Well, I bid on a Pioneer Laseractive laserdisc/game system the other day but didn't get it. So far, it's pretty much two strikes on some of the stuff I'd been looking for.

Wednesday I may go see if I can find a Wii system somewhere, but so far haven't had any luck.

Laseractive... off and on, I've wanted one of these systems. When they came out, they were kind of like the 3DO or Neo Geo. $1000 for the player, $600 for the sega module, $600 for the turbo grafx/duo module, and whatever for the 3-d glasses and karaoke modules. So, it ends up being the most expensive North American video game console ever.

The laseractive, with a sega module, would play sega genesis games and sega cd games, as well as cd+g discs and mega-LDs. The turbo grafx module would play hu-cards, tg16 cd-roms, super cds, and ld-rom2 discs.

Mega-LD and LD-Rom2 discs were actually laserdiscs (ya know, the big shiny things the size of records)... Just like the laserdisc arcades, you basically had two types of gameplay: the dragon's lair/space ace type gameplay, where it kind of looks like you're interacting with a cartoon, by choosing critical moves with just the right timings.

How this worked on a laserdisc arcade is that a very old 8088 cpu/computer would pretty much be connected to a serial port of the laserdisc player, telling it which frame to go to at a certain time, or when the right and/or wrong move was being made.

The next type of laserdisc arcade (chopper command) actually used movie backgrounds with 8-bit overlays. So, you may have a crappy looking space ship flying around, dodging stuff and killing other space ships, but yet have this cool-looking scrolling background.

The difference between the laserdisc arcades and the laseractive is that both the data and video are on the laseractive discs, while on the arcade, the rom was seperate from the video. Also, 8088 is 8-bit (I think) and the sega genesis is 16-bit. So, you've got 16-bit graphics, the added ram of the sega cd system, and the better video quality for background graphics or the cartoony games.

Some of the laseractive games look so cheesy that they kind of remind me of what the colecovision would have been like if they would have released their laserdisc add-on. The colecovision, running at almost 4mhz, should have been fast enough to run every 8-bit laserdisc arcade game out there.

There are very few times when I look back on video game history and hoped that things would have changed for the better. This colecovision add-on could have possibly advanced video in games far ahead of its time, and maybe, just maybe, FMV either wouldn't have happened or would have been at a higher resolution and possibly more cd-rom based systems later on would have even used higher data read rates, to push those higher res vids.