What sold in Japan wouldn't necessarily sell in the West (and even now that's something of the case: see PS3 outselling 360 in Japan even during the launch year when PS3 was WAY overpriced for a video game hardware product). More importantly, the West was FAR more price sensitive than Japan, particularly at that time. SoJ didn't do much of anything with very few exceptions But again, at least SoA tried there, and got interest from some very capable 3rd parties too (like Core). Then there's the separate issue of potential for 3D/pseudo 3D, both for original games and arcade/computer game conversions. (cutting back on investment for new/original games and putting some of that into licensing/attracting good computer games of the time would have been really nice. WAY too much was spent on interactive cinema stuff and not enough on building on existing game genres with multimedia (cutscenes for "action" games, FMV effects/backgrounds for graphic adventures, etc), and failed to capitalize on the software being worked on in the computer game world at the time. it just wasn't exploited in a very diverse manner. The Sega CD was capable of some pretty decent multimedia stuff for the time. (plus it works quite well with the typical art and animation styles of 2D genres of the time) (though Game Arts managed some rather novel and good looking streaming video and/or animation in the likes of Silpheed and Lunar II)Ĭartoon animation tends to fare much better than live action, and considering the lower cost of good quality animation and voice acting relative to a full live action production (let alone the amount of on-location stuff they did), that should have been used a lot more often. In any case, several western developers (including Sega with their "Cinepak" compression scheme) managed streaming video animation several times the quality of most Japanese stuff. (much of which was already done, though some of which wasn't done so much) And the better looking Sega CD stuff didn't look too bad next to 1x CD bitrate 256 color FMV on PC/Mac at the time either. The color limitations were there, but there's still quite a bit of decent quality video you could do within those limitations, and ways to optimize around that in general. didn't much mean a daggone thing considering Sega CD was an add-on to Genesis, and Genesis owners bought a Genesis even without it having those things. The fact is that the better sound and rotation effects, etc. Someone mentioned FMV not being good for SCD, what with it having to use the Genesis's own low-color capabilities, but FMV was the best SoA could come up with as a reason for US/NA gamers to buy the system. which did substantially better than the Mega Drive (though still a distance 2nd to Nintendo).Īnd the only possible reasons for that were marketing and software. The Mega CD should have been very capable at pushing the same market draw as the PCE Super CD (and Duo) did in the early 90s. even though MD cart sales in Japan were weak enough to be in the same range as MCD sales (in spite of only ~10% of MD owners having a CD). Isn't that a bit of a chicken and the egg thing? The MD didn't sell well in Japan either, yet it got the majority of their software support.
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