[HN Gopher] Sega AI
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Sega AI
Author : bpierre
Score : 118 points
Date : 2024-01-31 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smspower.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smspower.org)
| tiltowait wrote:
| What strikes me is how similar that keyboard's layout is to the
| HHKB's.
| wk_end wrote:
| As a Sega nerd and a Prolog nerd, this is insanely cool to me.
| Even if it seems like the Prolog relationship might be some kind
| of marketing gimmick - it's not clear to me to what extent the
| games really are written in Prolog.
| Grazester wrote:
| I would love to hear which console you have in your collection
| if any. I was a SEGA fanboy back in the day and have had a few
| of their console dating back to the Master System
| cglong wrote:
| Not GP, but I had a Genesis, CD, and Game Gear. A few years
| back I bought a Saturn off eBay too to play a leaked early
| build of _Sonic X-treme_ :)
| SandmanDP wrote:
| Is this the Jolly Roger restored build or a build of
| X-treme I haven't heard of yet?
| Grazester wrote:
| Something tells me it's someone's homebrew dev of Sonic
| x-treme. If it's that then the same developer also has a
| killer Quake style engine for the Saturn which is quite a
| showcase.
| wk_end wrote:
| Genesis (MD), Sega (Mega) CD, Saturn, Dreamcast. The Master
| System was kind of a bust in North America so I don't carry
| very much nostalgia for it.
|
| I love each of these consoles in their own way, by some
| combination of their own merits and my own associations of
| them.
|
| The first game I ever played (or at least the first I
| remember) was Sonic 2, at a demo kiosk at a Canadian Tire
| while my mom was shopping. That's the sort of thing which
| sticks with you forever. At home we ended up getting an SNES,
| and although the SNES' highs were clearly higher than
| anything Sega put out, I think the average Genesis game holds
| up better (and it certainly has incredible gems of its own).
| The faster and easier to work with CPU, I think, gave devs a
| bit more breathing room; the FM synth has an iconic, crunchy,
| aggressive, alien sound that's way cooler than the canned,
| fuzzy, plinky soundscape of so many poorly-made SNES scores
| (of course, again: the best SNES soundtracks are sublime).
| You could put Go Straight from SoR2 on at a club _now_ and
| get the dance floor going. The only thing about it that 's
| dated badly is that it really, really could've used a richer
| colour palette.
|
| As a kid I never had a Sega CD, but I did have a Windows 3.1
| computer, and it feels part-and-parcel with that era of
| "multimedia". It's all nostalgia, but I love the grainy look
| of the FMV, the very particular abstract and geometric style
| of the CGI of the era, the metallic sheen of those digital CD
| soundtracks. It's got some fantastic games, too: Sonic CD is
| a classic, and Lunar 2 (particularly if you can read Japanese
| and don't need to endure everything Working Designs did to
| it) is, as far as I'm concerned, up there with FF6 and Chrono
| Trigger as a definitive 16-bit JPRG.
|
| I of course understand why the Playstation won the 32-bit
| era, it's a better system than the Saturn with better games
| overall. But the Saturn has some absolute classics (again,
| Japanese knowledge helps here). It's not a system that I had
| much experience with at the time - except, again, for some
| time spent at a department store kiosk with Nights, which
| entranced me - but it's come to me to feel like the more
| interesting, mysterious machine than the Playstation.
|
| The Dreamcast feels more like the end of the 32-bit era than
| the start of the next-gen: a 32-bit system with next-gen
| performance. To me the quintessential Dreamcast game is fast,
| buttery smooth, vibrant, colourful. Again, it's easy to see
| why the PS2 came out on top, but looking back now I see the
| PS2 era more as a trial run for "modern" gaming - dark,
| muddy, slow, clumsy versions of the sort of games we're
| playing now; whereas the Dreamcast was home to the absolute
| best of the games we were playing then.
| brabel wrote:
| > The Master System was kind of a bust in North America so
| I don't carry very much nostalgia for it.
|
| Not sure if that's true in most places, but at least in
| Brazil, the Master System was incredibly popular... I don't
| live there anymore, but around just 10 years ago I remember
| seeing it still for sale (though IIRC they used a different
| name then - but it was clearly the same) as a low cost game
| console (average people just can't afford a PlayStation). I
| had a Master System in the late 1980's and then a Mega
| Drive, and really loved them both... the Mega Drive was
| definitely a huge upgrade from the Master System (I was
| upgrading to Master System from Atari, which was a
| similarly big upgrade). I never upgraded again, to the
| Saturn, just because I stopped gaming almost completely for
| a while (I started playing in a rock band, it was the
| 1990's, all the cool kids were doing it)... and I got a PC
| (also Windows 3.1, classic Pentium 100MHz!) and started
| doing my gaming on it.
| wk_end wrote:
| Yeah, the Master System was huge in Brazil. Sega was
| willing to license the design out to Tec Toy to
| manufacture locally, which got them around the massive
| import tariffs that made other systems unaffordable.
|
| It was also very popular in Europe (and Australia?) - not
| sure if there's any real reason for that, but the
| consequence of it - this [0] absolutely incredible rap by
| two British teenagers - makes me very glad it was.
|
| In North America and Japan, though, Nintendo absolutely
| commanded the market. Basically no one had a Master
| System.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks0_3Xlr5y0
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Genesis (MD), Sega (Mega) CD, Saturn, Dreamcast. The
| Master System was kind of a bust in North America so I
| don't carry very much nostalgia for it.
|
| Back before retro consoles were really collectible, I
| snapped up a giant pile of SMS stuff at a thrift shop for
| 35 USD.
|
| I believe it was almost my whole collection:
|
| - SMS 1st gen - 2 controllers - Light gun - A few card
| games in their original boxes - ~25 cart games, most of
| them in original boxes, some with manuals
|
| When I was living with a friend post-college, we would
| actually play it a bunch. Dreamcast and PS2 as well.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It's called an "AI" computer. Prolog was AI in 1986. I don't
| see that as a gimmick. I also don't see why one would assume
| the concept was really about games except for the fact that we
| know Sega as a games company today.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Sega still makes these neat things:
| https://www.segatoys.space/en/public/flux.html
| theNJR wrote:
| That's really cool! Do you own one?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Good time for Sega to bring it back
| wk_end wrote:
| Sega was known as a games company then, too. They've always
| been a games company - the name Se-Ga stands for SErvice
| GAmes, because their original business was importing games
| for American servicemen stationed abroad to play in their
| leisure time. The most they've ever really deviated from
| being totally game-focused towards general-purpose computing
| is when they licensed out their hardware to be incorporated
| into computers like the TeraDrive.
|
| I would assume the concept is about games because all of the
| software available for it seems to be an edutainment game.
| More than anything, it seems to be a predecessor to Sega's
| lines of educational game consoles like the Pico. There seems
| to be an association in Sega between it and AI and education.
| As the link says:
|
| > It does have some legacy though: starting with the Mega
| Drive, games on Sega platforms were required to have a ROM
| header. If it was a game, it was designated "GM", but
| educational software was designated "AI".
|
| The "computer" here might be something of a misnomer - there
| wasn't quite so hard a line between consoles and home
| computers back then, especially outside of North America.
| After all, the NES was known as the "Family Computer" in
| Japan.
|
| I'd describe it as a gimmick because it's not clear what
| exactly the association with Prolog is here, particularly for
| the end user:
|
| > The Prolog interpreter appears to be used by existing
| software to allow some form of natural language processing.
| It doesn't seem accessible to the end-user. [...] The Prolog
| interpreter is for running applications only -- it cannot be
| used for programming.
|
| Sega might have pushed the AI/Prolog angle because, then-as-
| now, AI was a hot buzzword in tech. Japan in particular had
| bought into the AI/Prolog thing, due to the Fifth Generation
| Computer Systems project [0].
|
| If the games mostly weren't written in Prolog, and the user
| can't use Prolog, but AI and Prolog were trendy at the time,
| I think calling it the AI Prolog to tap into that hype is a
| bit of a gimmick.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_S
| yst...
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Why don't we get games with those graphics nowadays? I'm bored of
| AAA realism.
|
| Bring back the Amiga graphics.
| Jensson wrote:
| Because making decent 2d graphics requires more skill than
| decent 3d.
|
| Put the minecraft textures in 2d and it is utterly horrible,
| but in 3d with shadows and shaders it starts to look very good.
| pjerem wrote:
| Ok, try this :)
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wlq6fFOqI28
| Lammy wrote:
| AAA 3D gaming isn't only about the games but was also a way for
| the security state to incentivize development of certain kinds
| of hardware broadly applicable outside of just graphics. SEGA
| were directly part of the paradigm shift from war-focused
| development to entertainment-focused development in the early
| '90s with their whole "omg look at our Lockheed tech!!" era.
| That was right at the fall of the USSR and end of the Gulf War
| when war became (briefly) publicly unpalatable, so the demand
| to keep working on this stuff had to come from somewhere and
| the somewhere is us :)
| gbalint wrote:
| There are games like this, just look for pixel art games. E.g.
| Terraria, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, etc
| miohtama wrote:
| I also recommend: Sea of Stars is one of the recent "modern"
| award winning indie JRPGs with pixel graphics.
| b0rbb wrote:
| Sega absolutely nailed it with graphic design in those days. My
| goodness.
| sen wrote:
| They really did. As a design-nerd, it's some of my all-time
| absolute favourite retro hardware and software design.
| robertheadley wrote:
| Any time I learn about a new retro system that I have never heard
| of, is an interesting day.
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(page generated 2024-01-31 23:00 UTC)