Why I Love The 3DO

Back when I was a young cunt, I had a Mega Drive. I loved my Mega Drive. I would while away the hours playing Zero Tolerance and FIFA. Then my life was changed. 

Christmas 1994, I awoke. I had on my special cunty pyjamas (Nothing), my Dad had his big cunt pyjamas on (Also nothing), he unlocked my room and carried me downstairs. It was then that my world was opened up to a cavalcade of kind of 3D awesome-ness. My present for that year, besides a dead hooker, was a Panasonic 3DO Interactive Multiplayer.

In case you have never heard of this, there is a helpful link here and if you can't be arsed to read that, here's a tl;dr: It was kind of like a Playstation, but three times the price, it didn't look as cool and it had one tenth the number of games. 

Even with all of those faults, I loved mine. Here is why.

3D-Oh My God, People Actually Played This?

Back in the 1994, the 3DO had a lot going for it. It was a ground-breaking machine. It was the first 32 bit machine, back when how many bits a console had fucking mattered. It had on-board memory to save games. It had advanced 3D graphics. It had stereo sound. It did only have one controller port, but extra pads plugged into the previous one, like weird nesting dolls or something. This meant you could have up to 8 player in FIFA, and that was in 1995! 

It wasn't a shit machine but failed in the market for a simple reason. It was over priced. £500 is a lot for a console now, let alone in 1995. Between that and a lack of quality titles, it gave way for it's competitor to smash it in sales; The Sony Playstation.

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The Playstation was cheaper to buy, had more games and had a dedicated team working on it's design. Not so true of the 3DO. There were hardware and software changes almost up until day of release, meaning that there was only one title released on day one. I don't want to knock the machine that I truly loved, but one game on day of release, and you want me to pay 500 notes for it? You can suck on my fucking cock. All of this helped to kill the 3DO.

It did well in Japan though. Kind of. Well okay, it just became a receptacle for fuck loads of porno laser discs.

FIFA

I'm not like Joe and Gash. I'm more of a cunt, hence, I love football. I played FIFA a lot, and still do. I love it. I know it is the same every year, I just don't give a fuck. This was the very first FIFA game, FIFA International Soccer, and it was class. In the words of my crazy elderly Uncle “Fucking hell, I didn't know there was a match on. Come and sit on Uncle Tone's lap”.

Image Credit: emuparadise.me

To my 9 year old eyes, it looked real. I had never seen anything like it in my life, mainly because I wasn't allowed to watch football. Instead, I was made to imagine it for six hours a day instead. It played like a dream, the players moved where I wanted them to, they passed where I wanted them to. It was everything I ever wanted from a football video game and it was only on the 3DO. To me, they didn't need to release anything else. They did though.

Road Rash

Road Rash was the game that first made me aware of Electronic Arts. Before Road Rash, I thought motorbikes were just for gay dudes who liked wearing leather. After Road Rash, I realised they were for people who liked fighting AND bumming. 

I first discovered Road Rash on the Mega Drive. It was exhilarating. It was fast. Plus, I got to smash people in the face with a chain while riding a motorbike. What else was there to love? Well, the 3DO version ramped it up. The graphics were better, the music was amazing, it was faster and it blew my mind.

Image Credit: trustedreviews.com

It's hard to describe the quality of this game because it has not stood the test of time. By today's standards, it looks shit, it is slow and unresponsive. The only thing that is still awesome is the music. At that moment in time though, around late 1994 to early 1995, it was the fucking dogs bollocks. I played it recently and wished I hadn't. Before I did that, I had skewed memories. The graphics seemed cleaner, it seemed faster and it felt more responsive. Sometimes, when I am really drunk, that is how I still remember it.

The Need For Speed

Before it became some kind of ridiculous Burnout clone, The Need for Speed was a balls out street racing game. It had the greatest supercars of the time, like the Lamborghini Diablo. And much like shagging, it was fucking awesome. When you play it now, the menu system seems stupid. At the time, the menu seemed stupid. The FMV was cheesy (Remember that? What happened to that? Oh yeah, it was shit), but fuck all of that.

Image Credit: youtube.com/watch?v=baAgstBpTNQ

When you got into the game, it was like actually stealing the neighbours Porsche again. It had cutting edge graphics, it had realistic sounds and the cars drove as they did in real life. It was the best racing game there was. I spent hours playing this and I don't think anything can describe the feeling I felt the first time I played it. Mainly because I had watched my Dad play it for a combined 3450 hours before I got a chance to play it. It was amazing. Eight cars was a lot 20 years ago, you know.

The Hoarde

This is the one that you Playstation babies probably never played, since it was only ported to the Saturn. At the time it was one of the weirdest fucking things I had ever seen. You built traps and farmed your land. Then, when the siren went off, you had to fight off a horde of monsters. It ruled.

Image Credit: ibiblio.org

It did have one strange feature though, to save the game, it would delete other games save files to make room for it. That was fucking annoying. Besides that, I can't do this game justice in mere words. Find an emulator, find the PC version, do whatever you need to do to fucking play it. It really was awesome.

In The End...

I haven't done a brilliant job of bigging up the 3DO. It's a lot harder than it was for Mike with the Dreamcast a little while ago. The Dreamcast is a lot more recent, the games didn't suffer from graphic degrading, which is something I just made up, where graphics which used to look sweet, but now look wank) as much as the 3DO titles. The Dreamcast also had a lot more titles, what with Sega being much bigger players in the market than 3DO. 

Image Credit: 3dotoday.com

It has its place though. Without it we might never have got to where we are today. Just like the Virtual Boy, the Jaguar and the CD-i before it, it is consigned to the bins of consoles that weren't treated right. Consoles that could have been legendary, but just didn't get the right support. In my house though, it is still important. It stays in its drawer. It rarely comes out, but when it does, it is ready and waiting. With games like Road Rash and The Need for Speed, the 3DO is ready to remind me how fucking awesome it is to be 9 and to get a new console for Christmas.

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By The Cunt
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A hidden face of the crew, The Cunt is main coder for Foul Entertainment games. He is currently documenting the progress of our game, Foul Fantasy, in his dev blogs.

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