Limitations - Falmouth-Games-Academy/comp310-wiki GitHub Wiki
Limitations
Due to the limited hardware on the NES, there are many limitations on what can be done using these systems. These limitations have made some genres of games harder to produce than others. It is quite noticeable how lots of these genres of games follow very similar designs but the reasons behind this are often because of the limitations.
There is a limit to the number of sprites that can be displayed at one time so games that require high amounts of sprites on the screen like bullet hell shooter games can be difficult to make 1(http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Limitations). An example of such limitation is sprites flickering if there are more than 8 sprites per horizontal line/scanline. This can be briefly seen in this video around the 1:19 minute mark. Fighting games such as street fighter would need character sprites to be less than 32 sprites as any more and the characters would flicker, once the 8 sprite limit has been crossed 1(http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Limitations).
The NES does not feature any 3D graphics hardware so making 3D games is not viable. Racing games on the NES use pseudo 3d or 2.5D techniques to simulate a 3D racetrack. More information on these techniques can be found here 2(http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/).
The colour palette is another big limitation to the NES. Due to the limited colours games had to make use of the colours provided, this is why most of the colours on the screen are fairly similar or the same, for more in-depth information and references about this head over to: Colour palettes.
Discussion
List of limitations for the NES