SEGA Genesis Classic Collection Gold Edition releasing in US on PCs

Oh not just those, I have the movie Star Trek VI on CD-I... Now you can say every format imaginable.
I think that is merely for convenience though. They want to make sure EVERYBODY can watch Star Trek, no matter what system they decide to choose to own.

I like a collection when it's based on a series (Sonic Mega Collection is almost strictly Sonic with just a couple extra games thrown in) or when it is on a new platform for the convenience factor, but these "same games + on the same systems" ideas make it so it isn't as fresh and original. It's like they are trying to get every last single video game player to buy at least one Sega Collection in their life. ("Hmm we sold a million of x game but there are millions more people in the USA. I know, lets make another collection and see if any of these other million people buy it because of the new games we added.")

I think that is what they are doing. They are pushing more and more to sell a little bit at a time until everyone falls for buying the same games they bought on Genesis years ago, or sell to new audiences. I think the worst system to do this on is PC though. With a little tweaking, much older PC games work on any newer PC and the old collections are still available on the platform. Since I never bought any PC collections, if I ever do it will be whatever is the newest.

 

I'm really running out of reasons to think 'yeah, sure, not everyone uses emulators, why not release a collection.' There's so many of them now; do they really sell that well? Virtual Console, Steam, XBLA, PSN, App Store, PC Retail, Xbox Retail, PS3 Retail- fucking everywhere.

Honestly, if I want to play a Mega Drive game, I'll pick up a cheap console off eBay and buy the cart. I can understand the convenience, but do they really need to be on every console ever? I grow tired of seeing Altered Beast for the 200th fricking time.

 

It's easy money.

But considering the fact that each CD-ROM must have hundreds of megabytes to spare, I think it's a bit dishonest to make four compilations at £15 each.

Lest we forget there are official Mega Drive cartridges with 10 games stored on them, and the idea with CDs is that they are supposed to be a lot better when it comes to storage. That was Sega's marketing in the early 1990s, anyway.

I would expect you could squeeze the entire library of Mega Drive games onto a DVD if you tried, and it wouldn't cost much more to produce than it does now.



The other problem I have is that Sega like to pad these compilations out with crap. Why on earth are they dealing with the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast or Golden Axe? There are much better arcade versions.

And on that note, many of Sega's arcade games have never been ported to home consoles. Maybe that would be a nice idea?

 

I'm surprised by the lack of Revenge of Shinobi in there, now that they have a copyright-issues-free version since the Virtual Console release.



Also, no Streets of Rage 3?

 

They either owned or had publishing rights to ~180 games in Japan alone (including Sega Game Library), and even if you drop the ones they merely published (not developed — that is, ones they don't actually own), it's still more than 100...

Then you have the question of games like Strider and Darwin 4081 which they ported to the Mega Drive but are owned by other companies... but it should still be way more than 100.

 

Well, there's one thing that's real, they have all the documentation / dev kits about the saturn...at they would just need to get some people to start coding a good commercial emulator.

"Amateur" emulators like SSF run flawlessly right now on any dual core PC with a lowend gpu... I have been playing Nights, Sonic Jam, Sonic R, Gundam Gaiden, Initial D and even Castlevania SoTN just perfect on it.

 

SSF is not a good enough emulator for this. Sure it runs many games fine, but it has many quirks and it has absurdly high cpu requirements. It would look stupid to have a compilation of games from 1996, that need a core 2 duo as the minimum config.

It would take many months if not a year for an expert coder to make a good Saturn emu - and this is just by following the official documents, not counting all the crap that is undocumented. But expert coders aren't that common, especially those who also have a lot of experience with the Saturn. So you have to have many people working simultaneously if you want a good saturn emu done fast, which means more expenditure, which means "fuck this, we ain't paying for all this development, lets just release another genesis collection next month".

Like you said: it's easy money. Why sell one mega collection for full price, when you can split it to 4 volumes each selling at 2/3 price?
Also, don't forget that Sega tends to add a lot of menus and info for each game, and that can raise the needed space tenfold. All the movies for the menus, etc. I recall the first Mega Collection even had the credit roll stored as a three hundred megabyte FMV.

 

Trailer:

 

Is it me, or did anyone else think that trailer could do with some BLAST PROCESSING references. It wasn't too far off adverts for the system back in it's heydey, anyway.
Regardless, I'll be steering clear of this. Enough fucking Mega Drive re-releases, please.

 

They did release that Dreamcast four-pack for the Xbox 360 iirc. It featured Sonic Adventure, among others.