I've played a Ton of Sega CD Games and I've played a Ton of PC Engine Super CD Rom games. I like the duo better. But While Soaking in the awesome of Valis 1-4 and Ys and Dracula X I kept thinking about what a Big deal this now 20 year old medium was. People saw a game like 7th Guest and shat themselves Shurlock Holmes were ground breaking... Then the Mega CD comes and Kills FMV games. Then once we went Polygonal the CD Medium wasn't as much of a big deal anymore. So here we are now with Blu Ray and DVD and that's our standard. Which after me long intro now brings the question: Of the early days of CD Rom which system/game most wowed you? And of those early systems which games do you think Best took advanage of the then new Tech?
Loom on CD ROM with voice acting... wow. Though I liked it when my dad made the voices and read the text to me when I was little and we played video games together.
Playstation, without a doubt. You say optical storage was not a big deal after polygonal graphics took off, but it's not true. FMV and way better music, cheaper games (I remember the epic first Platinum budget range), and more content were huge shifts in the industry. Especially vs. Nintendo, who used to rape publishers with their media pricing.
I think developers had a spazz-fit at all the space that was suddenyl available to them, and jammed loads on to fill it (FMV etc).. which wasnt always beneficial to the game.. Early CD Rom systems were basically crap with little value. Obviously the Playstation was the first to properly nail it. Thinking back, the first time I was really wowed was with the Sega Saturn and the CD Audio.. initially I didnt realise it was just streamed from the disc (I guess I imagined that it was generated by the sound hardware), some of the amazement obviously wore off when I soon realised it was just an audio track, but I was still very much amazed. The medium of a game has never really been a consideration to me. Well, CDs have never impressed me that much.. ofc you can create amazing things with plentiful space. Whats more amazing is beautiful and large games within constraints, eg N64 games had a tiny amount of memory in comparison to CD so they had to use it efficiently.
I don't think Sega had any clue what to do with the Mega CD It didn't help the FMV kinda sucked too. PC Engine Games on CD just felt different than Hu Card games The PC Engine is bordering on Best console EVER with me too... The PC Engine probably got the best Neo Geo Ports of the day. It's the shmupper's dream system too and the stider port is probably the best one there is. Plus it was also the only system you could play SF I on for the longest time. Then again what the SNES does with a Cart....
My personal early CD favorite is Rebel Assault. I loved the full motion video cutscenes and the new gameplay experience. However I remember it was quite hard. The successor Rebel Assault II was better because it featured a higher resolution and an easier, more variable gameplay. I still play Rebel Assault II on the PSX sometimes. Anyway Rebel Assault was groundbreaking for the CD technology when it was released.
You know for 2d games cd really offered alot of things like storage for more frames and higher quality audio. Problem with early cd systems were ram space. Mortal Kombat Cd shows greatly how slow the cd drive was as well as lack of ram. As for the mega/sega cd, all sega ever made it for was a solution to the issue of storage available on a cart. Stuff like fmv and scaling were added later on. Hell if the neo geo cd had a faster cd drive and a lot more ram to work with it would of been amazing. Still I sometimes wonder what it would of been like if the nes/famicom had a cd drive instead of a floppy. Can you imagine playing an nes game with cd sound?
I remember Playing Sam and Max on PC using the floppy version, years later I bought the CD version and tested it, the diference was stuning, the voice acting was awesome. Another game that benefited from the CD was Blood, the original CD tracks were fucking scary, while the MIDI/OPL Tracks were not so good. The CD Version had an awesome atmosphere.
How much Ram did the Duo have? Edit: I looked it up- Not much Well with the 64kb or video ram it had...it sure made the most of it, those Neo Geo Ports were incredible.
and what it could have achieved a snes cd-rom. this is what angers me. it would have been my dream. those day rpgs were realy great and massive, but were costantly butchered due to the lack od space... T_T like secret of mana and many others. my dream; great snes era rpg, with cd audio tracks, plenty of space so that nothing gets cut off, and space for proper translations to english!
sure the PC Engine CD-ROM2 system. released in 1988, it was years ahead to its competitors, when most of us not even knew what a cd-rom is and what it can do. the very early games weren't a big step ahead though, but a wonderboy monsterlair in 1:1 arcade quality accomp. with a superb, never heard before red book audio, was convincing enough. and then, when those games like snatcher, spriggan, gate of thunder, winds of thunder & dracula x came, you knew that there was a huge advantage to those ordinary little cartriges. funnily, the cd-rom system was the first and also one of the last standing. released in '88, last offical game produced in '98. makes it 10 years of living, even it was already technically dead after '95.
the neo geo ports requiring the arcade card, which adds 2MB (Two Mega Bytes) of extra rams :!: the external ADPCM ram from the cd-rom2 could also be used for extra video storage. monsterlair was the first game used that "trick". the super cd-rom sys card also added 192KB or ram. but regarded to a "seirei senshi spriggan" f.e. which only uses the 64KB, it's damn amazing what it outputs onto the screen.
very strangely then, that the first (1st) of all of them ever made, was/is also one of the best ever made, and with very HIGH value! @goh: the acd strider port unfortunately is one of the weakest. dunno what they was thinking at AVE, but that game kinda sucks. only 30fps, strange color palette, clumbsy controls. the strong point where only some of the BG details, which came quite close to teh arcade.
We were having serious issues with the Russian Federation. We don't see us in the position to comment any further on that subject.
I agree with you about Striider,Its really poor, Jerky and washed out looking, Only thing I like about it are the cut scenes and the musical score. The X68000 version is amazing and thats on floppy disk!
The first time i saw a PC Engine with the CD-ROM2 System i was like... WOW! Remember that this was 1989, i still had my Master System and the Mega Drive was just released. The system was so compact, so modern and amazing. Since it was imported from Japan, by the game stores itself, it was sold in small quantities at an insane price (it still like that today, on MercadoLivre) Later the SegaCD was released, but while i was curious about, it never had that WOW factor on me. Still, the Wondermega is the coolest console ever release. I remember being amazed at the 3D0 because of games like Road Rash, Need for Speed and Wing Commander III. Too bad it costed a fortune and didn't had much great games. Then all gaming magazines started to talk about CD's. The PSX, the Saturn, the Atari Jaguar CD, the M2... Of all those the PSX was the one who caught my attention. Tekken, Ridge Racer, Philosoma, Destruction Derby, Wipeout. Jumping Flash,...
I didn't think the CD rom gave people anything more than more space. It was just another medium after all. It's the console that it plugs into that always mattered to me and naturally the games. That said, I never missed the CD rom despite being a nintendo 64 owner at that time.
The TG-16 CD blew me away...I rememebr when my friend first got it (he saved up paper route money)... Last Alert and Y's Book 1 &2 (those two and fighting street where his first games)... The sound blew me away.. the Voice samples were so clear and there was so much of it (or so i thought at the time).. also the music was extremely good... funny thing is that the loading times really didn't even matter... (side note.. when my friend sold off his collection i scouped up his TG-16 and CD player.. still works great!!)
