The New "Games I Bought" Thread -- Copied For Your Enjoyment

[A Black Falcon]

The Sega CD is actually a fine little device with a lot of very well made games for it, even if a number of them are enhanced rereleases of Genesis games. Echo the Dolphin sounds incredible on the Sega CD. It gets so much flak because of all those terrible "interactive movies" on the thing, but look past those and there's a LOT of really good games on it.

I agree, I like the Sega CD too. It's got a pretty good library, really. Most of the FMV games aren't very good, but it's got enough other stuff to make up for that. And while I don't enjoy many FMV games, there are a few which are entertainingly bad at least... :) I think that the Sega CD is an under-rated system. The six shmups are all quite good, there are some good platformers, the RPGs and strategy games have some classics among them, some of the scaler-style games are pretty good (few, but good), etc.

However, apart from the saving issue below, I have one major complaint about the Sega CD -- Sega of Japan's game support for the Sega CD was just awful. Seriously, it was completely pathetic, to the degree where I think I could make a case that Sega of Japan's 32X support might have been better than its Sega CD support! It really was that bad... and it didn't help that some games originally meant for Sega CD, like Outrun 2019 and Phantasy Star IV, ended up on cart instead. It's fortunate that third parties, and Sega of America, stepped in to release some stuff for the system, because Japan really dropped the ball. Sure, they had some good ones, but precious few, considering that the system had a 3 to 4 year life (Dec. 1991-Jan. 1996 in Japan, Fall 1992-Dec. 1995 in the US). LIke, why were there zero scaler-style games from Sega of Japan on the Sega CD? They put hardware scaling and rotation chips into the system, and then didn't use them at all! It's hard to understand. The closest things to them are Sonic CD's bonus stages, which are just bonus levels, and After Burner III, which is a mediocre outsourced port of the arcade game Strike Fighter. Compare that to the 32X, which in just its first few months got great ports of After Burner and Space Harrier... And it's similar with platformers -- Sega of Japan's only platformer on the Sega CD was Sonic CD, released in 1993, several years into the system's life. However, in just six to eight months, they released two platformers on 32X (Tempo, Knuckles Chaotix). Sega of Japan did do some good stuff (Sonic CD, Dark Wizard, Shining Force CD, etc.), but not enough... there weren't even all that many titles not released here, either. There were some, mostly anime games and such, but not too much.

I'll say this. It's pathetic that so many of those games don't support save files. Both EWJ and Echo should have allowed saving since there's no additional cost to support that feature on a CD.

Yeah, Sega CD developers have a serious lack of vision as far as saving goes. Sure, RPGs, strategy games, racing games, some FMV games, and a few platformers save, but do shmups, rail shooters, or any of those kinds of games? No, they never do. And nor do most Genesis-port platformers, it's usually just the exclusives like Sonic CD and Wild Woody that have save systems; Genesis ports, no matter how enhanced (see the Ecco games, Ecco 2 particularly has some great additions), almost never do.

And yes, I completely agree that it's really annoying. The Sega CD is a good system, and it does have a good game library, but the missing save feature in so many games is frustrating. I don't think one single rail shooter, lightgun-style shooter, or shmup on the Sega CD saves, for instance... that is, unless you count FMV ones, in which case a couple of them, such as Ground Zero Texas, do. But apart from that, do any use saving for a highscore backup? No. I have no idea why they don't, implementing a highscore save feature to the backup memory would seem to be pretty simple, but they don't. :(

At least on Turbografx/PC Engine CD, a few of the shmups actually save something... sure, most don't, but a few do for things like high scores in the timed modes.

Yeah I'm aware of the password feature. I'm saying the push button code works a little better because you can start at halfway points and so have a little finer control of where you pop up. The passwords are also a little harder to write down since they use funky symbols instead of letters or something.

Huh. Yeah, it's always kind of annoying when games use symbols instead of letters and numbers, I agree. I also never used the cheatcodes, so I didn't remember that you could actually warp to any checkpoint... interesting, that is a nice feature. Still, adding passwords is a very nice addition, I think.