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> The console is all you need to play the games, Sega CD titles included, but for maximum authenticity, Sega is selling a purely cosmetic Sega CD accessory I h
by danans 4y ago
> The console is all you need to play the games, Sega CD titles included, but for maximum authenticity, Sega is selling a purely cosmetic Sega CD accessory
I had the original Sega CD, the one with the motorized tray for the CD that sat under the Genesis/Megadrive console, not the discman-esque top loading device they are copying here.
I suppose I'm the exact target market for this, as a pure nostalgic impulse purchase. But I have to say even as a kid I was so disappointed in the games available for it, that to impulse buy this would be to relive that disappointment, so ... pass.
Credit goes to the original device's included Video-CD for introducing me to Jimi Hendrix though (it had Manic Depression with a multimedia accompaniment) . That definitely changed me!
- cgriswald 4y agoWe had the top loading version. I'm really glad this version is cosmetic only, because we had to return the original several times for suddenly refusing to read discs.
- tombert 4y agoThere are definitely a few gems on the Sega CD; Lunar and Popful Mail are two common examples. I also do find that, in hindsight, there's a bizarre charm to the Full Motion Video games that were popular in the 90s. Night Trap and Corpse Killers aren't "good" games in any kind of objective sense, but at the same time they're extremely entertaining games in 2022, at least worth playing on an emulator.
- danans 4y ago> There are definitely a few gems on the Sega CD; Lunar and Popful Mail are two common examples. Alas the video gaming portion of my life ended right after I got the Sega CD, so never knew about the later better titles.
- cgio 4y agoNot Sega, but Gabriel Knight 2, the FMV one, is still my favourite gaming memory.
- shaunxcode 4y agoShining Force CD is worth playing as well.
- JetAlone 4y agoSo much of Golden Sun's aesthetic and design DNA is in the Shining series. For someone who has strong nostalgic memories of Golden Sun, it's fascinating to see/try its essential predecessor.
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoI approached it the other way around. Golden Sun was an exciting game as someone who used to rent Shining Force II every opportunity I got.
- shaunxcode 4y agoIs golden sun turn based strategy?
- JetAlone 4y agoNo, golden sun is a more traditional turn based JRPG, unlike Shining Force which is a Tactical RPG. A lot of the same people who worked on Shining Force went on to form Camelot, the company that made Golden Sun. Between Shining Force to Golden Sun I can see that the aesthetics of the overworld UI's first layer (very small illustrated buttons arranged as an overlay near the bottom of the screen) and the perspective of the battle system when an attack is performed (3/4 over the shoulder) are quite clear carry-throughs. The font and box graphics are also similar - thin white text on a deep blue. They even both ubiquitously have multi-headed dragons as the final boss! The creators of these games had a very particular, very effective experiential vision of a fantasy adventure and I'm grateful I got to experience it as part of my childhood and even got to see it when looking further back in time. Even though some of the Djinn were very frustrating to catch sometimes!
- makerofspoons 4y agoThe version I played was the CDX, which bizarrely you could put batteries in and carry around like a Discman: https://retroconsoles.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_CDX/Multi-Mega https://retroconsoles.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_CDX/Multi-Mega
- lostgame 4y agoIt was also notable for being a miniature but combined SEGA CD and SEGA Genesis. IIRC it did not officially support the 32X, but it did work?
- ajmurmann 4y agoIt's incredible how many different pieces of hardware Sega released around that time. All these weird permutations of Genesis, Sega CD and 32X with this portable thing and the Nomad and then the Saturn came out right after. I don't know what they were thinking.
- MBCook 4y agoAs I know it: The Genesis started losing to the SNES. They thought they could improve/extend it with the Sega CD but that flopped. Nintendo of America realized they needed something better. So they designed the 32X. They later planned to sell a Genesis with one built in, sort of like the CDX. Honestly 32X + Sega CD was pretty good. But Sega is a Japanese company. And Sega of Japan didn’t care for what Sega of America was doing (and possibly wanted to teach them a lesson?). So they basically refused to support the 32X, leading to very few games. To make things worse Sega of Japan had their own solution to the problem, the Saturn. It was further off (this why the 32X made it out), but it got announced. And it was incompatible. Why buy a 32X if it’s going to be obsolete in like a year anyway? So SoJ basically undermined/killed the 32X, though it may not have been a great idea in the first place. Sega found out about Sony and got scared. I believe that’s why the added the second CPU to the Saturn (making it harder to program/more expensive). But they decided to beat everyone to market to see things up with a first mover advantage. So they announced the console officially and said “It’s out today in the US”. That was a huge bombshell no one expected. Not even KB Toys and Toys R Us. They didn’t know and were PISSED. They were responsible for the vast majority of game sales. KB pulled all Sega stuff and stopped selling it. Huge loss. TRU did something too (lack of advertising? Low stock?). Between that, the insane price of $400, and the lack of promotion (it was a surprise launch so no pre-release coverage) the Saturn started in serious trouble and never recovered. Sony, famously, went up to the mic at their press conference, said “$299”, and walked off stage. It was a huge hit. Sony had money (Sega wasn’t doing hot), partners (Sega pissed ‘em all off), a lower price, and Nintendo didn’t come out until later. Nintendo was also expensive to develop (carts) and didn’t have much space (carts). So Sony cleaned everyone’s clocks. (I love video game history. I got to live through such an amazing time)
- trzy 4y agoThe non FMV library on the Sega CD is surprisingly good! Give it another look. Back in the day the FMV games had all the spotlight.
- HideousKojima 4y agoSnatcher (by Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame) is one of the best. Basically a Blade Runner-esque adventure/detective game with a bit of action too.
- wollsmoth 4y agoI started that one and it was actually pretty fun before my emu or something started bugging out. Eventually I'll sit down and watch a let's play or find a good copy.
- bena 4y agoLunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Eternal Blue were great.
- lostgame 4y agoTerminator is a notable original CD title, not a port unlike a lot of its cousins.
- MBCook 4y agoSonic CD was always my favorite.
- Konohamaru 4y agoBest Sonic the Hedgehog game imo
- MBCook 4y agoThe recent 2D Sonic that wasn’t truly made by Sega, Sonic Mania, would be my other contender.
- 4y ago
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYeah adding a CD-ROM onto those early 16-bit consoles was doomed from the start. The megadrive and similar consoles had just a few kilobytes of RAM so they had no hope of really loading or taking advantage of any high quality assets on the disc. You ended up with the same kinds of games and graphics but with a few full motion videos or CD audio tracks playing at times. Nintendo was planning to do a similar thing with the SNES and a CD-ROM addon but canned the whole project to instead build a new console with more memory.
- danbolt 4y agoWhile it didn't have as much of an impact in the west, I do think there's a lot more interesting content for the CD-ROM² add-on for the PC Engine. I sometimes wonder if the Sega CD's library would be more fondly-remembered if FMVs weren't as forefront and the extra technical abilities were more tastefully applied.
- ajmurmann 4y agoDidn't Nintendo's planned system disintegrate due to political shenanigans between them and Sony rather than technical reasons?
- qbasic_forever 4y agoThe concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg The big issue is that most of those early consoles were designed with the expectation that games were on ROM chips directly connected to the CPU bus and mapped into memory so you wouldn't have to load all the assets in RAM (which was miniscule, a few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most). If you just bolted a CD-ROM onto that architecture it can't be mapped into memory so now you have to cache things in RAM or architect your game to allow for seeking and getting them on demand. Sony did take all the learnings from the SNES CD-ROM and used it to design the Playstation hardware. They added 2 megabytes of RAM, a huge increase over the SNES, which worked much better with games on CD-ROM.
- deleted 4y ago
- mixmastamyk 4y agoFool me once… twice… won’t get fooled again! Yep, memories of a $300 attachment to play my Information Society CD+G, which was cool but not enough.
- havblue 4y agoThis seems to be a case of genuine irony: Sega CD might have had some good titles but the value was never there, even more so with 32x. But we can't get Sega systems anymore and retro games are cool anyway. And I'm guessing we won't have to worry about the load times of course. So all of a sudden these systems become cool again. For me, the system always seemed like a waste of money for my friend that had it. Sewer shark and night trap weren't exactly great games. So I guess I never had to regret the purchase. I'm excited about the games that aren't fmv based though.
- musha68k 4y agoThe set of games includes Shining Force CD and Sonic CD. IMHO worth it for those two titles alone