Retro video games are fun, yet there is an amazing history to be found hiding inside the pages of time. Come take a look into yesteryears most enduring consoles, dedicated consoles, handhelds, tabletops, and a MAME machine.
I look into the history, the tech, marketing, and gameplay in my popular A Look At series. I also do game play videos in my Let's Game series, along with modding and repair videos of these retro consoles, and computers. So come join the retro goodness of RetrogamerGenX's RU-vid Channel!!!
Estas everdrive chinas baratas note que me calentaba de más la consola y busque info en foros y en RU-vid y leí lo mismo , incluso a personas les daño la consola , ya que tiene. Muy malos componentes y mal regulaciones , la everdrive original o confiable cuesta como 200$ usd estas son imitaciones chinas de malos materiales
I played Gex* on my mom's 3DO until I was blue in the face. Great game! Great graphics, sound and gameplay. On just about any other system it would have been a mega-hit. The 3DO company must have had an inkling how much the system would cost to produce and therefore how hard of a sell it would be to consumers, even if it is fantastic. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say. * Puzzle Bobble was another great game for the system.
Gex is a good game. It gets pretty hard later on in the levels. It was ported to the PlayStation and Saturn later on too. I'm pretty sure Amiga has a port too, I'm not too sure if that one is official or homebrew. If they would have waited another year or so, the cost of chips fell and the cost wouldn't have been so high at launch. Also it would have given them time to see what Sony and Sega were releasing for the next gen. They might have released it with the M2 tech to compete with the big dogs. But like you said, hindsight is 20/20.
@@RetrogamerGenX Did game developers for the 3DO have to pay a license fee? I can't remember, but I don't think so. Although the pay-to-play licensing scenario is unpopular with some, it has two advantages: It can make the console maker a HUGE amount of money in the long run and it (in theory) helps keep the quality of games high (if the "approval" feature is part of the bargain).
My Mexican neighbors who didnt speak any English offered me a 3DO with Star Control 2, Space Hulk, both D&D's and Killing Time for $50, let me play it for a week for free before deciding to buy it. Less than a year after it was released. We were all poor living in an RV park so no idea how they got it, I had no clue what it was at the time but damn that was the best $50 I ever spent. It may not have had a lot of good games but the few good games it did have were AWESOME. I lucked out. Wish I still had it. Star Control 2 alone was worth owning it.
Wow $50 for a $699 console. I'm thinking it fell off the back of a truck. Lol. But, hey, you benefited from it. It definitely had some great games. Thanks for watching and sharing.
@@RetrogamerGenX Yeah it took me years later to become astonished at how they even aquired it at the time and then the regret that sank in when I sold it all for peanuts. It wasn't a bad console at all, just had a really poor library of games and was way, way overpriced. I think had they marketed it right it could have been huge.
Thank you for acknowledging the awesome that is Star Control 2 The Urquan Masters. Not many do in vids about the 3do. I still have the official Star Map that came with the 3do game framed on my wall.
@@dicezart9667 I played and beat it for the first time on that 3DO on my big surround sound tv and it was amazing. A life changing experience. Top notch sounds too.
I actually grew up with a 3DO, and getting one right after only playing on NES for years was INSANE for a kid! All my neighborhood friends loved to come over & play Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (even had this weird half vertical/half horizontal controller for it), FIFA, Foes of Ali (I never see anyone reference that game), Captain Quazar (another gem nobody talks about), Gex and this weird Mario Paint-style game where you could also make your own music & play other mini games. I have no idea how much my dad paid for it, but I still remember how cool it was to look through the manuals & ads inside boxes, with tons of product placement for future games. Which reminds me... that's what sold me on my first AWFUL game as a child - Rise of the Robots! As a kid, you can find a reason to like just about anything, but that game was the exception. Huge disappointment, and I remember having to pretend I liked it because I didn't want my dad to feel bad for wasting his money on the game I begged him for 😅
I bet you were happy, that would be a huge upgrade from a NES. I feel your pain, my parents bought me a few duds when I was a kid, and sat there and played them anyways knowing that games weren't cheap. Man I love hearing stories from folks like yourself. This is what keeps the heartbeat of the retrogaming community going. Thanks for sharing your 3do memories bro.
I had a friend who was super hyped up for 3DO, and I remember us going down to the software store when it first launched to see it. There were people playing Crash and Burn, and I remember thinking it didn't look too impressive, the game looked very slow and clunky. Because the system was so expensive, I guess I just expected something mind blowing, but it wasn't. Young me never gave it another chance.
I'd have to admit, my first impressions of the 3do weren't that great either. But over time the system has grown on me. It does have some impressive games for the time it came out, but as far as the system as a whole, your spot on saying clunky to describe it brother.
I had both its competitors, the Playstation and Saturn. I had a couple friends with 3do's. Imho it was ok and I kinda wanted one, until I saw the PSX. Totally get what your saying bro.
No. Goldstar was always their own company. They started in 1958 and between 1995 - 2000 became LG when they merged with a South Korean chemical company.
It's not a bad system. Seems folks have it out for the 3do. I think it was a pretty revolutionary console when it came out. But the time frame it was launched in was a weird time in gaming. Transitioning from sprite graphics to polygon and the transition from carts to CD format. It was more powerful than SNES or Genesis but lacked the power of the PS1 and Saturn. So it had games from both generations which made it an oddball console. I compare it more to the AGA Amigas like the Amiga CD32. It has a larger library of games than I thought, 254. Gives you plenty to collect for sure. Ah yes, I would love to have a PC FX or a PC Engine Duo.
When it comes to video games, the CD was a solution in search of a problem at this early point. They were pushing the idea of "multimedia" as the main use at the time. But nobody wanted it, even as "it" was so poorly defined. VHS in stereo is "multimedia" by a literal definition. Plus, everyone forgets and probably never knew that the VCD was the main AV option at the time and required additional hardware to play a 2 or 3 CD long movie at 320x200. The other use they were pushing was "Photo CD" which was horrible. It was ungodly expensive. IIRC, it was like 30 or 40 Dollars to develop one 24 exposure 35mm can. This was probably worth it for professional photographers, but not for regular people. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to sit around the TV to watch the family photos? Photo albums were 5 bucks. Frankly, I blame CDs for ruining the gaming market eventually leading to the horrible video game system we have now where you pay to rent (you never own any modern game, even if you have the disc) buggy software that needs constant hours long updating, have everything you do monitored and sold AND with tons and tons of in-game purchases. The reason I blame the CD is because it introduced bloat into the game. Rather than solving a widespread problem with all the extra storage, it became a goal to fill the CD and even 2 or 3 of them. More CD, more better. While a few games really did need more space, the vast majority did not and the games just got bloated with things like video intros and endless select screens along with all the waiting they required. The ONE saving grace of CDs is that they weren't rewritable. But, of course, this required buying overpriced memory cartridges.
It truly was a weird time in gaming. Going from sprite graphics to polygon and fmv. Argh I hated fmv. There were a few good games, but the majority were trash. I agree, I think game devs were really pushing the cd format, because let's face it, it was cheaper for them to produce the games. I think its funny that Nintendo was the last to go to cd based format, then to go back to a "cartridge" with the switch. Honestly, if I had to choose a format, I would pick a cartridge over cd or dlc. Carts are just rugged, and can take some punishment from kids per se'. While cd's scratch too easily and break, and I have never been a fan of downloading games from a store onto a console and not owning physical copies.
@@RetrogamerGenX This mostly (though not entirely, with Doom and Wolfenstein being on the console) predates polygons. A lot of CD games were a few megabytes in size with 20 red book audio-cd tracks that would be played in the game. Sonic CD is a good example of this. The CD drives were slow (even the double speed PSX/Saturn and I think the 3DO as well) and memory was extremely expensive. These 2 things came together to mean 1 level per load, which didn't leave room for high color graphics. There just wasn't enough RAM to store it and it couldn't be loaded anywhere near real time. Even with a fairly capable machine for the time like 3do, this was a major thing holding back the format. I think Nintendo was right. They were late to the generation and had 3rd party problems. I don't think it was the cartridges that held the N64 back. From what I've heard, the switch doesn't really have cartridges in the traditional sense. It functions more like a floppy disk or CD than a cartridge. OTOH, I've also heard when you get the cartridge, it's yours and will always work. But I don't know that for sure. The newest system I own is a DS.
Lol.. Same here man. PC Gamer these days (and retro gamer). Latest systems I have... PS3, Xbox 360, PSP. Since the PS3 is about to go "retro", figure I'll get a PS4 here soon, or maybe even a wii or wii u.
I remember playing 3DO around its launch. It played sluggish and I felt the controller was uncomfortable. Needless to say, I was unimpressed. 😂 I remember saying then, and a number of times since that "friends don't let friends play 3DO!"
lol. Right!! Nah, it was an cool system. It was just different. Loading times were pretty bad though. Really instead of calling it a 5th gen console, it should be a 4 1/2 gen, like the 32x imho. It just came out in that weird time between the snes/genesis and the ps1/saturn. The pippin, 3do, 32x, and even though it came out in 1990, the phillips cdi. I put all those consoles into that category, the 4 1/2 gen'ers. lol
@@RetrogamerGenX yeah the early 32-bit Gen. All that stuff had a whole lot of promise, but didn't have enough time to earn all the praises heaped onto it by the gaming press. The bit about console losses made me think of a video I saw recently about "FAILED consoles." It made me say aloud, aren't ALL consoles, failures? I mean, they all lost money.. but overall gains were achieved through software sales and licensing. Another rocking vid bro! Really enjoyed watching this, thanks! 🍻🕹️📽️
Thanks man. Glad you dig the video. I'll be posting a poll in my community tab soon for the next system an a look at video will be on. Keep Rock'n the Vote bro.
3:25 Therein lies the problem. $700 Dollars was too much money. Despite having a media that was so much cheaper to make than cartridges which were popular at the time, they charged just as much or more for a game on CD that introduced wait times. It is a shame it didn't get more Neo Geo games. Pulling off Samaria Shodown as well as it did was quite a feat. They just never had the games to justify the price.
@@RetrogamerGenX Or the later Neo Geo games. From what I understand, they get huge, like near 100MByte. They must have had a bankswitching scheme to get past the 330Mbits.
Always wanted to Try a 3do, I dont think I've legitimately seen one in the Wild... Turned On & Working to Play... Never seen one H00ked up at FuncoLand LOL
It's a cool system. I've played around on a few. I don't own one myself, but it's on my list of to get consoles. I personally like the design of the OG FZ-1. The Goldstar one looks too much like a dvd player or vcr. lol.
@@RetrogamerGenX Oh I've Studied it Over the Years, I got a little too Excited a Few Times at Flea-Markets thinking I Found One, but its just a Lazer Disc Player LOL
One day my friend, I will have a LD player again too. I've had one in the past, but it was dead when I got it. This was before 3d printing, and the plastic worm gears inside were shot. Held onto it for years before trashing it in a move. Now I regret it because I could have 3d printed the part in these modern days. Agrh. Oh well, c'est la vie.
at some point in the late 90's my local toys r us had two big displays set up C64's on one, and Floppy drives and some datasets on the other, computers were $49, same with disk drives, and datasets were $20 I kick myself in the butt to this day for not buying a 64 and a disc drive that day..
A fire sale for Toys R' Us at that point, I'm sure. They were probably c64c's if I had to guess. The Montgomery Wards in my town had c64c's and Amgia 500's until about 1996, and still sold c64 and amiga software until about 1998. All the local mom and pop computer stores that sold commodore stuff closed up shop around the same time too. A sad time for us commodore users.
@@RetrogamerGenX The Soviet's admitted that they 'took inspiration' from the F-111. But give it a bit of due. It could operate from improvised airfields as we see in Ukraine, and they avoided some of the needless technical gotchas the F-111 suffered from And when the Europeans made the Panavia Tornado, they 'copied' the Su-24 and not the F-111.
Thats crazy, atari wouldnt help so they did their own thing. I like it. I have the megadrive with the 32x connection but none of the other attachments yet.
The Sega CD is my favorite add-on. The 32X really never impressed me, I got it back when it was new. I mean it was cool, but even back then I felt like I was cheated out when they discontinued it so quick and no more games were released for it. There are some cool games for it though. I also have the power base converter, but I never use it because I have a master system. Having the "tower of power" back then was a huge status symbol for us teens. Everybody wanted all of that, but I was the one kid that had it. 😉
Thanks. Yeah it was my bad. I've never really did shorts, so I thought it would be like long form videos and tell you, you can't monetize if something is found. Nope not with shorts. They let you monetize. All it said was "Copyright content found, but this does not affect your short". So I thought things were on the up and up. but nope, they send you an email with no warning just saying you are de-monetized. Then throw you in youtube jail for 90 days for it. I should have known better. So for now I give up on shorts, because I can't trust them to tell me if something is wrong that I could have easily fixed to avoid all this. Oh well, it is what it is.
Yeah they are!!! Even on Game Gear they were pretty good. When was the last Shinobi game made? I think it was the one on the DS. Another great video game series that disappeared into oblivion over time. They should make a new one FPS style, where you got to sneak up on your enemies all ninja style. 🥷🥷
Yes I did. Even though commercially Sega expansion units (CD/32X) were not a success, they did manage to sell 2.2 million Sega CD units and over 800,000 32X units. The only other console that outsold Segas expansion units were the famicom disk systems with 4.4 million units sold. Even the TurboGrafix 16/PC engine only sold over 1 million add-on CD units. So seeing that Sega sold just about 3 million Sega CD/32X's altogether, (and I'm not even adding in the Power Base Converter Sales numbers) puts them in second place all time behind Nintendo in expansion unit sales for a system. Others have tried, Coleco Adam, Intellivision ECS, N64 64DD, etc, and definitely were not successful. So based on that, I'd say Sega was pretty successful in their expansions for the Genesis.
Dad Finally Upgraded us ot the Genesis from the 7800, when Sonic came packed in and the Box had an Advert on it to get Sonic 2 Free via Mail-In Post-Card. I Finally had a real game console, Had that thing for years until one of my younger siblings lo$t her $#!7 and Ripped the Player 1 Controller out, taking 2 PIns with it. I wasnt strong with my Electical engineering yet so it never got repaired and eventually trashed after I moved away
Cool that your dad upgraded you guys, and even got 2 sonic games. Nice. Man that sucks it got broken and then trashed. I lost a couple Atari 2600's and an Apple II + like that. They broke when I was young and didn't know the first thing about electronic repair yet. So they got trashed. Nowadays I can fix them easily.
@@RetrogamerGenX Yea few years after high school, Moved to na$hville for an IT Job: Came home a few months later looking for it, I was informed Most of my Collection was trashed outta spite
Yeah it was. Loved every minute of it. Back when games were released and tested for bugs, and didn't need updates every time you played it. And multiplayer games required your friends to be in the same room playing with you. Good times...
Great look at the very best home console of all time! SEGA of America was brilliant in the way the presented the Genesis, and they were ahead of the curve with how they would pivot from one idea to another. They actually sent my family letters prior to the release of the Genesis, letting us know that it was coming, and that they wanted to retain our brand loyalty. I can think of no other console that has such an eclectic lineup of games across such a short time period. Arcade ports, PC ports, strategy, RPG, action, simulation, and sports.. literally something for everyone. To this day i hear people say that they never had any friends who had SEGA.. well they either had no friends, or they were children when the Dreamcast ended it's run. I said it in the '80s at the arcades, i still say it today, I'll continue to say it, SEGA RULES! Rock on my brother! Great video!
I loved the Genesis. One of my top 5 favorite consoles for sure. Yeah it seems funny when people say they didn't have any friends with a Genesis. Everybody I knew in high school that gamed had one. It was actually more rare to see someone with a SNES. Maybe because we were older and in high school. The younger kids probably had SNES's. Us older "kids" saw the SNES for kids. Thanks again for watching and commenting bro.
Yeah I had both too. Played on the Genesis way more. Only played Nintendo exclusives on SNES. Genesis was just more bad ass than SNES. Or at least it seemed that way. Lol.
The graphics were the shortcoming of the system. The TG16 and the SNES, both supported far more colors and more modes. The PCE does 4096 total colors on screen in some modes and the SNES has a 256 color main mode along with transparency and sprite scaling and rotation. The Genesis was a very good console and probably my favorite back then. I've always been a sucker for cutesy graphics and SMW2 was a cutesy overload.
I don't think Genesis got sprite scaling and rotation until the 32x and only on 32x games. Yeah I was a Sega fanboy when the Genesis was released. Loved the games on it. But I still had an SNES for all their exclusives with the cutesy graphics. Lol
@@GenesisAftermarketDoes They had more color. The Genesis was limited to 64 colors. The genesis was better in most other respects though. If you read the whole comment, I was saying that I really like "cutesy" graphics, those with lots of bright color;.
It's hard to describe as a 39 year old Millennial. I had one friend, my best friend, in the early/mid 90s who had a Sega Genesis and he was the the "cool kid" with everyone. It was like the Super Nintendo was the default system for kids but it was the "edgy" kid with the edgy parents who went for the arrogant blue hedgehog and his cool system. Only that old best friend and my godcousins owned one of all the people I knew.
It's just the way it was. I had both systems, and I can tell you the more adult type, edgy games were on the Genesis. I had the SNES to play its exclusives like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, etc. But spent most my time playing on the the Genesis, and 32X, and CD. It was just an amazing system man.
One of the best tech products (value for your $) i've ever bought and i'm 70. It keeps my 2600, atari800, intellivision and colecovision working and easy.
@RetrogamerGenX And..... As your interview showed, a person behind that tech in Evie that is enthusiasticly improving and expanding the capabilities of the product and the systems the product serves. People even get Evie's individual support to solve how to get something working.
Back in the day I was mad that my parents got a Philips P2000T and not a Commodore. Today I have all the machines from the era, including ZX and CPC. My parents were pretty awesome in retrospective. Side by side I seriously don't get the appeal of the C64. Not even game graphics. After struggling with RF and compsite, I now have THE C64 monitor: a 1084. Still, the games look washed out and almost monochrome. If you yank up the saturation beyond the "middle position click" the image becomes dirty with tons of chroma bleed. The games I have in Teletext graphics on the P2000T look more interesting, they pop and have an art-like quality to them. A bit like colour clash on a ZX, that does have charm. C64 games just look OLD. Then there is the way software was made. On the P2000T there was a group of users that tested everything before it was allowed to be sold ONLINE, yes ONLINE in a Steam-like store before the internet. The beauty is that all programs follow basic rules. This is totally absent on the C64. So a game has 1) a built in guide, 2) communicates clearly what to do, 3) has a quit option that cleans the memory of the computer, 4) does all in Dutch, 5) give details on author and version history, 6) is well protected against bad input. On the C64 if you load a game, there is always a game before the game: guess what port the Joystick has to be in, guess what you have to do to start the game, guess what the controls are if you use the keyboard, bet on how many seconds it will take to have a complete machine-freeze, be 99.99% certain that if you are done with the game, you need to switch the machine on and off to load something else. No chance you can leave the game with the press of a button to return to the BASIC prompt with clean memory. Then there is the BASIC. Print heart to clean the screen. Seriously? Switch to show both lowercase and upper case, and type 10 PRINT"Hello World" and then RUN. You just get an error! The font is unbearable, the colours are bad to type code in, sure you can alter them, but only with POKE's, no elegant INK or BORDER command or such. Having all 4 machines of the era side by side, and scoring them in 2024 for use NOW, I rate them as follows: 1) CPC 464+modern expansion: great BASIC, good RGB out, good colours, nice looking games, great sound chip in stereo, fast loading and saving on a USB drive, cool looking, good keyboard, 80 character mode on the fly with reduced colour. 2) P2000T: great BASIC, teletext graphics charm, super clean RGB output, awesome tape loading mechanism faster and esier than C64 floppy's, fun machine to build internally expansion modules, easy to service, great looking, good keyboard layout, a tad less good button feel. Good expansion ports. 80 character mode is not limiting colours or games, they just play on the left half of the screen and the right half might show the alternating display buffer. 3) ZX Spectrum 128 2+: good BASIC, fun to make games in with very easy sprite editing, charming colour palette and its clashes, good RGB output, bad keyboard layout, weird buttons on the toastrack version. 4) C64: bad BASIC, bad colours make you think the machine is broken, impossible storage system even on a faster 1571 drive with horrible commands, very bad video output quality even on the bundled 1084, bad keyboard layout, non standard ports, but a nightmare on a TV, games dated worse than the other 3 systems, and even the SID gets annoying.
Sorry brother, your comment slipped through the cracks. I didn't see this until now. I have played a few rom hacks on it. Some work, some don't. It really depends on what mapper they are using for the cracked rom and if the cart supports it. Which, I have no idea which ones it supports. So it's really a crapshoot for me. I just try them and see if they work or not. So far been about 35% to 40% work. Were as about 99% of the real roms work.
I certainly remember all the nonsense with Guy Game and DOA Beach volleyball. What i really find funny (not so much funny: haha, but funny: sad) is how we censor sex, something that everyone does, and we normalize murder, something that nobody does.. what is wrong with us!? 😂
Honestly you didn't miss much. It really has no replay value at all, the jokes are meh. The girls, well seeing there's one underage in it, really makes me not want to play it. Funniest thing I remember about the game was trying to keep it hidden from my son. God forbid he find a PS2 game that he didn't play yet, and popped that in.. Oh boy, I would have never stopped hearing it from the Mrs. Retrogamergenx if that happened. lol Oh there were a few other games that made my top 10 list, and the ones you mentioned were on it. There was a Penthouse one too. But the games on the top 5 list are the ones that shocked people the most when they came out, I think.I could be wrong. But they are the ones I remember people talking about the most.
My first console! I loved this system and wanted the Pac-Man game but never had a chance to see or play it. Finally got the chance thanks to emulation. What a great port.
It was definitely an awesome console. Pacman is great on it compared to, lets say, Atari 2600 pacman. No comparison, for sure. Thanks for watching and sharing.
On Smurfs, yeah it does. Consequences of having only 1Kb of system ram and probably some sloppy coding on the developers part. But man, it does takes you back in time to see a game do that.
