Ran across an article about that controversial game Night Trap on the Sega cd and it reminded me of middle school when I got straight A’s (a rarity for me) because my parents said if I did I could get a gaming system so I picked the Sega cd since it was the newest thing. We get to the checkout and my dad sees on the box that it can’t run unless it’s connected to the Genesis. So we got that too. Sega cd flopped and I ended up playing the Genesis until I got a job in high school and got the PS1.
Any of y’all ever have a Sega cd, Neo geo, turbo Grafix, lynx, CD-I, etc?
I had a Dreamcast.
Fav game? I’d have to go with Mortal Kombat Gold, Soul Caliber, or Sonic Adventure (either)
Edit: crazy, I don’t recognize a single one of the games you guys have said, even though I had a stack of like 50 jewel cd cases of burned Dreamcast games
Im also retroactively adding Jet Grind Radio and Blue Stinger to my list, maybe VirtualOn too
Grandia 2 by far
Illbleed.
Starlancer
Oddly, my favorite was (and is) Hoyle Casino. Kid me learned Blackjack that way.
Crazy Taxi was great too, but I only ever had it on the PS2.
I still don’t understand how that system failed. I need to buy that Japanese rpg
It was also sabotaged by retailers themselves discouraging people from buying it because the PS2 was "right around the corner." It was a bizarre scenario where, rather than just push what was already on their shelves and available, they'd steer you towards something they couldn't even sell you yet.
Which was really too bad. The Dreamcast, despite its flaws (and the idiotic backwards controller cords), was a much nicer piece of hardware than the PS2.
Sega tend to sabotage it's own console releases, wouldn't surprise me the retailers were also tired of their shits and would rather sell consoles with more reliable production and distribution and probably higher profit margins
Thanks. But since then I wonder if Sega has ever considered x getting back into consoles
If you mean Shenmue then yes get it. It's very janky by modern standards but if you can play it with an understanding of the time and place it was out it's a spectacular game. I was mainly into the general Dreamcast library, arcade stuff, car games, etc. at the time. A friend from work gave me Shenmue, and it was like nothing I'd played before. I ended up importing the PAL release of the sequel to be able to play it even.
That’s it!
Shenmue was pretty comfy as a Japanese life sim. Just a normal sleepy neighborhood and not some big city like Tokyo.
Two things killed it in my region. First was PS2 hype. EVERYONE was saving their money because the PS2 and the "emotion engine" were supposed to blah blah blah. Consoles are expensive. The second thing was piracy. I'm usually the first person to say people should hoist the black flag, but the GD-ROM was cracked VERY early in the DC's life. It was commonplace at my school for kids to have whole CD towers full of cracked Dreamcast games, and everyone was trading and buying copies during lunch and recess. The kids who had broadband at home were downloading DC isos and making bank burning discs and selling them for 5 bucks a pop. This was in ONE school in the midwest US. I can't even imagine how rampant it was elsewhere.
Do you think it went uncracked because it was a very difficult crack, or because the Dreamcast was already dead by then, so what's the point?
My apologies, it appears I read your post above incorrectly!
I enjoyed it. I lost it after leaving the military, I think I left it at a buddies' house.
They were sued by Nvidia (don't know what they were called then), when Sega Japan switched the hardware after telling Sega America it was their call on final specs. Then they were still carrying the debt from the Saturn, and several other failed side projects. On top of that, AT&T reneged on an internet contract, and EAs president refused to allow their games on the console.
It has the superior Tony Hawk 1 and 2. The controller feels better with it as well.
Power Stone is still a big favorite of mine.
I think it has the better Crazy Taxi as well.
Phantasy Star Online was great, but also destroyed the brand.
Virtual Boy. And what is probably the most broken game of the era, Mario Tennis. Dogshit start to finish lol.
Also had a Virtual Boy. Picked up from the clearance bin at Kay Bee for $20 plus a one copy of each game they had for $15 each to get a collection of 8 games.
I still have it, it still works, and Wario Land is still my favorite. It's an excellent game. You're right about Mario Tennis, though.
I paid full price on launch for it, by mowing lawns, and it stopped working within eight months lol. What a dichotomy.
Did you get a chance to play Lawn Mower Simulator before it broke
I did not.
I remember how hard they pushed the Virtual Boy in Nintendo Power.
I also recall trying the demo unit at ?Kmart.
They really used Mario Tennis in their marketing as proof of concept.
The "don't play Virtual Boy for more than 30 minutes or you'll go all googley-eyed" warning probably didn't help.
I have a lynx and a wii u.
Atari Jaguar... what a disappointment. The launch games felt like no one knew how to program on it. Alien vs Predator was okay I guess, but it was no Doom. I've stuck with PC gaming ever since.
It has some great indie games though. Check out Atari Age.
NeoGeo Pocket Color. Still my fave handheld of all time and I still play it once in a while. Clicky-stick goes brrrrrr.
Had a 32X and a SegaCD back in the day, but all I remember playing were Metal Head and Lunar.
Dreamcast, AKA "The Soul Calibur and PSO machine" with a side of Sonic Adventure.
My cousins had a Sega CD. I remember playing it a ton as my older cousin used to essentially babysit us that summer after it came out so we'd go to their house and I played Sonic CD a ton. That's the only game I remember.
I've had tons of consoles, but not really before I was a teenager and could scrape together money. I'd buy things well past their prime or broken and try to fix.
Short lived if these are close enough to count: Dreamcast and a Wii U. I bought the Dreamcast for peanuts in the early 2000s. I really wish I'd kept it. I had a ton of games because they were dirt cheap at the time. Some of which are far from dirt cheap now if I'd still had them. The Wii U wasn't really that bad either, just a victim of timing and marketing. The games library included a ton of things that Nintendo sold on the Switch for full price again later.
The console I wish I had kept is the PS2. They are expensive now
Still have mine! It holds up very well still.
Nice!
I remember I bought a broken one off eBay for $40 and replaced the laser in it for not a ton more probably $30. I kinda gave it to my brother in a way in that he still lived with my parents and I left it at their house and talked them into getting him Gran Turismo 4 for Christmas that year. Not a bad deal, PS2s were still quite expensive then and we probably weren't getting one otherwise.
While it wasn't as short-lived as some of those, I had a PSP. Japanese market it was successful, but American market it was very short-lived indeed. I still play Final Fantasy Duodecim on it from time to time.
I still have mine. I ended up purchasing quite a few games on it. Still need to finish final fantasy crisis core someday…
Tiger GameCom.
Contemporary with the game boy pocket.
Was kind of an early smart phone in a way, though it was copper wire based.
Had two game cartridge slots a black and white screen and the ability to connect to dial up internet and send messages.
Had DukeNukem, Sonic, and Batman game. Apparently there was a Metal Gear Solid port in the works when it was cancelled 3 years after launch in 1997
I have a Turbografix CD, I bought it off a coworker second hand in the late 00s though.
And three Dreamcasts. Found em in a dumpster, no joke. Absolutely disgusting to clean, but all of them worked after. I later modded one to be an SD loader. I actually don't own any real Dreamcast games though.
Didn’t know there was a turbografix cd. What kind of games did it have?
Not a lot outside of japan. Only CD games I have for it in English are Fighting Street and Monster Lair
In terms of Japanese Games though I have Dracula X: Rondo of Blood which is the Symphony of the Night Prequel. I think it got ported to Super Nintendo, but stripped down, and without the CD quality sound obviously.
Other than that I have Valis III and IV, which are pretty good beat 'em ups that were also released on Sega Genesis,
And Tokimeki Memorial which is the game that created that dating sim genre (The RPG style one where you level stats, not visual novels). It later got stripped down a ported to the Super Nintendo as well, but also got ported to the PlayStation.
And also Ys I & II but those don't use the CD drive.
Yes not only without the sound but the CD version even had animated cutscenes! (these were included in the PSP version too)
There was not only a CD-ROM add-on but an Arcade Card add-on on top of that. Later the TurboDuo was released with the CD-ROM included. You can get a PC Engine mini to get a good sampling of the system's games including its various addons.
https://www.konami.com/games/pcemini/lineup/jp/en/
In that list the carts with a "Super CD-ROM" logo were on CD. Games with the HE logo are the arcade card games I believe. As you can see Kojima's famous Snatcher was released on CD, as was Akumajou Dracula X aka Castlevania Rondo of Blood.
In Japan the CD-ROM became the more popular version but the US TG16 failed before that could happen.
Cool!
I had an Ngage (the second model). Widely regarded as no good but the games were certainly serviceable. Full disclosure: I also enjoyed J2EE games on my feature (non-smart) phone.
Everyone knows the CDi and 3DO had different companies making hardware, but people mostly forgot that J2EE is also multi-vendor multi-hardware gaming ecosystem.
Also bought in to Ouya, via the kickstarter. I thought it would be a great way to learn how to build games on Android but from what I could tell it never had it's own SDK and, as a develop kit, wound up being more oriented to people who already knew how to write games for the OS than a gateway into learning. I bought maybe two games for it after all that.
When I was a kid, we had a VTech Socrates console. ( Video of it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtwV-KE3Mk )
It was educational.
So yes, it was bad.
I've got a Wii U and knew a friend who actually saved up his allowance to buy an N-Gage in 8th grade over the course of a few months. The poor soul.
Wii U lasted 5 years. It limped, but made it to the regular console line. I miss the games made just for it. Zombi U is best on it.
Its ironic that most of the Wii U games that got remade/rereleased on the Switch as noticeable worse and subpar compared to the Wii U due to lacking its major functionality.
Pikmin 3 or Breath of the Wild suck a whole lot on Switch after you've played them on Wii U, which shows that it had considerable potential that nobody ever proved enough to become a major seller.
Oh yeah, the Wii U controller was a major part of the game. It's not as drastic a change as Twilight Princess on GameCube and then Wii though.
Twilight Princess was at least a preference difference. I much preferred the Gamecube because I fucking hate Motion Controls. I don't recall there being any other major difference between the two besides the world being flipped.
Most of the Wii U games I'm thinking of were objectively better on it, sans Breath of the Wild lagging due to some weaker hardware. From being able to skip a shit ton of time menuing, to something like Pikmin where it was designed around it so much that the game is immensely frustrating to play without it.
I got twilight princess for GC after beating Wii and got lost because of the flip.
The flip is minorly annoying, because Link was lowkey famous for being Left Handed and one of the only major characters in any gaming franchise to be so. It was literal actual "minority representation."
And the flip only happened so they didn't have to deal with that little detail, so they lazily made it so Link used his sword in most people's dominant hand.
The flip made Link right-handed in future games since then, with the cop-out excuse from Nintendo that, ackshyually, Link was always ambidextrous with a left-handed preference.
Sega CD/32X, Dreamcast, Neo Geo (sorta. No one had it, no one in town sold games for it back in the day and they were multiple hundreds of dollars even back then)
Is it true that the Neo geo was a good system but what ruined it was its price?
Absolutely. I only have 4 games, but they're arcade perfect. They're actually conversions of arcade roms in giant sandwich boards in big cartridges.
Lately people have been making ways to convert the MVS games to AES.
MVS is the rom boards for the arcade, AES was the home console.
Does the Sega Game Gear count? Handheld CRT displays were kind of wild in retrospect and really battery hungry. There's definitely a reason that Nintendo owns the handheld market.
That would count. You are right. Haven’t seen a non Nintendo hand held in years
I own a Wii U and a PS Vita.
Playstation 4
Only used it for bloodborne and persona 5
I had a Sega cd. It was kinda cool. We had sonic CD and Sewer Shark. Can't remember if we had more games, but we played those the most.
Sonic CD was my favorite sonic game, by far, mostly because I could get all the emeralds by like the 2nd or 3rd stage.
Sega cd Terminator game was great.
A buddy had dreamcast. Better graphics than ps1. No games.
It doesn't count as a console but I still have the R-Zone with Batman, which was a Christmas present IIRC. Only mentioning it because it always shows up on those listicles of "weird and defunct game consoles" but it's really just a toy like other Tiger games.
I got a Mega Duck.
i had Dendy, chinese/russian NES clone
Any different games?
don't remember well but it was mostly standart roster: SMB, Darkwing Duck, Battle City (probably my favorite), Excitebike, Bomberman, Adventure Island, Contra (final boss scared the shit out of young me), Dr. Mario, Duck Tales, Jungle Book (man platforming in it sucked ass), Lode Runner (too much for my 7-year-old brain), Prince of Persia (insert PTSD flashback here),
couldn't find og FF cartridge around that time, sadly
Not a console, but I bought a Blackberry Playbook tablet new retail when they were cheap at less than $100 and discontinued.
Not previously owning a tablet (or a Blackberry) previously, I didn't understand that RiM had it's own proprietary OS that would soon become a deserted walled garden for apps.
I turned it on a couple of years back to see if it was usable for anything but it was nothing but dead ends & clunky compared to the modern Android.
We had a Texas Instrument keyboard computer console with cartridges growing up in front of the CRT dial TV without a remote.
My dad got interested at one point and started mail-ordering games on cartridge through the catalogue. I remember having Moon Patrol, Parsec and a Popeye game that didn't work properly.
Most of the games much like the C64 used that awful one button red joystick 🕹 that had such a tendency to break.
When I was very little my parents had the Atari home computer with games on disk. I haven’t thought about moon patrol in a very long time
I can still picture the bouncing of the wheels on the undulating terrain.
And the sweet MIDI-style background track.
Ha! 3D0 and Sega Saturn!
Daytonnnaaaa... lets go away, let's go away...
SeGa
Nintendo
Atari
Old School
Want
I had a Turbo Grafx 16, an Atari 7800 and an Atari Jaguar. Cheap games for all 3 on clearance. I remember being super frustrated that I could never find the later 7800 games though. The Jaguar was where I first played and beat Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.
I own a Playstation Portal and I still don't know what it's for. I guess it's for if you're in your house and for some reason can't be in front of the Playstation itself. Basically just for if you're taking a dump.
Username checks out.
I had both the cd and 32x
I didn't, but my brother got the Vita. Honestly, he should have known better...
I had a Sega CD. Only got Sonic CD, Parents wouldn't let me get the Mortal Kombat CD, and they were tough to find the disks to rent.
I had Sewerr Shark, NBA Jam and WWE Rage in the Cage