Meet Sega’s New Console…Wait, What?

Posted by Josh Harrison , Feb, 2010 @ 8:22 am

Lots of people have an evil twin. Superman’s got Bizarro. The Sentry has the Void. Even literary classics like The Man in the Iron Mask engage with the persistent trope of sinister doubles. Now Sega’s trying its hand at some creative cloning with a very familiar new console. See if you can spot the impostor:

That’s right. Sega hasn’t had a real console since the deceased Dreamcast, but here we are in 2010 and the company has stormed back into the console wars with a worthy rival to Nintendo’s dominating Wii system. Well, not really, but it is a home console (in a way) and it does have motion control (after a fashion).

The Sega Zone Wireless Gaming Console is one of those silly retro all-in-one deals, packed as it is with twenty classic Genesis titles including Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd and Golden Axe. The interesting thing to note is that an additional thirty games are new, and sixteen of those are motion-controlled with the two packed-in remotes.

To be fair, the games sound a bit rubbish. Just a bunch of sports games like golf, tennis and darts. Basically. Sega made one of those cheap plug-and-play systems, but tossed in a Wii rip-off while it was doing so. You can’t even load new games into thing. Worth fifty quid? You decide.

I’m torn, Geekologists. On the one hand this looks like nothing more than a bargain-bin waste of space–a “console” for those unwilling or unable to commit to actual games. It’s the kind of video game console you’d find at a pharmacy, or in one of those annoying little kiosks in the aisle of your local mall. And yet, it’s got official backing. It’s got the Sega name behind it! The last system to carry that distinctive seal–the Dreamcast–changed gaming forever. Sonic, Golden Axe, Alex Kidd–these are classics, and it’s wonderful to know that a new audience–made up, most likely, of ‘non-gamers’–will be experiencing them for the first time. Still, cheap motion controls? Tennis? Darts? Really?

What do you guys think of the Zone? Shameless cash-in or stepping stone on the path to a new Sega ascendancy?

[Via Destructoid]

[Image Source: blogs.terra.es]

Tags: motion control, Nintendo, Sega, Sega Zone, Sonic the Hedgehog, system wars, Wii