I used to have a 32x back in the day, but you know, Sega did what they did, and it didn’t really pan out. I thought the mushroom system was cool tech, but lamented how little value it added to the Genesis. I essentially gave it away.
The library was small, and even the top tier A-list games barely even graze competency, let alone “good”. Most of them play well enough in emulation (there are exceptions, of course), and even Mister has a core for it now.
Still, I unironically enjoy Cosmic Carnage; Doom on 32x was sadly rushed but the result is hilarious for so many reasons (my favorite is the end of the game dumps you into a fake DOS prompt); and I still remember being legit excited to play Mortal Kombat II on the system, and it got a lot of mileage. So it wasn’t all bad.
It may not make a lot of sense to buy it again now for the nostalgia, especially with all the benefits of hindsight I have. Did it anyway.
Now you just need to get the CD and your genesis will be complete!
The holy trinity.
It’s the tower of power
What I don’t understand is why they made the 32x at all. Sega should have instead delayed the Sega CD, made it as powerful as the Saturn (except without the excessive complexity), and then release it sometime around 1994-1995. Then cancel the Saturn entirely and tout the Sega CD as a next gen addon for your current console. Sell the addon for $199. Then maybe they would have stood a chance against the Playstation.
The Sega CD had a purpose. The CD quality sound and FMVs were clearly something that couldn’t be done on a stock SNES or Genesis. But the 32x… I played one in a Funcoland once and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between it and a normal Genesis game. Some extra superfluous scaling effects that the SNES could do natively and the Genesis could do if you were a clever programmer?
Kolibri was the shit. It was like Echo the dolphin but with a humming bird. I still have my 32x…somewhere.
I think owning this back in the day turned me off console gaming completely. Genesis+Sega CD was lots of fun, I even had the memory cartridge to store more saves.
Then, so many different systems released around the same time, and it was hard to rent and read GamePro and hope you’d pick a good game.
Now stack a game genie on top of that, like some cursed totem pole.
Followed by sonic and knuckles, and sonic 3.
Mother of God…
The Tower of Power? Psssh, witness my Fortress of Solitude