Sega 32X

"The darkest enigma of the video game industry, did anything good come from this freak of silicon nature?"

The 32X sounded like a great idea when information about it was first made public. When it came out, however, people saw that what the 32X offered was not worth the price at all. This was the biggest reason that it failed. There are other factors that contributed to its hatred and demise, but the above mentioned factor would have finished it by itself. All this led up to the 32X being known as THE strangest piece of hardware ever produced by Sega.

Graphics Capabilities: 9
When designing the 32X, Sega decided to take part of the hardware that would be in the Saturn and give consumers a taste of what was going to come later. Two Hitachi SH2 CPUs, each running at the same clock speed they run at inside the Saturn, were included, as well as 4 megs of extra RAM. The Genesis video chip still handled all the graphics, but they were improved immensely, meaning that all this time the rest of the Genesis system was bottlenecking its video chip. More sprites could be on screen, everything flowed smoothly even at very fast speeds and the extra RAM meant for many more frames of animation. 3D graphics were able to be done, not to mention at quite a decent framerate for its time. There were also a good amount of polygons on screen. There were never any textures on the polygons, however. The only thing this setup was lacking was more color, which was an advantage the SNES still held.

Yes, the 32X was pretty cool, but as said before, the price was just too much. If Sega made the 32X cost as much as a Genesis game, then it would have been much more popular.

As far as the question, ''Does it make Genesis games faster?'' goes, that's anyone's guess. I only noticed a little bit more speed on one Genesis game when played through my 32X; it wasn't even that much, either.

Sadly, the only games that incorporated the 32X AND the Sega CD together were FMV games. That's a shame. If all of the RAM and hardware were used as one in a good game, it may have been pretty darn good.

Audio Capabilities: 6
Digital voices and samples were clearer, which was very nice, but nothing was done about the crappy Genesis music.

Game Library: 6
The 32X library never had a chance to blossom, but some good games came out for it. Three of the most popular 2D games were Knuckles Chaotix (said by many 32X owners as the best 32X game there ever was), Space Harrier (an utterly FLAWLESS arcade port) and Kolibri (a quite popular SHMUP (SHoot eM UP)). As far as 3D games go, there were quite a few enjoyable titles. Shadow Squadron is a cockpit space shooter where you can fly anywhere you want in a level, unlike StarFox on the SNES where you are on a set path. If you have a PC (even a weak one like a 486), there is no reason for anyone to touch console FPS ports, but Doom was a pretty good port. Virtua Racing Deluxe has been heralded as the best home version of the game and I agree personally (the Saturn version has horrible new music, plus it doesn't have the arcade feel). Virtua Fighter made its way to this system, known for being enjoyable because of its playability.

Bottom Line?
Well, it sucked back then, but if you can find one now, there are some pretty good games for it, plus the added power is pretty nice as long as you can get the unit for cheap, which is why I give it a 4.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/11/01, Updated 07/11/01