Sega Mega Drive Adaptor and the Ridiculousness of 80s Sega Stuff

I fished another thing out of the Omocha Souko junk bin the other day: the Sega Mega Drive Adaptor: AKA yet another peripheral to add on to my already monstrously bloated Mega Drive confabobulatorionation.That, my friend, be a whole lot of Mega Drive. And I ain`t even put the adaptor on it yet.

I think this latest acquisition of mine provides a rather decent (and, for only 300 yen, cheap) way of illustrating the complexity of playing games on Sega Consoles from the 1980s.

To begin with it perfectly illustrates Sega`s Mega Drive-era policy of making you buy what amounts to almost an entirely new console to attach to the Mega Drive every time they introduced some new feature. In the adaptor`s case that new feature was backwards compatability with the Mega Drive`s predecessor, the Sega Mark III (AKA the Master System).

Note the complexity. If I want to play a Mark III game, I have to take the 32X attachment off. If I want to play a 32X game I have to take the Adaptor off. If I`m feeling really frisky and just want to, you know, play a regular Mega Drive game, then I have to either take the adaptor off or leave the 32X on. Everybody got that? Good.

In addition to that, for me personally at least, it also illustrates Sega`s rather silly pre-Mega Drive policy of just making you buy new consoles all the time period, at least in Japan. First they released the SG 1000 (photo courtesy of Wikipedia because I don`t have one of these):
Then they released the SG-1000 II, which I do have and I do love it so:
Then (finally) came the Mark III:
I think all of these were released over the course of a long weekend in the summer of 1983, though I`ll have to double check that.

Anyway, since my SG 1000 II cannot play carts released for the Mark III, my acquisition of the adaptor means that I can finally play the one Mark III game that I possess, baseball:
After only about 3 hours of fumbling around, PRESTO! My Mega Drive was conveniently switched from ready-to-play-32X games mode to ready-to-play-Mark III games mode:
I have to admit that I really like this adaptor. I think it looks rather sleek:
I also like the fact that the Mark III carts stick WAY out of it. No wait, I hate that fact. It means that I have to take them out every time I want to put the thing back on its shelf because the whole contraption with the CD, Mega Drive, adaptor and Mark III cart is almost waist-high.

At least it looks neat though. Yet another piece of weird 80s video game history from Japan.

Swingers: Best Video Game Movie Scene Ever?

I watched Swingers the other day for maybe the fourth or fifth time. I really like Swingers. Its one of those independent films done on a shoestring budget with a bunch of talented unknowns that gets everything right.

Its just so money.

I think one of best parts of Swingers, at least from a 30-something video game blogger's point of view, is the scene where they play hockey on the Sega Genesis. The scene (watch it here) gets everything about 90s gaming by poor 20-something guys exactly right.

Its got:

-Use of instant replay to taunt opponent after goal;

-A visibly annoyed third guy waiting his turn to play;

-Complaints shared by all parties present about how the new version of the game doesn't allow fighting;

-One guy demonstrating how to make Gretzky's head bleed to the third guy, possibly because he feels bad about the fact that he isn't getting to play;

-Use of the old "un-pausing the game while the opponent is distracted while paying for pizza" routine;

-A fight breaking out over the use of said routine;

-Embarrassing the guy who goes to the door to pay for the pizza with lurid sexual innuendo;

-An insanely messy apartment complete with Reservoir Dogs poster and foosball table.

I think the reason I like this scene so much is that it is exactly the way I remember playing games in the 1990s. I'm always going on about how nostalgic I feel for the 80s on this blog that I sometimes forget how awesome the 90s were.

This, for example, is the apartment I lived in from 1998 to 1999 (room-mates faces redacted to protect the innocent):
Pretty much exactly the same type of place as the apartment in Swingers where they played that Genesis hockey game.

At first, we only had an NES, but a couple months after moving in my room-mate (on the left) bought a Nintendo 64. That changed our lives forever. The three of us, and friends who'd drop by, would just play that thing for hours, drinking massive quantities of beer, fighting, and generally just trying to annoy the shit out of each other. But, you know, in a friendly guy way.

After a few hours of that, we'd head out to the bars in town and not come even remotely close to picking up any women.

Ah, how I miss those days.

Anyway, I've been reading about how little money the makers of Swingers had when making the film. They had to film it in actual people's apartments just using whatever was lying around. I guess that is the reason that scene looks so authentic: it actually is just somebody's apartment. I also like the fact that at the time the film came out the Genesis was already old news and not the latest console.

If the film had been made with a big studio budget, they'd have screwed it up completely by making the apartment look clean, and they'd have been playing the newest game (and not allowed to say anything bad about it because they had some sort of product placement deal with the maker).

It would have (ironically) been much closer to the scenes in the Break Up where Vince Vaughn is playing the PS2, which are just blah.

Above: not the best video game movie scene ever.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, anybody else got any favorite video game movie scenes?