Did any CD add-on ever make sense to you?

[Strategist Strategist]

I was there too. I thought the Sega CD was cool, but I didn't care about voice acting at all. RPGs were still a niche genre in the West, and most action games barely had stories. It was FFVII that made RPGs popular in the West, and it had no voice acting... it was the 3D and CG scenes that did it. CD-ROM was part of the next step, but without 3D it wasn't enough to make any console a success. Computers were expensive and people with a modern computer could buy a CD-ROM add on, but consoles were cheap and the difference in price was too much just for cutscenes and better sound.

Yeah, it took Sony and Playstation to put the whole package together but I'm saying the potential was there with the Sega CD. Perhaps it was too early for its time and being an add-on limited its potential.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Yeah, it meant a bunch of games that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day had a place to go.

 

[Majora Fi]

If you were wealthy at the time and companies were making good use of accessory, then yes (these add-ons are no different from Playstation VR or Nintendo Labo).

 

[bombatomba77]

Well, sort of. Maybe. See, I've tended to look at the few CD add-ons as being equivalent to modern "Pro' versions of consoles. Not in terms of performance (except maybe the Sega/Megadrive CD) but in terms of additional features. Take Emerald Dragon, for instance. Love the game, but a whole different experience on the PC Engine CD as opposed to the SNES. The SNES port is completely serviceable and playable, however on the PC Engine CD you get better music, cut scenes, and some pretty good voice acting.

 

[RageBurner]

None at all. These were all created because of starry eyed preconceptions that CD media would truly push the envelope then and there; it truly didn't, not until the next generation. Having a larger form of storage, on its own, is not enough.

You'll find some great releases in CD form for machines that supported it, but they ended up mostly coming across as director's cut versions of already existing games, sometimes not even that.

 

[Elfwind007]

My friend had the full sega setup 32x and cd add on,I thought it was cool at the time but now after reviewing the 32x games and cd game's there wasn't much difference from the standard mega games, better music of course, some longer scenes but essentially still the same 16bit quality,I'm amazed at how much these add on's go for today,but I truly salute anyone who has got these add-ons because they are much too expensive for me

Post automatically merged: Today at 12:58 AM

And thanks bombatomba77 for your comment about emerald dragon,love it on the SNES but I've recently played it on an emulator for the pc engine,it's a different experience on the good side

 

[Rez09]

I … appreciate that both existed and what they showed the industry could be done with CD technology, I just feel they had to contend with some … unfortunate circumstances around them. The massive increase in raw physical storage didn’t mean people knew how to best capitalize on it, and RAM limitations remained as well, so CDs basically served as audio and video storage in the era. :( It also didn’t help many people were focused on bit and polygon count during the 90s, so they didn’t have the attention on them they needed to survive even if someone DID find a good way to capitalize on them.