Bought my 3do in 98. Funcoland was just trying to get rid of it. $50 a new 3do and 25+ games. The reason I bought it for Street Fighter, Primal Rage, and Samurai Showdown. Road Rash was my favorite game. Wing Commander 2 was a pleasant surprise. I wish I collected more, but my money was going to Japanese exports of Saturn games and a Jaguar and Jag CD collection.
My friend's brother bought an FZ-1 brand new, right after the price had dropped to $399. I spent a LOT of time in 1994 at his house playing the 3DO. That system was downright MAGICAL back then. There was nothing else like it, and unlike what many people think in hindsight, it was a HUGE leap beyond the SNES that I had and even the Sega CD (which I didn't have, but would always play every time I went with my mom to Sears*). 3DO didn't always have a bad rap. There was still a lot of enthusiasm for it in 1995, and it was considered a viable competitor to the Saturn and Playstation at least up until 1996. The hardware had its limitations, but was surprisingly powerful considering it launched more than full year before the Playstation (2 years if you were in the US). The games that were designed for 3DO tend to be best on that console, or at least I prefer them on 3DO. Road Rash, for instance, runs faster on Playstation but the variable frame rate drives me nuts on the PSX, whereas on the 3DO it still varies but is less noticeable and less impactful on the gameplay. The FZ-1 is still my absolute favorite console design ever. It's hefty and feels substantial, it looks great, it's big but not too big, and it looks right at home with other high-end AV equipment. The controller feels very solid (way more so than Genesis or American Saturn controllers), the cord is thick but soft, and the headphone jack is extremely handy to play in silence. And unlike some, I love the daisy-chain design because it means you're not limited in how many controllers you can plug in (and you only need one port on the front of the console). Very forward-thinking. The 3DO, whether people realize it or not, was quite revolutionary. It pioneered a lot of things that would help push the industry forward, like CD-based media (being the first CD-only console) and drastically lower licensing fees. It also was, to my knowledge, the first console to us an operating system in order to maximize the ease of software development. If anything, 3DO was TOO far ahead of its time, *Speaking of which, Sears also had a CD-i kiosk on display, and while that thing always mildly interested me, I never had much fun playing with it. It always had that terrible remote-like thing attached to it which was no fun to use, and the kiosk focused more on the multimedia stuff than gaming. Philips decided far too late in the device's life to embrace gaming, at which point it was too late. Anyone remember the Phil Hartman commercials?
I remember back then on magazines...just pictures of Total eclypse..wing commander...SF2....we were 'the future is now' (from the Neo geo aes logo). I just seen one on shop and quickly returned on arcades,neo geo (I sold my super nintendo and bought one,quickly after ps1,people started to sell aes us euro games even the recents Kof,Pulstar,Slug..for 200 to 400$). Now with emulation,we have acces to all old great stuff and with steam,indies,reboots neo retro 2D...it's the best way to like videogames today....we have the rom/iso...not just a acces and licence without own it...and not censured..not Orwellian ideology on face....my latest game was Ghost of Tsushima and Cotton reboot. So,I m still surprised when I see younger people hyped by retrogaming...even if they dont have nostalgia with them...I started collection late 90s when noone did it openly at least..people and shop were happy to sell,change sealed super nintendo,ggear,etc...and surprised when I bought neo geo aes even pcb jamma when all were on dreamcast and ps2..
Great breakdown. Reading this brought me back. I was a NES/Genesis/N64 kid. I had a Playstation 2 in high school, but only played 3 games, Baldur's Gate, Manhunt, and Final Fantasy X. Then I stopped forever, the last 7 years I've been a gamer but only recently became a student of gaming. I recently learned about the Neo Geo and now, the 3DO. You're right though, the 3DO was waaay ahead of it's time. It wasn't until the mid to late 90s that fmv was able to play on Windows 95/98 on my parents Gateway 2000 desktop. Anyway I digress, long live the 3DO!
Sweet Jesus. Watching you play Flashback is like watching one of those mobile game ads designed to incite rage via total player failure. It's not that complicated my guy. Love your videos.
Having played Flashback at the time, i can attest this was how pretty much all of us experienced it. the game might worked with experience older gamers, but kids had a horrible time with it lol
@@Shishkebarbarian One of the few games I actually played all the way through! That and Out of this World. If you already played OotW before it then I imagine it was easier to get to grips with.
And "Alone in the Dark" since he complains about things chasing you all the time, not realising they're traps that can be blocked by moving furniture and items. This is the problem of having a quick go at a game, not ever really learning how to play it.
Fun fact: the original 3do controller's d-pad is so bad that the manual for Samurai Showdown instructs you to loosen the screws holding it together in order to actually be able to hit diagonals.
i DEMOLISHED my roommate on his copy of 3DO SamSho. in the 90s, nobody seemed to realize that Tam Tam was grossly, abusively powerful, and i routinely educated better players than myself. what you’re saying about the d-pad is funny because *i was always doing half-circles for Tam Tam’s air-demon attack*
Jason's cool, how he sees things is very unique and he doesnt have the same biases a lot of retro gaming fans do. I wouldn't be surprised if Jason got PO'd just to give a shot, but maybe he's aware of the Nightdive remake that just dropped lol Its hard to tell because he's really just out there sorting through the deals, like a picker almost.
They changed their branding in the mid-90s because they had gotten pigeonholed as a budget brand and wanted to be seen as a quality brand. It mostly succeeded.
The FZ-10 had compatabilty issues too. I remember buying a longbox Quarantine for mine and it wouldn't run at all and this wasn't from a jammed up laser reader as this was when the FZ-10 was new and on sale. Several other games wouldn't run either. Today, the best thing to do is to buy an FZ-1 with a failed CD drive (not a cheap as you'd think as enough people want to do this) then send it off to be recapped and have an Optical Drive Emulator fitted. Now you can download every game it ever had onto a single USB stick or compact flash (depending on which ODE you go for) and now you can select any game from the boot menu. Some people even replace the PSU with an external Wii one, which is the same voltage, but keeps the heat away from the system.
Put a cork in that whine, Junior. I’m the breadwinner in this family and if I want to use all the save slots for my North Africa campaign, I’ll damn well do it!
Captain Quasar's controls are insane, there's literally an option in the pause menu to make the controls better and IT'S NOT THE DEFAULT. Gets WAY more playable once you change it.
One of things that has always blown my mind about the 3DO was the draw distance it could achieve on the 3D games. It was super super good for 3D in 1993 and was even better than the Jaguar, 32X AND the Saturn which is crazy.
BIN/CUE files are not meant to be copied onto a CD. Those are instructions for burner software, such as Nero, on how to burn the tracks. That's like putting a cake cook book into an oven.
I came into this thread to post this. He needs CD burning software that understands bin/cue format, or needs to select that option when burning a disc and he'll be fine. The 3DO didn't use iso9660 for its disc, it had a proprietary filesystem and also some games came with red book audio tracks so bin/cue is mandatory to preserve the game properly.
I love the hell out of my 3do. Granted, I paid $30 for it at a used game store in 96/97 and not $700, but going from SNES to this was kinda really neat and it kickstarted my love of FMV games. Plus, the store I bought it from was also selling 3do games for $5-10, which was the perfect price for a teen without much money, so I had a pretty decent library for the system. Got a ton of 3do games on my Steam Deck now.
Oh yeah if anyone runs into that situation again: Try a music CD. Most consoles with CD drives can play them, and they're much easier to find than games usually. That will at least tell you if the disc drive is somewhat working.
@@MorMacFey-v2g CD patents have long expired. They didn't want to spend the cost of having an additional laser diode and pickup when few customers would use it. I believe xbox is the only console with a drive that can still read CDs.
Great video. As an undying fan of the 3do, you get a sub from this. I was a kid and sold off so many baseball cards to afford the system and was friends with the game store owner, so got to basically use the inventory as a rental store. Every one of these games takes me back.
The problem with younger people reviewing older systems is they have experienced Xbox, etc. This was state of the art in 1993, and really, it takes gen X' ers to truly appreciate it.
Yep, it takes all kinds but this guy kind of just hates everything as far as I can tell. Has some subscribers so some people like his ranting, good for him. First and last video for me , am glad he looked at 3DO even if i see it differently. Maybe i would be jaded to if I had not started on a 2600 and seen games improve and get more impressive every generation.
This thing could do some cool features for its time but the library is lacking. I played xbox 360 growing up and I just purchased a sega genesis. The genesis games library has a lot of games that are really fun and hold up today like the nes and snes. This console seems like more of a novelty collectors item or for street fighter 2 exclusively
@@clok1966 I started out on a NES, moved up to a Genesis, and then the 3DO was the third console I ever played. It was so far ahead of the Genesis and SNES at the time, it wasn't even close. The price is what really killed the system. I think if it was sold for $399 from the start it would have gained a lot more traction.
Sweet video! I love my FZ-1, and I've played most of the games you showcased. To me it's a super underrated system. Most of my games are burned so my trick is burning them at super slow speed. Used to have a 2x burner that played games flawlessly, but 4x speed drives work just as good.. Faster speed beyond that is hit or miss depending on burning software..
You spent hundreds of dollars you didn't need to spend. Young guys don't know how to burn a BIN and CUE, you clearly missed the days of piracy and filesharing. It's a disc image, you don't just throw the files on a CD and have Windows write them. You need CD/DVD burning software. Enable image burning mode, you select the CUE file and it's an instruction set that tells the software about the file structure of the data since the data is just a BIN file. It will then prompt you to select the BIN file, then you write the disc image.
Fun fact: the 3DO soundtrack of Ballz3D was made by Kurt Harland, from the band Information Society. He spent a bunch of years making game soundtracks and made some famously great ones like the one for X-Men 2 Clone wars on the Sega Genesis and Soul Reaver 1 and 2 for PSX and PS2 respectively. He always had a knack for making very dynamic music in these games. Ballz3D clearly isn't something he could really do much with though lmao. Extra fun fact: the music he made for X-Men 2 used more sound channels than the console could handle, but it was done so intentionally. What he did was make it so, depending on which character you're playing as, the instruments you hear change. So playing with different characters makes the music sound different.
You had to be there in 1993 to truly understand the feel for some of these games. Just to put into perspective, if you had PC, having a proper sound to your video games was a luxury. Sound Cards were very expensive back then and often we settle for PC speaker that only beeped. To hear CD quality music and sound FX on the 3DO was mind boggling experience. And the novelty of inserting a Disc was still fresh. You basically had the latest technology on your hands. We lacked controller standard in 3D games. All we had was game pad from 2D counterparts. So, it was logical for us to expect and to use the "awful" controls for the 3DO. We never thought for a second that I wanted an analog stick or whatever modern gaming has now. My uncle owned a 3DO and I vividly remember hearing voices from a game blew my mind. Everything that the 3DO did was discovering new ways of experiencing video games.
So storytime. My brother was working at a pet shop near the end of 1995. One evening he informs us that he had been fired, and the cops called on, for stealing from the store. He was questioned but they couldn't prove he stole the money (about $1200), so all that came about it was losing his job. A couple days later he buys the 3DO along with a few games including Zhadnost, and Myst for about the amount he "didn't steal". Myst was a revelation in gaming for me so that's something I guess.
I really love when you do these really big vids! Your editing and presentation improves every time too. Great job man! Glad we can enable your crippling retro game buying addiction 😃
This video is a good blessing. Thanks for uploading these weird arse vids, Poser Graves! 😂 I hope you're doing ok with the hurricane and all. Many prayers, bud.
Star Control II was released into the open source community and now exists as Ur-Quan Masters. It is now on steam as a free game called Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. A true sequel was kickstarted this year and I am excited. I played the 3dO version, it came with a star map! To this day it is one of my all time favorite video games, I have beaten it dozens of times and still find stuff I missed. Snag this game, it's great, it's worth it, it's a bucket list game.
Escape From Monster Manor was very cool. Otherwise, I'm glad I bought this console for 1-seventh of its initial retail launch price. 3DO had some good games (Quarantine, The Horde, etc,) but you really had to wade through the weeds in order to find them...
Man, I remember playing Star Control 2 on 3DO when I was a kid...this was before you could just look up solutions for games. That game was SO great and naturally figuring out what to do and where to go was so rewarding!
10 or so years ago I found a 3DO at a Goodwill laying around next to stereo stuff for 7 dollars. I miss the days when Goodwill didn't know what they had. I found SM64 there once for 2 dollars. Crazy you had such an issue with burned games. Maybe when I found mine my drive was just perfect for it since I never had any issues.
The Sherlock Holmes game, an expanded PC "The Case of the Serrated Scalpel," stands out as one of the era's finest point-and-click adventures, now only available as abandonware-highly recommended.
This was actually my favorite system I’ve owned. I got it for Xmas 1 year (at the end of its lifecycle) & was obsessed with ‘Way of the Warrior.’ Some real great games on this one.
Wing Commander 3 is a lot deeper than you got to experience in your short time with it. You get to make a lot of decisions that actually change the story, and it's one of the first games ever made where FAILING an objective isn't always a game over and actually gives you a different plot than succeeding would have. You need to do at least 3 or 4 playthroughs to see the whole game.
I got almost a half hour in to actually see the clickbait I clicked for (not really) and I will say it was worth the entire video just to hear you say "Shelly DuVall's Bird Life" because that's 3 juggernaut of the past all together at a single moment in time. God bless us, every, one! 😂
Played battle chess onmy uncles cpu eay back when, and had cpu beat. Was going to check mate next move but cpu wouldn't stop "thinking" so i never got the victory.
I bought the first FZ10 sold in the DFW metroplex. Put a deposit on it at an import shop right after it was announced. I spent like two months obsessed with Star Control 2. Loved that game. I also remember that i loved Gex, Road Rash, Wolfenstein, Soccer Kid, Return Fire, Samurai Showdown, and a few others. My wife (girlfriend then) loved the 3DO Wolfenstein and played it for hours. Once I was leaving to work a 12 hour shift and my dad came in with a cup of coffee and fired up Road Rash. He was still playing it when i got home! Great console.
Also some day I would love to chat with you about the role video games played during childhood trauma. Your breath of fire observations brought me to tears, because I had similar experience. Your best work comes from that earnestness.
I remember this thing well and fondly. I never owned one (it was much too expensive and we were much too poor), but i was just beginning to read gaming magazines when this was announced and followed it's life story as it was happening. It always looked pretty good, a step up from 16bit games for sure, but it was expensive and wasn't really doing anything that the PC couldnt, it didn't help that a lot of the games also came out on PC. What really killed it was the PSX coming out right as the 3d0 was about to hit its stride. the high price and premature 3d hardware just couldn't compete with the PSX. There were murmurs and rough prototypes of a 3d0 successor but it never amounted to anything. it was an interesting concept (design the hardware and have electronics manufacturers compete in manufacturing) but the costs were just too high. I'm so down to watch you go down the rabbit hole though, i'll experience it vicariously through you lol. I was an avid PC Gamer at that time (yay piracy) so i did get to play a lot of the games, but there were still some exclusives. I'm still really into 90s PC Gaming and still discover gloriously weird/horrible PC/3d0 multiplats.
AitD isn't a super frantic action game. If you let the opening demo play it shows you exactly how to stop the monsters from breaking into the attic. It's still a clunky game that HaSN't aGeD wElL but it definitely has much more tension and suspense than you're seeing so far. The majority of the game is solving puzzles, most of which are death traps. Now Alone in the Dark 2... That's the no chill shooty shoot explosions game.
Yeah, it's definitely not anything like he described it. I can understand why he might have struggled to get out of the first room because the game doesn't give you time to get your bearings before sending two monsters at you, but that's literally the only time that happens.
I bought one back in the day, with 3 paychecks from my first job. It came with a demo disc that had an episode of Batman the Animated series, and an episode of 2 Stupid Dogs. I remember having my mind blown that I was watching Batman off a disc. My first game was Need for Speed... good times man. 😅
for the first maybe 5 minutes of this video, i thought a guy was talking and his wife/gf was showing us the console. took me a bit to realize and feel blind
You're editing is getting more serious, very nice. Did you ever see the video named something like "smt nocturne is pokemon for insane people"? Or maybe it was IV and not Nocturne. The creator is named Foul Energy i think. You should check those out if you havent already Edit: emulating the 3do bach game is now on my bucket list. It has lessons about music structure at the bottom in the sheet music mode? I desperately need that in my life. Bach simulator deserves an "Ahead of Its Time" honorable mention 2: You missed the comparison to live a live for the guardian game, Mr. SNES RPGs. Mechanically they seem similar, but live a live probably did it much better since we're talking about Square. I'm not disputing your title, btw. 3: im going to stop this, you should definitely do a video on Hell though. Good cyberpunk media is always a treasure to find. The game sounds like a poor man's Planescape: Torment, which in and of itself is intriguing in ways it shouldn't be
My spool of CMC CD-Rs literally work with *every* CD-based console I own _except_ the 3DO. They work fine on playstation, they work okay on PC Engine Duo and Sega CD, but nope, not a chance on the 3DO. Someone told me to buy an old spool of Sony Supremas (the ones that say "CD-R" in italic on the left side and "700MB" on the right) and whaddya know--works first try! I really did not expect that to fix the issue but there you go.
My parents used to rent us a 3DO from Blockbuster back in the day. I remember you had to put like a $150 deposit on it which back then was insane. I used to mainly play Road Rash with it.
I loved your video, this is the best video I’ve watched for getting a taste of the 3DO experience. One thing that doesn’t matter if you don’t care but it’s hard to watch you put all those ssssoffft CDs on top of each other and read-side down on table tops. They’ll gain tiny micro scratches every time you do it. But I totally get it if you don’t care.
Hold on a minute... there was a gap for high-end gaming in the 1990's. That gap was filled by SNK with their Neo Geo AES. While SNK didn't move numbers like Sega and Nintendo, they sold enough to keep them going for a very long time. The AES sold from 1990-2004 outlasting all mid-gen (4th-5th) machines.
I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy Flashback, but unless you were deliberately trying to jump directly into the walls and the bottom of the platforms for comedic effect I would have taken the footage of you playing it as potential evidence of a serious neurological condition. You literally just need to get underneath the edge of the platform, stand facing towards the edge, and jump up. It's a grid based game with very clearly defined areas where moves work. I understand if that's not your thing, and it's why I can't get on with those games either, but I was genuinely starting to worry about whether you needed to seek medical help.
Yeah, I'm guessing he's never played the original Prince of Persia either. As an old guy, it's frustrating somebody young not being able to work out basic controls. lmao
Omg awesome… you live in Orlando? I live in Dr. Phillips next to DP highschool. Do you recommend and Retro game stores around here? I try to go to the Gamestop on Turkey Lake Rd.
There is a third market adapter which will let you play with an SNES pad. I don't know if they've made new ones but I have one from the old days. It really works great.
Do not sleep on Star Control 2... love that one!
It's freeware on Steam now, they just changed the title to "Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters"...
Jason Graves: "the Dreamcast and N64 are overrated"
Also Jason Graves: "the 3do is the coolest console ever"
More like 3D..shit.
This is the truth...
Bought my 3do in 98. Funcoland was just trying to get rid of it. $50 a new 3do and 25+ games. The reason I bought it for Street Fighter, Primal Rage, and Samurai Showdown. Road Rash was my favorite game. Wing Commander 2 was a pleasant surprise.
I wish I collected more, but my money was going to Japanese exports of Saturn games and a Jaguar and Jag CD collection.
My friend's brother bought an FZ-1 brand new, right after the price had dropped to $399. I spent a LOT of time in 1994 at his house playing the 3DO. That system was downright MAGICAL back then. There was nothing else like it, and unlike what many people think in hindsight, it was a HUGE leap beyond the SNES that I had and even the Sega CD (which I didn't have, but would always play every time I went with my mom to Sears*).
3DO didn't always have a bad rap. There was still a lot of enthusiasm for it in 1995, and it was considered a viable competitor to the Saturn and Playstation at least up until 1996. The hardware had its limitations, but was surprisingly powerful considering it launched more than full year before the Playstation (2 years if you were in the US). The games that were designed for 3DO tend to be best on that console, or at least I prefer them on 3DO. Road Rash, for instance, runs faster on Playstation but the variable frame rate drives me nuts on the PSX, whereas on the 3DO it still varies but is less noticeable and less impactful on the gameplay.
The FZ-1 is still my absolute favorite console design ever. It's hefty and feels substantial, it looks great, it's big but not too big, and it looks right at home with other high-end AV equipment. The controller feels very solid (way more so than Genesis or American Saturn controllers), the cord is thick but soft, and the headphone jack is extremely handy to play in silence. And unlike some, I love the daisy-chain design because it means you're not limited in how many controllers you can plug in (and you only need one port on the front of the console). Very forward-thinking.
The 3DO, whether people realize it or not, was quite revolutionary. It pioneered a lot of things that would help push the industry forward, like CD-based media (being the first CD-only console) and drastically lower licensing fees. It also was, to my knowledge, the first console to us an operating system in order to maximize the ease of software development. If anything, 3DO was TOO far ahead of its time,
*Speaking of which, Sears also had a CD-i kiosk on display, and while that thing always mildly interested me, I never had much fun playing with it. It always had that terrible remote-like thing attached to it which was no fun to use, and the kiosk focused more on the multimedia stuff than gaming. Philips decided far too late in the device's life to embrace gaming, at which point it was too late. Anyone remember the Phil Hartman commercials?
100% agree with all of this...underrated comment which unfortunately only those who owned a 3DO at that time would fully appreciate.
I remember back then on magazines...just pictures of Total eclypse..wing commander...SF2....we were 'the future is now' (from the Neo geo aes logo).
I just seen one on shop and quickly returned on arcades,neo geo (I sold my super nintendo and bought one,quickly after ps1,people started to sell aes us euro games even the recents Kof,Pulstar,Slug..for 200 to 400$).
Now with emulation,we have acces to all old great stuff and with steam,indies,reboots neo retro 2D...it's the best way to like videogames today....we have the rom/iso...not just a acces and licence without own it...and not censured..not Orwellian ideology on face....my latest game was Ghost of Tsushima and Cotton reboot.
So,I m still surprised when I see younger people hyped by retrogaming...even if they dont have nostalgia with them...I started collection late 90s when noone did it openly at least..people and shop were happy to sell,change sealed super nintendo,ggear,etc...and surprised when I bought neo geo aes even pcb jamma when all were on dreamcast and ps2..
Great breakdown. Reading this brought me back. I was a NES/Genesis/N64 kid. I had a Playstation 2 in high school, but only played 3 games, Baldur's Gate, Manhunt, and Final Fantasy X. Then I stopped forever, the last 7 years I've been a gamer but only recently became a student of gaming. I recently learned about the Neo Geo and now, the 3DO. You're right though, the 3DO was waaay ahead of it's time. It wasn't until the mid to late 90s that fmv was able to play on Windows 95/98 on my parents Gateway 2000 desktop. Anyway I digress, long live the 3DO!
Sounded like a small engine starting when you hit the power button
that almost sounds like a $700 bag of copium
enters the stage;
"one ninety-nine"
exits.
Sweet Jesus. Watching you play Flashback is like watching one of those mobile game ads designed to incite rage via total player failure. It's not that complicated my guy. Love your videos.
Having played Flashback at the time, i can attest this was how pretty much all of us experienced it. the game might worked with experience older gamers, but kids had a horrible time with it lol
@@Shishkebarbarian One of the few games I actually played all the way through! That and Out of this World. If you already played OotW before it then I imagine it was easier to get to grips with.
@@ShishkebarbarianI was in grade school at the time, and I thought it was pretty intuitive. It‘s really not that complicated.
And "Alone in the Dark" since he complains about things chasing you all the time, not realising they're traps that can be blocked by moving furniture and items. This is the problem of having a quick go at a game, not ever really learning how to play it.
@@boilerhousegarage Don't ya hate that? It's pretty frustrating, like that Cuphead tutorial guy
Fun fact: the original 3do controller's d-pad is so bad that the manual for Samurai Showdown instructs you to loosen the screws holding it together in order to actually be able to hit diagonals.
i DEMOLISHED my roommate on his copy of 3DO SamSho. in the 90s, nobody seemed to realize that Tam Tam was grossly, abusively powerful, and i routinely educated better players than myself.
what you’re saying about the d-pad is funny because *i was always doing half-circles for Tam Tam’s air-demon attack*
@@WeeWeeJumbo There were like 5 official controllers for the 3DO and this only applies to the first Panasonic one. They shipped a fixed version later.
Bro actually did it
He found an RPG that WASN'T in Majuular's vid! I honestly figured he covered them all, respect
Jason's cool, how he sees things is very unique and he doesnt have the same biases a lot of retro gaming fans do.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jason got PO'd just to give a shot, but maybe he's aware of the Nightdive remake that just dropped lol
Its hard to tell because he's really just out there sorting through the deals, like a picker almost.
DAMN IT JASON
@@MajuularJASONNNNN
X
12 year old me finding out about 3DO pricetag in 1995 700 dollars???. U MEAN 7 BILLION TRILLION DOLLARS!?!?.
I saw this in Sears and thought maybe I should wait for the Jaguar, Ended up not buying a new Consul until the PS2
In 1993 you mean. 6 months later, it was $500--or 5 BILLION TRILLION in 10 year old you money! In 1995, they could be bought in clearance sales.
@@boilerhousegarage take your meds.
@@DrBanananananananananananananaNot everyone is manically autistic like you, but if you've got any pills to share..
Might as well have been
Fun fact: the company we now know as LG was once "Lucky Goldstar" and I think they had a hand in producing some of the 3DOs.
Goldstar did make consoles for 3D0.
They changed their branding in the mid-90s because they had gotten pigeonholed as a budget brand and wanted to be seen as a quality brand. It mostly succeeded.
My parents used to own a Goldstar CRT monitor. It was really good one because the dot pitch was .21 instead of the more typical .24 of the time.
The FZ-10 had compatabilty issues too. I remember buying a longbox Quarantine for mine and it wouldn't run at all and this wasn't from a jammed up laser reader as this was when the FZ-10 was new and on sale. Several other games wouldn't run either. Today, the best thing to do is to buy an FZ-1 with a failed CD drive (not a cheap as you'd think as enough people want to do this) then send it off to be recapped and have an Optical Drive Emulator fitted. Now you can download every game it ever had onto a single USB stick or compact flash (depending on which ODE you go for) and now you can select any game from the boot menu. Some people even replace the PSU with an external Wii one, which is the same voltage, but keeps the heat away from the system.
My dad played Panzer General and the Wing Commander games, and used up all the flipping memory! How was I supposed to save my Gex progress??
Put a cork in that whine, Junior. I’m the breadwinner in this family and if I want to use all the save slots for my North Africa campaign, I’ll damn well do it!
I just discovered your channel, and I'm digging it. Anyone who dedicates this much effort to a lemon, like the 3DO, is A-OK in my book. Subbed!
Captain Quasar's controls are insane, there's literally an option in the pause menu to make the controls better and IT'S NOT THE DEFAULT. Gets WAY more playable once you change it.
One of things that has always blown my mind about the 3DO was the draw distance it could achieve on the 3D games. It was super super good for 3D in 1993 and was even better than the Jaguar, 32X AND the Saturn which is crazy.
BIN/CUE files are not meant to be copied onto a CD. Those are instructions for burner software, such as Nero, on how to burn the tracks.
That's like putting a cake cook book into an oven.
I came into this thread to post this. He needs CD burning software that understands bin/cue format, or needs to select that option when burning a disc and he'll be fine. The 3DO didn't use iso9660 for its disc, it had a proprietary filesystem and also some games came with red book audio tracks so bin/cue is mandatory to preserve the game properly.
I love the hell out of my 3do. Granted, I paid $30 for it at a used game store in 96/97 and not $700, but going from SNES to this was kinda really neat and it kickstarted my love of FMV games. Plus, the store I bought it from was also selling 3do games for $5-10, which was the perfect price for a teen without much money, so I had a pretty decent library for the system. Got a ton of 3do games on my Steam Deck now.
You found MYST?! I loved that game on PC! I had a really cool guide book that I followed until I got to this Atlantis world. Wow. Memory lane.
The 3DO is such a product of it's time. It's like I'm time traveling when I see these games 🤣 can't say I'm running out to play one myself though.
The UA-cam recommendations gave me a solid one here. Cant wait to check out more of your videos
Oh yeah if anyone runs into that situation again: Try a music CD. Most consoles with CD drives can play them, and they're much easier to find than games usually. That will at least tell you if the disc drive is somewhat working.
I couldn't believe my PS4 didn't play music cds. We are going backwards as a society.
@@tacotoosday42 its another license they didn't have to spend for that wasn't being used.
@@MorMacFey-v2g CD patents have long expired. They didn't want to spend the cost of having an additional laser diode and pickup when few customers would use it. I believe xbox is the only console with a drive that can still read CDs.
@@rfmerrill Thanks for that. I wasn't aware and also looked into it.
@@MorMacFey-v2gSony was the patent holder for CDs anyway.
Great video Jason! The Panasonic FlyAroundandShootShitDO 😂
Bro, I just found out about your channel, and I love it. Your reviews are well done and fun, plus you got that avgn humour going on
What's the little TV your using in this video please? Btw awesome video liked and subscribed
man I love your style. I love to log my researching experience also. Great stuff!
Super-informative! I learned about a lot of games I didn't know existed, and I hadn't heard of the Apple Pippin before, either. Nice work!
Dude, I dig your show. I hope to see plenty more.
Great video. As an undying fan of the 3do, you get a sub from this. I was a kid and sold off so many baseball cards to afford the system and was friends with the game store owner, so got to basically use the inventory as a rental store. Every one of these games takes me back.
PS1 used to come in long boxes too.
The problem with younger people reviewing older systems is they have experienced Xbox, etc. This was state of the art in 1993, and really, it takes gen X' ers to truly appreciate it.
he doesn't look young to me, probably 30 years old. not very old but not young either
Yep, it takes all kinds but this guy kind of just hates everything as far as I can tell. Has some subscribers so some people like his ranting, good for him. First and last video for me , am glad he looked at 3DO even if i see it differently. Maybe i would be jaded to if I had not started on a 2600 and seen games improve and get more impressive every generation.
This thing could do some cool features for its time but the library is lacking. I played xbox 360 growing up and I just purchased a sega genesis. The genesis games library has a lot of games that are really fun and hold up today like the nes and snes. This console seems like more of a novelty collectors item or for street fighter 2 exclusively
@@junaidmughal3806 He said he's 28 so either way there's no chance he ever knew what this console was like to play when it came out.
@@clok1966 I started out on a NES, moved up to a Genesis, and then the 3DO was the third console I ever played. It was so far ahead of the Genesis and SNES at the time, it wasn't even close. The price is what really killed the system. I think if it was sold for $399 from the start it would have gained a lot more traction.
Sweet video! I love my FZ-1, and I've played most of the games you showcased. To me it's a super underrated system. Most of my games are burned so my trick is burning them at super slow speed. Used to have a 2x burner that played games flawlessly, but 4x speed drives work just as good.. Faster speed beyond that is hit or miss depending on burning software..
I am the target audience for Shelly Duval's Bird's Life.
You spent hundreds of dollars you didn't need to spend.
Young guys don't know how to burn a BIN and CUE, you clearly missed the days of piracy and filesharing. It's a disc image, you don't just throw the files on a CD and have Windows write them. You need CD/DVD burning software. Enable image burning mode, you select the CUE file and it's an instruction set that tells the software about the file structure of the data since the data is just a BIN file. It will then prompt you to select the BIN file, then you write the disc image.
Wasn't there choose your own adventure movies made/ being made for 3DO?
Fun fact: the 3DO soundtrack of Ballz3D was made by Kurt Harland, from the band Information Society. He spent a bunch of years making game soundtracks and made some famously great ones like the one for X-Men 2 Clone wars on the Sega Genesis and Soul Reaver 1 and 2 for PSX and PS2 respectively. He always had a knack for making very dynamic music in these games. Ballz3D clearly isn't something he could really do much with though lmao.
Extra fun fact: the music he made for X-Men 2 used more sound channels than the console could handle, but it was done so intentionally. What he did was make it so, depending on which character you're playing as, the instruments you hear change. So playing with different characters makes the music sound different.
the whole its a bird's life sequence had me giggling hysterically.Thank you :)
I came back to watch the bird's life sequence again. its so hilarious :)
Just discovered your channel, and video and LOVE both! (I DID see however you are in Florida and just wanted to say I hope you stay safe!)
You had to be there in 1993 to truly understand the feel for some of these games. Just to put into perspective, if you had PC, having a proper sound to your video games was a luxury. Sound Cards were very expensive back then and often we settle for PC speaker that only beeped. To hear CD quality music and sound FX on the 3DO was mind boggling experience. And the novelty of inserting a Disc was still fresh. You basically had the latest technology on your hands. We lacked controller standard in 3D games. All we had was game pad from 2D counterparts. So, it was logical for us to expect and to use the "awful" controls for the 3DO. We never thought for a second that I wanted an analog stick or whatever modern gaming has now. My uncle owned a 3DO and I vividly remember hearing voices from a game blew my mind. Everything that the 3DO did was discovering new ways of experiencing video games.
Need for Speed was the reason to buy it. Everything else at that time was a cartoon. Graphics was beyond anything at the time.
I played Myst on a 486SX-25 PC with a single speed cd-rom drive back in the day. That 3dO version runs better.
So storytime. My brother was working at a pet shop near the end of 1995. One evening he informs us that he had been fired, and the cops called on, for stealing from the store. He was questioned but they couldn't prove he stole the money (about $1200), so all that came about it was losing his job. A couple days later he buys the 3DO along with a few games including Zhadnost, and Myst for about the amount he "didn't steal". Myst was a revelation in gaming for me so that's something I guess.
Pointing out gags is the worst kind of UA-cam comment, but you don't know how much I appreciate the 90s Sportcenter music throughout your videos.
I really love when you do these really big vids! Your editing and presentation improves every time too. Great job man! Glad we can enable your crippling retro game buying addiction 😃
That Road Rash is the best of the entire series. You did yourself a great disservice by skipping it.
This video is a good blessing. Thanks for uploading these weird arse vids, Poser Graves! 😂
I hope you're doing ok with the hurricane and all. Many prayers, bud.
Username checks out
Star Control II was released into the open source community and now exists as Ur-Quan Masters. It is now on steam as a free game called Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. A true sequel was kickstarted this year and I am excited. I played the 3dO version, it came with a star map! To this day it is one of my all time favorite video games, I have beaten it dozens of times and still find stuff I missed. Snag this game, it's great, it's worth it, it's a bucket list game.
Escape From Monster Manor was very cool.
Otherwise, I'm glad I bought this console for 1-seventh of its initial retail launch price.
3DO had some good games (Quarantine, The Horde, etc,) but you really had to wade through the weeds in order to find them...
you liking point and click games makes me wish youd go through the Quest for Glory series, the intersection of Point and Click and RPGs
Man, I remember playing Star Control 2 on 3DO when I was a kid...this was before you could just look up solutions for games. That game was SO great and naturally figuring out what to do and where to go was so rewarding!
10 or so years ago I found a 3DO at a Goodwill laying around next to stereo stuff for 7 dollars. I miss the days when Goodwill didn't know what they had. I found SM64 there once for 2 dollars.
Crazy you had such an issue with burned games. Maybe when I found mine my drive was just perfect for it since I never had any issues.
I don't think he was burning the discs correctly lol
@@MorMacFey-v2g I think that's probably the case. 3DO/TurboDuo/Dreamcast. Never had an issue playing burned discs.
The Sherlock Holmes game, an expanded PC "The Case of the Serrated Scalpel," stands out as one of the era's finest point-and-click adventures, now only available as abandonware-highly recommended.
This was actually my favorite system I’ve owned. I got it for Xmas 1 year (at the end of its lifecycle) & was obsessed with ‘Way of the Warrior.’ Some real great games on this one.
Wing Commander 3 is a lot deeper than you got to experience in your short time with it. You get to make a lot of decisions that actually change the story, and it's one of the first games ever made where FAILING an objective isn't always a game over and actually gives you a different plot than succeeding would have. You need to do at least 3 or 4 playthroughs to see the whole game.
Hey, Lost Vikings on SNES was Interplay. That was pretty great.
Guardian war rules it was so bizarre, hope you do a full video on it
I got almost a half hour in to actually see the clickbait I clicked for (not really) and I will say it was worth the entire video just to hear you say "Shelly DuVall's Bird Life" because that's 3 juggernaut of the past all together at a single moment in time. God bless us, every, one! 😂
Played battle chess onmy uncles cpu eay back when, and had cpu beat.
Was going to check mate next move but cpu wouldn't stop "thinking" so i never got the victory.
Blessed Keith Apicary footage.
EDIT: Oh and very blessed Pebble Beach Golf Links music usage.
nice video, console &
games presentation…
Very interesting. I like
the nice FZ-1 design.
I bought the first FZ10 sold in the DFW metroplex. Put a deposit on it at an import shop right after it was announced. I spent like two months obsessed with Star Control 2. Loved that game. I also remember that i loved Gex, Road Rash, Wolfenstein, Soccer Kid, Return Fire, Samurai Showdown, and a few others.
My wife (girlfriend then) loved the 3DO Wolfenstein and played it for hours. Once I was leaving to work a 12 hour shift and my dad came in with a cup of coffee and fired up Road Rash. He was still playing it when i got home! Great console.
Also some day I would love to chat with you about the role video games played during childhood trauma. Your breath of fire observations brought me to tears, because I had similar experience. Your best work comes from that earnestness.
Love this video, man, straight up subscribe to your channel
Always happy seeing a long haul Jason Graves video.
Jason out here doing the lord's work.
23:42 You actually turned your head while explaining this. True dedication!
I absolutely love obscure and forgotten FMVs
2:19 Nice Keith cameo. Where's my Dreamcast 2?!
Please try Psychic Detective! It truly needs it's own video =)
I remember this thing well and fondly. I never owned one (it was much too expensive and we were much too poor), but i was just beginning to read gaming magazines when this was announced and followed it's life story as it was happening. It always looked pretty good, a step up from 16bit games for sure, but it was expensive and wasn't really doing anything that the PC couldnt, it didn't help that a lot of the games also came out on PC. What really killed it was the PSX coming out right as the 3d0 was about to hit its stride. the high price and premature 3d hardware just couldn't compete with the PSX. There were murmurs and rough prototypes of a 3d0 successor but it never amounted to anything. it was an interesting concept (design the hardware and have electronics manufacturers compete in manufacturing) but the costs were just too high.
I'm so down to watch you go down the rabbit hole though, i'll experience it vicariously through you lol. I was an avid PC Gamer at that time (yay piracy) so i did get to play a lot of the games, but there were still some exclusives. I'm still really into 90s PC Gaming and still discover gloriously weird/horrible PC/3d0 multiplats.
AitD isn't a super frantic action game. If you let the opening demo play it shows you exactly how to stop the monsters from breaking into the attic. It's still a clunky game that HaSN't aGeD wElL but it definitely has much more tension and suspense than you're seeing so far. The majority of the game is solving puzzles, most of which are death traps. Now Alone in the Dark 2... That's the no chill shooty shoot explosions game.
Yeah, it's definitely not anything like he described it.
I can understand why he might have struggled to get out of the first room because the game doesn't give you time to get your bearings before sending two monsters at you, but that's literally the only time that happens.
@@casanovafunkenstein5090 the beginning of AitD teaches player that almost every enemy encounter can be avoided using different tools and items.
Shelly Duvalle needed a haircut, i never trusted her.
RIP Shelly
I had a 3DO! My buddy and I played "Way of the Warrior" endlessly! "Supreme Warrior" was a pretty cool game, also
There's a sequel to Microcosm called Novastorm, which is frankly an incredible step up in quality.
11:04 that is the music I hear in my head whenever I am mopping the floor at work
I bought one back in the day, with 3 paychecks from my first job. It came with a demo disc that had an episode of Batman the Animated series, and an episode of 2 Stupid Dogs. I remember having my mind blown that I was watching Batman off a disc. My first game was Need for Speed... good times man. 😅
Chiptune Slayer was genuinely awesome!
i was just looking at your snes reviews and boom you drop this masterpiece
for the first maybe 5 minutes of this video, i thought a guy was talking and his wife/gf was showing us the console.
took me a bit to realize and feel blind
one more for the road Star Control II is one of the best DOS games of all time
thank you for the awesome movies and video games, shelly duvall.
Damn dude you are the perfect person to discuss this console because of your cadence and scriptwriting.
Thank you for this.
I knew you could enter the gecko and beat gex babe
You're editing is getting more serious, very nice. Did you ever see the video named something like "smt nocturne is pokemon for insane people"? Or maybe it was IV and not Nocturne. The creator is named Foul Energy i think. You should check those out if you havent already
Edit: emulating the 3do bach game is now on my bucket list. It has lessons about music structure at the bottom in the sheet music mode? I desperately need that in my life. Bach simulator deserves an "Ahead of Its Time" honorable mention
2: You missed the comparison to live a live for the guardian game, Mr. SNES RPGs. Mechanically they seem similar, but live a live probably did it much better since we're talking about Square. I'm not disputing your title, btw.
3: im going to stop this, you should definitely do a video on Hell though. Good cyberpunk media is always a treasure to find. The game sounds like a poor man's Planescape: Torment, which in and of itself is intriguing in ways it shouldn't be
My spool of CMC CD-Rs literally work with *every* CD-based console I own _except_ the 3DO. They work fine on playstation, they work okay on PC Engine Duo and Sega CD, but nope, not a chance on the 3DO.
Someone told me to buy an old spool of Sony Supremas (the ones that say "CD-R" in italic on the left side and "700MB" on the right) and whaddya know--works first try! I really did not expect that to fix the issue but there you go.
Hey, that was me 😁
The 3DO version of Road Rash is more or less the definitive way to play Road Rash.
agreed!!! Top 3 game on the console and my favorite version of that series.
So happy to be your 1000th like!
I like all the failed consoles for some strange reason.
My parents used to rent us a 3DO from Blockbuster back in the day. I remember you had to put like a $150 deposit on it which back then was insane. I used to mainly play Road Rash with it.
I loved your video, this is the best video I’ve watched for getting a taste of the 3DO experience.
One thing that doesn’t matter if you don’t care but it’s hard to watch you put all those ssssoffft CDs on top of each other and read-side down on table tops. They’ll gain tiny micro scratches every time you do it.
But I totally get it if you don’t care.
Wing Commander hate always breaks my heart
Hold on a minute... there was a gap for high-end gaming in the 1990's. That gap was filled by SNK with their Neo Geo AES. While SNK didn't move numbers like Sega and Nintendo, they sold enough to keep them going for a very long time. The AES sold from 1990-2004 outlasting all mid-gen (4th-5th) machines.
I enjoyed reading this title and completely agreed and knew exactly what to expect coming in having seen the 3do LUL
i just picked up the exact same 3do, so this video was awesome to get me get the ball rolling
Video was R•E•A•L. Money well spent. Looking forward to turning 18 and getting a Saturn, myself.
Wait, “TrAxton’s” revenge??? You don’t think??? No… could it?
I dont think the console was released in germany. First thing I think of when i hear 3DO are the Army Men Ps1 games.
The Goldstar 3do definitely released in Germany, plenty of German ads and boxes out there
I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy Flashback, but unless you were deliberately trying to jump directly into the walls and the bottom of the platforms for comedic effect I would have taken the footage of you playing it as potential evidence of a serious neurological condition.
You literally just need to get underneath the edge of the platform, stand facing towards the edge, and jump up.
It's a grid based game with very clearly defined areas where moves work.
I understand if that's not your thing, and it's why I can't get on with those games either, but I was genuinely starting to worry about whether you needed to seek medical help.
Yeah, I'm guessing he's never played the original Prince of Persia either. As an old guy, it's frustrating somebody young not being able to work out basic controls. lmao
Omg awesome… you live in Orlando? I live in Dr. Phillips next to DP highschool. Do you recommend and Retro game stores around here? I try to go to the Gamestop on Turkey Lake Rd.
The soundtrack to Road Rash makes it worth it, same with Way of the Warrior
There is a third market adapter which will let you play with an SNES pad. I don't know if they've made new ones but I have one from the old days. It really works great.