Name: LGR - Sega PC Games: A Retrospective
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:00:35.000Z
Duration: 27 min 27 s
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Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! Today I would like to talk about SEGA!

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More specifically the Sega PC games that were released throughout the late 80s and

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into the 90s and early 2000s. This is somewhat inspired by having played

through Sonic Mania recently a couple times and I just frigging love that game

and I was happy to see it on PC. I'm always happy to see Sega stuff on PC

which is why I've collected a good amount of it, so let's take a look at a

good amount of it. This is not going to be a comprehensive video of everything

Sega's released on PC or anything like that, just a selection of my collection.

And when I say PC throughout this video I'm going to be referring to the IBM PC

and compatibles even though Sega released their games on all sorts of

personal computing systems. Wspecially during the 80s like this one right here

the official Zaxxon by Sega. Rhis is from Data Soft Incorporated for the Atari

8-bit line of computers. Although this is just sort of a generic box they used for

all of their releases, as far as I can tell, here in the US from 1983 to about

1985. But let's take a look at the PC version from 1984!

Well you can kind of tell this is pretty early on in the PCs life I mean it was

still using four color CGA for one thing. The low intensity cyan and magenta color

palette which is just not very appealing at all to me. I prefer the higher

intensity one or even the warmer colors to this. Not to mention that horrible

sound, oh my word, it's just a cacophony of noise and... NOISE. But you know, the PC

didn't really have any kind of good sound at that point. It's also one of

those games that expects a 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU so

running it on anything faster is gonna make the game completely unplayable. Not

that it's very playable anyway but you know, this is just an early arcade

conversion for the PC, and really most of the conversions weren't very good at the

time. PCs weren't up to snuff yet. Let's skip ahead a bit here to 1989 with

Afterburner here, which is released by Sega. Right here they had their Arcade

Hits brand going on at the time. This one is the Amiga box but again we'll be

looking at the PC version. And yeah they actually put some screenshots on the

back here that are pretty representative of the actual game that you're gonna get

on a home computer. They a lot of times would put fake ones on here like just

photographs of the arcade machines screen and say "ah you know your

mileage may vary depending on your computer" but yeah. This one they were

actually trying to represent it pretty well so let's take a look at what you

This is definitely an improvement. For one thing you've got 16 color VGA

graphics -- yeah that's *16* color VGA. It's kind of a

weird choice but I mean. I don't know, I guess they just wanted to do it that way.

Maybe it had to do with speed because Afterburner is something you want to run

quickly. Although unfortunately they didn't get it to run very quickly as you

can see here the framerate is kind of a mess. It's just not fast enough or smooth

enough to make it a very fun version of Afterburner.

Or Afterburner 2 in this case which is the arcade update that they're basing it

on. It does feature a fascinating remix of the original levels though, you can

tell what they're supposed to be if you've played the arcade game to any

degree. But this is sort of, you know, still kind of messed with to make them work.

And as you probably notice there were no sound effects here whatsoever you just

have more awful PC speaker music. It's really repetitive and shrill but hey at

least it's better than Zaxxon. Well that's all I'm gonna show in this video

from the 80s because I really want to get ahead to the stuff I really remember.

And that is the 1990s! Sega PC games like Daytona USA Deluxe here from 1997. And

yeah I know I'm skipping ahead a bit here here because there were a lot of

things in between like '89 and '97 that Sega did. For instance they ported games like

Altered Beast in 1990 to MS-DOS and then Ecco the Dolphin and Comix Zone in

1995 or '94 for Windows 3.1. But yeah, 1997 is where they really started

diving into the PC world once again. And this is the deluxe version of Daytona

USA which it's based on the arcade one and the Saturn one and you know just the

things that they had released up to that point.

However the 'Deluxe' really does mean that it's a different game. It was also known

as Daytona USA Evolution in Japan and this is a Windows exclusive update.

Really a re-imagining. It's got new cars, a new course, and a completely new

soundtrack, and eight player multiplayer. Yeah just take a look at this!

For one thing it runs in 640x480. Which I believe maybe the arcade one

did, but the Saturn one didn't, so it's at least an increase over those home

conversions. It also has a higher draw distance and a higher polygon count

available for the cars. Unfortunately it also runs a kind of a low framerate even

on the lowest settings on a Pentium 3 and all sorts of faster things like that. It

just didn't really matter, this game does not run very well, at least with the

version I have. I know there was a Direct3D version later on, maybe it

was a patch, I don't know I haven't actually looked into it yet because I

plan to review this in the future. I'm sure that one made it run a little

bit better, but the one that they actually sold in stores it doesn't run

terribly well. And personally, I don't know, I'm just not a fan of this because

of the things like the different soundtrack and the different way that

the game plays because of that lower frame rate. It doesn't feel very "Daytona

USA-y" to me but I guess it's nice to have a couple of extra features thrown in

there. Around 1996-97 though Sega started releasing a lot of their games through

Expert Ssoftware like Virtua Fighter PC here. "Distributed exclusively by Expert,"

they say, at least here in the US for a time. This is their PC Collection as

most of them were branded, and yeah this is a version of Virtua Fighter that has

been updated and optimized for the PC in a number of ways. Now this one in

particular is just I think the Direct3D version -- actually it might not even be

that, I think this might just be software rendering still. However, there was

another version of this that they released that I have talked about before

which was optimized for this beast right here. This is a Diamond Edge 3D 2120

video card using the Nvidia NV1 chip. So this is actually Nvidia's first

video card, or the first video chipset, that they sold in retail. And yeah the

Sega had their branding and everything on this you could actually plug in an

adapter here for real Sega Saturn controllers to work on your PC. It had

sound as well which is quite interesting, and yeah there you go! It's a thing

that lets you have your own specific video acceleration for games like Virtua

Fighter on PC. Not this one, but there was an Edge 3D version.

Again I've talked about this in the past, if you'd like to see my Oddware episode

on that you can see that by clicking the little card there or there's gonna be a

link at the end of the video. While I think that's super fascinating though

let's just take a look at this first one that they've released on PC here again

Again you get up to 640x480 resolution which is a nice little increase, and the

framerate is pretty good. It's probably, I don't know, on-par from what I remember

the Saturn being. Same goes for the rest of these games, pretty much all of them

have some sort of upscaling to 640x480 and usually 16-bit color graphics as