@Specter_of-the_OLED But it wasn't limited to just their North American branch, or even within their own company. Team Camelot, who were responsible for the Shining Force games, left Sega after meddling from upper management, from my understanding (and only Scenario 1 or 3 huge, interlocking Scenarios was ever localized for the Western market). Many of their very best titles, especially RPGs such as Dragon Force, Magic Knight RayEarth, and Albert Odyssey, had to be localized by Working Designs for Western gamers to be able to experience them, yet Sega treated them with such disdain (the final straw was apparently being relegated to an out-of-the-way booth at CES) that Victor Ireland abandoned Saturn support in favor of Sony's Playstation. Sega even forgot to include any copy protection for the Dreamcast, which helped doom that console right out of the gate. Just reading the list of screw-ups and self-inflicted damage Sega's higher-ups did to their own brand over the course of a relatively short span of time should be recommended reading for what NOT to do as a company. And a lot of it apparently had to do with how they treated people, both within and without.
Just further proof of what I have said before here: Sega's myopic focus on Sonic has come at the direct detriment of almost all of their other IPs. It's frankly disgusting that Naka would cannibalize a project made with genuine passion by a dev team for his pet mascot with the intent to dump all of them as a reward for their efforts. I know Sonic is still hugely popular, but it has come at an immense cost for Sega's other franchises and their fans. I won't lie; I have come to HATE the character simply because of what he represents for those of us who would love to see so many of those iconic IPs return. He's in the way, full stop. And as for Sega themselves, their upper management mis-ran the company from their onetime perch atop the videogame industry and out of console-making to what it is now: a shell of its former self that only wants to pump out the likes of Sonic and Yakuza.
Sega has needed a new guard at the helm for decades. Until it happens, they'll always be has-beens running a tired, has-been mascot out again and again as they try desperately to avoid going under for good.
@Metroidkiller64 It's nothing that requires private communication (i.e. illegal or unethical); it's a publicity available, free patch made by members of the fan community at Shining Force Central (just type in those three words together, all lowercase, with .com at the end, since I don't know whether NL allows links in posts here). It took them almost two full decades to translate and then iron out all the bugs and crashes, and YES, Sega has ALWAYS BEEN fully aware of the project, so no worries about legality here (just NEVER sell or redistribute "free copies" of ANY patched content).
The reason for this is because it still requires you to legally purchase the official Japanese copies of all three Scenarios, which A) can be found at various import specialist online sites; I'm sure the community there can recommend some good ones; it's been awhile so I've forgotten who I bought mine through), and B) it will be expensive, although in my experience it was actually closer to retail price than eBay scalpers territory, so hopefully you'll be equally as fortunate.
Once you have the discs in hand, you apply the patches (one for each disc) through your PC to either burn a new, patched CD for each game to play on a MODDED Saturn, or as a Bin/Cue file that can be played on the PC itself using an emulator like Yabause. I've done both and, as you may suspect, playing the game on the native hardware is a smoother experience (although your mileage may vary depending upon your PC and the emulator you are using).
Anyway, speaking for myself, the expense was well worth it. SF III is hands down the Saturn's greatest and most epic game (apologies to Dragon Force and Panzer Dragoon Saga) and arguably their greatest game ever. The cameo that Team Camelot makes late in the third Scenario (I won't spoil it) feels like both their signature on their Magnum Opus as well as their Goodbye (they left Sega shortly thereafter due to corporate meddling, which should come as no surprise given how Sega treated the game and its fans in the West).
Anyway, I hope that's enough to get you started (and again, the folks at SFC are really great and helpful should you have any further questions). Best of luck!
@ShadowofTwilight22 Yeah, if you're referring to Panzer Dragoon, you might want to consider the fact that, like most of the other non-Sonic games that have seen releases, it was outsourced to a third-party. The Sanshiro commercials were cool but then that doesn't equate to an actual game release, does it?
I don't have any sales figures for the original PD or PD: Zwei, but both were outstanding rail shooters at the time. Making PD Saga to begin with was a bold move by the development team considering the franchise's origins, but it was Sega themselves who ensured it never had a chance here from a sales standpoint.
Regarding emulation, I and probably no one else is even asking for that; those are 1st-gen 3D polygons and are pixelated horribly for modern displays. But given the length if time that's passed, there are so many awesome and deserving games that could find an audience with actual remakes using current engines.
Look, arguing over personal opinions is pointless; you have yours and I have mine. I'm not here trying to convince you or anyone else to hate Sega or Sonic; I simply see a ton of amazing franchises being wasted and forums like this are really the only places to vent (and as I and many others can vouch, approaching Sega themselves, yes, even with their token user feedback surveys, is useless).
@ShadowofTwilight22 Yep, you got me. Sega does spit out one non-Sonic IP after another...about three to five years apart. Valkyria Chronicles came out in 2009, almost a full decade before VC 4 (the next full console iteration) saw a release. Yakuza is one of the rare exceptions that's actually gotten some continuous support, but it isn't my personal up of tea, either.
One thing you can't deny is that they have a mountain of IPs they haven't touched in years or decades. Who knows, maybe even some you would pay money to be able to play.
@Spiders The reason I believe Sega blatantly ignores the Saturn like some Black Sheep is because that's where the ineptitude of their upper management made the wheels come completely off for the future of the company. Just a few examples:
1) They did a surprise launch 3 full months early with maybe three or four games that had to tide users over for the better part of a year until more software support could arrive. By then the PR was so bad that Sony absolutely destroyed them when the PSX launched.
2) The meddling and gross ineptitude of upper management with regard to in-house dev teams and third-party localization specialists can't be overstated. Things got so bad with their involvement in SF III that Team Camelot left afterward to found their own studio. Many of the Saturn's very best games (Dragon Force, Magic Knight RayEarth, Albert Odyssey, Iron Storm, etc.) had to be localized by Working Designs to even make it here, and when they were rewarded with an out-of-the-way booth at CES, Victor Ireland had had enough and took the LUNAR remakes along with several other titles with them over to Playstation.
3) Their handling of first-party localizations, especially RPGs, was atrocious. Panzer Dragoon Saga, one of the most ambitious RPGs of that period with a whopping four discs, got 3,000 copies printed for the entire North American market (oh, and instead of proper spindles each disc came in a plain PAPER SLEEVE inside the case). Shining Force III only saw the first of three interlocking Scenarios released in the West, leaving users with a storyline that never got resolved.
The Saturn was a hugely underrated console whose greatest gems sadly never got widespread exposure with most gamers. It's still my favorite retro console and I still have a modded one. The problem was never with the system or its games; it's that it's an ugly reminder of Sega's fall from its former perch at the top of the industry and the beginning of the end of their presence as a hardware maker. And its greatest offense is being tied to the long list of screw-ups and self-inflicted damage that lay the blame squarely at the feet of Sega's own upper management.
For anyone wondering why I am so relentlessly hard on Sega and their myopic focus on Sonic, it all comes back to this.
This really should have been an April Fool's announcement because it would have been fitting. "Oh, you guys have been wanting another Shining Force game for roughly 25 years now? Okay, here it is...FOR MOBILE!!!!"
Yeah, it's like pouring salt water over an open wound. About par for the course for Sega.
I was fortunate enough to play through all English-patched Scenarios of Shining Force III (you can download the patches for free from fan community site Shining Force Central, though they each require the actual, official Japanese disc to work and can either be burned to play on a modded Saturn or emulated on a PC). It wasn't just the greatest Saturn game ever (apologies to Panzer Dragoon Saga, Dragon Force, and so many other amazing games on that vastly underrated system), but one of the three best Sega titles ever (the others, IMHO, being Valkyria Chronicles and Skies of Arcadia) and perhaps the greatest SRPG of all time, right up to this day.
High praise? Yes, but it's well-earned. 190 hours of gameplay, actual STORYLINES (something the Genesis iterations never really had) that include some of the best and most manipulative villains in videogame history, three separate armies totaling roughly 50 characters (some of whom require multiple playthroughs to see them all; who you can recruit depends upon decisions made in previous Scenarios), a huge number of varied (and 3D, rotatable) maps with actual elevation including ones where you must split your forces to achieve separate, simultaneous, and even timed goals, an optional dungeon that awards the best weapons in the game for your three Leaders but involves an INSANE (probably hour-long) fight against a lethal Boss, and an EPIC climactic battle where ALL THREE of your armies must face the Big Bad (?) and his hordes of minions.
No other Sega game NEEDS a full remaster/remake more than Shining Force III. Sega's botched handling of its Western distribution (only Scenario 1 was ever released in the West) is a travesty long overdue to be rectified. And no platform is more suited to such a project than the Switch (although I'd readily pay for it on ANY platform).
Three things about modern Sega that are like death and taxes:
1) One promotion or "celebration" for Sonic running into the next...
2) ...while years or decades have passed since many beloved franchises were heard from...
3) ...and if we do end up getting them, they're either A) outsourced to a third-party developer instead of in-house, B) require a Kickstarter to exist, and/or B) naturally are made for mobiles, which are an instant "NO DEAL" for me and countless other gamers.
It was a pretty game to look at, but it never hooked me, and not because it wasn't a traditional, flight-centered StarFox game; I was absolutely fine with the idea of exploring its world early on; I liked the concept and I expected a great time out of it.
Unfortunately, that outcome just didn't happen. I didn't hate the game, I just felt apathetic toward it before long. Perhaps the deal breaker was the inane tasks you had to do to help the mammoths. Videogames often give you fetch quests and the like, but those really made me (and as I recall, at least one reviewer back then) stop and say, "How stupid and utterly helpless ARE these NPCs?" The bottom line is, A) even a small child wouldn't be as inept as some of those creatures, and B) such tasks simply weren't fun.
Although it was a great console, the Dreamcast was still doomed from the start; it had absolutely no copy protection, meaning unscrupulous users could copy and burn any game and play it for free on it. This eventually ended the Dreamcast's run well before its time, and was just the latest in a long string of incredibly inept screwups on the part of Sega's upper management that brought the company down from arguably the top of the videogame industry to abandoning consoles altogether.
They then became a mediocre third party publisher with a myopic focus on Sonic and the glory days of the Genesis, as evidenced by the percentage represented by each in their body of work since.
To think that the higher-ups at Sega greenlighted this complete waste of time, resources, and money. Outside of being a desktop curio, there is zero practical use for this thing. Remember folks, this is the same company that doesn't want to take risks on any of their mountain of beloved IPs not named "Sonic". But they have time and money to blow on garbage like this; seems appropriate for a 60th Anniversary "celebration" given what the company's been reduced to over the past third of that span.
Sega's typical response to all the fans who've been asking for (fill in the blank) for two decades kind of echoes Judge Smails from Caddyshack: "You'll get nothing (but Sonic) and LIKE IT!!!"
Too bad Microsoft's Backward Compatibility program cut off before this and many other deserving original Xbox titles got included. No idea whether they intend to pick up where they left off after Series X launches; if the new hardware requires a full start-over on making older generations BC then I fear the program will be toast and a major promise made by Microsoft (every game on every Xbox generation will be playable on every generation of future hardware) will be broken.
A Sega arcade compilation in the vein of SNK, Konami, Midway, Namco, or any number of other collections would be guaranteed to sell like crazy. Imagine all the Sega arcade machines from Zaxxon and Congo Bongo all the way through their Model 3 lineup, including titles never before released on home consoles, like Daytona USA 2/SCUD Racer, all in one place. I know I'd have that pre-order locked down ASAP. Too bad we're talking about Sega here, though; if it isn't Sonic they frankly don't seem to care anymore.
@Darthroseman I apologize if I came across in a condescending manner; that was not my intention. I used to own the Sega CD, 32X, etc. myself, but as has already been mentioned here, the hardware can only last so long before failing after 25 years. Emulation, for better or worse, has become the easiest way to preserve and enjoy the games for those platforms.
My point was that the Mega SD and Genesis/Mega Drive Mini both utilize emulators and ROMs/ISOs, and from a cost standpoint the latter is far cheaper and compatible with the screens most of us have in our homes nowadays. Maybe it's Apples and Oranges in terms of the Mega SD utilizing the original hardware and/or CRT monitors, and there's nothing wrong with that if it's what someone is going for. In that sense it really isn't trying to compete with Sega's mini console, but rather to carve out its own niche. For the typical gamer/hobbyist however, I suspect the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini will suffice.
So again, sorry if I caused any offense. I certainly wasn't telling anyone to "get bent", as it were, and for what it does the Mega SD certainly sounds like a great piece of tech. Again, to each their own.
I highly suspect that the Mega Drive Mini will be hacked soon after it releases, and once that happens it's practically a given that hackers will do their best to also figure out ways to add 32X and Sega CD files. So do the math: pay $250 Euros ($280.50 US) for a flash cart that plays Isos, or $79.99 US for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Mini which does the same. But to each their own.
While this is certainly nice and I'd LOVE to enjoy some more Point Blank parties with friends and family, I'm afraid a handful of niche games just aren't worth investing in $100 for a single peripheral (keep in mind you'd need TWO for multiplayer titles like Point Blank), let alone an entire new console platform. I'd definitely be onboard if, say, Namco packaged one or two less expensive light guns utilizing this same tech for Switch or even either PS4 or Xbox One along with a compilation of some of their most famous genre entries like Time Crisis, Point Blank, etc.
Even then, another barrier to entry is that Sega (House of the Dead) and other publishers may or may not even make their games compatible with such a peripheral if they released them. Gamers are in BAD need of a more universal, "one size fits all" option for light gun games, and unfortunately those are almost always best supported when they come from the platform manufacturer themselves. In other words, not likely to happen anytime soon.
I realize they're trying to fill a void in the marketplace for retro fans, but the biggest hurdle Polymega and other companies (even Google's Stadia, which definitely has its own red flags, i.e. dependence on internet bandwidth) is that, historically, there's only ever really been room for up to three major players in the console industry at any given time. Again, Polymega is only trying to fill a specific niche, but when the existing platforms (not to mention various emulators) already offer so many of these retro games via compilations or other means, it's going to be a hard sell to convince gamers to plunk down the cash for yet another system. Best of luck to them though, because their product looks like it has potential.
Comments 19
Re: Yuji Naka Killed "Dreamcast's Star Fox", Says Former Sega Producer
@Specter_of-the_OLED But it wasn't limited to just their North American branch, or even within their own company. Team Camelot, who were responsible for the Shining Force games, left Sega after meddling from upper management, from my understanding (and only Scenario 1 or 3 huge, interlocking Scenarios was ever localized for the Western market). Many of their very best titles, especially RPGs such as Dragon Force, Magic Knight RayEarth, and Albert Odyssey, had to be localized by Working Designs for Western gamers to be able to experience them, yet Sega treated them with such disdain (the final straw was apparently being relegated to an out-of-the-way booth at CES) that Victor Ireland abandoned Saturn support in favor of Sony's Playstation. Sega even forgot to include any copy protection for the Dreamcast, which helped doom that console right out of the gate. Just reading the list of screw-ups and self-inflicted damage Sega's higher-ups did to their own brand over the course of a relatively short span of time should be recommended reading for what NOT to do as a company. And a lot of it apparently had to do with how they treated people, both within and without.
Re: Yuji Naka Killed "Dreamcast's Star Fox", Says Former Sega Producer
Just further proof of what I have said before here: Sega's myopic focus on Sonic has come at the direct detriment of almost all of their other IPs. It's frankly disgusting that Naka would cannibalize a project made with genuine passion by a dev team for his pet mascot with the intent to dump all of them as a reward for their efforts. I know Sonic is still hugely popular, but it has come at an immense cost for Sega's other franchises and their fans. I won't lie; I have come to HATE the character simply because of what he represents for those of us who would love to see so many of those iconic IPs return. He's in the way, full stop. And as for Sega themselves, their upper management mis-ran the company from their onetime perch atop the videogame industry and out of console-making to what it is now: a shell of its former self that only wants to pump out the likes of Sonic and Yakuza.
Sega has needed a new guard at the helm for decades. Until it happens, they'll always be has-beens running a tired, has-been mascot out again and again as they try desperately to avoid going under for good.
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
@Metroidkiller64 It's nothing that requires private communication (i.e. illegal or unethical); it's a publicity available, free patch made by members of the fan community at Shining Force Central (just type in those three words together, all lowercase, with .com at the end, since I don't know whether NL allows links in posts here). It took them almost two full decades to translate and then iron out all the bugs and crashes, and YES, Sega has ALWAYS BEEN fully aware of the project, so no worries about legality here (just NEVER sell or redistribute "free copies" of ANY patched content).
The reason for this is because it still requires you to legally purchase the official Japanese copies of all three Scenarios, which A) can be found at various import specialist online sites; I'm sure the community there can recommend some good ones; it's been awhile so I've forgotten who I bought mine through), and B) it will be expensive, although in my experience it was actually closer to retail price than eBay scalpers territory, so hopefully you'll be equally as fortunate.
Once you have the discs in hand, you apply the patches (one for each disc) through your PC to either burn a new, patched CD for each game to play on a MODDED Saturn, or as a Bin/Cue file that can be played on the PC itself using an emulator like Yabause. I've done both and, as you may suspect, playing the game on the native hardware is a smoother experience (although your mileage may vary depending upon your PC and the emulator you are using).
Anyway, speaking for myself, the expense was well worth it. SF III is hands down the Saturn's greatest and most epic game (apologies to Dragon Force and Panzer Dragoon Saga) and arguably their greatest game ever. The cameo that Team Camelot makes late in the third Scenario (I won't spoil it) feels like both their signature on their Magnum Opus as well as their Goodbye (they left Sega shortly thereafter due to corporate meddling, which should come as no surprise given how Sega treated the game and its fans in the West).
Anyway, I hope that's enough to get you started (and again, the folks at SFC are really great and helpful should you have any further questions). Best of luck!
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
@ShadowofTwilight22 Yeah, if you're referring to Panzer Dragoon, you might want to consider the fact that, like most of the other non-Sonic games that have seen releases, it was outsourced to a third-party. The Sanshiro commercials were cool but then that doesn't equate to an actual game release, does it?
I don't have any sales figures for the original PD or PD: Zwei, but both were outstanding rail shooters at the time. Making PD Saga to begin with was a bold move by the development team considering the franchise's origins, but it was Sega themselves who ensured it never had a chance here from a sales standpoint.
Regarding emulation, I and probably no one else is even asking for that; those are 1st-gen 3D polygons and are pixelated horribly for modern displays. But given the length if time that's passed, there are so many awesome and deserving games that could find an audience with actual remakes using current engines.
Look, arguing over personal opinions is pointless; you have yours and I have mine. I'm not here trying to convince you or anyone else to hate Sega or Sonic; I simply see a ton of amazing franchises being wasted and forums like this are really the only places to vent (and as I and many others can vouch, approaching Sega themselves, yes, even with their token user feedback surveys, is useless).
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
@ShadowofTwilight22 Yep, you got me. Sega does spit out one non-Sonic IP after another...about three to five years apart. Valkyria Chronicles came out in 2009, almost a full decade before VC 4 (the next full console iteration) saw a release. Yakuza is one of the rare exceptions that's actually gotten some continuous support, but it isn't my personal up of tea, either.
One thing you can't deny is that they have a mountain of IPs they haven't touched in years or decades. Who knows, maybe even some you would pay money to be able to play.
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
@Spiders The reason I believe Sega blatantly ignores the Saturn like some Black Sheep is because that's where the ineptitude of their upper management made the wheels come completely off for the future of the company. Just a few examples:
1) They did a surprise launch 3 full months early with maybe three or four games that had to tide users over for the better part of a year until more software support could arrive. By then the PR was so bad that Sony absolutely destroyed them when the PSX launched.
2) The meddling and gross ineptitude of upper management with regard to in-house dev teams and third-party localization specialists can't be overstated. Things got so bad with their involvement in SF III that Team Camelot left afterward to found their own studio. Many of the Saturn's very best games (Dragon Force, Magic Knight RayEarth, Albert Odyssey, Iron Storm, etc.) had to be localized by Working Designs to even make it here, and when they were rewarded with an out-of-the-way booth at CES, Victor Ireland had had enough and took the LUNAR remakes along with several other titles with them over to Playstation.
3) Their handling of first-party localizations, especially RPGs, was atrocious. Panzer Dragoon Saga, one of the most ambitious RPGs of that period with a whopping four discs, got 3,000 copies printed for the entire North American market (oh, and instead of proper spindles each disc came in a plain PAPER SLEEVE inside the case). Shining Force III only saw the first of three interlocking Scenarios released in the West, leaving users with a storyline that never got resolved.
The Saturn was a hugely underrated console whose greatest gems sadly never got widespread exposure with most gamers. It's still my favorite retro console and I still have a modded one. The problem was never with the system or its games; it's that it's an ugly reminder of Sega's fall from its former perch at the top of the industry and the beginning of the end of their presence as a hardware maker. And its greatest offense is being tied to the long list of screw-ups and self-inflicted damage that lay the blame squarely at the feet of Sega's own upper management.
For anyone wondering why I am so relentlessly hard on Sega and their myopic focus on Sonic, it all comes back to this.
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
This really should have been an April Fool's announcement because it would have been fitting. "Oh, you guys have been wanting another Shining Force game for roughly 25 years now? Okay, here it is...FOR MOBILE!!!!"
Yeah, it's like pouring salt water over an open wound. About par for the course for Sega.
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
I was fortunate enough to play through all English-patched Scenarios of Shining Force III (you can download the patches for free from fan community site Shining Force Central, though they each require the actual, official Japanese disc to work and can either be burned to play on a modded Saturn or emulated on a PC). It wasn't just the greatest Saturn game ever (apologies to Panzer Dragoon Saga, Dragon Force, and so many other amazing games on that vastly underrated system), but one of the three best Sega titles ever (the others, IMHO, being Valkyria Chronicles and Skies of Arcadia) and perhaps the greatest SRPG of all time, right up to this day.
High praise? Yes, but it's well-earned. 190 hours of gameplay, actual STORYLINES (something the Genesis iterations never really had) that include some of the best and most manipulative villains in videogame history, three separate armies totaling roughly 50 characters (some of whom require multiple playthroughs to see them all; who you can recruit depends upon decisions made in previous Scenarios), a huge number of varied (and 3D, rotatable) maps with actual elevation including ones where you must split your forces to achieve separate, simultaneous, and even timed goals, an optional dungeon that awards the best weapons in the game for your three Leaders but involves an INSANE (probably hour-long) fight against a lethal Boss, and an EPIC climactic battle where ALL THREE of your armies must face the Big Bad (?) and his hordes of minions.
No other Sega game NEEDS a full remaster/remake more than Shining Force III. Sega's botched handling of its Western distribution (only Scenario 1 was ever released in the West) is a travesty long overdue to be rectified. And no platform is more suited to such a project than the Switch (although I'd readily pay for it on ANY platform).
Re: We're Getting A New Shining Force Game, But Of Course There's A Catch
Three things about modern Sega that are like death and taxes:
1) One promotion or "celebration" for Sonic running into the next...
2) ...while years or decades have passed since many beloved franchises were heard from...
3) ...and if we do end up getting them, they're either A) outsourced to a third-party developer instead of in-house, B) require a Kickstarter to exist, and/or B) naturally are made for mobiles, which are an instant "NO DEAL" for me and countless other gamers.
Re: Feature: The Making Of Star Fox Adventures, The Game That Was Once Dinosaur Planet
It was a pretty game to look at, but it never hooked me, and not because it wasn't a traditional, flight-centered StarFox game; I was absolutely fine with the idea of exploring its world early on; I liked the concept and I expected a great time out of it.
Unfortunately, that outcome just didn't happen. I didn't hate the game, I just felt apathetic toward it before long. Perhaps the deal breaker was the inane tasks you had to do to help the mammoths. Videogames often give you fetch quests and the like, but those really made me (and as I recall, at least one reviewer back then) stop and say, "How stupid and utterly helpless ARE these NPCs?" The bottom line is, A) even a small child wouldn't be as inept as some of those creatures, and B) such tasks simply weren't fun.
Re: The Untold Story Of The Bug That Almost Sank The Dreamcast's North American Launch
Although it was a great console, the Dreamcast was still doomed from the start; it had absolutely no copy protection, meaning unscrupulous users could copy and burn any game and play it for free on it. This eventually ended the Dreamcast's run well before its time, and was just the latest in a long string of incredibly inept screwups on the part of Sega's upper management that brought the company down from arguably the top of the videogame industry to abandoning consoles altogether.
They then became a mediocre third party publisher with a myopic focus on Sonic and the glory days of the Genesis, as evidenced by the percentage represented by each in their body of work since.
Re: Hardware Review: Game Gear Micro - Go Home Sega, You're Drunk
To think that the higher-ups at Sega greenlighted this complete waste of time, resources, and money. Outside of being a desktop curio, there is zero practical use for this thing. Remember folks, this is the same company that doesn't want to take risks on any of their mountain of beloved IPs not named "Sonic". But they have time and money to blow on garbage like this; seems appropriate for a 60th Anniversary "celebration" given what the company's been reduced to over the past third of that span.
Re: Sega's Next Micro-Console Could Be The Dreamcast Mini, But Don't Expect It Soon
Sega's typical response to all the fans who've been asking for (fill in the blank) for two decades kind of echoes Judge Smails from Caddyshack: "You'll get nothing (but Sonic) and LIKE IT!!!"
Re: Sega's Next Micro-Console Could Be The Dreamcast Mini, But Don't Expect It Soon
Sega's next game announcement could be something other than Sonic-related, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that, either.
Re: Feature: OutRun 2 On Xbox - How Sumo Digital Helped Bring Sega's Classic Home
Too bad Microsoft's Backward Compatibility program cut off before this and many other deserving original Xbox titles got included. No idea whether they intend to pick up where they left off after Series X launches; if the new hardware requires a full start-over on making older generations BC then I fear the program will be toast and a major promise made by Microsoft (every game on every Xbox generation will be playable on every generation of future hardware) will be broken.
Re: Book Review: Sega Arcade: Pop-Up History - A Gloriously Decadent Tribute To A Golden Age
A Sega arcade compilation in the vein of SNK, Konami, Midway, Namco, or any number of other collections would be guaranteed to sell like crazy. Imagine all the Sega arcade machines from Zaxxon and Congo Bongo all the way through their Model 3 lineup, including titles never before released on home consoles, like Daytona USA 2/SCUD Racer, all in one place. I know I'd have that pre-order locked down ASAP. Too bad we're talking about Sega here, though; if it isn't Sonic they frankly don't seem to care anymore.
Re: This FPGA-Powered Mega Drive / Genesis Flash Cart Can Play CD Games
@Darthroseman I apologize if I came across in a condescending manner; that was not my intention. I used to own the Sega CD, 32X, etc. myself, but as has already been mentioned here, the hardware can only last so long before failing after 25 years. Emulation, for better or worse, has become the easiest way to preserve and enjoy the games for those platforms.
My point was that the Mega SD and Genesis/Mega Drive Mini both utilize emulators and ROMs/ISOs, and from a cost standpoint the latter is far cheaper and compatible with the screens most of us have in our homes nowadays. Maybe it's Apples and Oranges in terms of the Mega SD utilizing the original hardware and/or CRT monitors, and there's nothing wrong with that if it's what someone is going for. In that sense it really isn't trying to compete with Sega's mini console, but rather to carve out its own niche. For the typical gamer/hobbyist however, I suspect the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini will suffice.
So again, sorry if I caused any offense. I certainly wasn't telling anyone to "get bent", as it were, and for what it does the Mega SD certainly sounds like a great piece of tech. Again, to each their own.
Re: This FPGA-Powered Mega Drive / Genesis Flash Cart Can Play CD Games
I highly suspect that the Mega Drive Mini will be hacked soon after it releases, and once that happens it's practically a given that hackers will do their best to also figure out ways to add 32X and Sega CD files. So do the math: pay $250 Euros ($280.50 US) for a flash cart that plays Isos, or $79.99 US for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Mini which does the same. But to each their own.
Re: Polymega's "Next Gen" Light Gun Controller Will Let You Play Duck Hunt On Your HDTV
While this is certainly nice and I'd LOVE to enjoy some more Point Blank parties with friends and family, I'm afraid a handful of niche games just aren't worth investing in $100 for a single peripheral (keep in mind you'd need TWO for multiplayer titles like Point Blank), let alone an entire new console platform. I'd definitely be onboard if, say, Namco packaged one or two less expensive light guns utilizing this same tech for Switch or even either PS4 or Xbox One along with a compilation of some of their most famous genre entries like Time Crisis, Point Blank, etc.
Even then, another barrier to entry is that Sega (House of the Dead) and other publishers may or may not even make their games compatible with such a peripheral if they released them. Gamers are in BAD need of a more universal, "one size fits all" option for light gun games, and unfortunately those are almost always best supported when they come from the platform manufacturer themselves. In other words, not likely to happen anytime soon.
I realize they're trying to fill a void in the marketplace for retro fans, but the biggest hurdle Polymega and other companies (even Google's Stadia, which definitely has its own red flags, i.e. dependence on internet bandwidth) is that, historically, there's only ever really been room for up to three major players in the console industry at any given time. Again, Polymega is only trying to fill a specific niche, but when the existing platforms (not to mention various emulators) already offer so many of these retro games via compilations or other means, it's going to be a hard sell to convince gamers to plunk down the cash for yet another system. Best of luck to them though, because their product looks like it has potential.