Finally writing the last article on the 16-bit war of the 90’s. The big next thing during this era was the advent of the CD-ROM. The CD-ROM allowed games to be a lot more complex because of the huge amount of data they could hold. Your typical Super NES and Genesis games were 4MB. Those sizes increased for more popular games Like Street Fighter 2 which was the first 16MB cartridge and because needing the extra memory chips the price was around $70 if I remember correctly. A CD-ROM disc at the time could hold 650 MB and was a lot cheaper to produce. Sega came out with their cd-rom unit in October of 1992. The first version attatched to the Genesis underneath the console and had a motorized tray that was used for inserting the CDs. However, because of the price not many were sold. A couple of years later Sega released a version 2 of both the Genesis and Sega CD. The new Sega CD attached to the side and opened manually. This unit was a little bit cheaper than the original unit since it didn’t have the motorized tray.
On the Nintendo front they had planned a CD add on for the Super Nintendo. Original Phillips was going to make it and then the project was moved to Sony. Nintendo decided not to follow through with the deal. Rather than cut their losses Sony decided to continue and the system became the original Playstation (i bet Nintendo is kicking themselves over that one).
I was holding out for the Super Nes CD but when it seemed like it wasn’t going to happen I jumped ship again and got a Sega CD. I enjoyed quite a few of the games even though most games at this time overused Full Motion Video. Everyone was saying that video was the future of games. I guess because we hadn’t experienced 3D yet or something. Some of my favorite games for the Sega CD were: Dragon’s Lair (remake of the 1983 Laserdisc arcade game) Which looks just like your playing an interactive cartoon, Mortal Kombat CD the graphics still weren’t up to par of the Super NES version, but did have the blood and with using CD the soundtrack was just like the arcade, Lunar: The Silver Star this was a great RPG for the Final Fantasy fan in me. It had a really involving story and is still a favorite among fans.
