Retrogamingradio About The Gp2x

[x68000]

I don't have any hatred towards the playstation whatsover, just the strategy used by sony of europe with regards to advertising. I know first hand what happened when large amounts of sony's money was handed over to magazine publishing houses, and that is certainly not wide of the mark. So many game magazines gave less than impartial reviews to sony's hardware and software under direct orders of their managment. But i do agree that sega came into the market at too high a price, with too little quality software and with a poor advertising campaign.

The likes of the daytona vs RR debate is a little harder to argue, as ridge racer was without doubt a much slicker looking title, but the more complex and intricate daytona never had the same visual appeal due to the lower res graphics and the seriously bad clipping effects. It did however have the exact same feel as the arcade and had a lot more reply value than RR, and at the time, especially at the initial japanese lauch sold a lot more copies for me than ridge racer. Just as it did in Japan.

The playstation had some seriously good games and i for one look forward to a day when we can emulate the psx sufficiently well enough to play games as they were meant to be played (no hope for the saturn on that front though) and yes, i may have a little bias towards sega, but most hardcore gamers do tend to go that way. I've sold more saturn games over the years, but i do specialise in japanese only titles these days and the psx import market is nowhere near as collectible as the saturns.

I think the japanese sega saturn will be the last genuinely collectible games platform for a long time to come.

 

[Alpha2]

Well I wouldnt say the Dreamcast is much of a slouch in the colection dept either, I mean heck they still release commercial games for it in japan and it's been out of production for 2 years. While it wasn't a convincingly better platform to me than the PS2 I did feel it should have been strong enough to not be Sega's last console, but as is par for the course they made another bad move and dumped the system before it could try to build a stronger base.

As for PS I only have about 4 import games for it and in a way that makes me happy because that means most of the games I wanted I was able to buy domestically. Same for the PS2 I only have 2 games that are japanese for it. Frankly, I'd love to see Saturn emulated more than I would PS but I think we all know that'll never happen.

I'm not sure I can agree with you on the replayability of Daytona vs RR but I'll just call that a differance of opinion since they're both very differnt types of racing game.

But yeah, Sony and a corporation in general has done a few stupid things for sure, they arnt 100% free from blame, hell that whole fake movie reviewer thing last year caused them to have to refund millions of dollars from ticket sales.

 

[junker]

with the saturn, even domestic games have become collectibles heh.

and while the dc wasn't a better machine than the ps2, it was on the same level more or less, and was released earlier. it should've done much better than it did, but they had to pull out like they did since they were losing much money and were already in debt with the dc. the dc had a not too bad fan base throughout its life, too.
was a nice, nice system that introduced the "next gen" 3d graphics to consoles. best system launch ever for me.

oh yeah, love your art, alpha2 B)

 

[x68000]

I totally agree! The dreamcast launch was stunning. When i got my first batch of systems in october '98 (i drove 300 miles to collect them from customs at heathrow airport in London as i would have had a 3 day extra wait for the delivery as it was over a weekend) I got them back in a limited quantity (around 30ish) due to the demand in japan, at around 2am and i just opened one up and sat playing VF3 tb and pen pen tricellon till about 8am in the morning. I was trashed but i couldnt sleep!

Sega did everything right, made a system which addressed all the issues which hindered the saturn and they had a great year before the ps2 came out, but then things went bad for them, it was inevtiable but noone thought it would lead to them pulling out of the hardware market entirely.

I just couldnt get over how the media bandwagon lapped up every one of sony's words (i should have known better), emotion engine this, emotion engine that.....what a load of crap. Hard facts were that at the time, the big jump sony promised in performanve was not there to be seen and whilst the dreamcast had the fantastic soul calibur and shenmue wowing everyone in the know, sony had ridge racer 5 which looked like a polished ps1 game and that fireworks game fantavision which looked more like an early shoddy ps1 tech demo.

Just think if the dreamcast had run it's course, how great the games would look now. We would have had a new system a year ago too

@alpha2, you're right about the dreamcast being collectible, but it tends to be more hardware collectible rather than software due mainly to the large number of special editions sold in japan. Games are still very reasonable when stood up against the price of some saturn games.

ps. The last DC game i stocked as new was Trizeal earlier this year, an excellent vertical shoot em up. I bought 50 copies and they were mainly pre ordered, the rest sold within a week. Now, i'm lucky if i have one or two pre owned copies in per month.

pps, Wasn't Dreamcast the coolest ever name for a console. Breathtaking!!

pps, @alpha2 & Junker - i love our little chats u guys - much better debating stuff like this with other knowledgable hardcore gamers than telling noobs for the 100th time that the gp2x stick does NOT click!

 

[Alpha2]

Thanks for the compliment Junker!

To be fair it was more than the dreamcast that put Sega in the hole, it was their expensive investments in their chain of arcades. If they had started cycling back early like Nintendo did they wouldnt have to have been rescued by Sammy... well, at least probably not as soon as they did.

Domestic DC games are hard to find in decent condition too! I would have bought one for myself (my brother has a DC and a Saturn but hardly ever uses them he just collects the games) but I could never find a faithful source of the games I wanted to get for it and eventually I couldnt find any used DCs.

 

[x68000]

hey alpha2

just looked at you're art too and it is fantastic

I'm jealous

ps. regarding Sega's massive outlay within their arcade divisons, check out this pic from inside Sega World in London (closed many years ago) which was without doubt the most amazing arcade in the world!

http://www.davidphenry.com/England/England009.htm

 

[Huxley]

I remember the Trocadero, great arcade. First place I played a proper VR machine...it was so 90's.

The likes of the daytona vs RR debate is a little harder to argue, as ridge racer was without doubt a much slicker looking title, but the more complex and intricate daytona never had the same visual appeal due to the lower res graphics and the seriously bad clipping effects.

That's exactly the point. Technically the comparison didn't favour Daytona, even though the console was actually capable of much more (as was the Playstation). And even if Daytona sold more copies in Japan (I've no idea about sales figures, but I doubt it was the same story in Europe), this was symptomatic of the kind of publicity coo that was winning Sony the console war. It's really not just money and bribes, it's a whole bunch of reasons why Sony became market leaders so swiftly.

@alpha2, you're right about the dreamcast being collectible, but it tends to be more hardware collectible rather than software due mainly to the large number of special editions sold in japan. Games are still very reasonable when stood up against the price of some saturn games.

These things can take time (unless your console has SNK written on it, in which case it's pretty much collectable from the word go ). I guess the problem with the DC is that there was plenty of stock left over when Sega jumped ship, so it was still on the shelves for quite a while. Wait and see I guess...

 

[x68000]

when sega eventually got around to rereleasing daytona in a deluxe edition, it addressed all the issues of the original release graphically, but was coded by a 3rd party and they forgot to give it the same game physics making it a soulless very disappointing game to play.

 

[Ravnos]

Sega did everything right, made a system which addressed all the issues which hindered the saturn and they had a great year before the ps2 came out, but then things went bad for them, it was inevtiable but noone thought it would lead to them pulling out of the hardware market entirely.

​

I did. I figured it was fairly common knowledge that the DC was going to make-or-break Sega as a hardware company, and it didn't surprise me at all when it failed. It was a great system and it DID address all the issues that hindered past Sega consoles, but they'd dropped the ball too many times already. They released the Sega CD and hardly supported it, did even less to support the 32X, they abandoned the Saturn too early. The PS2 hype machine sure didn't help the DC, but pretty much everyone I knew at the time felt like buying a DC was betting on the wrong horse. There was a genuine feeling that Sega was going to abandon the platform at the first sign of trouble, which was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody bought it because they expected it to fail, and it failed because nobody bought it. I love my DC, but I didn't pick one up until it was on the way out and the prices were coming down.

 

[junker]

so x68k, you own an import gameshop or something??
and yeah, dreamcast units and most games are still really cheap. it's too bad you'll only find them online or at a few stores, though.

^yeah, the saturn was abandoned way too early over here, but that was done to get a head start on the next system, right? since it wasn't doing well against the ps1 at all. yeah some of sega's past systems definitely attributed to the lack of interest on the dc.

ps. you're right, the dreamcast defnitely had the coolest name ever

 

[x68000]

@ravnos, i never would have thought this was sega's make or break system one year in from lanuch, as at that point sales in europe, and japan especially were pretty healthy. Sega did burn too many bridges though and North America & Canada were always Nintendo territories, whilst in europe and japan sega were used to be being the number one (until the psx), ever since the mid 80's. So they had a little extra breathing space there. But that wasnt enough. You guys are a tough nut to crack.

@junker, sort of, we import and distribute mainly japanese and some north american stuff to game stores and mail order companies and a little retail, but mainly just to friends as it's not worth the hassle for the odd one or two games. We also source and have a large amount of retro japanese titles mainly for the staurn, dc, psx, sfc, pce and md.

I'm tussling with my japanese distributor at the moment regarding a certain $ony system for the beginning of next year. It's gonna be tough to get anywere near as many units as we need, but's its always the same at launch time.

ps. after all this playstation bad mouthing, i'm off to go and play some gradius V on the ps2

I'm such a hypocrite!!!

 

[junker]

gradius V is one awesome game, though!!! man i love it, but i can't seem to pass the second level...wish i had more time to play these games at home.

hey have you played the new Raiden III? is it worth picking up? i loved Raiden II back in the arcades.

 

[x68000]

raiden III is fantastic! i've already sold out my first batch and am waiting for my second batch to come in next week. I totally underestimated how popular it was going to be.

Gradius V IS awesome but is very very hard. I can get to level 4 but that is it! Also had a quick game on Gradius IV which IMO is much more old school gradius, and as long as you stay alive and don't need to power up again, you can finish it in normal or even hard in 1 life!

Can't wait till we get pc engine iso support so we can play gradius II Gofer on it! Fantastic conversion!

Here's a few other fantastic shooters we will be able to play once the gp2x has pc engine cd support:

CHOANIKI/SUPER BIG BROTHER (sort of semi-sequel to Gynoug)
SPRIGGAN 1&2 (Fantastic Compile overhead shooters)
SUPER DARIUS 1&II (The most user-friendly Darius game's & best sounding!)
IMAGE FIGHT II (ROCK HARD overhead shooter, very old-school)
FORGOTTEN WORLDS (the best home conversion available)
STAR PARODIA (Excellent cutey Parodius-style overhead shooter, where you can even play as a PC Engine!)
SYLPHIA (fantastically playable overhead shooter, with a greek mythology theme)
GATE OF THUNDER & WINDS OF THUNDER (Rock hard, heavy metal Soundtrack, graphical tour de force)
NEXZR (easily one of the best shooters on any system)
COTTON (fantastic arcade conversion)
GINGA FUKEI DENSETSU SAPPHIRE (the most famous and probably one of the rarest shooters on any system!)

 

[Alpha2]

I've seen the PS2 version of Cho Aniki and I have to say it's one of the most disturbing shooters EVER.

 

[x68000]

it certainly is, it makes you think that the guys who developed it must have been 70's style village people stereotypes. The amount of baldy headed muscly men is quite an odd thing to see in a shooter!

If you try out gynoug on dr md you will see were the series began turning weird!

 

[Alpha2]

There was a point where it was normal??

 

[junker]

yeah i saw a video of Cho Aniki in this saturn shooter special video http://www.segagagadomain.com/RetroCorepage-main.htm
damn weird looking game!

and yeah, gradiusV is incredibly hard, but so fun. the 2nd boss had too many levels! can't wait to get back to it once i get my ps2 back. hopefully going to get raiden III once i get some $$ soon.
oh and you lot have played soukyugurnetai? i'm still having a lot of fun with that

pcengine cd emu would be niice

 

[x68000]

pc engine cd would be guaranteed if we can get fluBBA to dev for the system - fingers crossed he can be prized away from his gba.

And soukyugurentai is an amazing shooter, it has a fantastic feel about. It 's that instant coolness you can feel as soon as that first level begins. awesome!

my favourite 32bit shooter though has to be Layer Section on the saturn. The gameplay is pitched perfectly, the graphics are excellent, especially the scaling effects and the music from Zuntata team is one of the best game soundtracks of all time. It's better than the arcade soundtrack.

My other favourite shooter has to be Gradius III on The SFC. I know it slows down badly at times and has the 3d mini levels missing but you know whats it like when one game stands out in your memory from your childhood!

And yes, i stand corrected, choaniki games, including gynoug were incredibly weird right from start!

 

[junker]

yesss, layersection is perfect. i love it. the spacey soundtrack fits it perfectly.
i just tried out my copy on SSF emulator and it plays very nicely.
i've never gotten around to beating it, though.
may have to give up and load it up on mame to beat it w/ infinite credits