The reason NES games are so big is because of the stupid front-loading mechanism Nintendo made. They were already aware by 1985 that the Famicom cartridges were going to be made bigger later, and the NES, since it's not top-loading, needed to have plenty of space for expansion in the carts.
Plus, some of the first-gen NES carts are simply Famicom ROM boards with adapters built-in
My pocket fami just arrived as well, be warned that ling sang does take a long time to ship, well worth it and a must have for 90 bux (shipping to the us included)
the screen is great, the controls are tight, and its a huge improvement over the game axe
The reason that Nintendo decided to make the carts so big was to make them not look like a video game system because back then, people thought that video games were dead after atari's huge screw ups.
Yeah, Nintendo decided the VCR look was "in" and decided to borrow some of the crappy mechanisms from them. Really sad decision. But the reason the carts themselves are so big isn't because they're afraid they look like video games- the console itself was just to look distinguished among consoles. There were technical reasons for it. And Nintendo wanted to produce all USA cartridges, so they wanted them to all use the same cases too. If you've come to a store in Japan selling Famicom carts (or in China selling bootleg ones, for that matter), you'd be shocked/impressed/etc. at the variety of colors and shapes the cartridges have. Most of them have mainly have the same basic dimensions, but sometimes they randomly go wild.
Look at when the NES came out, what 1981? That was only about 6 years after VCRs went on the market in North America, and in the 80s, VCR really started to sell. I'm kind of suprised that they didn't go with BetaMax style. You know, the cassette type loading.
