The Sega love

[RCBH928]

Hello,

in another thread I was asking for tips on shenmue, one of the most significant sega games in its history.
that made me think about Sega and its history, and the many troubles sega has been through. When you think of it, the only real success sega ever had was with the genesis.

I understand that the master system didn,t have much of impact in the videogames market, while the genesis was a success(still didn,t beat snes),
about everything else was a failure

i dont have to explain 32x and sega cd
saturn, complicated hardware, lack of titles compared to competition, high price, i believe its the worst console Sega put out and its a commercial failure

Dreamcast, everything was going right for this systen, still i do no understand how it failed exactly other than it being a business decision as the console and its capabilities are extremely good and very innovative with online gameplay, simple design, vmu and more.

today Sega is not one of the of the main market movers, i don,t know o fany titles they make that has great impact on the industry. There is nothing they make that is on par with EA sport titles, activision, blizzard, sony , or microsoft and many other big titles makers such as bungie. The last decent sonic game was sonic 2 on the dreamcast as far as iknow.

yet the company has a very strong following and people highly appreciate Sega games, i know that we have many sega enthusiats here in the forum.

could you tell me about your love for Sega, why do you highly appreciate this company given the many failures it went through, and why are you still a dedicated fan?
share your feelings, i am listening

[Pulsar_t]

http://gamedeveloperresearch.com/game-d ... s-2009.htm

Sega is a top 20 publisher, not a mean feat considering how consolidated the market is, but it's nothing to scoff at, either.

I guess it boils down to what you grew up with. I know lots who grew up with both Ninty and Sega (let's not talk about the PS1 generation) but they're usually always more partial to one or the other. I used to be indifferent towards game branding but in the early 1990s marketing did have a great effect and I feel shame to have been so affected, in retrospect.

Plus, it was 'cool' to support the underdog at a time when everyone and their dog were Mario's bitches (sorry)

[flamepanther]

This is NOT my video, but it sums up my feelings better than words ever could: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j63lGb0O-5U

Plus, it was 'cool' to support the underdog at a time when everyone and their dog were Mario's bitches (sorry)

Why wasn't it cool to support the underdog when everyone was Sony's bitch?

[Flake]

I was a Nintendo kid growing up. I've come to the Sega side of things WAY after the party.

Sega is risky and almost always original. Nintendo is a company I look at for rediscovering my childhood. Sega is where I go to for the things I missed: Arcade perfect experiences, blacksheep franchise releases, and games that have never been re-released anywhere.

[Incognito D]

I was a Nintendo kid growing up. I've come to the Sega side of things WAY after the party.

Sega is risky and almost always original. Nintendo is a company I look at for rediscovering my childhood. Sega is where I go to for the things I missed: Arcade perfect experiences, blacksheep franchise releases, and games that have never been re-released anywhere.

I'm in the same boat. I was a Nintendo kid growing up when Sega was very much "the enemy". A lot of my friends had Mega Drives, so I knew about Sonic and Streets of Rage, and later on I was introduced to games like Shenmue and Jet Set Radio on my friend's Dreamcast.
I finally got my own Dreamcast in 2008 and got to explore all these great games in my own time. I'd played most of them before, but it was nice to own it for myself.

I agree with saying that Sega is risky and original - at least they used to be. Certainly more so than Nintendo. With Nintendo, you always know you're going to get a quality game, but it always feels familiar. With Sega I find you get hit and miss experiences - but when they are a 'hit', they're amazingly original. Most Nintendo games are superior to Sega games, but then out of nowhere Sega will pull a great game out the blue and it'll be incredible and offer something that Nintendo can't. Sega games are usually a bit more rough around the edges I find though.
When I got my Dreamcast it was like discovering a whole new world, seeing as up until that point I'd really only played Nintendo games.

So I'd sum it up like:

Nintendo: a consistent stream of 8-9/10 games
Sega: lots of wacky 6/10 games and then out of nowhere the occasional 10/10

[Breetai]

When you think of it, the only real success sega ever had was with the genesis.

You lost me already.

The Master System was a huge success in Europe and S.America. The Genesis was an absolute failure in Japan. The Saturn was a huge hit in Japan. The DC was a hit in the US. They still make huge hits today (Ryu ga Gotoku comes to mind right away).

[VincentX]

Dreamcast, everything was going right for this systen, still i do no understand how it failed exactly other than it being a business decision as the console and its capabilities are extremely good and very innovative with online gameplay, simple design, vmu and more.

It failed for multiple reasons and one is something you pointed out: The Saturn.

Sega made a lot of mistakes with the Saturn and even though they tried to do the exact opposite with the Dreamcast a lot of their mistakes came back to bite them.

One was that the haphazard handling of the Saturn in the market discouraged retailers from promoting or even carrying the Dreamcast. Sega pissed off a lot of big retailers with the surprise launch of the Saturn and most that didn't carry that system didn't have the Dreamcast either.

Third party companies also were getting ticked off due to Sega prematurely cutting support for their systems like the CD, 32X and the Saturn. EA dropped support of them completely and even though Sega brought out some very good sports titles, they had ticked off one of the biggest developers at the time and that hurt them.

People were also wary that Sega was gonna drop the Dreamcast like they did the Saturn and waited on buying it...which I guess was a self-fulfilling prophecy in that regard.

Sony. Just Sony. The PS1 had dominated the previous generation and Sony announced the PS2 during the E3 before the DC came out so people were more interested in that. The PS2 had been announced with better hardware and even a built in DVD drive while the DC still used CDs. Plus Sony had a pretty loyal following with both consumers and developers thanks to the success of the PS1. Plus when the PS2 finally came out it broke the DC's launch sales records and immediately picked up speed with sales.

One of the other reasons Sega has mentioned is that the Gamecube and XBox were coming out and they weren't sure if they could compete with Nintendo and Microsoft with the limited resources they had. Though personally I think the DC could have beaten the Gamecube at the very least.

But the deciding factor was this: Sega ran out of money.
They didn't have the funds to keep producing the system and they had to discontinue it because they felt it was better for the company to become developer of software only.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Dreamcast (bought it two years ago) and I would've loved for it to have kept going but Sega just made too many mistakes. It's a shame too because like you said, it was a very innovative and amazing system with some terrific games and a lot of them are still exclusives or better on the Dreamcast than on other consoles.

...Sorry, long rant/summary there. But for the topic, my best memories of Sega are the Genesis. I unfortunately never owned one when I was a kid (now I have one) but I remember playing it at friends' houses and renting it and the Sonic games. In fact I remember jumping for joy when Sega released the Sonic Mega Collection for the PS2 (the only system of that generation I owned at the time) and I bought it the day it came out just so I could play the old games again.

[HellHammer]

I grew up being a Mario/Nintendo kid, so my feelings for SEGA weren't totally realized untill I got a GameGear around middle school.
Ristar and Shinobi (1&2 on GameGear) are some of the early games that gave me fuzzy romantic feelings, but it wasn't until I played Sonic 3, Panzer Dragoon, NiGHTS, Jet Grind, Shenmue, and the entire Yakuza series that I realized I had fallen for a lot of SEGA's games.

[Pulsar_t]

1up drew parallels between the DC and 360, but come to think of it the Wii feels like DC2.0 thanks to its browser, funky peripherals and party games. Nintendo cashed in on the 'casual craze' big time, pity Sega didn't think of that in 1999. They could have become trend-setters, with the proper funding of course.

[flamepanther]

Nintendo cashed in on the 'casual craze' big time, pity Sega didn't think of that in 1999.

Anyone wanna play Sonic Shuffle?