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Service Games: The Rise and Fall of SEGA: Enhanced Edition Paperback – December 18, 2013
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateDecember 18, 2013
- Dimensions6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101494288354
- ISBN-13978-1494288358
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Product details
- Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; First Edition (December 18, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1494288354
- ISBN-13 : 978-1494288358
- Item Weight : 1.41 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,518,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #273 in Business Infrastructure
- #2,984 in Video & Computer Games
- #3,673 in Computer & Video Game Strategy Guides
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There are a few things that will stop me from giving this book a perfect five stars. While some of the information has been updated (I used to read the online version of what was put into this book), some of it wasn't. For example, there's a part of the book that discusses Nintendo and Namco's relationship and how it's strained to this day because of how Nintendo screwed over Namco during the 8-bit era. While this may have been true more than 15 years ago, it is simply not true anymore. For over a decade, Nintendo and Namco have collaborated on a variety of projects, the most recent being the upcoming Smash Bros. game. Also, throughout the 2000's, Namco had brought several games from it's Tales series over to Nintendo hardware and at least two of those games were exclusive to Nintendo hardware for a while. Not to mention that almost 10 years ago, Nintendo and Bandai collaborated into a holdings company, meaning that Namco has been under new leadership, and whatever hate may have been left within the company is now completely irrelevant. So not only does the information seem terribly dated, it also sounds fanboyish, although I do believe that it was an honest oversight and not meant as a jab at Nintendo. Another complaint is the style in how some of the book was written. While I do understand that the source material did come from a fan site and is meant for diehard fans and gamers, some of the writing comes off as fanboyish, but not in a biased sense. It's more like hearing a couple of kids talk about their favorite gaming company rather than a professional book writer talking about their favorite gaming company. While I think the book definitely shouldn't be bland, I just wish there was some sort of balance in how it was written. The third complaint are the images and the formatting of the images. While I'm sure budgeting restrictions prevented the use of color, a lot of the black and white images looks terrible. It's the fault of the people who made the book. It's just that some of those images aren't meant to be in black and white. Also, some of the images are rather pixilated, which seems rather unprofessional in my opinion. The final complaint are about the interviews at the end of the book. It's obvious that the people being interviewed do not speak english as a first language, but don't you think you guys could have done some correcting on that? There are some parts of the interviews that are almost unreadable because of how broken the english is.
While it may sound like the complaints outweigh the compliments, that's far from the truth. This book gets four stars from me because the sheer amount of the information the book contains outweigh a few of the complaints. That being said, if there were ever a future re-release of this book that addressed some of the complaints, I would probably buy it again.
As a proud Sega kid growing up, I was there for the magic of the Genesis and the Game Gear, and even attempted to get our 32x to run with the 1st model Sega. Didn't work! And like many others jumped ship to the PS1 in '97. These are issues discussed in the book. The author is obviously invested in video game history loves Sega.
Highly recommended, fun read.
In a book about 480 pages long, it dismisses about 30 years of Sega history before the Master System in 20 pages. The 8 bit master system gets about another 20 pages. The 16 bit Genesis is discussed separately from the Sega CD, which is discussed separately from the 32x, which cause the reader to bounce back and forth trying to build a timeline of concurrent units. The photos are not in chronological order, with the SNES coming before a Genesis, and the photo of the Genesis with the Power Base Converter is missing the key word "Converter". The author slips into 1st person (his love of Beavis and Butthead), opinions are given as blunt statements without referencing any survey or source ("To the typical American consumer, long inured to a steady stream of high pitched advertising, every video game system was a “Nintendo”), and some facts are blatantly wrong ("–Exidy’s Death Race suffered from a similar public outcry back in the 1980s" - Death Race is a 1976 arcade game ). Some statements are poorly worded ("Turning the SMS’s US fate over to Tonka proved a fatal mistake from which Sega never really recovered" - actually Sega recovered just fine, and if he meant the Master System, you cannot recover market share you never had to begin with, and Mattel, a toy company, had marketed its first video game console just fine). There are glimpses of gold not mined, for instance Kalinske was there at Mattel during the Intellivision years - that's interesting in looking in how he steered Sega of America a few years later, but its not explored. Neither is much about Sega of Japan's inner workings of the execs, or after exploring Sega's set back against Accolade why it was that Accolade had to capitulate to Sega's terms. The author is conflicted on his own opinions within the same paragraph, such as saying a cartridge adapter to the Saturn would have been an expensive and unnecessary oddity for a CD-ROM based console, but in retrospect may have been a good idea - so which is it, the oddity or a good idea, or what about the CD ROM based Sega CD games?
The book does have good information, its just still in Beta. Like having the Table of Contents in the back, its a book you find yourself wanting to interrupt - to expand here, to pin down an opinion there, to clarify this, and tie together that. It doesn't. The harshness of the subheadings, like "Anatomy of a Failure" made me want to use that as the title of my review, but I thought that was too harsh. Maybe a 2nd edition will reorganize, build a list of references, interview more substantial people, oh, and removes comments like "The rest, as they say, is history" .



