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Sega CD/Mega CD Appreciation Thread of Welcome to the Next Level

I like both soundtracks. I really did Sonic CD's level exploring. Might be my favourite Sonic.

It's the best Sonic game for me in 2D and I loved the time travel parts. It should have been a real showcase for the system and the bosses should have used the scaling and rotation chip and there should have been plenty of spot effects during the game, even the bonus sections was a letdown as they didn't use the scaling chip for the sprites and more use of the PCM sound chip should have been made for the game sound effects

Yeah it really looks like it pushes the system in all the directions other developers should have done too.

Yep it pushed the Mega CD to it's limits, Also check out Battlecorps, That is another great CORE Mega CD game that uses the system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE-4gpnDhWE
 

MikeMyers

Member
Yeah, the bosses were a let down. The last boss just didn't have an epic feel to it, like in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 & Knuckles.

The bonus stages were pretty mindblowing back in the day though.

EDIT: Much appreciated to everyone who liked the OP. Glad to hear you liked it.
 
Make that 3 or us. Was actually a pretty good game.

Loved the game, but SEGA America went down the route of spending too much on FMV. When they should have used John O'Brein more and had him to port Super Hang-On , OutRun, PowerDrift, AB II to the system.

Yeah, the bosses were a let down. The last boss just didn't have an epic feel to it, like in Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 & Knuckles

They were and the bosses should have used all the fancy sprite based ASIC effects like for the Mega CD boot screen and use those sort of effects on the bosses.
 

ranmafan

Member
The Sega CD remains one of my all time favourite systems. I loved so many games on it. Even the FMV games were fun to me. Really enjoyed Night Trap when I played it. And games like Rise of the Dragon were amazing experiences for me. Sadly I never owned one. All my experience with the system were the numerous times I rented the system and a bunch of games from Blockbuster video. I spent many weekends doing that.

One of these days, I want to try and find a genesis/sega cd system and get all those games I loved and the ones I missed too. Not sure how Ill be able to do that, but hopefully one day I can. Really want to play so many of those games again.
 
It's a overlooked and awesome system and is my fav console 2nd only to the Saturn , even some of the FMV games were good. Prize Fighter made great use of FMV and Dracula Unleashed remains to this day the best point and click Adv game I've ever played.

Its just a shame SOA spent so much money on FMV rather than getting more sprite based games which used the ASIC chip, SOA went too much 1 way and also SOA really should have brought 3x3 Eye's to the SEGA CD
 
Damn, Core knew their Mega CD! They seemed to be really into the system!

Core did a really good job delivering original games for the S(M)ega CD for the most part. They really were one of the few developers that took full advantage of the hardware.

AH-3 Thunderstrike was also pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0NDUj3QBdA
BC Racers was a decent Mario Kart clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeaIPtMaIMQ Though the framerate could've been a little better for this game, and it lacked a two player mode. Still not a bad effort.
Jaguar XJ220 also does a decent job with the Sega CD scaling hardware, and runs smoother than BC racers, and also had a track editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l5gvlXi4PU

And then there is also Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck, which is a decent platformer that has many enhancements over the other console versions of the game. using the scaling and rotation hardware.

Not all of their games were perfect, but they did try to fill as many genres as they could on the add-on. Outside of Sega, they were the most active developer on the system. ... Well Sega, Digital Pictures (cringe), Wolf Team and Core.
 
Core did a really good job delivering original games for the S(M)ega CD for the most part. They really were one of the few developers that took full advantage of the hardware.

AH-3 Thunderstrike was also pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0NDUj3QBdA
BC Racers was a decent Mario Kart clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeaIPtMaIMQ Though the framerate could've been a little better for this game, and it lacked a two player mode. Still not a bad effort.
Jaguar XJ220 also does a decent job with the Sega CD scaling hardware, and runs smoother than BC racers, and also had a track editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l5gvlXi4PU

And then there is also Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck, which is a decent platformer that has many enhancements over the other console versions of the game. using the scaling and rotation hardware.

Not all of their games were perfect, but they did try to fill as many genres as they could on the add-on. Outside of Sega, they were the most active developer on the system. ... Well Sega, Digital Pictures (cringe), Wolf Team and Core.
I always wanted to play the Jaguar game, I remember seeing screenshots of it in a Sega magazine I got at a store and wishing I could get a Mega CD system with it!
 

keviny

Member
One of my prized gaming items:

H5DSMwJl.jpg

I have the PAL version, Multi-Mega. Bought at a flea market for ~1,5 euro. :)

multimega.jpg
 
Core did a really good job delivering original games for the S(M)ega CD for the most part. They really were one of the few developers that took full advantage of the hardware.

AH-3 Thunderstrike was also pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0NDUj3QBdA
BC Racers was a decent Mario Kart clone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeaIPtMaIMQ Though the framerate could've been a little better for this game, and it lacked a two player mode. Still not a bad effort.
Jaguar XJ220 also does a decent job with the Sega CD scaling hardware, and runs smoother than BC racers, and also had a track editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l5gvlXi4PU

And then there is also Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck, which is a decent platformer that has many enhancements over the other console versions of the game. using the scaling and rotation hardware.

Not all of their games were perfect, but they did try to fill as many genres as they could on the add-on. Outside of Sega, they were the most active developer on the system. ... Well Sega, Digital Pictures (cringe), Wolf Team and Core.

AH-3 Thunderstrike was a good game. I remember I originally bought it at the same time as Final Fantasy III (VI) when both game had come out new. It cost me $100 USD for the two of them, FF III being $70, and AH-3 being a mere $30.

I played through the first half of FF III till the world was destroyed, and then I took a break and played through AH-3. FF III was an amazing game...but so was AH-3. It really showed what the Sega CD was capable of, and happened to be a pretty decent game to boot. It was a nice change of scenery, and then, after finishing AH-3, I was ready to head back into FF III. Not quite to the level of "Epic Gaming Christmas 2000", but still I chunk of gaming from my past that I remember fondly.

One of the other ones being when I bought Lunar II and Chrono Trigger together in late 95 with my first paycheck from my new job at the time after being unemployed for 10 months.
 

AmyS

Member
Okay, here's the early Sega CD article I had wanted to post yesterday and didn't realize I had. EGM #15 October 1990, This was before they or anyone outside SoJ knew the the CD system was going to be not just an expansion (more capacity plus some RAM, like what NEC did, twice: CD-ROM, Super CD) but would actually have additional processing hardware (the second, faster 68000 and custom ASIC for scaling/rotation, etc).

Seems Sega was targeting a $200 price point. The final Mega CD / Sega CD, IIRC was $300 due to the additional processors, plus having 6 megabits of RAM (Turbo Duo expanded memory to just 2 megabits from 64K with original Turbo CD).

Mq3l6yA.jpg
 
I remember there were supposed to be other collections of games on disc. A sports collection, rpg collection and so on. Would have loved to have had the slated RPG collection Sega CD disc.
 

lazygecko

Member
I remember there were supposed to be other collections of games on disc. A sports collection, rpg collection and so on. Would have loved to have had the slated RPG collection Sega CD disc.

It was probably more work than expected, since it wasn't possible to just put the roms on a CD and load them up from there. They had to actually manually port the games over. This also led to some interesting subtle differences in the games that did get ported, like Golden Axe using the original arcade music as CD audio, and Streets of Rage using different higher fidelity voice samples.
 
It was probably more work than expected, since it wasn't possible to just put the roms on a CD and load them up from there. They had to actually manually port the games over. This also led to some interesting subtle differences in the games that did get ported, like Golden Axe using the original arcade music as CD audio, and Streets of Rage using different higher fidelity voice samples.

Golden Axe only uses the arcade music in the title screen. Columns adds additional music tracks too. Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi and Super Monaco GP adds better quality voice samples. But oddly the Sega CD port of Golden Axe is missing the two player mode from the Genesis game. Which was a big disappointment for me.
 

psp12345

Member
My first system was Mega Drive with Mega CD that I got from my dad.
Used to play Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi, F1 and

latest


Happy times :)
 

M3d10n

Member
Why didn't Sega increase the number of colors or get a "true" 60fps Mode 7 effect onto the Mega CD? Those were the weaknesses when compared to the SNES. Most of the Mode 7 wannabes (like Sonic CD special stage) did not run at 60fps.

Increasing the number of colors wasn't really possible since it was intrinsic to the video chip. The only way to do that would be adding a video out to the Sega CD unit like they did to the 32X, which would make it even more expensive than it already was.

AFAIK the mode 7 effects couldn't run at 60fps because of bandwidth: the Sega CD rendered the scaled/rotated sprites/tiles into a buffer and had to stream it back to the Genesis to be displayed on the screen.
 
A friend of mine had one, and here's the thing, I was in love with those FMV games. I can't really deal with them anymore, but the younger version of me was super impressed lol.
 

petran79

Banned
Oh, the Multimega is a Japanese product. It's just extraordinarily rare.

A IBM PC/Sega CD hybrid would have been every gamers dream back then
Too bad they only got the MegaDrive instead
At least Amiga's could be converted to CD32

AmstradMegaPC_Advert.jpg
 
I'll always have a soft spot for the Sega CD. Aside from Bram Stroker's Dracula and C&C Music Factory (yeah, my mom was either clueless or picked it up because it was dirt cheap), I loved all the games I got for it as a kid, and loved discovering stuff that I'd missed out on once I was buying games for it as an adult.

I finished up finding and collecting most of what I was looking for on Sega CD from 2004-2007. I can't imagine trying to find or buy some of the "holy grails" now.

When I bought it off of eBay ten or so years ago, I didn't realize the Wondermega model I got was the Wondermega M2, which came with an infrared wireless controller.

kNwNRFe.jpg
 

Teknoman

Member
It was probably more work than expected, since it wasn't possible to just put the roms on a CD and load them up from there. They had to actually manually port the games over. This also led to some interesting subtle differences in the games that did get ported, like Golden Axe using the original arcade music as CD audio, and Streets of Rage using different higher fidelity voice samples.

Wait so the Golden Axe on the Sega CD collection has a different soundtrack?
 
Wait so the Golden Axe on the Sega CD collection has a different soundtrack?

Yes, the 4-in-1 and 5-in-1 collection discs' version of Godlen Axe has some nice CD audio music, but is one player only, sadly. Otherwise it is the same as the Genesis game.

The other games on the discs are much less changed -- none of the others have CD audio soundtracks added, only Golden Axe -- but I think there are some minor sound-effect changes or something, I forget the details.

It was probably more work than expected, since it wasn't possible to just put the roms on a CD and load them up from there. They had to actually manually port the games over. This also led to some interesting subtle differences in the games that did get ported, like Golden Axe using the original arcade music as CD audio, and Streets of Rage using different higher fidelity voice samples.
Yeah, it's difficult because the SCD only connects to the Genesis through that fairly small bus on the side. While the bus that connects the Turbo CD to Turbografx is wider, apparently only a limited amount of data can fit on the SCD bus, or something, if I remember right (Of course the SCD has a LOT more RAM than the TCD sans Arcade Card, so the SCD has the advantage there. But it has limitations as well.). Combine this with other restrictions, and SCD games can actually have more limited animation than Genesis games because of hardware restrictions, or something like that. I think this is one reason why Pier Solar didn't have a Sega CD version, but instead is a Genesis game with that CD soundtrack disc. The hardware restrictions are surely also why Golden Axe had its two player mode removed, though it's a bit weird considering that Streets of Rage is on the same disc and is two player... sure, that doesn't have an added CD audio soundtrack, but still.
 
Wait so the Golden Axe on the Sega CD collection has a different soundtrack?

I have two copies of this game in my collection, so I had to go back and check and see if used the arcade soundtrack. For some reason I thought it was just the title screen. But yeah, the entire arcade Golden Axe soundtrack is on the CD as redbook. Huh. Funny that I don't remember this. The sound effects have been updated too for this version. Shame that it lacks two player, it could've been the definitive home version of the game back in the day. This game excels in two player.

Also, The Sega CD version of Super Monaco has one of my favorite Easter eggs hidden in it.

VNxetM4.gif


You couldn't do this in the Genesis game. (by this I mean run into the flagman)
 

IrishNinja

Member
LTTP but sub'd so hard...i should add this link in retro-GAF!

have we talked about Wirehead yet, or how great Panic! is when high

ps wish Final Fight CD was cheaper, was gonna bitch bout Road Avenger too but D-lo was just swearing it can be had in other regions for peanuts
 

iidesuyo

Member
Back then people complained that many CD games were just updated versions of the cartridge game, like Mickey Mania CD or Earthworm Jim CD. But I wish there would be more of them, especially since they were easy to make. A Moonwalker game with CD sound, that would have been nice. Contra/Probotector Hard Corps with even more action, woohooo!
 
I have two copies of this game in my collection, so I had to go back and check and see if used the arcade soundtrack. For some reason I thought it was just the title screen. But yeah, the entire arcade Golden Axe soundtrack is on the CD as redbook. Huh. Funny that I don't remember this. The sound effects have been updated too for this version. Shame that it lacks two player, it could've been the definitive home version of the game back in the day. This game excels in two player.

Also, The Sega CD version of Super Monaco has one of my favorite Easter eggs hidden in it.

VNxetM4.gif


You couldn't do this in the Genesis game.

Keep in mind, the levels that are only in the home version of Golden Axe uses the original FM tracks, not as Redbook audio.
 
Back then paople complained that many CD games were just updated versions of the cartridge game, like Mickey Mania CD or Earthworm Jim CD. But I wish there would be more of them, especially since they were easy to make. A Moonwalker game with CD sound, that would have been nice. Contra/Probotector Hard Corps with even more action, woohooo!

Considering that Earthworm Jim CD is apparently now a $90 game, I guess peoples' opinions on this have turned around. :p
 

iidesuyo

Member
Considering that Earthworm Jim CD is apparently now a $90 game, I guess peoples' opinions on this have turned around. :p

What the heck, on Ebay people demand 120€ for the PAL version O_O

I got a Mega Drive II + Mega CD II + Road Avenger + EJ CD + Mickey Mania CD for 50€ back in 2004, and then I struggled to buy it because I already owned the PC version of EJ.

I recently made a thread about consoles as some kind of investment, guess there are some pricey games in my basement without me realizing it.


Edit: They sell Mickey Mania demo CDs on Ebay. I never knew there were any demo CDs for that console!
 
Considering that Earthworm Jim CD is apparently now a $90 game, I guess peoples' opinions on this have turned around. :p

Earthworm Jim Special Edition was more than just a Genesis port with update music though. They did add a few new sections to levels as well as an entirely new level. There was a lot of new animation was added too. All the enhancements in this version ended up in the PC port. It is crazy to think that this one became so expensive too. This is another game that I purchased for less than $10.00 originally.


Keep in mind, the levels that are only in the home version of Golden Axe uses the original FM tracks, not as Redbook audio.

Oh that's right, there was at least two additional level in the Sega Genesis port of the game that weren't in the arcade game.
 
I loved the Sega CD. I always wished we coulda got a Gale Racer/Rad Mobile port or something. The scaling effects were pretty cool as seen in those Core games.

Its crazy how much mileage Nintendo got out of Mode 7 even though it was so basic in comparison but i guess it was just easy to use.

I have a CDX that I intelligently bought on eBay back in the day for $60 bucks when i was in high school around 2001. Originally we had a model 1 but it just stopped working due to faulty connector.
 

iidesuyo

Member
Its crazy how much mileage Nintendo got out of Mode 7 even though it was so basic in comparison but i guess it was just easy to use.

Nintendo's attitude was quite clever. Instead of packing the machine full of expensive chips back in 1990, they took the route of extra chips, which would become cheaper over the years. Keep in mind that countless SNES games used extra processors. Even early stuff like Pilotwings.

The only Mega Drive/Genesis game with an extra processor was Virtua Racing.
 

Teknoman

Member
One "game" that I always thought was pretty amusing was Switch aka Panic!

Literally the entire game has you pressing buttons/flipping switches and wacky things happen.

There aren't many fail-states, but certain switches cause national monuments to be destroyed. It's pretty ridiculous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6phOfN_AVQ

Yeah Gunstar reviewed that one awhile back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbmGYKunmaY

I kinda want it just for the hell out it.
 

IrishNinja

Member
i played the shit out of the kriss kross one in the day, mostly ignored caller requests & freestyled it. always got booed but had a good time

yeshrug.png


i'd jump on a boxed copy on the cheap
 

cj_iwakura

Member
i played the shit out of the kriss kross one in the day, mostly ignored caller requests & freestyled it. always got booed but had a good time

yeshrug.png


i'd jump on a boxed copy on the cheap

That MC would bring some serious thunder to the prank callers. (Well, as 90s snaps go, anyway)

They had some strange random clips mixed in.


And I have a boxed copy. :p If I had only one MMV game, I wanted Kris Kross'.
 
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