Getting demo discs for the Sega Mega CD was very exciting. For years I was secretly jealous of home computer owners who regularly got magazine-mounted cassettes and floppy discs full of game demos. It was too costly for magazines to do them for cartridge based systems like the Mega Drive and Master System. And to my knowledge no Commodore 16 Plus/4 demo tapes ever existed on magazines - but that is way back in the days before my Master System so I wouldn't count on my memory there!
The demo CDs were on either Sega Pro or Mega Power - both were wretched magazines and the CDs were the only reason to buy them. The first one was Thunderhawk on Mega Power, me and my friends were wowed by it. It was the first time we'd seen a game that harnessed the power of the Mega CD for something other than FMV.
The demo CD that stands most out in my mind is the Psygnosis Demo CD. Unlike most other discs it had more than one game on it - a real treasure trove! It included demos of Puggsy and Wiz 'n' Liz. Wiz 'n' Liz... I can only imagine the game was conceptualised by Psygnosis developers in a Alan Partridge Monkey Tennis moment.
The games were so-so but there was also footage of Microcosm, a game that really intrigued me as the concept of being a airship shrunk down and injected into someone felt very Inner Space (and Inner Space has zero defects!) The footage - like most FMV games of that era - looks shocking now, so it is hard to describe how excited it made me and my friends for the game. The music accompanying the footage was stupidly bombastic, in a poor-man's Terminator soundtrack way. One time when we watched the music didn't play and the footage took on an eerie minimalist quality.
Finally on the Psygnosis Demo CD was a music video! A really hideously compressed video of Broken English by Sunscreem. It looked so bad the only thing you could really make out was that a guy was wearing neon pink sunglasses. And the song was awful. But there was something quite special still about having a music video on a CD no matter what the quality was.
How easily pleased I was before the internet!
My endless video game musings. Sega, Sony, Xbox, Konami, jrpg, shmup, 8-bit - that kind of thing.
Showing posts with label sega cd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sega cd. Show all posts
Thursday, 27 November 2014
Thursday, 16 October 2014
The Secret of Point & Clicking?
I always wanted to play the Secret of Monkey Island but being a console-owner meant I all I could do was look enviously over at Amiga and ST owners. My hopes were raised by the port to the Sega Mega CD, but it never got released in Europe (maybe that was a blessing in disguise considering the poor reputation of that version).
Anyway after some persuasion from my girlfriend I recently decided to give the re-mastered version from 2009 a spin. Thankfully you can change the graphics back to the 1990 originals, the pixel art still looks fantastic and superior to the soulless slick new visuals where characters seem to float over the backgrounds.
I can see why the game has such a following; it has a great sense of humour and a fun cast of characters. I particularly liked having to tail the storekeeper to find the sword master or (later in the game) the appearance of the three-headed monkey.
In general point and click games hold up really well in the modern era aside from one thing... the internet. I completed Monkey Island in a couple of days and whilst I'd love to claim I have the deductive powers of Colombo the brutal truth is whilst I tried to work out all the puzzles, a few had me completely stuck and so I caved and sought the internet's easy answers.
This got me to thinking - how the hell did I complete Broken Sword back in the day on the PlayStation? Did I just sit there for days on end exhausting every single point and click option? In fact I remember way back playing Sherlock Holmes on the Mega CD. When I got stuck there I went methodically and patiently through the entire phone directory line by line...
There's something to be said for the elated feeling you get when you solve something that had stumped you for weeks (if not months), but in reality the temptation of having the answers ready at your fingertips is all too tempting.
Even if you try to resist.
And I did try to resist.
A little.
Anyway after some persuasion from my girlfriend I recently decided to give the re-mastered version from 2009 a spin. Thankfully you can change the graphics back to the 1990 originals, the pixel art still looks fantastic and superior to the soulless slick new visuals where characters seem to float over the backgrounds.
I can see why the game has such a following; it has a great sense of humour and a fun cast of characters. I particularly liked having to tail the storekeeper to find the sword master or (later in the game) the appearance of the three-headed monkey.
In general point and click games hold up really well in the modern era aside from one thing... the internet. I completed Monkey Island in a couple of days and whilst I'd love to claim I have the deductive powers of Colombo the brutal truth is whilst I tried to work out all the puzzles, a few had me completely stuck and so I caved and sought the internet's easy answers.
This got me to thinking - how the hell did I complete Broken Sword back in the day on the PlayStation? Did I just sit there for days on end exhausting every single point and click option? In fact I remember way back playing Sherlock Holmes on the Mega CD. When I got stuck there I went methodically and patiently through the entire phone directory line by line...
There's something to be said for the elated feeling you get when you solve something that had stumped you for weeks (if not months), but in reality the temptation of having the answers ready at your fingertips is all too tempting.
Even if you try to resist.
And I did try to resist.
A little.
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