Late-gen Japanese games are way out of whack on the supply/demand ratio, and it's pretty much always been like that. The system was only
really successful in the west, and when you consider that the reverse was more or less true for the Saturn, the scarcity of Mega Drive games from that overlapping period between the two consoles makes a lot of sense.
I remember visiting Akihabara in 2004 and being surprised to even see loose American Genesis carts and things like Nomads going for some pretty hefty prices in stores (compared to their domestic value at the same time, anyway). Had I been better informed beforehand, I'd have brought some of my own collection to offload there myself.
Edit: So, as you may have seen on here before, i do Sega reviews on youtube, and im currently working on fiishing up Smash TV. However, im getting very ambitious with my next video, a Sega Channel retrospective. I truly believe this to be be most interesting, cool, and possibly important thing Sega created during its golden age. However, this is also the one with the least amount of info out there, due to the volitale nature of the service. Well i've looked over old threads at all the major Sega sites, videos, and whatever i could find, id like to dig deeper!
So, thats where im coming to you guys. Even if its just memories of the service, every bit of info is helpful in truly painting how awesome the service is. Even if its just second-hand evidence of unique content you remeber playing, id love to hear about it. I've heard rumors that a couple games that were on the service that exist in prototype form are owned by someone, but undumped. Im not looking for them to dump or do anything but possibly talk about the game in some form! Im also going to try and track down anyone who might have worked on it at Sega, though thats gonna be a longshor. So, besides just talking about how awesome the service was and our memories of it, im putting this up as a call for help, to make a video that is worthy of the great Sega Channel!
As far as exclusives went, I remember playing a lot of Wily Wars, Maui Mallard, and a little bit of Alien Soldier. I remember seeing Pulseman but I don't think I ever actually played it through the service.
A lot of retrospectives on the service state that you couldn't save progress on games. That wasn't exactly true. As long as you kept playing the same game, your save data would remain intact even after powering off the system. It was only when you downloaded a different game that the old save data had the chance to be wiped. This might have varied between vendors, though; I know there were a few different models of the adapter, each probably distributed by different cable companies.
Super Street Fighter II had an interesting implementation on Sega Channel. IIRC, the Sega Channel adapter could only store 4MB ROMs. SSF2 was a 5MB game, the highest capacity of any Genesis game if I'm not mistaken. To get the game to work on the service, two separate versions were made, each with a different subset of the roster. Some characters were only available on Version A; others only on Version B. If you wanted to switch between them, you'd have to back out to the menu and download the other version of the game.
The Test Drive area let you play games several weeks or maybe even months before they hit stores. Often times, you'd have access to the entire final version of the game but were limited to only 30 minutes of playtime before the game would kick you out to the Sega Channel menu. I remember getting
really efficient at the early levels of Vectorman, seeing how far I could actually make it within that time limit. I'd be curious to know if there were ever legit beta versions available here that differed from the retail games in some way or another.
I wish I would have been prudent enough to tape some of this stuff back in the day for posterity, heh.
