The Mega CD was, strictly speaking, not a console at all. It was a fairly cumbersome attachment for the Mega Drive that was released in Britain in 1993. It was notable however, not only because it was larger than the bloody console it was an addition to, but also because it was the first mainstream video game system to boast CD storage, and therefore… offer deeper and more graphically intense games than ever before. Well, that was the theory anyway.

My Sega love was intense and unshakeable at this time, but the Mega CD was the turning point for me. Games like old-fashioned arcade-shooter Sol-Feace didn’t dazzle me the way those on my prevous consoles had. Perhaps, at seventeen years old, I had already become jaded with video games. They were yesterday’s news for me and I had started to think about girls and wonder why they only looked at me when they wanted something from a high shelf in the supermarket.

Don’t misunderstand me: I enjoyed my time with the Mega CD, but I only owned a few games for the machine. Cobra Command was one of those games. I actuallly think it came bundled in with the system, because it’s not the kind of thing I would have bought. It’s an on-rails shooter in which you pilot a helicopter, so you really just have to point and press the button before the bad guys get you. At the time it was one of the best looking things out there. It looked fantastic, and I had a lot of fun with it.

The most controversial game in the life cycle of the Mega CD was Night Trap. It utilised full motion video (albeit grainy and sometimes indistinct) at a time when that fad was beginning to take over. I had the game, and the outcry was (typically) overblown and unjustified, but the notoriety probably helped to sell about half of the peripherals that were bought. The most frightening thing about it was the fact that Dana Plato of Diff’rent Strokes fame was the protagonist.

I also remember having Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and Sewer Shark. Both of those were also FMV-heavy games. It seemed like every second title back then was jumping on that particular bandwagon. It’s a form of entertainment that has largely disappeared, but for those couple of years at the start of the nineties, it was all the rage. It wasn’t my thing though, and I couldn’t get into it.

For that reason… the Mega CD was the last Sega system I ever purchased.