Tag: sega

Dreaming of 2001

Read to the end for a post about talking heads. I’ve been a lifelong Sega fan. From the day my parents brought home a Genesis, I was hooked. My teenage years were spent rushing Sonic through Emerald Hills zone, blasting monsters in the sewers, and virtually fighting. There’s been leaks of news lately that Microsoft may stop making the Xbox console and let me tell you, it’s giving me large Sega Dreamcast flashbacks. Why? Let’s get into it. The Dreamcast was Sega’s final console. Released on 9/9/99, it was the company’s last attempt to recover from the debacle of everything…

Sega’s 3D Tech

There was a lot of hard work being done by video game companies in the 80s. The American market was in shambles and nobody knew how to break into a new era for entertainment. Sega released their 8-bit Master System in 1986 and with it the ability to play some games in 3D. But this wasn’t the Red / Blue 3D you’d see on the NES with Rad Racer. No, Sega created an Active Shutter system that made truly impressive 3D. Nicole Branagan does a deep dive on this early technology to see how it worked and let me tell…

Half-Life’s Dream

Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s. The introduction of supreme storytelling into a shooter while adding exploration elements flipped an industry on its head. Half-Life was everywhere… except one notable place: Sega’s Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform. And sure enough, it was going to come to the Dreamcast. Now, the Dreamcast Game Preservation group has found reporting of a near-release version of the game. The version I was given for review was about 95% complete with…

SEGA Shamone

One oddity of 90s video gaming is Sega’s clandestine work with Michael Jackson. It was rumored for many years that Jackson composed the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3 along with Sonic & Knuckles. Even more incredible is recently-found footage of Jackson’s work with an unknown Sega simulator game where all the footage has been found. Matt Gardner at Forbes has more. Previously unseen footage of Jackson as the lead actor in the largely unknown Advanced System-1 (AS-1) motion simulator game Scramble Training has finally been made public by a pair of Sega enthusiasts, following the chance discovery of a seemingly forgotten…

Finish Him

One staple of the mid-nineties is Mortal Kombat. The arcade game took the world by storm due to its digitized fighters recorded from real actors. Oh, and there was violence galore. So it came as no surprise when a sequel came out soon thereafter. Mortal Kombat II was a phenomenon and (in my opinion) the best of the series. Midway took everything great about the first one, dialed it up to the extreme, and improved it in so many ways. Now, YouTuber Modern Vintage Gamer goes over the AI of Mortal Kombat II and how it looks like the game…