@@SegaLordX I remember posting this last year when I bad surgery as well. Sega Lord you will be surprised who you are helping out by making these awesome vids!!
I was always disappointed with Neo Geo ports that just had the Neo Geo music streaming from the CD. I didn't want that. I wanted superior arranged versions of the music.
Was that something that actually bothered you 26, 27, 28 years ago as a kid who was fortunate enough to have owned those consoles. Or is this an opinion from modern eyes?
Heh my Sega CD Christmas was total opposite... I just got bad games. (I chose them, noone's fault but mine.) Actually I think I could only pick one or two and one of them was that horrible robot fighting game. And the packins were stuff like Sherlock Holmes. Soon after this I got into Amiga so I never really grew my Sega CD library... looks like it was decent if you chose wisely.
Mine was the original PlayStation. I couldn’t wait for Christmas, so I tried to secretly open it up, only to find out my tv didn’t have composite. Had to get my mom to go out again to get the nasty RF adapter from Electronics Boutique.
@@mercster Yeah. I remember buying Night Trap 🤣. I remember you could use the Lethal enforcers light gun with Snatcher. I would have it in my pocket until a combat scene then pull it out and fire. Made you feel like a real Blade Runn....er... Junker. I did get an Amiga later on. Civilization 1 for 50p on my local market is probably the most value I have ever gotten out of a game. I so miss those great big boxes and lovely thick manuals.
I think the sega cd was powerful enough to have developed a port of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, in the same way that Final Fight was developed ... it would have been perfection ...
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-love your work, man. Through your explorations, you always take me back through familiar territory while also inevitably charting new territory. I always come away with a few “new” titles to track down and enjoy. It’s like I’m a middle-aged adolescent all these years later-thanks again for both the trip down memory lane AND the opportunity to expand the retro collection!
In middle school, I bought the SEGA CD months after it came out with my own money. From the first I heard of it I started skipping lunch and saving that money (except pizza day!). I went in to HH Gregg and paid cash. $318 one dollar bills lol! The cashier was thrilled lol! But shortly after I bought it, the only games I really had any love for was Sonic CD, Silpheed, and Sol-Feace. And I too look forward to the scaling effects. SonicCD was the only example I had and I hated it. But like an abused dog... I kept coming back to SEGA over and over!
@@XenonXyanide They solved that later with the 32X. Its solution was to overlay the 32X graphics over the Genesis/Megadrive's own. They could have done the same with the Sega CD. What gets me is the games that didn't upgrade sound over their cartridge versions, the Sega CD added 10 sound channels (2 for CD audio and 8 PCM) to what the Genesis already had. I'd wager there were bottlenecks trying to juggle all of the audio as well.
I'm sure Sega considered a 32X style solution for the color on the Sega CD even then. They likely axed it because the unit was already skyrocketing in price.
@@lazarushernandez5827 Thats the issues, why the need for 32x. don't get me wrong, I don't hate 32x...I just would have been on board with Sega CD had they added color and vibrancy along with sound...Maybe getting something closer to SNES. Interestingly, SNES was much less expensive and had ( arguably) much better games...
@@mxggo9046 I hear ya. When the rumors of the Sega CD first showed up I really wanted them to improve the base Genesis functionality beyond just storage and audio; my list also included a larger color palette, mode 7/hardware scaling and rotation...basically enough power to do justice to their arcade ports. To their credit they got a lot of it right. The letdown for me was the focus on the FMV video games. Instead of games like Outrun, Turbo Outrun, Super Monaco GP etc...there was a bunch of 'Make my Video' games, Night Trap (controversy and nostalgia have given that game more fame than it deserved; it was ok) and those weird sports titles (Scottie Pippen Slam City). Still, wouldn't have experience Sonic CD, Lunar the Silver Star, Snatcher and a bunch of others without it.
I feel like I'm one of the few who loved Sega CD since I got it upon its US release, but not for the reasons others may have sought the console for. While I admit I was definitely awed by FMVs (despite discovering how bad many of those games were) and the incredible CD quality music (some of which I still listen to even to this day), the stars of the system in my eyes were largely RPGs: the Lunar series, Vay, Dark Wizard, and Shining Force CD, to name my favorites among them. Through some of those RPGs, I was also introduced to Working Designs, a publisher I loyally followed until they closed down in the mid-2000s, including some of their other ports like Cadash, Dragon Force (well, nearly their entire Saturn line, really, but Dragon Force is my favorite among them), Alundra, Arc the Lad Collection, and Vanguard Bandits. Also, I probably played Final Fight CD more than any other port of that game (even the SNES version, which I owned a solid 2 years prior) solely because it was the absolute best version: co-op play, all three characters, near-arcade quality, and the best OST remixes to date. EDIT: Typos.
I played the snes version a lot when I was a kid, but when I discovered the Sega cd version... Oh boy, you can imagine my face back then. One of the best arcade ports of the generation by far
Fun fact about final Fight. The JP Mega CD version retains the arcade audio sample for the car bonus round "Oh my God" but the NA Sega CD version used the SNES audio sample which was more muffled and changed to "Oh my car"
The Sega CD suffered from the same thing several other consoles did: Hardware capabilities that the company refused to let (most) developers fully use by way of not including the full documentation and instructions in the dev kits. Essentially third-party devs had to work with 70%-90% of a system's capabilities, and the company reserved the full use for their own games. They wanted to have an Ace in their sleeve so their own games would have an edge versus third-parties, but this was a stupid concept because by gimping your third-parties, it only hurts the system itself. IIRC Sprite Scaling was one of these features Sega jealously guarded and only select games were given permission to use it. In the end it's always the same story: (System) had far greater potential than most of the games used, because the parent company wanted to reserve the full power for themselves.
Remember picking mine up on launch day at Totally Video Games. Golden age baby. She sits in the box in my archive but I play all the games on the MegaSD.
The PC Engine Arcade card version of Fatal Fury 2 Special is pretty darn close to the Neo Geo port too. Then again it did have a expanded color pallet and more ram added vs the Sega CD port.
@@SegaLordX Yeah and very late into the PC Engine's life. Regardless, I still love my Sega CD for what we did get. Just wish we saw some more scaler games and maybe up the color pallet a bit more like the 32x we got a few years later.
I still remember my neighbor hyping up the Sega CD like nothing else. Come Christmas day I eagerly headed to his place to enjoy some, what he ensured me, was some next level gaming. We spent probably 4 hours playing Criss Cross' Make My Video and I felt incredible disappointment. I will say we eventually got some solid use out of the system when Lunar and Popful Mail brought some much needed JRPG love to a Sega system.
Ahh, Popful Mail. Now there is a game that doesn't get talked about nearly enough on TH-cam channels. There was also versions of it on the PC Engine and Super Famicom in Japan. They are all pretty different from one another. I get the impression the PC Engine was pretty much a straight port of the original computer version, much like Y's. The Sega CD version seems like a built from the ground up re-imagining of the game, and the SNES version seems somewhere inbetween with majorly overhauled visuals (much larger sprites and vibrant colors) compared to the PC Engine version, but still fundamentally the same map layouts and gameplay feel. I couldn't say which version is the best as I've mostly played the Sega CD version because it was the only one translated into English.
Imagine if the original Genesis/Megadrive had the hardware of the Sega CD to begin with. (Sans CD player, of course.) We could have gotten decent ports of Afterburner, Thunderblade, Space Harrier, etc... scaling sprites in NBA Jam... It probably would have been more expensive at launch, but it would have been worth it.
The whole reason the Genesis was popular in the US was it’s competitive price point (well, also Sonic). If it had that kind of technology from the jump it would’ve been really difficult for them to get any traction
I'm not an expert on the Sega CD architecture but my understanding is that graphics are still displayed by the Genesis VDP and that the Sega CD's sprite chip renders out tiles that are then copied by the Genesis CPU to its VDP. That's why Sega CD games cannot display any more sprites, tile layers, or colors. The Sega CD is essentially a math accelerator for the Genesis. Adding more colors, layers, sprites, etc. would probably have required some sort of video pass-through connection, like the 32X, and would likely have been much more expensive.
IMO, the problem with the re-releases on Sega CD was, it was brainless to port the cartridge games to the CD format and only add Redbook audio... then sell it that way. Redbook audio on a console was pretty new and sufficient to sell. Given this idea, there was probably few incentives to mobilize a team that would reopen the code and improve the game to have scaling sprites etc.... We have to keep in mind that, the code from these old game was radically optimized and expensive to modify... for a re-release you'd have to think about it twice, putting effort on an old title or producing something new? Pretty sure some people scratched their head on that question back then.
I remember having saved up to buy a Mega CD as a kid, going to the store and not being able to find it anywhere. I asked the clerk where they kept the add-on and he replied that they didn't sell it anymore, as the Saturn had just been released. In hindsight I was probably better off not having brought the SEGA CD, as channels like this one didn't exist to guide us through the system's.. uneven library.
Ninja Warriors Again also got an enhanced version on PS4, you can see more the screen and it plays like an arcade version of the game if it had an arcade version. Highly worth.
I loved my mega CD. The only developer that I found to ever use the capabilities in full was CORE Design. Thunderhawk still remains one of my favourites
My favorite sega cd games were final fight, shining force, the terminator, and the awsome remake of batman returns. In thoroughly enjoyed the sega cd, and i grabbed it as soon as it was released in the states. It was severely underrated in my opinion, wish it had gotten more support. Also games that were designed just for the sega cd like sonic, or shining force showed a lot of potential. Sega dropped the ball in many ways, but i still love it to this day
After Burner III feels like a cartridge game bumped up to CD at the 11th hour to add CD music. Without the hardware scaling, it looks almost as bad as Super Thunder Blade. Sengoku turned out well. A perfect 1:1 port wouldn't be possible, but Sammy got it about as close as they could. Well, almost... they should've tried for a 2 player mode. If Final Fight can do it, why not?
Even the genesis ports as well. No improvement other than music and added sound effects. Only malibu, core and game arts were the first gaming developers to utilize the add-on hardware before sega did.
i hated when the sega cd games just basically took the same format the cartridge games had then just added a few things like better sound. felt like such a lazy way to improve the games
Sega? Lazy? Never! ;) See also: where the hell's my up to date PC ports of your entire model 1, 2 & 3 arcade game back catalogue, eh Sega? It's a license to print money and they do nothing with them.
Some of those bad arcade ports could have been rereleased on the Saturn and Dreamcast and been more arcade accurate. The Sega CD was really handicapped by the inferior Genesis hardware. I think 32X had more colors but it was cart based.
@Dave Davies The Sega CD was never going to compete with something as graphically intensive as After burner or Virtua racing. 2d fighting games yeah maybe.
I absolutely agree that the Sega CD should have been $150. If it had been without the extra chips, people would have bought it and then it would have gotten more games, and some of them would have been better than what we got. I think the real problem with Sega CD in the hardware is that they used it to make FMV games but with limited colors the Genesis was really poor at that. It would have been a much idea to go the Turbo Graphics route and just fill the games with loads and loads of voice acting to animated stills ala Wing Commander. Every time I see all these awesome Japanese exclusive games that were loaded with animation and voice acting I turn green with envy. If America got the same games at all instead of adding English voice acting they just replaced everything stills and text. The only good example of a game that DIDN'T do that which I can think of is Snatcher. Just imagine Sega CD released at $150 with 30 games like Snatcher over it's life.
I mean the MegaCD has almost enough hardware for a full console. Some of the stuff seems to be specifically to counter the SNES -- there's an 8 channel sample based sound chip (just like the SNES one!) which generally goes unused because CD audio, and hardware to do Mode 7 equivalent stuff. It's like they had a checklist of SNES features they wanted parity with.
@@birdrun4246 Not "Mode 7 equivalent stuff". The SNES could only scale and rotate a background layer and use tricks to sometimes simulate sprite work, while the Neo-Geo could only scale and rotate sprites. Sega-CD, on the other hand, could do both at the same time. It's a shame that they didn't focus on these capabilities. It's a sight to behold when used right and goes far beyond what either the SNES or Neo-Geo could do. E.g.: Soul Star. I blame Sega of America on deciding to put most of the dev focus and marketing on FMV and other "interactive media" games. The FMV capability was the most obvious difference from older consoles and did initially sell some systems based on the novelty, but it was ultimately a crappy gimmick.
@@Prizrak-hv6qk Even to this day I'm still amazed at how many companies got suckered into the "lets push interactive multi-media" mindset. It seems even a business guy in a suit could have picked up a controller, and played Star Fox and Sewer Shark back to back and have understood which technology was going to dominate the business (3D or FMV).
Watching this I just dream 'what if' Sega actually utilized the darn 32X in conjunction WITH the Sega CD. It would essentially have none of the compromises Mel discussed in his epic video.
Such a shame Sega didn't take advantage of the sprite scaling abilities of the Sega CD with some more arcade ports. I've always been curious what a Sega CD version of stuff like Outrun or Afterburner would've looked like. As SLX already mentioned, also a massive shame that Sega just re-released the Megadrive versions of Golden Axe and Super Monaco GP with slightly improved SFX. A fully sprite scaler optimised version of Super Monaco would've been ace. Or imagine if Golden Axe had a port that got the full Final Fight treatment. Such wasted opportunities...
I disagree - the SNES was doing better ports without expensive hardware add-ons. There was too much untapped potential with the Sega CD. I liked the music though.
Sonic CD, Final Fight CD, Lunars, Snatcher and Lords of Thunder. It reached its potential just fine, Batman was a doozy if a rail shooter too. Was steep for its time, but worth it if you were older and had a job unlike so many kid fans. SNES couldn’t even handle two player Final Fight. Base Genesis he two Punisher which ran on stronger arcade hardware than Final Fight. CD Final Fight was a gem.
I wanted to see lots of sprite scaling and rotation on my Mega CD. John O'Brien did such a great job on Batman Returns that at the time I was sure the likes of Power Drift and Rad Mobile were still going to come, eventually. But I have to agree that the inclusion of the extra hardware, including also the PCM sound channels and the extra CPU, meant the machine was overpriced, and in turn the small userbase meant most developers didn't think it was viable to learn how to use the extra features.
Great content as usual. Some of those even caught me by surprise! And I even had one as a child. I think it must have been pretty difficult to decide what features they should have put in the hardware at the time without knowing what game devs would choose to put in the games. Hindsight is 20-20
Truly, if the Sega CD had also been launched with a power upgrade akin to the 32X it would have taken the early lead the PSX had and given Sega the time it needed to make the Saturn properly.
Yeah there's a few really great games, the Lunar series and Shining Force, Final Fight, Fatal Fury Special was good, then playable but not great ones like Hook and BC Racers
I think you are remembering wrong.;) Wait, I take that back. Lazy ports. Overhyped games that sucked. Yeah, I guess it actually was ahead of its' time because that pretty much sums up the game market of today.;)
I remember when Sega said there was no money in hardware. I knew that was BS then and now that I'm seeing the add-ons and Consoles that Sega was putting out with these hefty price tags and the slap in the face half-assed effort they were putting in. It rings even louder now how full of it they were.
I remember being SO excited when I got the Sega CD, and being so pumped when I got "Sewer Shark" and "Night Trap," thinking FMV games were going to be the future of gaming. Oh, how wrong I was. I felt bad that I didn't play it nearly as much as I assumed I was going to. Though, the last game I got for it was "Silpheed," and that was awesome!
Thanks for giving Mortal Kombat CD some love. It is the best home 16-bit port of the original game and the extra frames of animation, voices and all the music from the arcade game really make it a great experience. You just have to ignore the horrendous lag when fighting Shang Tsung in the final battle. 😁
I never understood why the mega cd was never used to add on colours and ram? It has it s own CPU and why not have the genesis for background and mega Cd for sprite? A bit like the 32x?
I remember a friend at the time saying that the bride in Road Avenger was better off dying to those gang members, because it's demonstrated throughout the rest of the game that her husband was a violent psychopath. I mean, he's not wrong.
That is true with most video game heroes.;) A guy is just sitting there on the subway, minding his own business, and BOOM, the metro city mayor grabs him and pile drives his skull into the floor.
Great video. I agree with his closing statement. It seems resources could've been better utilized to increase the genesis' strengths rather than attempting to compete with the aracade sprite scaling.
Hardware-wise the Sega CD was great, an amazing sound chip adding many more channels and better SFX quality, a much faster CPU and sprite scaling capabilities, not to mention you could store basically all Genesis or SNES cartridges in a single disc. In Japan, the Super Famicom received so many amazing RPGs developers had to fit somehow into tiny cartridges, if Sega had a better install base and management, they could seduce lots of developers to bring those amazing RPGs to the Mega-CD, with amazing music, cutscenes, visuals, etc. Lunar and a few others made the cut, but overall, the biggest failure of the addon was they hadn't good ideas to make it worth buying. Instead of the arcade version of Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, they port a bad FMV PC game with the same name, lazy Genesis/Mega Drive ports with "CD Sound", weak exclusives like Earnest Evans and many others. There are dozens of good games for the addon, specially third parties that used well the hardware, but otherwise, it's another case of an era of experimentation and lazy software. I won't even mention the amount of bad FMV weird stuff from this era, fortunately, PS and Saturn escaped this.
I agree and don't think it would be hard to do so, specially at the time it was released. I believe they kept the same color limitations of the Gen/MD because so then they could port the cart games fast enough to build up the library, just adding a few redbook tracks and FMV sometimes. It's kinda sad really.
@@roberto1519 Especially as it came out the same time as the SNES. Sega had a huge chance to blow the SNES out of the water in every way. AND it had a working Megadrive connected to it. Imagine how powerful it could have been with both running their CPUs and a GPU together and sprite scaling etc and 256 colours.
@@roberto1519 They should have forgotten the FMV angle and made a 2D arcade powerhouse like the Neo Geo and CPS1. The Sega CD alone had a faster CPU than the CPS1 plus the Megadrive CPU on top. What a waste!
@@alexojideagu The lack of RAM prevented it from doing anything close to Neo Geo quality games. They were uncompressed cartridges for a reason. They basically just used it like a giant cache.
I really miss those days of going to the arcade and finding a game you liked, then waiting and watching which home system was going to have it or which was going to do it better. Those were exciting times to watch technology advance. Now there is no more excitement and anticipation for what's around the corner. It just feels like meh whatever. Sure modern console games look great now but it's pretty much a standard now. Call me when we have a personal holodeck then I'll get excited again. :)
What's worse is none of them really take full advantage of the hardware to do much of anything interesting anymore. It's all about things looking better, instead of actually doing something interesting and new with the gameplay. You could immediately see in say, F-Zero, that this was something that your NES couldn't do beyond just looking prettier. The same was true with Super Mario 64. I need that new N64 if I want to play a game like that. My SNES just isn't going to be able to pull that off. What was the game that Sony fanboys were most excited about getting for their brand new PS5? Demon's Souls! A game originally released for the PS3, but hey, it looks prettier now. (yawn)
The Genesis should've had more on-screen colors from the get go. It would've been a perfect 16-bit machine (though maybe not as commercially successful due to higher costs?). Unfortunately, all color output from the Sega CD goes via the Genesis, so the add-on couldn't have improved upon that. That's why the 32X is such an ungodly contraption that loops the Genesis' video output through itself and then adds its own assets at the end.
Lethal enforcers 2 lol I love how some of the bad guys say "owe" when there shot, a bit of an understatement, if getting shot just causes an "owe" dosent seem to deadly
They're Sega. Finding ways of running their business into the ground is what they do. Think of all of that R & D, engineering, and promotion that went into the Sega CD. Now think about all of the things they could have done with those resources that would have helped the Genesis compete, from development and promotion of games, to cartridge enhancements that would have improved the games and not split the install base like an add-on did. There is a reason why Nintendo scrapped plans for a CD add-on for the SNES. It just doesn't make much sense to offer up an expensive add-on to a system people already own when you can use enhancement chips to improve the games while having the entire install base be a potential customer for that game.
The last game you talked about was one of my favorite arcade games I loved to play. I was so happy that I actually got a version of it on PlayStation 4.
I think the problem back then was that publishers were often claiming arcade or near arcade perfect conversions. If they had just set some reasonable expectations it would have be easier to overlook the many shortcuts that had to be made to bring these games home.
The SNES Version of Ninja Warriors is Amazing! Hardcore...I have it on my modded Xbox. U can play most of the Sega CD on a modded Xbox through Coinops 8. It's Amazing with the Original HD Component Cables!
I love all your content.. sometimes you show some games I've never heard of I really wish you would post the game title on the screen as you switch from game to game
After Burner 3 really sucks. When your expensive add on produces a game inferior to After Burner 2 on the Mega Drive...ouch. Don't have Fatal Fury, as it is extremely expensive. Final Fight is great on Mega cd, maybe better than the arcade version, except for the colour downgrade. Fewer enemies makes the game better. Mortal Kombat is not really my thing. For me, the Mega cd version doesn't offer enough over de Mega Drive release. NBA Jam is great, but this version isn't the best. I would choose the 32X or Jaguar game over it. Ninja Warriors is great, shame it didn't get a PAL release. Road Avenger is pretty fun and the Mega cd version is fine, but the fun doesn't really last and it becomes too difficult. Don't have Samurai Shodown, much too expensive like the other JVC release. Might buy Star Blade some time. It is also pretty expensive. Do have the 3DO version, which I like. I think the Lethal Enforcer games both have very ugly Mega cd releases. They are ok-ish at best. Never played Night Striker. The pack in collection is just a collection, that there were some sound updates is just a nice bonus. I don't understand the Golden Axe two player loss either... Sengoku I have only played on Neogeo. It isn't worth the effort.
SLX, just a heads up but the arcade hardware was significantly better than the Genesis/Mega CD hardware. The latter only had the benefit of the ~680MB storage size but it was still the Motorola 68000 doing the work.
By 1993 the arcade by my Grandma's old house in Burnaby, BC had a four game Neo Geo machine with Cyber-Lip, Fatal Fury Special, Samurai Showdown, and Sengoku on it. I played each game religiously.
its so cool to hear your "adult" takes on these consoles since i was a mere lad between 5 and 10 during these years.. i remember thinking the sega cd looked cool but it was never enough to be able to convince my mom to buy one... i do remember a salesman trying real hard to convince her with batman returns on sega cd
I find the Sega CD much more interesting than the 32X. Sadly, poor ports from Sega itself and the lack of colors of the console made it not being as powerful for the consumer as it could. If the expansion port of Mega Drive could allow for more colors on the screen, with the power of both CPUs, Nintendo would have no chance in porta comparison for each single title.
Thanks for using my favorite Final Fight CD track, been listening to it for 28 years. Great to see these prominent TH-camrs giving the soundtrack love in recent years.
Sadly I think improved color was never an option with the Sega CD. They would have had to do what the 32X ended up doing with video overlay. Videy inlay options like for the FMV the Sega CD did were limited by the Genesis color palette. This also is why we got about a maximum of 20fps in sprite scaling too, the Genesis just couldn't fill any more pixels than that. So yes, I'd agree, had they just added a ton more RAM in addition to its processing upgrades, the Sega CD would have been better able to compete with the NeoGeo and for less money. But back then, RAM was hella expensive, so who knows.
Had Sega done a far better job at managing their own console, maybe today we'd be marveling how great SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY looks on the Sega Switch, huh? But no, we're not.
Loved My Sega CD back in the day. The game I remember most is Spiderman, great music, animated cutscenes, lots of stages. Far better than the genesis version
Sega CD was a decent system. It was expensive. The automatic tray version for 300? That was quite the asking price, especially if you didn't have a Genesis, so you'd need another 150 on top of that. I had the Model 2 Fliptop version that was 150, a much better asking price. I think Sega CD could've done better if it was just its own system. $200 for the fliptop version and a bit of extra power so those arcade ports could've played well and it would've been the ultimate 16 bit system, with sprite and background scaling. A worthy sendoff for the 16 bit era just as we were entering the age of 3D.
@TrueSinister It was implied though. Having said that, Ninja Warriors in the arcade and all home ports were complete garbage. The completely re-imagined SNES game developed by Natsume is the greatest side-scrolling beat'em up of the 16-bit era. Period. No other game ever came close, despite it lacking 2-player co-op (which the updated modern version corrects). All of the characters felt completely different from one another and not just variants in speed and strength with a move or two to differentiate them. We're talking entirely different move sets, and a lot of moves I might add. Playing on a single plain like a one-on-one fighting game opened up so many cool elements too that were completely missing from more traditional beat'em ups.
Yeah. The Sega CD version is accurate, all right. Accurate in how awful it is. The SNES Ninja Warriors is a masterpiece and the single greatest beat'em up of the 16-bit era. I do get your point though. It wasn't a port of the arcade at all, which the Sega CD version was.;)
@TrueSinister Honestly, I really don't think the Sega CD could have handled a decent port of the SNES Ninja Warriors. There are just too many frames of animation needed for any given section of level for them to load up entirely into RAM. There is a reason you never saw even a Streets of Rage port on CD and that pales in comparison in terms of the sheer size of the characters, amount of animation, and number of unique character types in any given section of the game. I think Final Fight CD was pretty much bumping into the absolute limit that a game like that could get away with on a CD based system at the time and that game doesn't have nearly as much in terms of character and background animation.
I gave a speech in high school about the sega cd and played the first stage of road avenger for the class. Glad i didnt fuck up playing. I think back how insane i must have been to do it
Imagine if we've had SEGA CD arcade ports of titles such as Captain Commando, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sunset Riders, Gokden Axe, Space Harrier, After Burner & Outrun! I could see them doing "SEGA CD Editions" of arcade titles w/extra content, stages & visual FX or mid-quels (games that took plave between the main games) w/visuals that showed off the SEGA CD hardware. Instead we got what we got. Quick & cheap ports of already existing SEGA Genesis games & FMV titles. It's like SEGA, especially SEGA of Japan, didn't care to make games that showed off the hardware. At least you had SoA & SoE making SEGA CD games that had scaling & rotation FX - compared to SEGA of Japan, which did very few. It's been long rumored that SoJ resented the success, & perhaps this is one reason why the peripheral did so poorly.
I think the Sega CD would been good, if it had the 32X hardware in it in the first place. like example if the sega cd and 32x where made together as one console instead of separated consoles. I think it would sold better? Like let it play genesis games but also can play cd games, with ram card, or a game that take a cd and cartridge that acts like cd's ram's card.
Aw man I remember finding the pink second gun at a car boot sale when my brother and I were kids and picking it up immediately then going home to play two player Lethal Enforcers. Also using the gun in Snatcher was so much fun.
It will likely always remain a mystery why the Sega CD never got a port of Streetfighter 2 with red book audio similar to what the 3DO had...if Capcom were comfortable enough bringing Final fight then why not S.F 2???🤔
@@SegaLordX logic would come into play though with Streetfighter 2 ripping the arcades to shreds with its popularity, having it on the Sega CD would definitely shift units and then some! Even Capcom's effort for the stock genesis was ok, but it took a hack to ultimately bring that close to arcade perfect quality...
A Sega CD port would have taken considerable time and manpower, though. The Sega CD only had 6 megabits of RAM, which means that it would have had big load times to decompress all the animation. Capcom and Sega likely considered it, but with most games selling poorly for the platform, I can see why they never completed it.
You did good work on this. Interesting to see side by side comparisons. Yeah I spent alot of cash on my Mega CD. If only Sega could have done more with it.
Unfortunately for me, I was never able to experience the Mega-CD back in the day because it was far too expensive to own one. My parents had just bought me a SEGA Mega Drive in late 1993 bundled with Sonic 1 & Sonic 2 coming from owning a SEGA Master System II and it cost $300 so there was no way my parents were going to buy me the expensive add-on. I remember being at Kmart once and saw hundreds of copys of Sonic CD behind the glass cabinet and hundreds of SEGA Mega-CD II attachments on the shelf but like I said I never got to see what Sonic CD was all about other than the game case and cover. Now days I own several Mega-CD attachments and burn all ROMS to CD-R myself instead of paying thousands of dollars just for an original copy. The Mega-CD failed in 3 aspects: 1. It launched a bit too early, most of us were still only in our infancy in collecting cartridge games. The technology came too soon. 2. It was too damn expensive at retail so most parents ignored it because of it's price. 3. 70% of it's software were shitty FMV games that didn't even feel like you were playing a video game. As much as I love the add-on, I too feel that more should have been done with the software of games. There should have been more focus on the scaling and rotation and less on those shitty FMV games (aside from Road Avenger).
@@Clay3613 Please re-post the same question over on my channel and i'll answer it for you there, for some very strange reason I can't post a reply to you here, someone is deleting them or not letting them post or go through.
It's such a massive shame that the Sega CD never lived up to what it might have been. Oh for those conversions of the glorious sprite scaling arcade games that would have been so amazing. It never felt much more than standard Megadrive games with different soundtracks to me. Great video as usual 👍
I was so hyped up for the Sega CD and my young mind saw it as a huge leap from the SNES and Genesis. I played crap like Dracula and thought it was a legit masterpiece, lol at my taste as a 10 year old. I was thrilled with Sewer Shark and still find it enjoyable, Sonic CD was legit great, playing Dragon's Lair at home was mind blowing as was Mad Dog Mcree....
I think the most dissapointing aspect of Fatal Fury Special on the Sega CD is that is inferior in a fair number of ways to the Super Nintendo version, since a lot of details are missing, so that shows that it could have been better.
Even the backgrounds in the Game Gear version look more pleasing than most from the Sega CD version (which look terrible, coming from a arcade port or not), and i think it even plays a bit better too, so that's a bit disappointing.
True... if you are from North America or Japan. You see, when it came to the European version of Fatal Fury Special for the SNES, we got a very shitty deal: while the North American/Japanese version was released as a 32 Mbit cartridge, the European one was only 24 Mbit in size, meaning that it was missing 4 characters and stages, so the Sega CD version was considered the superior one around here.
Could it have been better though? The underlying problem that the Sega CD had was that it was still fundamentally using the inferior Genesis hardware with the Sega CD only adding a few additions to functionality. That was why it didn't sell. If you were a kid with a Sega Genesis would you spend $300 on a Sega CD that has barely improved versions of the games you could already get for the base system, or would you be better off spending that money on a SNES and opening up a whole new library of games to you, including some arcade ports that were superior to even the Sega CD versions? I don't think anyone at Sega ever really thought this through. Actually, I don't think that anyone at Sega has ever thought much of anything through.;)
@@davidaitken8503 plus, unable to do 100% what the genesis can do by itself. I believe the sega cd caused 32x to born instead of focusing on enhancement chips like the svp and snes was doing.
PC Engine CD offered more to its respective platform and the Mega CD was not making enough difference from the base Mega Drive. Considering also the price, it was really a success that it sold as many units as it managed. Even today that it is cheaper or easily emulated, it still has not gained an audience due to lack of must have games.
The Mega/Sega CD add on was essentially the beginning of the end for SEGA. It was an ill conceived , underpowered system. Its library consisted of generic arcade ports and FMV garbage that killed whatever potential it had. It never really had a stand-out title that was considered a system-seller. I was thoroughly disappointed in it. It has few mildly entertaining titles, but nothing I would consider must-haves. It eventually met the same fate as the Turbo-CD add on, it was largely ignored and forgotten by developers.
I know a lot of the games on Segs CD where bad vs the arcade, but at the time it was amazing to see real video on a home console. I was blown away at the time the first time I saw it.
Something I didn't know about Night Striker and most of Taito's sprite scaling arcade games until recently is that they didn't really use sprite scaling at all! Look closely at them and you see that objects always get larger via animation. I found one exception but forgot what it was. It does present further evidence that the sprite scaling hardware in the Mega CD was a bad idea, as sometimes the absence of sprite scaling just goes totally unnoticed.
I just gotta say if you want arcade perfect Starblade then get the Playstation version. Personaly I appreciate how the Sega CD version looks like the graphics from "The Last Starfighter". Give me those wireframes and flat unshaded polygons! To be clear I wish a lot more games looked like the video games in the movie TRON.
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I recently had surgery and haven’t been able to work for the past few days and your videos have been keeping me entertained at home thanks a lot man
No problem dude. Hope you're back on your feet soon.
@@SegaLordX Do you like feminazis?
@@SegaLordX I remember posting this last year when I bad surgery as well.
Sega Lord you will be surprised who you are helping out by making these awesome vids!!
Get well my friend.
@@cristinamaiapm what even is this comment
I was always disappointed with Neo Geo ports that just had the Neo Geo music streaming from the CD. I didn't want that. I wanted superior arranged versions of the music.
With the cuts those games usually saw, an arranged soundtrack would have been a great addition.
Was that something that actually bothered you 26, 27, 28 years ago as a kid who was fortunate enough to have owned those consoles. Or is this an opinion from modern eyes?
@@fmdof This was something that bothered me 26, 27, 28 years ago. I loved what they did with Final Fight.
@@GameSack awesome. My two favorite reto channels talking together.
Get you two together for a fireside chat about the Mega CD. We would love that.
The Mega CD was my favourite Xmas present ever. Final Fight, Terminator and Snatcher were worth the price of admission on their own.
Heh my Sega CD Christmas was total opposite... I just got bad games. (I chose them, noone's fault but mine.) Actually I think I could only pick one or two and one of them was that horrible robot fighting game. And the packins were stuff like Sherlock Holmes. Soon after this I got into Amiga so I never really grew my Sega CD library... looks like it was decent if you chose wisely.
@@mercster Robot fighting game? Probably Heavy Nova...
@@homejonny9326 Just checked, it was the Sega CD-only sequel "Black Hole Assault." It assaulted a black hole alright...
Mine was the original PlayStation. I couldn’t wait for Christmas, so I tried to secretly open it up, only to find out my tv didn’t have composite.
Had to get my mom to go out again to get the nasty RF adapter from Electronics Boutique.
@@mercster Yeah. I remember buying Night Trap 🤣. I remember you could use the Lethal enforcers light gun with Snatcher. I would have it in my pocket until a combat scene then pull it out and fire. Made you feel like a real Blade Runn....er... Junker.
I did get an Amiga later on. Civilization 1 for 50p on my local market is probably the most value I have ever gotten out of a game. I so miss those great big boxes and lovely thick manuals.
I think the sega cd was powerful enough to have developed a port of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, in the same way that Final Fight was developed ... it would have been perfection ...
I hate feminazis
I've been going through my old Amiga games lately, and the whole "this is just the A500/Genesis version warmed over for the A1200/Sega CD" is a mood.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-love your work, man. Through your explorations, you always take me back through familiar territory while also inevitably charting new territory. I always come away with a few “new” titles to track down and enjoy. It’s like I’m a middle-aged adolescent all these years later-thanks again for both the trip down memory lane AND the opportunity to expand the retro collection!
In middle school, I bought the SEGA CD months after it came out with my own money. From the first I heard of it I started skipping lunch and saving that money (except pizza day!). I went in to HH Gregg and paid cash. $318 one dollar bills lol! The cashier was thrilled lol! But shortly after I bought it, the only games I really had any love for was Sonic CD, Silpheed, and Sol-Feace. And I too look forward to the scaling effects. SonicCD was the only example I had and I hated it. But like an abused dog... I kept coming back to SEGA over and over!
LMAO, I'm glad I'm not the only one who held on to extra lunch money to save up for games!
@@RichardCraig back at you lol! I thought I was the only one!
I love the Mega cd, it was really under appreciated. It only puzzles me that they didn't upgrade the colours, especially with the focus on fmv.
The base Mega-Drive was the bottleneck for the colour issue.
@@XenonXyanide They solved that later with the 32X. Its solution was to overlay the 32X graphics over the Genesis/Megadrive's own. They could have done the same with the Sega CD.
What gets me is the games that didn't upgrade sound over their cartridge versions, the Sega CD added 10 sound channels (2 for CD audio and 8 PCM) to what the Genesis already had.
I'd wager there were bottlenecks trying to juggle all of the audio as well.
I'm sure Sega considered a 32X style solution for the color on the Sega CD even then. They likely axed it because the unit was already skyrocketing in price.
@@lazarushernandez5827
Thats the issues, why the need for 32x.
don't get me wrong, I don't hate 32x...I just would have been on board with Sega CD had they
added color and vibrancy along with sound...Maybe getting something closer to SNES.
Interestingly, SNES was much less expensive and had ( arguably) much better games...
@@mxggo9046 I hear ya. When the rumors of the Sega CD first showed up I really wanted them to improve the base Genesis functionality beyond just storage and audio; my list also included a larger color palette, mode 7/hardware scaling and rotation...basically enough power to do justice to their arcade ports. To their credit they got a lot of it right.
The letdown for me was the focus on the FMV video games. Instead of games like Outrun, Turbo Outrun, Super Monaco GP etc...there was a bunch of 'Make my Video' games, Night Trap (controversy and nostalgia have given that game more fame than it deserved; it was ok) and those weird sports titles (Scottie Pippen Slam City).
Still, wouldn't have experience Sonic CD, Lunar the Silver Star, Snatcher and a bunch of others without it.
I feel like I'm one of the few who loved Sega CD since I got it upon its US release, but not for the reasons others may have sought the console for. While I admit I was definitely awed by FMVs (despite discovering how bad many of those games were) and the incredible CD quality music (some of which I still listen to even to this day), the stars of the system in my eyes were largely RPGs: the Lunar series, Vay, Dark Wizard, and Shining Force CD, to name my favorites among them. Through some of those RPGs, I was also introduced to Working Designs, a publisher I loyally followed until they closed down in the mid-2000s, including some of their other ports like Cadash, Dragon Force (well, nearly their entire Saturn line, really, but Dragon Force is my favorite among them), Alundra, Arc the Lad Collection, and Vanguard Bandits.
Also, I probably played Final Fight CD more than any other port of that game (even the SNES version, which I owned a solid 2 years prior) solely because it was the absolute best version: co-op play, all three characters, near-arcade quality, and the best OST remixes to date.
EDIT: Typos.
I played the snes version a lot when I was a kid, but when I discovered the Sega cd version... Oh boy, you can imagine my face back then. One of the best arcade ports of the generation by far
@@pedroangelsaezhernandez5347 You and I probably had the same expression: our jaws hitting the floor at the awesomeness that was Final Fight CD. :)
Final Fight is perhaps the best arcade port on the Mega CD
The colours have been fixed recently too
Final Fight CD my all time favorite Sega CD game I did put countless hours into that game lol.
the attack combos are too damn slow
@@SuperGaknar The punching seemed slower on the Sega version vs. the arcade.
Final fight CD was my uncle's favorite
Your uncle had great taste
Loved my Mega-CD. Bought it as soon as it was released. If only Sega had improved the colour palette the FMV would have looked so much better. 😢
Fun fact about final Fight. The JP Mega CD version retains the arcade audio sample for the car bonus round "Oh my God" but the NA Sega CD version used the SNES audio sample which was more muffled and changed to "Oh my car"
The Sega CD suffered from the same thing several other consoles did: Hardware capabilities that the company refused to let (most) developers fully use by way of not including the full documentation and instructions in the dev kits. Essentially third-party devs had to work with 70%-90% of a system's capabilities, and the company reserved the full use for their own games. They wanted to have an Ace in their sleeve so their own games would have an edge versus third-parties, but this was a stupid concept because by gimping your third-parties, it only hurts the system itself. IIRC Sprite Scaling was one of these features Sega jealously guarded and only select games were given permission to use it. In the end it's always the same story: (System) had far greater potential than most of the games used, because the parent company wanted to reserve the full power for themselves.
Remember picking mine up on launch day at Totally Video Games. Golden age baby. She sits in the box in my archive but I play all the games on the MegaSD.
The PC Engine Arcade card version of Fatal Fury 2 Special is pretty darn close to the Neo Geo port too. Then again it did have a expanded color pallet and more ram added vs the Sega CD port.
Yeah, that Arcade Card had what, an extra 16 megs? That was an insane amount at the time.
@@SegaLordX Yeah and very late into the PC Engine's life. Regardless, I still love my Sega CD for what we did get. Just wish we saw some more scaler games and maybe up the color pallet a bit more like the 32x we got a few years later.
24:44 So you have the ability to transform yourself into a samurai warrior, an altered beast and a shinobi, right?
Indeed.
Yup! I would have taken a color upgrade over the given scaling/rotation capability (15 color pseudo frame buffer for scaling at a low frame rate).
The launch price would've been cheaper than it's original price.
I fell in love with the fmv games, especially Night Trap.
I still remember my neighbor hyping up the Sega CD like nothing else. Come Christmas day I eagerly headed to his place to enjoy some, what he ensured me, was some next level gaming. We spent probably 4 hours playing Criss Cross' Make My Video and I felt incredible disappointment. I will say we eventually got some solid use out of the system when Lunar and Popful Mail brought some much needed JRPG love to a Sega system.
Ahh, Popful Mail. Now there is a game that doesn't get talked about nearly enough on TH-cam channels. There was also versions of it on the PC Engine and Super Famicom in Japan. They are all pretty different from one another. I get the impression the PC Engine was pretty much a straight port of the original computer version, much like Y's. The Sega CD version seems like a built from the ground up re-imagining of the game, and the SNES version seems somewhere inbetween with majorly overhauled visuals (much larger sprites and vibrant colors) compared to the PC Engine version, but still fundamentally the same map layouts and gameplay feel. I couldn't say which version is the best as I've mostly played the Sega CD version because it was the only one translated into English.
Imagine if the original Genesis/Megadrive had the hardware of the Sega CD to begin with. (Sans CD player, of course.) We could have gotten decent ports of Afterburner, Thunderblade, Space Harrier, etc... scaling sprites in NBA Jam... It probably would have been more expensive at launch, but it would have been worth it.
The whole reason the Genesis was popular in the US was it’s competitive price point (well, also Sonic). If it had that kind of technology from the jump it would’ve been really difficult for them to get any traction
At least added expansion support to the expansion and fully on the cartridge port for future enhancement graphically/audio wise.
I came home from school one day and it wasn't even Christmas, my mom had a brand new model 2 sega cd for me...good times
Thank u for the photosensitive notice!
I'm not an expert on the Sega CD architecture but my understanding is that graphics are still displayed by the Genesis VDP and that the Sega CD's sprite chip renders out tiles that are then copied by the Genesis CPU to its VDP. That's why Sega CD games cannot display any more sprites, tile layers, or colors. The Sega CD is essentially a math accelerator for the Genesis. Adding more colors, layers, sprites, etc. would probably have required some sort of video pass-through connection, like the 32X, and would likely have been much more expensive.
IMO, the problem with the re-releases on Sega CD was, it was brainless to port the cartridge games to the CD format and only add Redbook audio... then sell it that way. Redbook audio on a console was pretty new and sufficient to sell. Given this idea, there was probably few incentives to mobilize a team that would reopen the code and improve the game to have scaling sprites etc.... We have to keep in mind that, the code from these old game was radically optimized and expensive to modify... for a re-release you'd have to think about it twice, putting effort on an old title or producing something new?
Pretty sure some people scratched their head on that question back then.
I remember having saved up to buy a Mega CD as a kid, going to the store and not being able to find it anywhere. I asked the clerk where they kept the add-on and he replied that they didn't sell it anymore, as the Saturn had just been released. In hindsight I was probably better off not having brought the SEGA CD, as channels like this one didn't exist to guide us through the system's.. uneven library.
Ninja Warriors Again also got an enhanced version on PS4, you can see more the screen and it plays like an arcade version of the game if it had an arcade version. Highly worth.
FANTASTIC side by side comparisons. Great video Sega Lord. I think it's your best one yet.
I loved my mega CD. The only developer that I found to ever use the capabilities in full was CORE Design. Thunderhawk still remains one of my favourites
My favorite sega cd games were final fight, shining force, the terminator, and the awsome remake of batman returns. In thoroughly enjoyed the sega cd, and i grabbed it as soon as it was released in the states. It was severely underrated in my opinion, wish it had gotten more support. Also games that were designed just for the sega cd like sonic, or shining force showed a lot of potential. Sega dropped the ball in many ways, but i still love it to this day
After Burner III feels like a cartridge game bumped up to CD at the 11th hour to add CD music. Without the hardware scaling, it looks almost as bad as Super Thunder Blade. Sengoku turned out well. A perfect 1:1 port wouldn't be possible, but Sammy got it about as close as they could. Well, almost... they should've tried for a 2 player mode. If Final Fight can do it, why not?
This brought back a lot of memories. Road Avenger was so great
Some common themes: Sega CD games could rarely match the Arcade, and frequently Sega CD got the Genesis game with enhanced music.
Even the genesis ports as well. No improvement other than music and added sound effects. Only malibu, core and game arts were the first gaming developers to utilize the add-on hardware before sega did.
i hated when the sega cd games just basically took the same format the cartridge games had then just added a few things like better sound. felt like such a lazy way to improve the games
Sega? Lazy? Never! ;) See also: where the hell's my up to date PC ports of your entire model 1, 2 & 3 arcade game back catalogue, eh Sega? It's a license to print money and they do nothing with them.
Mortal Kombat and Final Fight were not arcade perfect on Sega CD.
Some of those bad arcade ports could have been rereleased on the Saturn and Dreamcast and been more arcade accurate. The Sega CD was really handicapped by the inferior Genesis hardware. I think 32X had more colors but it was cart based.
@Dave Davies The Sega CD was never going to compete with something as graphically intensive as After burner or Virtua racing. 2d fighting games yeah maybe.
@@robkrasinski6217 The Sega CD wasn’t that good, it was miles behind dedicated arcade machines costing 1000’s.
I absolutely agree that the Sega CD should have been $150. If it had been without the extra chips, people would have bought it and then it would have gotten more games, and some of them would have been better than what we got.
I think the real problem with Sega CD in the hardware is that they used it to make FMV games but with limited colors the Genesis was really poor at that.
It would have been a much idea to go the Turbo Graphics route and just fill the games with loads and loads of voice acting to animated stills ala Wing Commander.
Every time I see all these awesome Japanese exclusive games that were loaded with animation and voice acting I turn green with envy. If America got the same games at all instead of adding English voice acting they just replaced everything stills and text.
The only good example of a game that DIDN'T do that which I can think of is Snatcher. Just imagine Sega CD released at $150 with 30 games like Snatcher over it's life.
I mean the MegaCD has almost enough hardware for a full console. Some of the stuff seems to be specifically to counter the SNES -- there's an 8 channel sample based sound chip (just like the SNES one!) which generally goes unused because CD audio, and hardware to do Mode 7 equivalent stuff. It's like they had a checklist of SNES features they wanted parity with.
@@birdrun4246 Not "Mode 7 equivalent stuff". The SNES could only scale and rotate a background layer and use tricks to sometimes simulate sprite work, while the Neo-Geo could only scale and rotate sprites. Sega-CD, on the other hand, could do both at the same time. It's a shame that they didn't focus on these capabilities. It's a sight to behold when used right and goes far beyond what either the SNES or Neo-Geo could do. E.g.: Soul Star. I blame Sega of America on deciding to put most of the dev focus and marketing on FMV and other "interactive media" games. The FMV capability was the most obvious difference from older consoles and did initially sell some systems based on the novelty, but it was ultimately a crappy gimmick.
@@Prizrak-hv6qk Even to this day I'm still amazed at how many companies got suckered into the "lets push interactive multi-media" mindset. It seems even a business guy in a suit could have picked up a controller, and played Star Fox and Sewer Shark back to back and have understood which technology was going to dominate the business (3D or FMV).
Watching this I just dream 'what if' Sega actually utilized the darn 32X in conjunction WITH the Sega CD. It would essentially have none of the compromises Mel discussed in his epic video.
With a launch date in late 92 or 93 in JP/NA. Duo console for EU or only NA/JP.
Such a shame Sega didn't take advantage of the sprite scaling abilities of the Sega CD with some more arcade ports. I've always been curious what a Sega CD version of stuff like Outrun or Afterburner would've looked like. As SLX already mentioned, also a massive shame that Sega just re-released the Megadrive versions of Golden Axe and Super Monaco GP with slightly improved SFX. A fully sprite scaler optimised version of Super Monaco would've been ace. Or imagine if Golden Axe had a port that got the full Final Fight treatment. Such wasted opportunities...
And Golden Axe was only single player. Why is that game only single player?
@@ENiceGeo Right???
Worst part, 32x can program those games easier than the sega cd due to software programming.
I'm actually impressed with many of these arcade ports. For the time this was amazing
I disagree - the SNES was doing better ports without expensive hardware add-ons. There was too much untapped potential with the Sega CD. I liked the music though.
Sonic CD, Final Fight CD, Lunars, Snatcher and Lords of Thunder. It reached its potential just fine, Batman was a doozy if a rail shooter too. Was steep for its time, but worth it if you were older and had a job unlike so many kid fans. SNES couldn’t even handle two player Final Fight. Base Genesis he two Punisher which ran on stronger arcade hardware than Final Fight. CD Final Fight was a gem.
@@thomasbeall9069 That's just you trying to make yourself feel better about buying this crap.
@@kingofdust9725 Final Fight Guy
@@i-dont-burn-under-the-sun What about it?
I wanted to see lots of sprite scaling and rotation on my Mega CD. John O'Brien did such a great job on Batman Returns that at the time I was sure the likes of Power Drift and Rad Mobile were still going to come, eventually. But I have to agree that the inclusion of the extra hardware, including also the PCM sound channels and the extra CPU, meant the machine was overpriced, and in turn the small userbase meant most developers didn't think it was viable to learn how to use the extra features.
Looks like the Sega CD version of MK has transparent shadows where the arcade does not. That’s one improvement anyway…
There's also more animation on the Sega CD port compared to the Genesis.
Great content as usual. Some of those even caught me by surprise! And I even had one as a child.
I think it must have been pretty difficult to decide what features they should have put in the hardware at the time without knowing what game devs would choose to put in the games. Hindsight is 20-20
Truly, if the Sega CD had also been launched with a power upgrade akin to the 32X it would have taken the early lead the PSX had and given Sega the time it needed to make the Saturn properly.
Not the ps1 but the 3do and jaguar. Release it a year or two prior to the ps1 release as a add-on or duo console.
I wished they made a streets of rage for the addon. Alas it never happened. Still have many fond memories of the system
I remember the Sega CD way ahead of it's time
Yeah there's a few really great games, the Lunar series and Shining Force, Final Fight, Fatal Fury Special was good, then playable but not great ones like Hook and BC Racers
I think you are remembering wrong.;) Wait, I take that back. Lazy ports. Overhyped games that sucked. Yeah, I guess it actually was ahead of its' time because that pretty much sums up the game market of today.;)
I remember when Sega said there was no money in hardware. I knew that was BS then and now that I'm seeing the add-ons and Consoles that Sega was putting out with these hefty price tags and the slap in the face half-assed effort they were putting in. It rings even louder now how full of it they were.
Road Avenger and Final Fight are by far my favorite arcade ports on the Sega CD. The audio alone makes it worth playing.
I remember being SO excited when I got the Sega CD, and being so pumped when I got "Sewer Shark" and "Night Trap," thinking FMV games were going to be the future of gaming. Oh, how wrong I was. I felt bad that I didn't play it nearly as much as I assumed I was going to. Though, the last game I got for it was "Silpheed," and that was awesome!
Thanks for giving Mortal Kombat CD some love. It is the best home 16-bit port of the original game and the extra frames of animation, voices and all the music from the arcade game really make it a great experience. You just have to ignore the horrendous lag when fighting Shang Tsung in the final battle. 😁
I never understood why the mega cd was never used to add on colours and ram? It has it s own CPU and why not have the genesis for background and mega Cd for sprite? A bit like the 32x?
In hindsight that's what they should have done and ditched the scaling hardware that was rarely used.
I remember a friend at the time saying that the bride in Road Avenger was better off dying to those gang members, because it's demonstrated throughout the rest of the game that her husband was a violent psychopath. I mean, he's not wrong.
That is true with most video game heroes.;) A guy is just sitting there on the subway, minding his own business, and BOOM, the metro city mayor grabs him and pile drives his skull into the floor.
Great video. I agree with his closing statement. It seems resources could've been better utilized to increase the genesis' strengths rather than attempting to compete with the aracade sprite scaling.
There's a disturbing lack of Sega arcade ports to the Sega CD.
Hardware-wise the Sega CD was great, an amazing sound chip adding many more channels and better SFX quality, a much faster CPU and sprite scaling capabilities, not to mention you could store basically all Genesis or SNES cartridges in a single disc. In Japan, the Super Famicom received so many amazing RPGs developers had to fit somehow into tiny cartridges, if Sega had a better install base and management, they could seduce lots of developers to bring those amazing RPGs to the Mega-CD, with amazing music, cutscenes, visuals, etc. Lunar and a few others made the cut, but overall, the biggest failure of the addon was they hadn't good ideas to make it worth buying. Instead of the arcade version of Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, they port a bad FMV PC game with the same name, lazy Genesis/Mega Drive ports with "CD Sound", weak exclusives like Earnest Evans and many others. There are dozens of good games for the addon, specially third parties that used well the hardware, but otherwise, it's another case of an era of experimentation and lazy software. I won't even mention the amount of bad FMV weird stuff from this era, fortunately, PS and Saturn escaped this.
It should have displayed more colours
I agree and don't think it would be hard to do so, specially at the time it was released. I believe they kept the same color limitations of the Gen/MD because so then they could port the cart games fast enough to build up the library, just adding a few redbook tracks and FMV sometimes. It's kinda sad really.
@@roberto1519 Especially as it came out the same time as the SNES. Sega had a huge chance to blow the SNES out of the water in every way. AND it had a working Megadrive connected to it. Imagine how powerful it could have been with both running their CPUs and a GPU together and sprite scaling etc and 256 colours.
@@roberto1519 They should have forgotten the FMV angle and made a 2D arcade powerhouse like the Neo Geo and CPS1. The Sega CD alone had a faster CPU than the CPS1 plus the Megadrive CPU on top. What a waste!
@@alexojideagu The lack of RAM prevented it from doing anything close to Neo Geo quality games. They were uncompressed cartridges for a reason. They basically just used it like a giant cache.
I really miss those days of going to the arcade and finding a game you liked, then waiting and watching which home system was going to have it or which was going to do it better. Those were exciting times to watch technology advance. Now there is no more excitement and anticipation for what's around the corner. It just feels like meh whatever. Sure modern console games look great now but it's pretty much a standard now. Call me when we have a personal holodeck then I'll get excited again. :)
What's worse is none of them really take full advantage of the hardware to do much of anything interesting anymore. It's all about things looking better, instead of actually doing something interesting and new with the gameplay. You could immediately see in say, F-Zero, that this was something that your NES couldn't do beyond just looking prettier. The same was true with Super Mario 64. I need that new N64 if I want to play a game like that. My SNES just isn't going to be able to pull that off. What was the game that Sony fanboys were most excited about getting for their brand new PS5? Demon's Souls! A game originally released for the PS3, but hey, it looks prettier now. (yawn)
Ever been to retro arcade bar? Great experience and it brings back all the memories of going to a arcade as a child/teenager.
The Genesis should've had more on-screen colors from the get go. It would've been a perfect 16-bit machine (though maybe not as commercially successful due to higher costs?). Unfortunately, all color output from the Sega CD goes via the Genesis, so the add-on couldn't have improved upon that. That's why the 32X is such an ungodly contraption that loops the Genesis' video output through itself and then adds its own assets at the end.
High color and pallete genesis would've done better during the arrival of the 32-bit era and snes with donkey Kong country and star fox.
Congratulations man for 100k !
That proves that if you passionate about something, you're always get an audience!
Even if he was passionate about Virtual Boy, I doubt he would find 100k audience.;) Just saying.
CORE was the only studio that took advantage of all the extra hardware in the Sega CD. Excluding all the FMV games
Lethal enforcers 2 lol I love how some of the bad guys say "owe" when there shot, a bit of an understatement, if getting shot just causes an "owe" dosent seem to deadly
I often wonder why they even bothered making the Sega CD at all.
They're Sega. Finding ways of running their business into the ground is what they do. Think of all of that R & D, engineering, and promotion that went into the Sega CD. Now think about all of the things they could have done with those resources that would have helped the Genesis compete, from development and promotion of games, to cartridge enhancements that would have improved the games and not split the install base like an add-on did. There is a reason why Nintendo scrapped plans for a CD add-on for the SNES. It just doesn't make much sense to offer up an expensive add-on to a system people already own when you can use enhancement chips to improve the games while having the entire install base be a potential customer for that game.
i always wondered how they fit so many robbers into that impala
The last game you talked about was one of my favorite arcade games I loved to play. I was so happy that I actually got a version of it on PlayStation 4.
Lovin' this Sega content, great way to ease into the weekend. 👍
I think the problem back then was that publishers were often claiming arcade or near arcade perfect conversions. If they had just set some reasonable expectations it would have be easier to overlook the many shortcuts that had to be made to bring these games home.
The SNES Version of Ninja Warriors is Amazing! Hardcore...I have it on my modded Xbox. U can play most of the Sega CD on a modded Xbox through Coinops 8. It's Amazing with the Original HD Component Cables!
SEGA really wanted an answer to Mode 7, huh?
You can't really call it an answer if you never use it.
I love all your content.. sometimes you show some games I've never heard of I really wish you would post the game title on the screen as you switch from game to game
After Burner 3 really sucks. When your expensive add on produces a game inferior to After Burner 2 on the Mega Drive...ouch. Don't have Fatal Fury, as it is extremely expensive. Final Fight is great on Mega cd, maybe better than the arcade version, except for the colour downgrade. Fewer enemies makes the game better. Mortal Kombat is not really my thing. For me, the Mega cd version doesn't offer enough over de Mega Drive release. NBA Jam is great, but this version isn't the best. I would choose the 32X or Jaguar game over it. Ninja Warriors is great, shame it didn't get a PAL release. Road Avenger is pretty fun and the Mega cd version is fine, but the fun doesn't really last and it becomes too difficult. Don't have Samurai Shodown, much too expensive like the other JVC release. Might buy Star Blade some time. It is also pretty expensive. Do have the 3DO version, which I like. I think the Lethal Enforcer games both have very ugly Mega cd releases. They are ok-ish at best. Never played Night Striker. The pack in collection is just a collection, that there were some sound updates is just a nice bonus. I don't understand the Golden Axe two player loss either... Sengoku I have only played on Neogeo. It isn't worth the effort.
Sengoku is great on Sega CD. Has set lives unlike AES version. Plays faster than NeoGeo and tracks the arcade sound and music. Just lacks color depth
SLX, just a heads up but the arcade hardware was significantly better than the Genesis/Mega CD hardware. The latter only had the benefit of the ~680MB storage size but it was still the Motorola 68000 doing the work.
By 1993 the arcade by my Grandma's old house in Burnaby, BC had a four game Neo Geo machine with Cyber-Lip, Fatal Fury Special, Samurai Showdown, and Sengoku on it. I played each game religiously.
its so cool to hear your "adult" takes on these consoles since i was a mere lad between 5 and 10 during these years.. i remember thinking the sega cd looked cool but it was never enough to be able to convince my mom to buy one... i do remember a salesman trying real hard to convince her with batman returns on sega cd
I find the Sega CD much more interesting than the 32X. Sadly, poor ports from Sega itself and the lack of colors of the console made it not being as powerful for the consumer as it could. If the expansion port of Mega Drive could allow for more colors on the screen, with the power of both CPUs, Nintendo would have no chance in porta comparison for each single title.
Thanks for using my favorite Final Fight CD track, been listening to it for 28 years. Great to see these prominent TH-camrs giving the soundtrack love in recent years.
Sadly I think improved color was never an option with the Sega CD. They would have had to do what the 32X ended up doing with video overlay. Videy inlay options like for the FMV the Sega CD did were limited by the Genesis color palette. This also is why we got about a maximum of 20fps in sprite scaling too, the Genesis just couldn't fill any more pixels than that. So yes, I'd agree, had they just added a ton more RAM in addition to its processing upgrades, the Sega CD would have been better able to compete with the NeoGeo and for less money. But back then, RAM was hella expensive, so who knows.
Had Sega done a far better job at managing their own console, maybe today we'd be marveling how great SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY looks on the Sega Switch, huh? But no, we're not.
Loved My Sega CD back in the day. The game I remember most is Spiderman, great music, animated cutscenes, lots of stages. Far better than the genesis version
Sega CD was a decent system. It was expensive. The automatic tray version for 300? That was quite the asking price, especially if you didn't have a Genesis, so you'd need another 150 on top of that. I had the Model 2 Fliptop version that was 150, a much better asking price. I think Sega CD could've done better if it was just its own system. $200 for the fliptop version and a bit of extra power so those arcade ports could've played well and it would've been the ultimate 16 bit system, with sprite and background scaling. A worthy sendoff for the 16 bit era just as we were entering the age of 3D.
Even a duo console similar to the sega neptune.
The Ninja Warriors Again on the SNES is a completely different game; Ninja Warriors on the Mega CD is an accurate arcade port.
But the snes Ninja Warriors was better than that trash Sega CD version. Period!!!
@@jabarijones7871 That's a matter of opinion. The video was about arcade ports on console so the info in this particular case didn't make sense.
@TrueSinister It was implied though. Having said that, Ninja Warriors in the arcade and all home ports were complete garbage. The completely re-imagined SNES game developed by Natsume is the greatest side-scrolling beat'em up of the 16-bit era. Period. No other game ever came close, despite it lacking 2-player co-op (which the updated modern version corrects). All of the characters felt completely different from one another and not just variants in speed and strength with a move or two to differentiate them. We're talking entirely different move sets, and a lot of moves I might add. Playing on a single plain like a one-on-one fighting game opened up so many cool elements too that were completely missing from more traditional beat'em ups.
Yeah. The Sega CD version is accurate, all right. Accurate in how awful it is. The SNES Ninja Warriors is a masterpiece and the single greatest beat'em up of the 16-bit era. I do get your point though. It wasn't a port of the arcade at all, which the Sega CD version was.;)
@TrueSinister Honestly, I really don't think the Sega CD could have handled a decent port of the SNES Ninja Warriors. There are just too many frames of animation needed for any given section of level for them to load up entirely into RAM. There is a reason you never saw even a Streets of Rage port on CD and that pales in comparison in terms of the sheer size of the characters, amount of animation, and number of unique character types in any given section of the game. I think Final Fight CD was pretty much bumping into the absolute limit that a game like that could get away with on a CD based system at the time and that game doesn't have nearly as much in terms of character and background animation.
Damn that was a fast 28 min!
I gave a speech in high school about the sega cd and played the first stage of road avenger for the class. Glad i didnt fuck up playing. I think back how insane i must have been to do it
I hope you didn't declare FMV to be the future of gaming or anything like that.;)
My favorite Sega Cd game is Sonic Cd. It’s will always be one of my favorite games ever
Imagine if we've had SEGA CD arcade ports of titles such as Captain Commando, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sunset Riders, Gokden Axe, Space Harrier, After Burner & Outrun! I could see them doing "SEGA CD Editions" of arcade titles w/extra content, stages & visual FX or mid-quels (games that took plave between the main games) w/visuals that showed off the SEGA CD hardware.
Instead we got what we got. Quick & cheap ports of already existing SEGA Genesis games & FMV titles.
It's like SEGA, especially SEGA of Japan, didn't care to make games that showed off the hardware. At least you had SoA & SoE making SEGA CD games that had scaling & rotation FX - compared to SEGA of Japan, which did very few. It's been long rumored that SoJ resented the success, & perhaps this is one reason why the peripheral did so poorly.
This trend continued until the dreamcast arrived.
I think the Sega CD would been good,
if it had the 32X hardware in it in the first place.
like example if the sega cd and 32x where made together as one console
instead of separated consoles.
I think it would sold better?
Like let it play genesis games
but also can play cd games,
with ram card, or a game that take a cd and cartridge that acts like cd's ram's card.
This video is solid gold! I remember saving up my money to get the SegaCD and just being blown away at the time.
I loved Night Striker. The arcade was so smooth and I literally pulled the joystick to breaking trying to navigate those tight spaces.
Aw man I remember finding the pink second gun at a car boot sale when my brother and I were kids and picking it up immediately then going home to play two player Lethal Enforcers. Also using the gun in Snatcher was so much fun.
It will likely always remain a mystery why the Sega CD never got a port of Streetfighter 2 with red book audio similar to what the 3DO had...if Capcom were comfortable enough bringing Final fight then why not S.F 2???🤔
Sega lined up Final Fight for the Sega CD, not Capcom. Most 3rd parties didn't see any profit in the platform.
@@SegaLordX logic would come into play though with Streetfighter 2 ripping the arcades to shreds with its popularity, having it on the Sega CD would definitely shift units and then some! Even Capcom's effort for the stock genesis was ok, but it took a hack to ultimately bring that close to arcade perfect quality...
A Sega CD port would have taken considerable time and manpower, though. The Sega CD only had 6 megabits of RAM, which means that it would have had big load times to decompress all the animation. Capcom and Sega likely considered it, but with most games selling poorly for the platform, I can see why they never completed it.
@@SegaLordX it will need a twin advance rom or ram cart.
I used to finish school, head over my friends and we'd spend hours on lethal enforcers 1 & 2. So much fun with the guns
In my dream in thegrave mega cd will be as powerful as mega drive 32x with its own colour output.
Thanks for this 👍 I wondered what the comparisons were like.
You did good work on this. Interesting to see side by side comparisons. Yeah I spent alot of cash on my Mega CD. If only Sega could have done more with it.
Unfortunately for me, I was never able to experience the Mega-CD back in the day because it was far too expensive to own one. My parents had just bought me a SEGA Mega Drive in late 1993 bundled with Sonic 1 & Sonic 2 coming from owning a SEGA Master System II and it cost $300 so there was no way my parents were going to buy me the expensive add-on. I remember being at Kmart once and saw hundreds of copys of Sonic CD behind the glass cabinet and hundreds of SEGA Mega-CD II attachments on the shelf but like I said I never got to see what Sonic CD was all about other than the game case and cover. Now days I own several Mega-CD attachments and burn all ROMS to CD-R myself instead of paying thousands of dollars just for an original copy.
The Mega-CD failed in 3 aspects:
1. It launched a bit too early, most of us were still only in our infancy in collecting cartridge games. The technology came too soon.
2. It was too damn expensive at retail so most parents ignored it because of it's price.
3. 70% of it's software were shitty FMV games that didn't even feel like you were playing a video game.
As much as I love the add-on, I too feel that more should have been done with the software of games. There should have been more focus on the scaling and rotation and less on those shitty FMV games (aside from Road Avenger).
What discs and software do you use to burn? My copies always have issues.
@@Clay3613 Please re-post the same question over on my channel and i'll answer it for you there, for some very strange reason I can't post a reply to you here, someone is deleting them or not letting them post or go through.
Why not just emulate the system instead of burning cd copies?
@@AlienGenotype I prefer to use real hardware.
It's such a massive shame that the Sega CD never lived up to what it might have been. Oh for those conversions of the glorious sprite scaling arcade games that would have been so amazing. It never felt much more than standard Megadrive games with different soundtracks to me. Great video as usual 👍
I was so hyped up for the Sega CD and my young mind saw it as a huge leap from the SNES and Genesis. I played crap like Dracula and thought it was a legit masterpiece, lol at my taste as a 10 year old. I was thrilled with Sewer Shark and still find it enjoyable, Sonic CD was legit great, playing Dragon's Lair at home was mind blowing as was Mad Dog Mcree....
I think the most dissapointing aspect of Fatal Fury Special on the Sega CD is that is inferior in a fair number of ways to the Super Nintendo version, since a lot of details are missing, so that shows that it could have been better.
Even the backgrounds in the Game Gear version look more pleasing than most from the Sega CD version (which look terrible, coming from a arcade port or not), and i think it even plays a bit better too, so that's a bit disappointing.
True... if you are from North America or Japan. You see, when it came to the European version of Fatal Fury Special for the SNES, we got a very shitty deal: while the North American/Japanese version was released as a 32 Mbit cartridge, the European one was only 24 Mbit in size, meaning that it was missing 4 characters and stages, so the Sega CD version was considered the superior one around here.
@@KittyMeow1984 I think the term you're looking for is, "best of the worst".;)
Could it have been better though? The underlying problem that the Sega CD had was that it was still fundamentally using the inferior Genesis hardware with the Sega CD only adding a few additions to functionality. That was why it didn't sell. If you were a kid with a Sega Genesis would you spend $300 on a Sega CD that has barely improved versions of the games you could already get for the base system, or would you be better off spending that money on a SNES and opening up a whole new library of games to you, including some arcade ports that were superior to even the Sega CD versions? I don't think anyone at Sega ever really thought this through. Actually, I don't think that anyone at Sega has ever thought much of anything through.;)
@@davidaitken8503 plus, unable to do 100% what the genesis can do by itself. I believe the sega cd caused 32x to born instead of focusing on enhancement chips like the svp and snes was doing.
PC Engine CD offered more to its respective platform and the Mega CD was not making enough difference from the base Mega Drive. Considering also the price, it was really a success that it sold as many units as it managed. Even today that it is cheaper or easily emulated, it still has not gained an audience due to lack of must have games.
Pc engine CD was crap.. No any enhanced hardware like sega CD had
@@shaolin95 PC Engine CD had a better library and the System Cards offered extra memory. It was far better value than Mega CD for PC Engine owners.
@@shaolin95 developers program the add-on better than the sega cd. Quality over quantity.
The Mega/Sega CD add on was essentially the beginning of the end for SEGA. It was an ill conceived , underpowered system. Its library consisted of generic arcade ports and FMV garbage that killed whatever potential it had. It never really had a stand-out title that was considered a system-seller. I was thoroughly disappointed in it. It has few mildly entertaining titles, but nothing I would consider must-haves. It eventually met the same fate as the Turbo-CD add on, it was largely ignored and forgotten by developers.
Once the 32x cd platform and 3do came out, it was over for both add-ons.
I know a lot of the games on Segs CD where bad vs the arcade, but at the time it was amazing to see real video on a home console. I was blown away at the time the first time I saw it.
Something I didn't know about Night Striker and most of Taito's sprite scaling arcade games until recently is that they didn't really use sprite scaling at all! Look closely at them and you see that objects always get larger via animation. I found one exception but forgot what it was.
It does present further evidence that the sprite scaling hardware in the Mega CD was a bad idea, as sometimes the absence of sprite scaling just goes totally unnoticed.
SNK's Neo-Geo-related games belong in the arcades and ported on Neo-Geo home consoles.
I just gotta say if you want arcade perfect Starblade then get the Playstation version. Personaly I appreciate how the Sega CD version looks like the graphics from "The Last Starfighter". Give me those wireframes and flat unshaded polygons! To be clear I wish a lot more games looked like the video games in the movie TRON.