Man, Sega had so many problems, it's hard to really consider all of the angles.



I think the Saturn was actually the biggest issue that Sega had going against it. The problem is, the Saturn was somewhat outdated technology, before it even released. Sega realized this at the last minute, and tried to add a couple of extra processors to help it out, but that just made things even more confusing. The Saturn was too expensive, and it just wasn't very good hardware. Especially in comparison to the Playstation.


To fix that, Sega would have needed to start the Saturn project much later, so the tech would have been more up to date. They would have needed to have had much better engineers working for them, than they did. Even if I had a time machine, and could go back and show Sega exactly where they went wrong, I'm not sure they could do anything about it. They just didn't have the financial muscle to be able to compete head to head with Sony either via technology or marketing.


The 32X of course was a total disaster for Sega. I'm sure every person that bought into the promise of the 32X left with a very bad taste in their mouths. I bought that crappy thing the day it launched for $169.99 . What a total waste of money. There really is only 2 or 3 decent 32X games, and the rest suck big time. The thing promissed 32,000 colors or something, yet the games don't seem any more colorful than the Gunstar Heroes cart. Where are those 32,000 colors ? The 32X was just a piece of junk, any which way you slice it. You'd think that by spending $170 on something like that, that it could take the Genesis beyond the Super FX Chip, but honestly, I think Starfox is more impressive than any 32X game. It's amazing that they were able to squeeze so little technology into something that cost that much money.


The Sega CD was a major disappointment from the standpoint that they didn't address the single biggest weakness of the Genesis. The lack of simultaneous colors on screen for the Genesis is it's single biggest weakness. Super Nintendo ports looked better with all that color. Heck, TG-16 games looked more colorful in many instances (of course you need a RGB modded TG-16 to appreciate it) . You'd think that Sega's engineers would figure out a way to have the same number of on screen colors as the Super Nintendo, when using a Sega CD, but apparently that was too difficult. Instead we got scaling and rotation that frankly wasn't even as smooth as Nintendo's Mode 7 effect. So, Sega definitely missed a golden opportunity to have the Sega CD address any of the Genesis' technological shortcomings, which I'm sure also partly contributed to the lack of support from developers. Many companies just half-assed ported over their cart games and added better music and a few cartoon cinemas. If the Sega CD really provided something more than just extra storage, maybe developers would have been more hyped about trying to really push the thing. Instead, they kinda just said, "meh", in regards to Sega CD, so it never really got the needed software support.