[Andrew Rosa]

doc eggfan, on 23 November 2014 - 06:39 PM, said:

I bought my first 32x second hand from a senior at high school for about $200 with 3 games. About 6-9 months later, they were being sold new with a free game for $18 to clear the stock. I bought 2 more, but I should have bought dozens then and sold them now for like 1000% profit.

That would have been sweet! Personally, I would have loved a port of Virtua Cop. That way I'd have a sort of "trilogy" on 32X, and another excuse to use the Menacer aside from T2: The Arcade Game.

[Caniad Bach]

MarkeyJester, on 22 November 2014 - 05:01 PM, said:

C'mon folks, owning a 32x but not owning Knuckles Chaotix is like some sort of sin!!

I would have owned this today, but I got shafted at the last second on eBay >.<

GagaMan, on 23 November 2014 - 11:05 AM, said:

PAL 32X consoles and games are fucking expensive though, games like Chaotix and Koribli are now triple digit value on ebay. Would love to get mine modded (and working again) so I can buy the much cheaper US and Japanese games. PAL collecting is a joke. I own Virtua Racing, Cosmic Carnage and Star Wars boxed, and carts of Space harrier and completely cpu errored NBA JAM.

If your 32x is fucked chances are the ribbon connectors have come loose. See here. Alternatively why not buy a US 32X? Since they tend to go for a tenth of the price of the ones this side of the pond.

[BlackHole]

Wait, can NTSC 32x's work with PAL Mega Drives and PAL Knuckles Chaotix?

[Caniad Bach]

Whack a 50hz switch on that sucker and you'd be good to go if all you wanted to do was play PAL games. If my memory serves me correctly, the 32X leaves most of the region locking to the Mega Drive, but won't boot titles of the wrong frequency. If you wanted to play NTSC 32X games on it you'd have to switch the Mega Drive as well. The 32X just acts as a passthrough when playing MD games so they would be unaffected by the mushroom's region.

[BlackHole]

Well if I can't find a PAL 32x, I'll try that. Thank you for the advice.

[W.A.C.]

The Taxman, on 24 November 2014 - 12:38 AM, said:

The technical challenges of getting 32X and Saturn's designs to play nicely with each other aside, I think Sega would still have been trumped by the enormous momentum the PS1 created for Sony. I think the Mega-CD was Sega's only chance to do an upgrade, before over saturating the market with too many choices.

Had the extension port on the Megadrive been designed so it was easy to incorporate graphics from a new VDP (instead of piping stuff as tiles into the MD's), and SOJ had waited a bit longer to design a more powerful Mega-CD system, we could have seen some wonderful arcade ports of various Super Scaler games, along with new games with hopefully less reliance on dodgy FMV to showcase the system's true potential. And of course the CDX/Multi-Mega would then basically serve the same purpose as the Neptune.

It'd still be hard to keep the momentum going once PS1 and N64 were announced, though. It's not like today when people think nothing of replacing hardware for the next model up on an almost yearly basis. So ultimately, money saved on not releasing add-ons would have been the best choice. But then we wouldn't have the wacky and colourful hardware history that makes Sega unique either :P

Pretty much agree with all of this. The 32X was a bad idea and severely hurt the reputation of SEGA. Much of the games were rushed and the Sega Saturn only came out about half a year later. I can't help but wonder what the hell SEGA was thinking releasing so many damn systems. Also, why is there so much fondness for Knuckles Chaotix in this thread? It's one of the worst Sonic games I've ever played. Its level design is terrible and uninspired, the controls suck, the boss battles range from terrible to mediocre, some of the songs are really annoying, and the backgrounds were lazily put together. About the only redeemable qualities that game has are a lot of the game's beautiful graphics (despite the meh backgrounds), some songs (which get repetitive after five fucking acts), and the fact you had many playable characters with unique controls. Oh, and the special stages which are about the most fun I had in the game despite being extremely unfair at times and its massive lack of fluidity in movement. I haven't played Sonic '06 or Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, but I can't think of any Sonic games I've played that are worse than Chaotix except maybe Sonic Labyrinth.

This post has been edited by W.A.C.: 30 November 2014 - 05:21 PM

[SpeedStarTMQ]

I haven't played Knuckles Chaotix much, but I didn't really do well with it and it's dodgy control scheme from the offset. Sonic games are meant to be easy to jump in to but I found the mechanic quite annoying. That said, it looks and sounds really nice, and I'd like to own it and play through it on real hardware. Shame that I'm not a millionaire really, given the price it seems to fetch

Also, the 32X was released in good faith by SEGA who had the upperhand in the EU and UK market and thought that pushing the Saturn on people who had spent so much on their Mega Drive already was a bad move. I can totally see why they released it, but I think they should have done some ground-level research with consumers first.

Still, an amazing bit of tech.

This post has been edited by SpeedStarTMQ: 30 November 2014 - 05:28 PM

[winterhell]

W.A.C., on 30 November 2014 - 05:21 PM, said:

Also, why is there so much fondness for Knuckles Chaotix in this thread? It's one of the worst Sonic games I've ever played. Its level design is terrible and uninspired, the controls suck, the boss battles range from terrible to mediocre, some of the songs are really annoying, and the backgrounds were lazily put together. About the only redeemable qualities that game has are a lot of the game's beautiful graphics (despite the meh backgrounds), some songs (which get repetitive after five fucking acts), and the fact you had many playable characters with unique controls. Oh, and the special stages which are about the most fun I had in the game despite being extremely unfair at times and its massive lack of fluidity in movement. I haven't played Sonic '06 or Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, but I can't think of any Sonic games I've played that are worse than Chaotix except maybe Sonic Labyrinth.

One couild say the same thing about all the 8-bit games. Never played them in the first 10 years after release, look like crap and move worse than Super Mario 1 or any of its clones.
How many people played Chaotix in its year of release 95 and hold bad memories? Probably not bigger % than the ones who got Triple Trouble or Chaos day one.
Ask random young person that grew up with PS2/PS3 games instead of Doom, Prince of Persia, Dune 2. "What is this super crap, how could people even play this" etc etc.

[W.A.C.]

winterhell, on 01 December 2014 - 03:53 AM, said:

One couild say the same thing about all the 8-bit games. Never played them in the first 10 years after release, look like crap and move worse than Super Mario 1 or any of its clones.
How many people played Chaotix in its year of release 95 and hold bad memories? Probably not bigger % than the ones who got Triple Trouble or Chaos day one.
Ask random young person that grew up with PS2/PS3 games instead of Doom, Prince of Persia, Dune 2. "What is this super crap, how could people even play this" etc etc.

I don't quite understand what you're going for in your point. The Master System versions of Sonic 1 and 2, along with Sonic Chaos and Triple Trouble have much more interesting level design than what was seen in Knuckles Chaotix. None of those games are amazing by any means, but I can say they at least felt like some effort was put into them outside of visuals. And while the controls to those games aren't great, they were certainly lightyears beyond the confusing, unpredictable controls in Knuckles Chaotix. The rubber band mechanics were poorly implemented and a very bad idea.

[DigitalDuck]

W.A.C., on 01 December 2014 - 04:23 AM, said:

The rubber band mechanics were poorly implemented and a very bad idea.

I wouldn't say they were a bad idea. For a series about momentum, a mechanic which can both use and be used for that momentum is a very good idea, as it means it's heavily tied to the main mechanic (with a rubber band).

Poorly implemented, definitely. There shouldn't be a need for a "HOLD" mechanic, and it certainly shouldn't be restricted to one player. Players should be able to run in opposite directions to stretch it out, only snapping in one direction when one stops, rather than just continually bouncing back again. It shouldn't be so easy to gain height by just repeatedly throwing your partner upwards.