I thought, that with all of the new "high-tech" systems that are available today, that it would be nice to take a look into the past. The design of the current consoles (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii) are made to look sleek and futuristic. When looking back on old consoles it's very easy to think that they were never thought to look that way. However, the NES stood apart from it's competitors in its design and its dominace over the market for almost a decade. Anyway, getting to the design aspects, this just looks like a tri-color rectangle. I don't think that this is necessarily bad. It's very simple and allows people of all ages to be able to recognize that all is needed is to insert the cartridge and press the power button. Compared to other consoles of the time (Atari 5200, Sega Master System, etc) this was a fairly good looking machine. Those systems were much bigger and ,in my opinion, harder to operate. As with my previous post, this design denotes simplicity. The controllers only have an "A" and "B" button for gameplay which implies, although incorrectly in many cases, that the games are simple. The D-pad was standard, as the joystick was going out of fashion and start and select are fairly standard components on any console. I think this is why Nintendo was able to garner such a wide age-range in their fan base. The simplicity is inviting to someone of any age. My two year old nephew has even fiddled around with this controller with varying degrees of success. Now, controllers and systems aren't nearly as inviting, with possible exception to the Wii. You really have to have played generations of consoles to thoroughly understand how to work a current system. This is unfortuante and could be corrected easily if we took a look into our gaming past and try to ressurect some of the good ideas present at that time.
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