Consoles From The Eighth Dimension!

What's an M2? Is it better than the normal 3DO?
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The M2 was an upgrade/sequel to the 3DO. The system was canceled very late in development, so a lot of pre-production material exists -- advertising, dev kits, prototype systems and games and so forth.

3DO made some good games for the XBox and PS2, I guess they went the way of SEGA at first, but they seem to be chapter eleven right now.
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The 3DO that developed Army Men games is a shell of the original company. Trip Hawkins left Electronic Arts to create the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, a console that he pitched as a replacement for the VCR.

That never happened, but the console itself was top of the line during its brief existence. Because of Hawkins' extensive ties with the industry (and especially EA) the 3DO ended up having a lot of neato exclusive games... like Super Wing Commander (and an amazingly interesting port of Wing Commander III).
 
I know just one person who had the 3DO. I only saw it once, but never played it. The guy just showed a couple of games and some kind of demo, I think of Batman TAS.
 
The 3DO Multiplayer itself actually had some really excellent exclusives right up until total irrelevance, and right up until the M2 ceased existing (basically) there was reasonably aggressive advertising for it. I recall issues of EGM with like 15 pages with weird M2 sidebar ads on them.

I also vividly remember the M2 tech preview that made it into every magazine around the same time the PlayStation was still trying to establish itself, pictures of link fences, a cow, and a kung-fu dinosaur fill my mind. The power of the machine at the time was absurd, something like 1,000,000 textured polygons/sec compared to the PSX's 180k (if I remember right,) and a 100 megapixel fillrate, and hardware features like texture filtering.

And there would have been an M2 plug-in module that sat under the FZ-10 like one of the versions of the SegaCD add-on.

At the same time, 3DO had a pretty compelling propaganda campaign (We got it - they don't) that was mostly true, but wasn't ever really going to make the 3DO competitive. Captain Quazar was an excellent game that nobody else had, but it wasn't going to sell more 3DOs than PSXs.

Then at some point, it just all stopped existing. The 3DO Company became something entirely different, M2 never materialized in its intended form, and everyone forgot all of that. Now the association is with Army Men, rather than Gex and Wing Commander 3. Lame.
 
Didn't the 3DO company also publish some of the Might&Magic games too?

OK, so WC3 was released for the PC, 3DO and PSX systems, and they were going to make another WC3 port for the M2?
 
OK, so WC3 was released for the PC, 3DO and PSX systems, and they were going to make another WC3 port for the M2?
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Yes, and that's not all.

There were also released ports of Wing Commander III for the Macintosh and for Windows 95 (released as part of Kilrathi Saga in the US, but alone in Japan).

Ports for the 3DO M2 and the Sega Saturn were cancelled during development. We don't know how far along the M2 version was, but the Saturn release was close to finished -- it was announced, advertised and shown at E3.

Of all these ports, the 3DO version is the most interesting -- because they redesigned the gameplay to be fun on a console. Instead of trying to make dogfights act exactly like they did on the PC, they changed the engine so it was a little more 'arcade' like. All the mission layouts were completely changed, often for the better... for example, when the Victory is attacked by Kilrathi in Tamayo, the enemy force includes things like destroyers.

There's also all kinds of neat additions and changes... the cutscenes have been much celebrated, but there's different ships and weapons, too. The Confederation gets a 'Vampire' missile which makes holes in enemy shields, and the Kilrathi defend their planet with heavily armored 'gun platforms'. Things like the "triangle" Kilrathi transports seen in Wing Commander IV cutscenes show up in-flight.

Edit: Also, the 3DO version of WC3 was designed so that it could take advantage of a special controller... a version of the CH Flightstick released for the 3DO. If you can get your hands on one, flying on the console is exactly as easy as it is on the PC.
 
I'm definitely considering getting that version then, it's pretty cheap on ebay.

What about WC 3 and 4 PSX, are they worth getting? (other than the sheer collection value).

EDIT: Oh, and more importantly, do the PSX ports work with the Dual Shock? I'd love to play them with the analog stick.
 
The PlayStation ports are nowhere near as impressive as the 3DO release. They do have (most of) the extra cutscenes, and the video looks better in WC3... but they also try very, very hard to be identical to the PC release, and suffer for it.

Note that the suffer only in comparison, though -- they're still great games and certainly are worth a look if you have a PlayStation. They're readily available, and thanks to Sony's dedication to supporting their previous systems, you'll probably still be able to play them in 2670 when the Playstation 308 comes out.

Wing Commander IV is something of an oddity, because two discs worth of video are cut out -- that means things like the Circe series are removed completely from the game. At the same time, it drifts away from the 'just like the PC' feeling of WC3... the cockpit interface feels a little different, and the controls are a lot better.

Wing Commander IV (I believe) supports the Dual Shock -- that's the analog stick? I get thee all terribly confused. In my mind, analog should mean digital and vice versa. Whatever the case, WC4 supports the nice later system and WC3 doesn't.

WC4 actually has a number of controller profiles, including one for the impressive giant Sony flightstick/throttle system that was put out in 1997. I forget the exact name, but it's a giant laptop sized controller with two parallel joysticks designed for flight games... I managed to pick one up on eBay, and it absolutely makes the WC4 PSX experience. The game suddenly becomes incredibly intuitive once you're using it.

Edit: Here it is! At, ugh, the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Flightstick
 
I'm not looking for a 3DO console, it would probably cost me too much...
I'll try my luck with FreeDO. And I already have SWC 3DO, ehehehe
 
I actually played a VTech today. My little cousin was playing it while everyone was conversing in the living room during our Thanksgiving lunch, so naturally I gravitated towards the closest thing to video games available. :p
 
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