DuckTales MSU1 version is pretty awesome

Kirk_Johnston · August 19, 2023

1 hour ago, Biff Burgertime said:

"The Sega CD plays CD games and adds hardware functionality such as a faster CPU and graphic enhancements such as sprite scaling and rotation." -Wikipedia

Sega CD has additional hardware inside, it's not a lazy barebones CD add-on a la Jaguar CD. If I may steal a page out of your playbook and spam some videos, all timestamped to the relevant bits...

In retrospect it's odd to think that Sega didn't bother porting any of their classic Super Scalers (After Burner, Space Harrier, Outrun) to the Sega CD despite it supporting hardware sprite scaling, only to later port them to the 32x where everything had to be done in software. But I think with the Sega CD they were trying to look towards the future and seem cutting-edge, and CD technology absolutely was at the time!

But yeah, there's a lot more to the Sega CD than many of today's retrospectives might have you believe. Core Design made use of its advanced featured in far more games than any other dev (BC Racers, Thunderstrike, Battlecorps, and especially SoulStar).

When Genesis hit the scene, it made the 8-bit NES and it's "nowhere near arcade-like graphics" look like a chump by comparison. Then SNES debuts with a Mode 7 show-of-force at launch F-Zero and Pilotwings. The Sega CD's counterattack gave us an early look at the type of graphics (above) we wouldn't see again until the next generation of consoles fully kicked off. It simply didn't make enough sense for more devs to devote time towards gorgeous Soul Star-like titles since the 16-bit stuff was still selling quite well, and would straight into the 32-bit era. So there's just a handful of Sega CD games that look as good as these do.

(For the record: no, I'm not a fucking Sega fanboy - my posts merely reflect my view of reality. I grew up with NES and SNES, I love those consoles. To this day I've never owned a Genesis or any of its add-ons. The Dreamcast is my all-time favorite console, but that's so far removed from this era of gaming that it's a non-factor.)

This post isn't a rebuttal to argue Sega CD's "superiority" or whatever, so don't take it that way. It's further evidence that it makes no sense to try and compare the MSU-1 with the Sega CD. They're similar in that they're both capable of delivering FMV and CD-quality sound... that's it.

Now that I'm on my computer I can see the FMV on that clip wasn't anywhere near as good as it looked on my phone.

But, yeah, there was obviously a lot more to the Sega CD than just the FMV stuff, as there almost certainly would have been on the final SNES CD too, and it's a shame we never got to see more of it playing to its other strengths than mostly a bunch of rather fugly FMV games.

Edited August 19, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston