Sega Sorta Christmas 2016
From
Kendrick Kerwin Chua@21:1/5 to
All on Mon Dec 26 18:32:24 2016
It's a Sega Sorta Christmas again in 2016. Every year we ask... Well,
every year *I* ask, how Sega was your Christmas?
It's a strange time to be a gamer, in that we can now distinguish distinct
and separate generations of video game consumers. Rather than being a
single monolithic demographic, gamers are now a multilingual and
multicultural group that contains all races and all genders, as well as
all ages. What I've observed is that the oldest of us who grew up with the Atari 2600 are not the same group that chases after N64 units just after graduating. The kids who couldn't have Gameboys because they were too
young are now having children of their own that fling Angry Birds and
think microtransactions aren't strange at all. So in a lot of ways, we
don't have a shared hobby culture anymore.
This is on my mind because of my sole Sega-related Christmas gaming
experience this year, the Android port of Crazy Taxi. Years ago I signed
up for the free download when they were promoting their stupid endless
runner version of Crazy Taxi, but it wouldn't run on my ancient and early Samsung hardware. It wasn't until I upgraded to a Marshmallow device that
I could finally run the thing, and I found it a surprisingly well-done
port of the original Dreamcast game. It even featured a few of the
original music tracks, which are notably absent from the PC port. Of
course, it doesn't appear to support any external controllers that I
happen to have, which means that it's essentially unplayable when
presented with all the other options available.
I have to ask, who was this for? If I'm twelve years old today, the
Dreamcast is nothing to me but another obscure retro system. If I'm forty
and I'm an enthusiastic gamer, I'm not going to try to make any 'crazy
money' on my phone if I've got an Xbox or a PS2 or a Dreamcast at the
ready. And if I've never been a gamer at all and this is just one of the thousands and thousands of downloads available on Google's stupid store, there's nothing there to convince me that I shouldn't spend my six
American dollars on something else.
Anyway. I'm ashamed to say that the majority of my gaming experiences
these days have been very limited. My priorities mean that any gaming that happens is usually something that supports a 3DS sleep mode pause or a
Vita suspend mode. I've got a huge backlog of Sega titles on all my
platforms that just simply isn't shrinking in any meaningful way. It
starts with the Valkyria Chronicles remake on PS4 and goes all the way
back to a pile of Genesis classics that aren't part of any current
collection.
So it falls to you to help me fill this festive gap. How Sega was your Christmas?
-KKC, who gets to be at work this week. Hooray.
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com
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