Las Vegas has been the scene of numerous championship matches, but last week saw one of the most memorable heavyweight battles of them all: Nintendo vs. Sega.
The site was the floor of the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, a five-day extravaganza (this year it was Jan. 5 through 9) that attracts close to 100,000 conventioneers. For the past few years, Nintendo and Sega have competed to see who would have the largest, glitziest displays. This year was no exception.
Nintendo pulled no punches with its 55,000-square-foot display that highlighted new Super NES titles such as Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball and Stunt Race FX, a souped-up racing game boasting twice the speed of its predecessor, Star Fox.
The company also offered tantalizing glimpses of Project Reality, Nintendo’s 64-bit cartridge game machine that should be on store shelves in fall 1995 for about $250. But if you can’t wait that long, Project Reality will be in arcades for Christmas 1994.
Over in Sega’s 39,000-square-foot compound, the company previewed the latest program starring the world’s most famous hedgehog. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is set to be launched on Feb. 2-Groundhog Day. A nifty new feature is a split screen that allows simultaneous, two-player competition.
Sega also showed off its new Genesis CDX Multimedia System. The Genesis and Sega CD combo has the extra feature of a CD unit that can be detached as a lightweight portable audio CD player. It should be out in March for $349 suggested retail.
Two cinematic programs that make the most of the new machine’s capabilities are Double Switch (a mystery starring two actors from the Whatever Happened To? file: Corey Haim and Deborah Harry) and Prize Fighter (a boxing program directed by Ron Stein, who choreographed the fights in “Raging Bull” and “Rocky III”).
But perhaps the hottest new title of them all is Virtua Racing, a stunningly realistic driving game for the Sega Genesis. At the Virtual Reality Arcade at the Luxor Hotel, computer nerds and race enthusiasts were lined up four deep for a chance to play.
Meanwhile, a few other contenders drew crowds of their own. Panasonic’s recently released 3DO system was spotted all over the place, and perhaps no other new piece of software showed off that machine’s power as well as C.P.U. Bach (Microprose), a truly delightful program that lets you compose music in the baroque style of Johann Sebastian himself.
Another new machine making noise was the Atari Jaguar, a 64-bit cartridge game system that is on sale on San Francisco and New York but that won’t hit Chicago shelves until next month. It will retail for about $200. We’ll review this system, which soon will have a CD-ROM attachment, in depth in February.
But the dark-horse surprise of the show was the Amiga CD32. This system has the most impressive specifications sheet of any of the new game machines and even has the ability to play FMV (full-motion video). From what we saw, it’s as good a game machine as the Genesis and as good a multimedia machine as the $700 3DO. The CD32 is also much less expensive than the 3DO at $400.
A local company that went to the electronics show for the first time to display its wares was Konami, of Buffalo Grove. Of its five newest titles, the one expected on the shelves first is perhaps also the best: Castlevania Bloodlines, the latest in Konami’s line of fun vampire sagas.
A word of warning, however: Don’t expect to find most of the products mentioned here on your store shelves today. Most of these titles will be released during the next several months.
– The electronics show also attracted its share of celebrities. Spectrum Holobyte hawked its new Star Trek: The Next Generation game with Brent Spiner, who plays Lt. Data on the television show. Look for it on Super NES, IBM PC and 3DO. Meanwhile, Dennis Miller was on hand to hustle his new comedy title, “That’s News to Me,” for the 3DO system (Sanctuary Woods). It’s a tongue-in-cheek roundup of what Miller called “the historical carnage that was 1993.”
– Speaking of carnage, one of the more depressing trends of the show is the video game industry’s continued fascination with violence and mayhem. Titles such as Lethal Enforcers (Konami), Total Carnage (THQ) and Maximum Carnage (Acclaim) speak volumes about about the lack of imagination-and social consciousness-of many firms.
– Another trend on display at the show was the industry’s willingness to pay hefty fees for a license to turn just about any children’s product into a video game. Consequently, here are some upcoming tie-in titles: Biker Mice From Mars (Konami), seaQuest (THQ), Barney’s Hide & Seek (Sega), Ren and Stimpy (Sega), Itchy and Scratchy (Acclaim), and Beavis and Butt-Head (Viacom).
