I don't buy many SNES games these days at all.
Sega-16 is better in censorship regards, but the best place to go for that would be neo-geo.com. The only catch is everyone else there is equally free to say and do what they want.
From what I've seen here, Sega-16 is what you would call a gamer community. There's more discussion here about games and the hardware to play them on than how much X game is worth or if Y game will spike in the near future, like what clogs NintendoAge. They also get tons of reproduction cart traffic, they even allow users to help each other make repros. They completely encourage reproductions, they even praise the occasional limited edition repro run for whatever "safe to repro" game is the flavor of the day. All this is publicly viewable, no need for an account.
And yet they complain about all the bootlegs on eBay.
It's a shame nobody has actually tried to make a Sega-16 clone for the SNES, or any other Nintendo system. There's Micro-64 for N64 but that's more of a niche system, not like the SNES. I know of www.rvgfanatic.com but it's not as polished and professional as Sega-16. I think it's also run by one person. Was there a Saturn version of Sega-16? Maybe alecrob would know.
To be fair, I have not been dedicated enough to SNES Central to make it anything more that a glorifed reference site. I made the scope of the site far too large for just myself to make it into something like Sega-16, and I never was able to get a dedicated group of people to collaborate with. This was especially accute during the past few years when I dedicated my life to other endevours, and SNES Central was something I went to only on occassion when I felt inspired. During my peak article output time back in 2009, I thought I might attract some regular user base to my forum, but it never happened. I love Sega-16 and everything that has been accomplished here, and I doubt there will ever be anything like it purely for the SNES.
All things considered, if people want to make some sort of SNES community, people are welcome to join my forum. Since I finished my PHD a couple of weeks ago, I have started to dedicate some time to SNES Central. Updates are forthcoming.
I did say, as far as I knew, you were the sole contributor to SNES Central. Thus the low activity is understandable. Micro-64 is just starting out too, largely just two guys writing for it (me and cheaterdragon). With persistence and marketing, you can get a site to grow. Sega-16 had an awfully big hill to climb with little retro drive going on, which is strictly a Nintendo thing. It's nice that enough Sega fans still existed to make Sega-16 the site it is today.
There's plenty of potential to expand SNES Central into a Sega-16 type site, nearly every man and his dog online praises the SNES as some sort of gift from god. Tons of retro games for download use 16-bit style graphics now. I can't really dedicate time to two article sites, but there's others who would probably be interested. Ask Thunderblaze16, he's big into SNES (collecting at least).
So far my favorite article on SNES Central is the one for Starfox 2. Hard to believe it was dumped so long ago... And I took SNES for granted and chased after other consoles for so long. I got a Starfox 2 cart last year, I wish I had gotten one sooner.
Yeah, I have to say I am extremely proud of my Starfox 2 article. I spent about two months researching that, and found lots of interesting things. Finding the time to do something similar to that article would be difficult, especially when I have to write 2-3 scientific articles in the next couple of months. Certainly SNES Central could be made up to be something like Sega-16, but I would be lying if I said that it would by my efforts. I've been running it for over 13 years now, and it is what it is.
I did hang out on Nintendo Age for a while, but the user base there clearly has different interests than me.
No but Sega Saturn.UK http://segasaturngroup.proboards.com/ is pretty good. It's slower usually but great info and a great community.