shmups.system11.org

That's an atrocious way to launch a console, I didn't realise Sega had messed up quite so badly.

While I generally agree, cave hermit stated explicitly that he enjoyed Ultracore, which is a much more flawed game than any on that list, so I guess his tolerance for questionable game design is quite high. Personally, I couldn't stand it, even though it came free with my Mega SG. There's definitely some enjoyment to be had from those titles Udderdude listed. Back in the day I did enjoy MD Gods enough to play all the way through it, even though it's an experience I don't have any desire to repeat today. Flink is worth playing through once for the lovely Henk Nieborg artwork alone. (An even better choice would be its spiritual successor Lomax on the PS1.)

Funnily enough I picked up Gods Remastered on Xbox for pennies over Xmas. The remastered visuals are so ugly it's untrue. The original visuals are stretched and muddy and lose the style that made them stand out in the first place. The game... I've always been perplexed at how this one was rated so highly at the time... even when it came to consoles it got solid reviews.

OP, wanted to say a while back (but totally forgot) that I also am in the same boat. I have this fascination for Sega that came later.

Well AKSHUALLY in the 16-bit era a good friend had a Genesis and I saw him play a ton of Shinning Force and Phantasy star, which completely blew my mind. And in Dreamcast era another friend had one and we spent countless hours 420-blazin' it HARD and playing Soulcalibur and others. so I guess I always had Sega in high esteem.

but 5 years ago or so I really gained another extra level of appreciation for them and now am kinda obssessed with them. lol. and I'm a Nintendo kid. but man. Sega are coooool...

Didn't have a Genesis growing up. My friend did. I would go over and play Sonic 1. Never managed to clear it over there, but was still fun times. Later on, I did own a Saturn and Dreamcast.

As an aside, if you're on Steam and have enough points, you can still buy the SEGA 60th Anniversary Frame for your Steam profile.

I'm glad I have something that can play 50 Hz games, so I could try Flink out closer to the proper speed. Artwork in that game is amazing. It's also nice seeing a more recent game (Xenocrisis, which I bought the Genesis ROM of from the official site) with his artwork.

KenJu, unreleased Atomiswave arcade game now running on Dreamcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xw_hlJfI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftct2bjXIt4

That looks better than Fighting Ex Layer. Arika should've just bought the rights to that instead.

You know, the Saturn gets all the talk about being the crazy expensive console to collect for, but the Mega Drive market has gone insane lately.

I was looking at what games are going for ¥10,000 & up right now, and this was the count:

Saturn: 42 + those real estate discs.

Mega Drive: 50
Mega CD: 8
32-X: 4

And keep in mind the Saturn saw twice as many releases in Japan as the Mega Drive did on top of that.

Alien Soldier? $500. Bloodlines? $350-400. Eliminate down? One thousand dollars.

I'm guessing it must be a combination of A) the global Mega Drive collector's market being larger than the Saturn's due to its success in multiple regions, while at the same time B) the Saturn had higher print runs for games in Japan than the Mega Drive did. You'd think the same would apply to the Master System though, but you can complete the Japanese library for that pretty easily. I guess it did have way fewer Japan exclusives. And nobody in North America cares about it.

I wonder if we're heading for a future where Japan has been sucked dry of this stuff by the global market. How many copies of Radiant Silvergun and Eliminate Down can there be left in that country?

The only people left are the hardcore collectors, so it doesn't surprise me at all.

A guy at my local retro shop told me covid lockdowns were getting a lot of people to go back & pick up their old nostalgia consoles to have something to do. I'd imagine it's because there's something comforting in them during a crummy moment in time as well. Sales have been really strong. Looking at online retailers I can believe it, a lot of digital shelves are looking pretty bare.

You'd think they would just buy the SEGA Classics on Steam or something. They're certainly not the ones shelling out hundreds for relatively obscure titles.

I'm sure plenty did. But the lesson with that stuff is always that emulation doesn't fully replace the original, it just leads to a bunch of people wanting the actual physical thing.

I'm not surprised that PC emulation has failed to replace the sensation of playing these games on the original hardware, with the original controllers. Not everybody cares about playing on the original hardware... but I get it. The nostalgia, the original controllers, the zero-lag experience on a CRT, etc.

What does surprise me is that flash carts and optical drive emulators have failed to put a damper on the insane collector's prices for some games.

I mean, there was a time when paying through the nose for a physical copy of Dragon Force or MUSHA or Cotton or whatever was the only way to play it on original hardware and it made sense that some people would be willing to pay the necessary megabucks.

But I figured that the market would cool off once all of the flashcarts and ODE's proliferated and matured. Nope!

I grew up with Sega. I remember playing Hang on, Space Harrier and Shinobi in the arcade. Actually a few years befor that, an older player (1982 ish?) asked of I can help him on the first level of Zaxxon. I said I can beat it just to play a few credits, which he provided. Then had A Master System. Just knew two other kids with one. After had a Genesis and Loved playing all the EA sports stuff. Had my first experience with a turn based rpg being Phantasy Star 2. Funny thing was that every time the game would transistion to the battle mode, I thought my game was busted cause I only experienced real time battles up to that point. Lol.

Thankfully skipped out on the add-ons and The Saturn. Years after bought a Saturn to play Panzer Dragoon Saga and loved it. Now though, my Saturn serves as a mainly shump console. Bought me a Dreamcast around 2000 and had my first experience with on line gaming. Loved Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi and so on. Man was that system ahead of its time! If Sega of Japan and the American branch were as one, they may have still been in the console game.

I mean, why are people paying tens of thousands for a third edition Cervantes when Don Quixote is public domain and they can legally read it for free on their Kindle? Why did the last copy of Action Comics #1 that was put up for sale go for $3.2 million when you can just type "read Action Comics #1 free" into Google and have Superman throwing a car in front of you in seconds? Hell, why do people buy old stamps that aren't even valid anymore? At least Action #1 still functions as a comic book.

Aside from the nostalgic, haptic & aesthetic value of the tangible thing, a large part of it is that the collecting is a hobby in and of itself. It involves planning, a chase, the excitement of landing a rarity, and the anticipation that comes along with hunting for the opportunity that doesn't involve paying *checks price* $1008.15 USD for Eliminate Down.

Plus, no self-respecting Youtuber can stand in front of shelves full of HDDs marked "ROMs." I really think the ubiquity of the huge, fully stuffed shelves in gaming videos plays no small part. Seeing Shmup Junkie have the case for Blazing Star behind him while the intro for Pulstar also loops on the TV beside him, and then the pile of PCE rarities...Soldier Blade, Sapphire, etc...made me think damn, I never should have sold my copy of Space Mega Force. I need it back.

Speaking of gaming Youtube videos...

I was watching this one, which went through the top 30 best selling Mega Drive titles in Japan. I was surprised by a lot of it. By some of the titles that made the list, and the positions of some of the ones you'd expect:

1. Puyo Puyo
2. Shining Force
3. Sonic the Hedgehog
4. Street Fighter II’ Plus
5. Virtua Racing
6. Sonic 3
7. Shining Force II
8. Phantasy Star IV
9. Langrisser 2 (Mega CD)
10. Sonic 2
11. Landstalker
12. Columns
13. Shining in the Darkness
14. Silpheed (Mega CD)
15. Super Monaco GP
16. Puyo Puyo Tsu
17. Shining Force CD (Mega CD)
18. Lunar: The Silver Star (Mega CD)
19. Streets of Rage II
20. Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion
21. Phantasy Star II
22. Gunstar Heroes
23. Super Street Fighter II
24. Lunar: Eternal Blue (Mega CD)
25. Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker
26. Golden Axe
27. Ghouls n’ Ghosts
28. J-League Pro Striker
29. Advanced Daisenryaku
30. Yuyu Hakusho

Like Shining in the Darkness being that big. (Also never noticed that the original title was Shining _and_ the Darkness). Or the fact that both Shining Force titles outsold the biggest Phantasy Star game (IV). Toss in Landstalker being the MD's Link to the Past for the Camelot crown. And was Virtua Racing that big in the West? How did it never become a series? And Puyo Puyo was massive, it sold more than #2 and #3 combined. It sold as much as all three Sonic games put together.

Also pretty surprised by the number of CD titles that made the list - and Langrisser II, a game that never even released outside Japan - being the Mega CD's biggest hit. I had thought the device was more niche than that. And Sonic CD not even making the list, meaning it couldn't even beat out Daisenryaku, a plain-looking super early game that was on shelves in the system's first 6 months.

Also, Silpheed. Huh. Somehow, with the massive shmup library the Mega Drive has, it was the only one to make the top 30.

This ^^. It's never made any sense to me... I paid $100+ for JP MegaDrive shmups individually in 2002-ish... When the best flashcart you could hope for was the Tototek 64M which would hold about eight games at most, was hard to find, and required the most dodgy parallel programming software.

Flash forward to today, and people are paying 2x - 3x as much when everything is readily available on super well supported hardware that can store up your entire game library with no loading times on original hardware. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

Same goes for Cave games all now dumped on MAME, PGM boots, Xbox, PS4, etc....

To think there was a time when I sold a complete Eliminate Down for $150, and I had to beg people on here to buy my cotton collection (including the arcade PCB which sat unsold for...a year? at $150).

Astro City in the West

The cost is pretty much on par with the jp version, which is a little surprising.

I'm still looking longingly at the arcade stick, though there's no way I can justify it.
Also I did not know Cool Riders was a thing. I need to play this game.
Where's the sprite-scaler collection damn you Sega!?

I'm considering buying a MODE and replacing the clone GDemu currently in my Dreamcast with it. Basically just comes down to the ability to hook up a SATA drive to it for a full selection of games at once, and the drag and drop nature of drive prep on the MODE (as opposed to manually creating numbered folders and renaming gdi files to generic file names, prepping a third party menu system, being limited to a small selection of games per sd card if you don't want to deal with ridiculous loading times or reliance on a hard to find, janky, AV false positive triggering third party program, etc.). Plus I had some issues with games crashing at one point, and when I cleaned the power supply pin header on the dreamcast it didn't really seem dirty or oxidized, so I can only guess it had to do with the gdemu clone.

Of course there's that hefty price tag...