Yeah, it had a built-in MPEG 1.0 decoder. 3DO was very advanced for its time. I still remember when they announced M2 add-on, and demoed it at 1995 E3, games looked out of this world, way better than anything on PC or consoles at the time...

3DO, yearslight better, because of this:

/thread

DrYon said: 3DO, yearslight better, because of this: /thread

An almost Arcade perfect release, I really enjoyed it. Road Rash and Samuari Shodown were also classics.

 

 

@ exindguy

The Amiga CD32 was a direct competitor released just before the 3DO and Atari Jaguar were. Those other consoles you mentioned simply were not.



The console had a very short lifecycle as mentioned earlier within this thread, the parent company was unable to meet demand (and thus the console was too risky for big investments from developers). The best CD32 games are enhanced versions of A1200 originals, sadly the A1200 did not come with a CDROM drive by default, so the bulk of these games were primarily designed for using diskettes.

For example Naughty Ones is almost the same on Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, the A1200 version only has extra colors. The CD32 version is almost exactly the same as the A1200 version which uses just one 880KB diskette, so 99.9% of the available disc space was left unused. A fun little game, but does not show of what the CD32 is capable of.

coolestguyever said: I have a 3DO and I'll tell you the one reason its better than Jaguar: If you want to play 2 players, you plug the second controller into the top of the first controller! How cool is that? There's no second plugin, you have to plug it into the first controller. No fuckin joke, if you have one you'll know what I mean. Whoever thought of that is a real jackass.

That was certainly a cool idea for the time (wireless controller solutions before this gen mostly sucked). A thrid player would connect to the second player's controller and so forth.

What I really loved about the controller was that you could plug in a headphone and you would control the volume directly on the gamepad!

 

 

I'd pick the Jaguar thanks to Tempest 2000 and AvP.

MikeB said: @ exindguy What's next: complaining that the Amstrad GX4K, SuperGrafx and PC-FX don't get mentioned much? The Amiga CD32 was a direct competitor released just before the 3DO and Atari Jaguar were. Those other consoles you mentioned simply were not. In fact, were there even ten CD32-exclusive games released? (And just so we're clear: by exclusive I mean they didn't exist in some fashion already on the CDTV/A500/A1200.) The console had a very short lifecycle as mentioned earlier within this thread, the parent company was unable to meet demand (and thus the console was too risky for big investments from developers). The best CD32 games are enhanced versions of A1200 originals, sadly the A1200 did not come with a CDROM drive by default, so the bulk of these games were primarily designed for using diskettes. For example Naughty Ones is almost the same on Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, the A1200 version only has extra colors. The CD32 version is almost exactly the same as the A1200 version which uses just one 880KB diskette, so 99.9% of the available disc space was left unused. A fun little game, but does not show of what the CD32 is capable of.

The point is, the machine is ignored for good reason (just as the PC-FX is ignored for good reason when people talk about the Saturn and PS) as it died in less than a year and had virtually no compelling games you couldn't get somewhere else (I say this as someone that owns a CD32 and lots of games for it, many of which were actually inferior to the system they were ported from--Chaos Engine, for one, is a glaring example of this.) To expect that it be included, in the same breath, with two machines that had largely exclusive libraries is asking a bit much considering what it brought to the table.

Sure, the hardware, on paper, was decent (the controller, however, was an abomination), but the fact that it basically stumbled out of the gate, took three steps, soiled itself, collapsed, and then was beaten to death by its coach means it isn't actually worth mentioning as anything other than as a brief footnote by 'yanks' or anyone else.

@ exindguy

Apart from an added intro (and maybe an outro, I am not sure) the Chaos Engine on the CD32 is roughly identical to the slightly different (more colorful than the Amiga 500 original) Amiga 1200 version.