My flight to Narita for Tokyo Game Show boards in about ten minutes, so I don’t have time to put together the usual teaser graphic for this article. However! The article exists, and it’s great. What article is it, you ask? Why, none other than a loving treatise on Sega’s Typing of the Dead. It neatly captures that wonderful slice of history when Sega was pouring its creative all into the console market before becoming a desultory third party, and crazily entertaining games like this were the result. Please to enjoy this fine piece of literature.
11 thoughts on “GSQ4: Before I go-go”
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I passed on playing this since I didn’t like the idea of having to buy a keyboard peripheral to use, but I regret that now because I missed out on the best rail shooter….uh, ‘rail typer’ ever. I wish this game had a PC port available.
That is the best description of Shenmue I have ever read.
Ah come on, Sega’s not that bad this generation. They made Valkyria Chronicles, which is super special awesome, and er….Yakuza, which I hear is pretty good. OK, I guess that is desultory. :( Although they have published a lot of interesting games recently.
@Metal Man Master
There most certainly is a PC port of this game! It’s what I used to get the screenshots for this article. Be warned, though: for whatever reason, when I play the game on my current computer, the apostrophe key doesn’t function. I managed to find a key combination that worked (shift + F7, for some reason), but it made the experience a lot more cumbersome than it should have been. And it worked perfectly on my old computer…
I played a bunch of the PC version.. it made a great typing tutor.
Why did Sega become so conservative as a 3rd party when they could always put their games on the most popular platform? Shouldn’t that enable them to do even crazier stuff than they did on Dreamcast?
This is a fine article.
Because after the Dreamcast, Sega learned their lesson; people don’t buy awesome, unique, and crazy games; people buy Sonic the Hedgehog. Now don’t get me wrong, Sonic’s great and all, but they’ve let so many old properties languish over the years that it’s really depressing. Even when they bring them back, it’s always a tossup between Golden Axe Beast Rider and an After Burner Climax. Sega has barely created any new properties that are well, good, post Dreamcast era, the few that I can think of being Valkyria Chronicles and Yakuza. Any other ones that people care to mention?
PS tl;dr Sega’s not going to make many new unique games
One of the bigger issues is that they put out a lot of experimental games that might have done better, but their reputation was going down the toilet, and their destruction of even their main properties (Sonic) didn’t help perceptions at all.
Really, they bungled the Saturn years so badly that most people weren’t willing to go all-in for the Dreamcast, instead waiting for the PS2, which happened to be from the competitor that cleaned their clock the previous generation. That Sony happened to include DVD playback at a time where DVD players weren’t prevalent was just one more nail in the coffin. I’m thoroughly convinced that had Sega managed to include that one feature, we likely wouldn’t be talking so much about the PS2.
They do have a few creative properties, but their legacy holds them back. A lot. They don’t have a whole lot of margin for error, and as such, they’re not going to take a whole lot of risks.
A great review of a great game. The Wii supports USB keyboards, so I was really hoping one or two Typing of the Dead games would have been included with the House of the Dead 2 & 3. I think they missed a big opportunity.
They should’ve released House Of The Dead 1 with that. Seriously, first of all, it is an arcade game, so it’s not like it’s retardly hard to port, like the Saturn version (which I hear was quite gimped) would be. Secondly, wouldn’t that be more conssistent? They should’ve put House Of The Dead 4 on it, and released it as a compilation for $40. Typing Of The Dead would be pretty cool too though. I thought the PC version was just a port, is it really a different game?