Hardware add-ons for the 16bit era – Retro Insight

Anyone who’s a member of one of the MyMedia game site may have noticed that I’ve been posting retrospective articles on a fortnightly basis and just today the most recent article was posted and it covers the hardware add-ons for the fourth generation of consoles AKA the 16bit era.
mywii.com.au
myps3.com.au
myds.com.au
mypsp.com.au
my360.com.au
Click anyone of the above links to check out this week’s Retrospective article.
Well I grew up watching the 16bit console come to light with great interest and I ended up owning both a Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo, and no I wasn’t some spoiled kid I busted my ass doing crap work for local factories as a kid to fund my gaming hobbies.
See I used to purchase a lot of gaming mags to keep my self up to date with what’s out and what’s on its way. Mind you this was an expensive method of information gathering but it was our only decent information source back then, thinking back now it just makes me say; “thank you Internet”. I used to sit there flicking through mags dreaming about all the cool stuff sprawled across the pages and make myself a virtual shopping list. When I first heard about the Sega Mega CD I just had to have one, it was like; “games on CD they have to be awesome” and to make the Mega CD even more desirable the first game I sampled was Sonic CD which even to this day I think is one of the best Sonic games ever created. I remember one time I stood up for hours in Toys r Us playing the display model until I finished the game…then I got booted out for loitering. Sonic CD was one of many fond gaming moments and this one game alone basically sold me on the Mega CD and the time came when I finally got enough coin to buy my own, mind you it was a second hand one but I wasn’t complaining. I did start complaining when I began to explore the rest of the Mega CD library. 90 percent of the games sucked balls and I only endured them to get my moneys worth. There was nothing but rubbish FMV games and Megadrive ports believe me I was very disappointed and later on my Mega CD only got used to play Sonic CD and music CDs. Live and learn I guess, never get to excided over things you see in a magazine as pictures don’t portray the whole story.

The Sega 32X also caught my interest, back then I though the idea of turning my 16bit Megadrive into a 32bit gaming console was the best idea ever and I just couldn’t wait to get it and play the Virtua series and Doom and on that there were games that were made that required both system add-ons to work. My thinking back then; “If a game requires a Megadrive + Mega CD + the 32X it must be beyond awesome why else would they need all that hardware for?”. I’m glad I came back to reality and my desire to get the Sega Saturn put me off from buying a 32X. It ended up as a dismal failure anyhow and bombed something shocking. Tody I still want to get one because it’s one thing I want to add to my Sega collection. Who knows maybe I’ll snag one on ebay some day but PAL versions are hard to come by and a great deal of them are damaged thanks to the 32X crappy design.

As for the Super Nintendo add-ons I was very jealous of the Japanese because they were the only ones to get Satellaview. I didn’t know much about the system back then so researching and writing about it was very interesting for me as it answered a few questions I had when I first saw it in a magazine many years ago. If you managed to get one now that had some games downloaded onto it I’m sure it will be worth a lot to the right buyer. The Super Gameboy was a cool idea but I never bothered with because I was just playing the same two games which were Tetris and Mario Land and since I played them to death I had no urge to view them on a bigger screen.

Last but not least the Turbo Grafx-16 was something I wasn’t to familiar with because it never was popular in Australia and not many people bothered to import them over. I did like the idea of it have lots of Anime themed games but that was about it. Finding information about the CD add-on was tough as well.

Well there you have it a more personal note about the recent Retrospective.