AtomicPurple

The version I’ve always heard isn’t that the expansion pack “randomly fixed it”, but rather that the issue was a memory leak that would cause the game to run out of RAM and crash after a couple hours. The extra memory of the expansion pack would just delay the crash for an additional 6-7 hours. I’m curious how true this is actually is now, as it seems like it would be easy enough to test.

No, it was inaccurate, even at the time. The Famicom was built to cost and and mainly used cheap off-the-shelf components that were already obsolete when the system first released in 1983. The NES released in North America the same year as the Commodore Amiga, a system that actually was cutting edge, and represented a big leap forward in what home computers could do graphically. By the time Mega Man released, the Amiga was on it’s second revision and other home computers were rapidly catching up to it’s capabilities.
While Mega Man was one of the best games on the NES, it ran at the same resolution as every other game on the system, and was stuck working within the same limited color palette and low sprite limit that were more than five years behind the curve when it released.

I’m pretty sure all the edutainment titles predate Charles Martinet as the voice of Mario, and I don’t think Nintendo would ever make a game like that these days.

Because you’re my 5 year old god daughter who always wants to play as “Uwiigi”.

Do they even need to replace him though? There’s a 25-year back catalog of recorded voice lines to recycle, and most of those consist of “Let’s-a-go” and “Yahoooo!” I think the most complex sentace I’ve ever heard Mario speak in game is “Thank-a-you so much for playing my game”. Combine that with AI voice recreation, and there’s literally no reason to ever hire a replacement. Just cut Martinet a big-ass check for perpetual use of his voice, and they’re golden.

I’m surprised that Gran Turismo was number one is 2005. I remember Star Wars Battlefront II being the hot new game everyone was playing at the time, and Star Wars being huge in general due to Episode III releasing that year. Just the fact that a PS2 exclusive driving sim, beat out a multi-platform Star Wars game that was one of the most hyped releases at the time is insane to me.

It’s a fundamental limitation of the technology. Anything wireless, when it comes to audio, requires a certain amount of fidelity loss in order maintain real-time transmission without using an astronomical amount of bandwidth. With landline telephones, you have an exclusive, end-to-end physical connection, so you’re free to fully saturate the line with as much information as it can carry. It’s possible to fit multiple analog audio transmissions onto a single copper line, but the signals need a hard frequency cutoff for it to work. This is why long distance and international calls used to sound worse than local ones. In a similar vein, terrestrial radio has to split airspace between multiple stations, which is why it sounds worse than records or reel-to-reel tape, despite each station using a massive amount of bandwidth by modern standards.

Moving into the digital realm, the same principles still apply, but you can push bandwidth requirements way down thanks to the inherent efficiency of digital encoding, plus the magic of digital compression algorithms and error correction. As a result, wireless digital audio transmissions can maintain a much higher level of fidelity than analog ones, compare Bluetooth audio to FM, for example. Quality still needs to be sacrificed somewhere when transmitting wirelessly though, which is why audiophiles bitch about Bluetooth headphones and wireless mics. Even the best digital audio compression can’t compare to a copper cable carrying an unfiltered analog signal.

Digital audio compression is what makes it even remotely possible to have hundreds of real-time audio streams transmitting wirelessly to a cell tower, unfortunately you have to reduce the audio quality down to the absolute limits of usability in order to pull it off. Even if you still have a copper land line, the audio is always going to sound like crap if you talk to someone on a cellphone, it’s just not possible to operate a large cell network with the same level of fidelity.