| VGPolyglot said: Yeah, I like them a lot too. Which is why I also like seeing 3D PC games pre-accelelerator, SNES 3D FX games, Jaguar games, 32x games and 3DO games, to see crude 3D graphics. |
Ugh, the Jaguar! Okay that one was a genuinely bad system. I got it with a game called Cybermorph in 1993 thinking like "Wow, 64 bits: this is the future!" It wasn't the future. :P Cybermorph was like a planetary exploration game...kind of...in extremely primitive form. To give you an idea of the quality we're talking about, it was graphically inferior to the original Star Fox for the Super NES and they didn't even bother to include background music. That's how lazy the developers were. And that turned out to be but a microcosm of Jaguar titles as a whole and, as I later learned, of Atari's systems as a whole, which explains why they never really recovered from the crash of '83.
The 3DO was kind of fun though! That was a much better-made system. I mean you hear about the legendary price tag of that one model ($700 in 1993 money), but in truth there were a number of models released early on and they quickly came down in price a lot. The one I got wasn't over-the-top expensive. It was kinda cool! Especially the space-faring rail-shooter Total Eclipse, which was, both technologically and in game play quality terms, somewhere in-between the original Star Fox and Star Fox 64. Right about in the middle. By the standards of its time, it was amazing! The 3DO also didn't need an add-on to play CD games (or CDs themselves), as CD was the standard format for a change. It also served as a VCR, which made it my first system to have a built-in movie player. :D By the standards of the early '90s, it wasn't the worst machine on the market. It never got anywhere near having the game library of the Super NES or Sega Genesis, but I kind of liked it nonetheless.
The sequel to Total Eclipse, called Solar Eclipse, came out on the Sega Saturn two years later and was quite awesome. I like Solar Eclipse better than Star Fox 64 because it's got a pretty good storyline for a rail shooter! Solar Eclipse came out at the tail end of the original FMV era and IMO actually makes the case for it pretty well because, in contrast to the early Sega CD games, Solar Eclipse was genuinely a game of quality, both narratively and in game play terms. It really represented the evolution and best of that type of game from that era. I kinda wish it hadn't gone away after that. Oh well. Now we have games like Her Story showing that games using live actors can, in fact, be quite awesome in today's era.
EDIT: I swear I wasn't thinking about today's solar eclipse when writing the above post. I just now thought about that. :P
