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| What was your first experience 2; Sega Saturn | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Oct 28 2009, 09:53 PM (574 Views) | |
| sheath | Oct 28 2009, 09:53 PM Post #1 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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Going random unless the group feels otherwise. What was your first experience of the Sega Saturn. Remember that for this discussion your first experience is not a magazine ad or a television commercial but your first hands on experience with actual games. My first experience Was at a rolling promotional truck outside of my highschool with numerous kiosks available to play. It was like getting hit up by a drug dealer only I wasn't buying. My impression of the games Was mediocre. I had actually worked to earn the money for a 32X at the age of 17 just six months before and just wasn't that impressed by anything I saw on either of the upcoming stand alone consoles. I played Panzer Dragoon and possibly Daytona, and just didn't get any sort of desire to fork out $300+ for the console alone as the result. My impression of the overall package The launch price was $399, and even when it dropped to $299 in September of 1995 I was still more than content to purchase games on my Genesis-SegaCD-32X. The Saturn's CD playback, CD+G and Karaoke functionality mattered to me not at all. To me it seemed like a stand alone console that offered very little more than what I already had. The facts that changed my first impression I played almost all of the early Saturn and PS1 games at friends houses and remained unimpressed until November. Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally and Virtua Cop lit an incredible fire under me to purchase the Saturn... What season and year did I buy the system? November 1995 along with a Saturn Virtua Stick (which I returned twice, only to realize that the Hori stick was vastly superior) and Virtua Fighter 2. Since I had saved up and bought the full Virtua Fighter 32X package just a month before, I think this testifies to just how impressed I was with its sequel. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| DarcSeven | Oct 29 2009, 07:15 AM Post #2 |
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I'm gonna sing the DOOM Song.
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Random's good. It make's it more of a surprise. :) Sega Saturn My first experience: Um... I think I played Ultimate MK3 on it. I remember that I was still afraid of the Fatalities. It was kind of funny because I went through the tournament mode the game had, so I was rewarded with pure horror, the Supreme Demonstration! My impression of the games: Sadly, that was the only game I remembered. So... yeah. My impression of the overall package: I didn't care. At the time I was perfectly happy with my Genesis and playing outside (scary concept, I know;)). Facts that changed my first impression: ScrewAttack had a Top 10 best brawlers list a couple of years ago. On the list there was an awesome looking game called Guardian Heroes. To my dismay, I found out it only went to the Sega Saturn. I still really want to get that game. What season and year did I buy the system: I haven't. I still want to for Guardian Heroes, but I'm not looking for one right now. |
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Just call me Steve. ;) Twitter Page http://ds7gamestalk.blogspot.com/ | |
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| sheath | Oct 29 2009, 09:17 AM Post #3 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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You know, I hope this comes across the way it would if I said it in person. These threads are going a different direction than I thought they would. So far the responses have been typical of everything I can read elsewhere on the internet. This is despite my effort to bend the discussion in another direction. So, I have a couple of questions. 1) Since nearly everybody has stuck to one platform each generation, and still doesn't pick up competing platforms when the entry price becomes stupidly low, what are your criteria? I'm honestly stumped here. My console history goes like this: Master System, NES, Genesis, TG16, Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, SNES, N64, Gamecube, PC-Engine DUO, 3DO, 360. Most of which I own currently. I won't complicate things with facts about how I sold one console to get another and when I bought them back, I just want to know one thing: What was the driving force behind your purchase decisions? My studies of statistics tells me *not* to leave an open ended question like that. I would prefer to think that people are able to reveal the truth through open ended questions. So, go ahead, prove me right for the first time ever. ;) |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| LoneCrusader | Oct 29 2009, 10:05 AM Post #4 |
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The other pallet swapped ninja
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I've never been able to afford or considered a priority buying any console when it was first released to market. I've pretty much bought them all used or when there was a significant price drop. I bought my first NES used at a garage sale for $30 in 1988 or 1989 from a teenager who got busted for playing it too much and had to repeat a grade. I skipped the whole SNES/Genesis/TG16 generation entirely. I didn't have a playstation, but my roommate did in 1999 after we figured out how to install a mod chip and I bought my first CD burner. I didn't have a console of my own again until the PS2 dropped from $300 to $200. The main reason I wanted it was to play cheap playstation 1 games and to have my first DVD player. I wound up trading it to someone else for a used XBox and some games 2 years later. A year later I wound up selling it to make a truck payment, then bought my used dreamcast for $30 at a video games store when I found out you could download the games off the internet and burn them on to CD and play them without having to install any kind of mod chip, and discovered the graphics in general were on par with or better than PS2 or XBox games. I then accumulated about 10 DVD's worth of archived ISO's off the internet via IRC chat rooms and bittorrent in 2003. In 2005, I bought a modded xbox and proceeded to download games off the internet, but found it easier just to go buy them used at EB/Gamestop because by then they were/are dirt cheap. I haven't bought any current gen consoles, no 360, Wii, or PS3 for me. I've also used a playstation emulator for years to play downloaded disk images of PSOne games on a PC. I guess you could call me a bottom feeder of the console industry. I don't currently own an HDTV, so don't really see the point of owning any of the newer stuff. My preference would be to get a 360 after I get an HDTV, but I probably won't do that until the elites are <$200. So, to answer Sheath's question in bold, money is usually the sole driving force behind my console purchases. In economic terms, I probably don't get the same utility(enjoyment/pleasure) from playing newer games on consoles as cost is a much higher priority for me. I also think that there hasn't really been a single console exclusive game that pushed me to get one console over another. I think PC games have a better shelf life than console games, but that may be different now with console hardware closer to what it takes to run a decent FPS on a PC. I'm more of a PC gamer, mostly because I prefer mouse/keyboard to controllers. Even then, I only buy about 1 new game a year, simply because they usually wind up requiring me to upgrade my hardware, either a new video card, or motherboard+cpu. But it seems lately, games have kind of hit a plateau in terms of system requirements, or the new games I buy aren't as resource intensive as games/technology in the past. My current motherboard and CPU in my gaming pc are coming up on 3 years old, and my video card is 18 months old. The next game I plan to get is Mass Effect 2, and I probably won't need to do any upgrades to play that comfortably. |
| I'm thinking about what I want and what I need. I want a peaceful soul. I need a bigger gun | |
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| Belpowerslave | Oct 29 2009, 11:10 AM Post #5 |
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Administrator
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Well, it's also important to note that using these forums for this will probably yield similar answers. As we're an extremely small community, mostly made up of people who already knew each other before joining(either from the real world, usenet, other forums, etc) we're likely to give similar answers...since we all came here for a similar reason. We like the way the other thinks here, we have similar views, the love of old school Sega, etc. If you want a truly varying opinion, you'd have to hit up something like GameFAQs Forums or just something that covered *every* single platform and let those people intermingle. This way you'd have a chance of getting a little bit of everyone. Here you're just getting one type...hitting the Sega 16-bit Forums you'd run in to maybe one or two more types, but I think the further you get from forums that focus on one or two things, the more varied the answers may be. I need to get back and do some replying here in the forums, have just been busy doing some other bullshit. I will reply to stuff pretty soon... :) Bel |
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| sheath | Oct 29 2009, 12:43 PM Post #6 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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@Bel I'm mostly trying to encourage activity in these forums and refine some questions for any potential polls I set up down the road. I have absolutely zero interest in polling teenagers at Gamefaqs who weren't even alive when most of these consoles were released. General discussion in these forums I am interested in regardless of the results. @Lonecrusader It sounds like you'd be more of a proponent of "open source" than even I am. ;) If more people were tech savvy enough to do things your way I'm sure the companies would have moved away from retail and MSRP a long time ago, but I'm not sure how big the game industry would be today. If you asked me, eliminating the possibility of the EAs, Sonys and Microsofts from turning a profit with massive budgets would only be a good thing for the industry. @Drkstlkr I am absolutely shocked that you wouldn't pick up a Saturn for $30 to play Guardian Heroes alone, much less all of the other great titles, import and domestic, you would have access to. I suppose its just a matter of how much money one wants to spend on gaming total, and I definitely understand that not everybody wants their house cluttered with game stuff like mine is. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| DarcSeven | Oct 29 2009, 01:33 PM Post #7 |
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I'm gonna sing the DOOM Song.
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! $30!? I must not be looking hard enough. I actually would pay $30 just for Guardian Heroes if it's as godlike as I think it is. If that's the case, then only thing holding me back at this moment is the fact that I live in a tiny dorm. I think I'll start trying again during winter vacation. GUARDIAN HEROES, YOU WILL BE MINE!!! ;) Edited by DarcSeven, Oct 29 2009, 01:35 PM.
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Just call me Steve. ;) Twitter Page http://ds7gamestalk.blogspot.com/ | |
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| LoneCrusader | Oct 29 2009, 01:53 PM Post #8 |
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The other pallet swapped ninja
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Not as much as you might think, hardly at all really. |
| I'm thinking about what I want and what I need. I want a peaceful soul. I need a bigger gun | |
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| sheath | Oct 29 2009, 02:09 PM Post #9 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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Well, I've recently become a fan of finding free solutions to things most people pay for, preferably without resorting to piracy. For example, if I could play the latest 360 games for 48hrs for free or a nominal fee I would instead of renting or buying them. Of course that is mainly because I find most retailers despicable, so I doubt my perspective is relevant. On the topic of modded consoles and CDR/DVDRs, I just haven't tried it past the 16-bit generation and Dreamcast. I broke *two* PC-Engine DUOs messing around with CDRs, and I have personally experienced Dreamcasts' disk access time quadrupling with CDRs and thus decreasing the life of the GD-ROM drives. As a result I have taken a policy of being about two years out of date with new releases so I can, if I remember to, pick them up at $8-15 instead of $40-60 when the "games" are new. All in all our two approaches are just as detrimental to the mega-corps bottom line. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| Belpowerslave | Nov 3 2009, 01:18 PM Post #10 |
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Administrator
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My first experience Where I was working, at the time, there was this one supervisor who pre-paid for *both* the Sega Saturn and PSX, as the Saturn launched early, that's the one he got first. We all went over to his house and tried it out. My impression of the games I was pretty blown away...up until that point I had only seen 3D games in the arcade and via Virtua Racing on Genesis. On top of pre-paying for the Saturn, the guy also purchased *all* of the launch titles so we got to see Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, Panzer Dragoon and Worldwide Soccer. My impression of the overall package $400 was *way* out of my league at the time(still kind of is), so I couldn't really feel anything other than upset with it. Still, I felt that the hardware and software were damn solid. The facts that changed my first impression Seeing that PSX "Developer's Disc". With just a demo disc the PSX had blown *every* Saturn game out of the water in terms of graphics. Then seeing stuff like WipeOut sealed it: The PSX was kicking the fuck out the Saturn's 3D. Suddenly I wasn't nearly as blown away with the Saturn's graphics as I originally was. What season and year did I buy the system? A few months after it had came out. The guy who had bought the Saturn was really digging the PSX a lot more and decided to sell off the Saturn in order to fund more PSX game purchases. He made me a deal, and I can't really remember the full price, but I think it was around $200 to $250 for his *entire* Saturn collection. The system, the games, the controllers, everything, all with original boxes and in mint condition. I told him I'd take it...I just had to find a way to come up with the money. I decided to sell of my SNES collection and work some over time...and in a few weeks I had the cash. Right after I bought it off him VF Remix showed up in the mail, free, to him and he gave it to me. I was happy with my purchase, I loved the Saturn and its software...despite it not impressing me as much as the PSX's graphics had. I was the only person with a Saturn, everyone else had a PSX...so it was always a big deal when I brought it over to people's houses. Bel |
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| sheath | Nov 6 2009, 02:35 PM Post #11 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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No Astal, Clockwork Knight, Galaxy Fight or Shinobi Legions?
Diddo, especially when I really was enjoying 32X and Sega CD titles that were released around the same time. With that said, I think the whole media representation of why the Saturn failed in the US is horribly skewed. So few people bought a Sega CD or 32X in 1994-1995 that they might have not even been on store shelves.
Sony, the masters of hype, smoke & mirrors. Looking back at Warhawk, Wipeout, Tekken and Twisted Metal, I honestly don't know how they did it. Wing Arms, Cyber Speedway and Virtua Fighter Remix trash the first three games utterly, and Vitual On was just a few months away. Still, somehow Sony even stuck me with the impression that PS1 games were technically superior in some indescribable way.
This sounds about typical. The only people who really bought a Saturn were seriously impacted by the gameplay quality of its library, got a killer deal, or just fluked upon it. The Saturn was never a mass market product for whatever reason, and so people in general never even bothered to look for it. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| Belpowerslave | Nov 6 2009, 02:50 PM Post #12 |
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Administrator
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No, none of them were out at the time. He just pre-ordered the Saturn, another controller and then all of the launch games. Later I did rent Astal...and then bought, and immediately returned Shinobi Legions. I regret not giving SL more of a shot...but at $49.99, it just wasn't doing it for me. I'd love to have it back now, just to see if my thoughts of it have changed...I just remember it being so awful.
I really wished I'd of had a 32X when it was alive. Sadly, that $150 price tag was just killer, for me, back in the day. My mom said that she almost bought me one for my birthday one year, but didn't...I don't remember her reason on why not. With that said, my only real experience with the 32X, when it was alive, was having a guy at school talk about his, Doom and how awesome it was. I also remember seeing Spider-Man: Web of Fire over at Service Merchandise and just imagining how awesome it must have been.
Honestly, I think it was the Saturn's launch software that did it. Virtually every launch title on the PSX looked better than almost any of the launch software on the Saturn. This is where things start going downhill: People didn't care than Tohshinden played like complete ass compared to Virtua Fighter, they just loved how good it looked. They didn't care that Cyber Speedway really *is* a solid title, even when compared to WipeOut, they just cared that WipeOut ran so smoothly and looked so good. This is also when "casual" gaming took off, so you had a lot of people who knew *nothing* about games going out and buying them...as they knew nothing of good gameplay or control, they simply through crap like Tohshinden was *awesome*. I still remember sitting there, in utter disbelief as a crowd of people played Tohshinden at my buddy's house. I mean, these people were cheering, aweing, everything. They would slam the buttons on the controller and act like they were playing the best game ever made. It would come to my turn, or some of my other friends' and we just couldn't believe how bad the control was, how shitty the actual game was, we couldn't believe people were cheering for this. Still, that PSX Developer's Disc is fucking sweet. It runs via ePSXe, if you want a copy of it, just let me know...
That sounds about right. Bel |
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| sheath | Nov 6 2009, 03:06 PM Post #13 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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Really? The dates online place all of these at launch. I know there are tons of discrepancies with release dates, and since I didn't actually look for Saturn software that summer I can't confirm or deny the popularly affirmed dates. I know these didn't come out in the Fall of that year at the least.
In retrospect I could have saved a ton of money by waiting about six months, but who knows how my impression of the add-on would have changed in that amount of time. In 1994 Virtua Racing, After Burner, Space Harrier, Doom and MKII were top notch efforts on a relatively inexpensive 32-bit upgrade that I hoped would last a couple of years with new software releases.
Hahah! That sounds like me sitting in my in-law's house watching them try to bowl accurately with the Wii-mote. As for the Developer CD, I think I have the one with the Dinosaur on it somewhere. It looks about the same as the Dinosaur in one of the Tomb Raider games, and never really impressed me. I saw a 3DO demo in magazines that showed off most of the same stuff a couple of years earlier. Maybe that's why I didn't care about whoever that guy's name was and his "genius". |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| Belpowerslave | Nov 6 2009, 03:34 PM Post #14 |
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Here's some info from the Wiki, that I posted in another thread a long while back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_launch_games#Sega_Saturn Not saying that that is completely accurate, but I do remember him getting Daytona, WWC Soccer and Panzer Dragoon with his Saturn...because they were the only games I had on the Saturn for the longest time. The first one I actually bought, past the initial package from him, was Robotica.
I got my first 32X during the Saturn days, and it still blew me away.
Uh, you may want to look again, the dino on the Dev disc is *way* better than that blocky thing on the first TR. In case you don't want to dig it out, it starts at 8:53 on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9SSfDUlYdQ Do you have the actual disc, or is it just a copy? Bel |
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| sheath | Nov 6 2009, 09:13 PM Post #15 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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For the Saturn Launch, I checked Gamefaqs and Rotten Tomatoes, if one or both dated a month I went with it. I will be cross referencing these dates with digitpress at some point, but I definitely don't consider wiki writers authoritative either. I could have sworn that I had that developer disk, but I guess I just have a real time demo disk laying around somewhere. The dino section looks nothing like that youtube video. Actually, the video segments of that youtube video are practically DVD quality, whereas PS1 video is very obviously below VCD quality. I've got several books that reference that developer disk as a major source of enthusiasm for Sony, and it's pure fabrication. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| Belpowerslave | Nov 6 2009, 11:00 PM Post #16 |
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Well, I'd wait until you actually saw it to make any comments...I mean, it really is fucking impressive. The video segment almost looks DVD quality, as hard as that is to believe, which is just incredible for stuff back in the day. I'm still wowed by the demos on that disc. Granted, all were usually just a single graphic, so everything the PSX had could be put into a single entity(like the dino or mantis)...but it's still really incredible. I'd love to get my hands on the actual disc...but it's hard to come by, and damn expensive when you do come across it. I do have a copy of it, and it runs in both ePSXe and on my modded PSX...looks better in ePSXe, as you can imagine...but it's still really awesome on the system as well. I like it as much as the Dreamcast and Xbox demo videos I've seen(I can upload those as well, but I think I put them on one of the various discs I sent you at one point, they'll actually be in folders named "Dreamcast Demos" or "Xbox Demos")...but then, I'm a sucker for tech demos: I've got every ATI demo I can run installed, recorded and uploaded to both YouTube and Yahoo. Bel |
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| sheath | Nov 7 2009, 06:51 AM Post #17 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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Yeah I was pretty much spouting off at the mouth there if that disk actually runs on a PS1. I thought for sure I had it laying around, or I had an original demo disk that had a dinosaur on it that wasn't nearly as impressive as that one was. If you don't mind, I'd like to get ahold of this disk at some point. -edit- I know what it was that I had, it was the demo section of the original Ridge Racer. |
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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| Belpowerslave | Nov 8 2009, 02:52 PM Post #18 |
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No problem, I'll get it to you once I get back to the house(Sunday night). Bel |
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| sheath | Nov 9 2009, 02:25 PM Post #19 |
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I have been, and remain, non-sequitur
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I got it, though I got an error when I unpacked it and the dino demo crashes ePSXe. This is a very impressive demo to be sure. In 'Revolutionaries at Sony' they talk quite a bit about how influential this disk was to winning developer loyalty in the '93-'94 time frame. What still kills me is that Sony was able to produce this stuff, but literally no games come anywhere close to that image quality. It's too bad I can't load it in PSX 1.7 to see if there is full screen dithering. Actually, I'm going to burn it to CD and see if that works with PSX emu. -edit- The error was that the file was broken, I'm going to redownload it to see if that fixes it. Please leave it up for a bit longer. Edited by sheath, Nov 9 2009, 02:30 PM.
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www.gamepilgrimage.com Buy the games of yore before they are no more
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