Did the 32X kill Sega?

[Anonymous No.4513162]

I made a thing. What happened to this console is history, but what if it had come out as the Neptune instead, or if it had come out a year or two earlier?
The 32X meme is true for the most part, but a handful of the games are surprisingly not bad. Just a taste of what could have been.

[Anonymous No.4513165]

>>4513162
Saturn was the final nail in the coffein

[Anonymous No.4513167]

>>4513162
>if it had come out a year or two earlier?
It would've been at an even higher price and would've been fucked even harder.

[Anonymous No.4513169]

Whoa, hey, man, I'd figure Tempo gets a B+ at worst.

[Anonymous No.4513173]

>>4513169
It looks cool, but doesn't play well.

[Anonymous No.4513192]

32x had some great ports. I feel like emulation redeemed the system, since now we can dig up the good stuff. Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing Deluxe, Space Harrier, Star Wars Arcade, AfterBurner complete... For the time period all of these are cool, particularly VR Deluxe.

[Anonymous No.4513201]

>>4513192
>I feel like emulation redeemed the system
Whenever I want to emulate Mortal Kombat II, I always go for the 32X version if possible. I think it's the best version of MKII on retro consoles, especially among those that emulate well.

[Anonymous No.4513370]

Nice chart anon.

I'd argue Knuckles Chaotic needs a C. The game isn't good at all except for the visuals. Poorly implemented mechanics and terrible CTRL C CTRL V level design.

Also I personally think Kolibri deserves an A. Comparatively to other games that recieved an A, it's in the same level.

The rest are decently accurate grades, I mean, there's subjectivity there, the Star Wars arcade may deserve a bit higher as well as the wrestling games, but again, it's subjective.

[Anonymous No.4513375]

>>4513162
Sort of.
32X was indicitive of the business philosophy that killed Sega. It itself was just a step on a long ladder.
I'm still sad.

[Anonymous No.4513429]

Saturn flopping outside Asia and Dreamcast selling for a loss is what did them in.

32X was a good idea, just didn't have enough time to prove itself before Sega decided to rush the Saturn out the door like retards.

[Anonymous No.4513440]

I know I've made this post before, but the 32x should have just been Virtua Racing style huge carts that would go into the Genesis for $100-$150 a pop, rather than a shitty add-on

[Anonymous No.4513486]

>>4513440
That is a spot on idea. VR was pretty impressive on Genesis.

[Anonymous No.4513512]

>>4513162
3 exclusives? breh

[Anonymous No.4513526]

>>4513370
Yeah, ratings are pretty subjective. I tried to consult as many outside sources as possible in addition to my own (brief, for some games) impressions.
>I'd argue Knuckles Chaotic needs a C.
I originally had it at a lower grade, but there are a lot of positive opinions of it out there, so I bumped it up out of fairness. It's one of the more polished 32X games at least.
>Kolibri deserves an A.
I had a hard time with that one. I hadn't touched it at all before, and the reviews of it are all over the place. Some people praise its pretty graphics while others complain about boring gameplay. In the end I thought its graphics had stood up quite well compared to other 32X games, so I went with an "above average" rating.

>>4513512
Yeah, as a console it never even got a real chance to live. Some of the "ports" are actually quite unique though. FIFA '96 came out on loads of systems both 4th and 5th generation, and the 32X version is like a weird hybrid of the fully 3D Saturn version and the fixed-perspective isometric Genesis version. MKII on the other hand looks pretty much the same on 32X as it does anywhere else, but slight variations make it the best retro console version of the game. The 32X version of Virtua Fighter is also considered by some to be superior to the Saturn version. As a whole I think the system is only really valuable as a curiosity though.

[Anonymous No.4513531]

>>4513440
That's stupid, unless you only wanted 1 or 2 games. Eventually the consumer would end up overpaying for each game than if they'd just bought the "shitty add-on" for those games.

[Anonymous No.4513536]

>>4513531
Except one would be an expensive flop for SEGA and one wouldn't

[Anonymous No.4513539]

>>4513531
It becomes a question of "do we make a handful of blockbuster games with improved graphics for this aging system while we wait for the next generation to begin" vs "make another addon, the 32x." Looking at what actually happened, the "handful of games" might have been a better bet, because there were only a handful of good 32X games anyway.

Although, maybe the games wouldn't've been good if they had to work as an extra-chip cart rather than through an addon with its own video output and everything. Virtua Racing was possible as a Genesis cart, but it isn't as detailed as it is on the 32X. Would Genesis Virtua Fighter have been possible? I rather doubt that it could have run fast enough to be a playable game.

[Anonymous No.4513568]

>>4513531
Well what we still got was only a handful of games, but you had to buy the attachment for it. Especially after they just did that.

[Anonymous No.4513924]

>>4513568
>Especially after they just did that
Well, the Sega CD was a reasonable attachment at least. Two attachments at once was probably too much to ask, but imagine if they had been able to release just one addon that combined the features of the CD and 32X units in '92. I guess that would have been prohibitively expensive though. If only.

[Anonymous No.4513937]

Darxide looks 5th-Generation tier. Just what was this thing capable of?

[Anonymous No.4513943]

>>4513162
It would have been nice if it had succeeded. The thing was literally drawn on a napkin by a SEGA employee during lunch break. It would have made a nice story.

[Anonymous No.4513949]

>>4513937
It looks great until more than two objects are on the screen at once and the framerate dips into the single digits.

[Anonymous No.4514013]

>>4513924
It was a cool attachment, but the lack of real support for it was one of the things that made me hold off on 32X and was so glad I dodged the bullet. I think many Sega fans felt that way.

[Anonymous No.4514031]

>>4513937
https://youtu.be/w0JnJjdiu7w?t=7m34s

[Anonymous No.4514164]

they should have supported the sega CD more, the asic is capable of really impressive graphics and better than the 32x in many ways

[Anonymous No.4514193]

>>4513162

the last time a thread like this came up, I concluded they died with the Sega CD.

The 32x was mediocre and suffered from the Saturn clustrfuck, but the Sega CD as they presented it was the absolute wrong play at the time. Nobody had the patience after the Sega CD for anything but an absolute winner, and that wasn't the 32x.

What the Sega CD should have been was an upgraded stand alone Genesis machine with an improved color output that could under-clock itself and backward compatible play Genesis games.

[Anonymous No.4514194]

>>4514164
This. They ought to have made SegaCD built-in Mega Drives and sold them parallel to the Saturn, as a budget game system.

They could have kept the thing going just by slowly localizing the Japanese games we never got.

[Anonymous No.4514530]

>>4513162
Sega had been screwed since the Sega CD, it was a huge misstep. The time that the 32X was released obviously had a major financial effect on Sega, but they continued to make the same mistakes. The 32X was released too late and the Saturn had no main Sonic game, not to mention Sega used almost none of their most popular IPs on the Saturn. It was a combination of the 32X, Saturn, and the games for the Saturn that killed Sega. By the time the Dreamcast came out everyone had moved on to PlayStation.

[Anonymous No.4514532]

>>4514194
The problem with that is cause the original Genesis wasn’t designed for add ons you gotta put in two CPUs and shitloads of unnecessary RAM extra to make it work.

Even in a hybrid you had to do that, which is why the CDX was expensive as fuck.

[Anonymous No.4514739]

>>4514530
Yeah, I don't think it's really worth trying to pin it on any one thing. It was a series of mistakes that killed them slowly, alongside some unlucky timing with the Dreamcast especially.
If you consider Sega a major player in the home console market from the release of Sonic until the demise of the DC, they really only had about ten years of influence. Weird to think that most major hardware brands still in the business today have surpassed that by a long shot. But Sega's legacy is impressive, that being the case.

[Anonymous No.4514759]

>>4513531
It worked for Nintendo on the SNES. I remember some SNES games retailing for $80+ back in the day. Some of them weren't even games with special enhancement chips.

I specifically remember Chrono Trigger retailing for $89.99 at Toys R Us when it came out. I also remember seeing a $94.99 price tag on a copy of Super Street Fighter II for the SNES at one point.

[Anonymous No.4514878]

Like many things people tried in the 90's, I liked the idea they had but it obviously failed in practice.

IIRC, the idea was to give people the cheaper version of the Saturn. If you had a Mega Drive and a Mega CD and are still playing those in 1994, don't upgrade to a £399 Saturn, get a £169 32x and you can play dumbed down versions of Saturn games, as well as more powerful Mega Drive games from this 6 year old console.

The 32X is one of the many things that killed Sega, I'd say SoJ was the main cause overall though. A lot of these dumb ideas came from them, along with them being pissed off with all the success America was having with the Genesis, language barriers and rejecting a Sony/Sega console (which became the Playstation).

[Anonymous No.4514881]

>>4514878
Don't forget they rejected the N64 chip because it wasn't Japanese in favor of their idiotic in-house one.

[Anonymous No.4514883]

>>4513162
The international decline of arcades, both as places and as game design philosophy, and the failure of Sega to adapt efficiently to the new growing modern casual gaming is what truly "killed" Sega apart from some other questionable market and financial decisions.

[Anonymous No.4514897]

>>4514883
Lol

[Anonymous No.4514941]

>>4514897
It's true, the Dreamcast was made to be fully compatible with Sega NAOMI so it could get perfect arcade ports. It was, with some exceptions, a home arcade console. This also happened with the Saturn and the ST-V. But times were changing and they didn't adapt fast enough to the babbyfication.

[Anonymous No.4514961]

>>4514941
Yeah, it actually makes a lot of sense. The decline of the arcade and the decline of Sega seem to go hand in hand. Sony and eventually Microsoft weren't big arcade players and were able to pivot away from it more easily as the market changed.
The 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all intended to sell the "home arcade" experience to Sega's consumers.

[Anonymous No.4514971]

>>4514961
To me vintage games (it's the good term, retro means a new game made in the style of an older game like say La-Mulana) are games that follow arcade design philosophy or were some other style but made during the times arcade-style games were prevalent and haven't been since. This is why Dreamcast being the last console allowed here, being the last one with a strong arcade influence feels pretty fitting for /vr/ and why later consoles feel a bit different, even if 5th gen market the beginning of the real decline of arcade influence (and it didn't truly seem to disappear almost completely until 7th). Also why Dreamcast got way less discussion on /v/ compared to other 6th gen stuff on /v/.

[Anonymous No.4514976]

>>4514971
Yeah, I agree. The arcade context is why /vr/ doesn't just mean "games that are X number of years old." It's the same as how 20th century popular music will never become "Classical music" even in hundreds of years.

[Anonymous No.4514979]

>>4514976
The problem here it's that it's a bit hard to draw a hard line since it was a gradual change.

[Anonymous No.4515351]

>>4514979
Well at least we agree that things did change. It's not just that game development changes over time; there was a real paradigm shift once arcades were clearly dying.
I guess some of the "vintage" game spirit persisted into the 6th gen and in isolated cases even beyond, so yeah the line is blurred, but it doesn't matter if there is a hard line that falls on exactly one date as long as we can say that boundary exists somewhere within a finite range.

[Anonymous No.4515367]

>>4514971
Dreamcast got less discussion on /v/ because of the fact /v/ is filled with normalfags who JUST played the PS2 and Gamecube that gen.

It's why the Dreamcast needed a home here on /vr/, it didn't get discussion on /v/ and if it did it was in very small pockets usually shitting on it in favour of the PS2.

It's why I don't want PS2/GC/Xbox on /vr/ since you can still discuss it on /v/ without any difficulty.

[Anonymous No.4515396]

>>4515351
Nope.

[Anonymous No.4515567]

>>4513162
a bunch of those actually look cool. how much do all the space shooters go for? and the star wars game? might as well get those too, i was planning on getting the genesis just for snatcher

[Anonymous No.4515616]

>>4515367
>It's why the Dreamcast needed a home here on /vr/
No, the fact that it is a console system released before 2000 is why it is here. The fact that it was ever not allowed despite meeting all of /vr/'s requirements was nonsense as was the sticky claiming its inclusion was due to the spawn of the eighth generation as opposed to mods just being stupid for disallowing it because it's technically 6th gen.

[Anonymous No.4515627]

>>4515616
Dreamcast was originally banned because moot knew the sixth-gen shitters would come here and clamor for the rest to be allowed as well. We should have listened.

[Anonymous No.4515643]

>>4515567
I don't know about Star Wars or the other one, but Darxide is the rarest and most expensive 32X game, only released in Europe. Probably not worth trying to buy.

[Anonymous No.4515652]

>>4515627
It's tough to enforce a ban on a system that conforms to the one extra limitation this board has over /v/. If they didn't want DC to be retro they should have picked a different metric for defining "retro," ie 5th gen and earlier instead of 1999 and earlier. It wasn't going to be perfect either way, there's always going to be people bitching about rules here.

[Anonymous No.4516302]

>>4515351
360 has a lot of Japanese arcade shoot'em up ports. A bit suicidal considering how little that console sold in Japan but I think it had to do with the online scoreboard thing.

[Anonymous No.4516352]

>>4513375
This. I'm still mad that the Microsoft investment propaganda is still being parroted today.
>Hey potential partners, the Xbox has great security and DRM, remember SEGA? Remember how piracy on the Dreamcast was the cause of their death? We don't have that problem!

Just looking at their publicly known R&D projects alone is enough to come to the conclusion that they were bleeding money on re-iterating the same products, 100% useless peripherals, and re-engineering their own shit before release over and over again just to fuck it up anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I like when companies focus on R&D but SEGA went overboard with it.
>what if we extended the genesis?
>and we'll have a head mounted display, and it's a balance board, Nintendo has a gun, I heard Nintendo does games over cable in Japan, we should try it in the US where telecom is extremely expensive
>what if we extended the genesis?
>but what if we made...ANOTHER GENESIS
>what if we extended the genesis?
>oh fuck Sony is doing some 3D magic, make sure the Saturn is focused around 3D before we launch it in 1 week, 2D is obviously dead now
>devs hated our Saturn SDK, make a better one even though nobody will use it because nobody trusts us now also lmao quads
>maybe you've heard of this thing called the genesis
>we need to make a train conductor controller

I will never fault them for trying, but they had the SUN microsystem problem, "why not trust engineers with blank checks? what could go wrong?"

https://youtu.be/VvR_3OTxs8A?t=406

[Anonymous No.4518695]

>>4513162
this webm is great. Is there more?

[Anonymous No.4518729]

>>4513162
After Burner and Space Harrier are nearly arcade perfect ports and are two of the best games on the system.

[Anonymous No.4518762]

>>4513162
No. The 32X is a symptom, not the cause. Sega of Japan and Sega of America had a ridiculous feud that had them sabotaging themselves and each other repeatedly until the situation became unsalvageable.

[Anonymous No.4518767]

>>4518695
There were webm charts for Dreamcast and Saturn along with a couple about Playstation. This one is new.

[Anonymous No.4518770]

>>4518729
I do love that sprite-based 3D effect. After Burner pulls it off better than Space Harrier though.