#laseractive

Melon Brains (Multimedia Creators Network/Pioneer, LaserActive, 1995)

'Ghost Rush!'

[LASERACTIVE] [JAPAN] [MAGAZINE] [1994]

"The player, tasked with exploring a haunted mansion at the edge of town, must hunt down and trap as many ghosts as they can. Each floor of the mansion is randomly generated each playthrough. In between floors, the player has the opportunity to buy new items and check their rank. Graphics are presented using laserdisc FMV, using a mixture of clay animation and CGI." ~MobyGames

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The Pioneer LaserActive is a really, really weird console.

It's kinda an anti-console, a non-console that you plug consoles into. Out of the box it's "just" a Laserdisc player.

Fuck. The tumblr editor ate most of this post (ctrl-Z is a bad idea), so I'm just gonna summarize, as I've lost motivation, sorry.

Basically it was a laserdisc player that could be upgraded to playing Sega Genesis and Turbografx-16 games, and optionally play a few games off laserdiscs. There were only like 20 games made for the laserdisc mode, and most of those weren't released outside of japan.

It cost like 970$ for the base console, in 1993 dollars, and you needed to pay another 600$ to add on game capabilities. You could literally buy another laserdisc player and a separate console for far cheaper. I don't know how Pioneer ever thought this would sell. And it didn't.

In the modern day, the laserdisc-exclusive games are rare because no one bought them. The consoles are all broken because of a capacitor issue, and that's on top of the issues that all laserdisc players have with belts going bad. I have a friend who has made quite good money repairing these for collectors, because they're rare and worth spending the money to have them repaired.

I love Pioneer for all they did to keep the laserdisc format alive after most other companies had dropped it, but this was not one of their best ideas. This was never going to be a winner, so I don't really get why they threw money at this thing. We weren't THAT hungry for Dragon's Lair at home, and Dragon's Lair never even came out for it.

But it does get some points for having one of the best game ideas we missed out on: At one point, Sega prototyped an LD-ROM version of Myst.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

It’s always great to meet other lesbians who love Glomgold. We gotta make a club!!