The Disappoint of No Return

Remember that Genesis Flashback HD I mentioned in the last post? It arrived on my front door a few days ago, and oh boy does this thing live down to its unflattering reputation. To better illustrate the Flashback's failings, let's say this is a real Sega Genesis.

You know him, you love him, and while he sometimes comes up short next to his contemporaries, he can seriously impress you when he puts forth the effort. Now here's the Genesis Flashback HD.

It's a sad, hastily thrown together mockery of the real thing, but the worst part is that it doesn't even know it's a fraud. It tries to reach the same heights as its predecessor, only to fall flat on its face every time.

So what specifically is wrong with the Genesis Flashback HD? The untrained eye may not notice much. After all, it looks just like a Sega Genesis; a scale model of the original system with a real cartridge slot and two controller ports. If you've got any Genesis carts or joypads left over from the early 1990s, they'll work on this machine. It's also got an HDMI port for your modern television set, and two wireless controllers for added convenience.

That is all I can offer in the system's defense.

The big issue with the Genesis Flashback HD isn't so much the controllers (they're competent clones of the six button Sega Arcade Pad, with an extra button that gives you quick access to the system menu) or the menu (it's functional if a little clumsy, and the blurbs for each game are fun to read). It's the emulation that sinks this leaky ship. At best, games run almost as quickly as they do on a real Genesis, with barely noticeable but nevertheless annoying frame skips that serve as a constant, gnawing reminder that something is amiss. 

Sonic and Knuckles runs better, but the game
crashed on me during this battle with Robotnik.
All three of us were wearing this expression
after it happened.

At worst, the shabby emulation ruins the experience... there's slowdown in Sonic 2 that wasn't there on a real Genesis, while fights in Mortal Kombat 3 move too quickly, making it difficult to time combos that used to come naturally. These are the headliners for the system... the Mortal Kombat logo and Sonic are even prominently displayed on the front of the box! AtGames couldn't afford to screw up the emulation for these two titles, yet somehow, they did it anyway.

It gets worse. While it's possible to hack the Genesis Flashback HD to play more games, it takes an obscene amount of work, and is rarely worth the trouble. You'll first have to remove seven deeply recessed screws, most hidden under rubber feet or stickers, take the cover off the system, remove four more screws from the main board, then connect a mini USB cable to it. Wait, you're not done. Next you'll need to run an Android diagnostic tool on your computer, connect the Flashback to it, then type in a series of commands to redirect access from the machine's system files to an SD card soldered into the system. 

The innards of the Genesis Flashback HD.
Who knew something that small could be
that big of a pain in the ass?

Once you've done all that, you can add all the Genesis games you please to the Flashback, BUT you'll also have to edit an INI file to let the system know they exist, AND you'll have to include an image of each game's box art in a specific resolution. Oh yeah, and if you want to add more games later or remove ones that don't run so well, you'll have to tear the system apart again to reach the USB port. You could probably add an extension cable, drill a hole in the back of the system, and hot glue it there with the rest of the connectors, but uh... shouldn't that have been AtGames' job?

Even after you've jumped through all the necessary hoops to install games on your Flashback, you might not actually be playing them. I tested nine personal favorites, some with hacks like color enhancements and improved scripts. Five of these games worked, albeit in a frame-dropping, barely passable Flashback kind of way. The other four had serious problems which made them difficult or impossible to play. It lost track of where the background should be in Contra: Hard Corps, refused to respond to controller input in Samurai Shodown, and wouldn't play Snow Bros. at all, jumping back to the menu the moment it was started. Shadow of the Beast was probably the worst of the bunch... sure, it would start, but it quickly became a tragicomic spectacle of glitchy backgrounds and absent collision detection. After the lead character fell through the floor and several stories below it, the emulator just gave up and retreated to the menu.

There's a door somewhere in that mess.

There comes a point where you stop being disappointed in someone's failure and just expect it as an inevitability. AtGames has gone well past that point, demonstrating that they're incapable of making a Sega Genesis that meets the standards of the original console released nearly thirty years ago. Their previous failures were the result of negligence, but the Genesis Flashback HD was supposed to be a fresh start for AtGames, with more capable hardware and an HDMI port better suited to 21st century television sets.

Yet it's still disappointing. It's disappointing in a different way than the old Firecore systems with their morbidly depressed sound chips, but it's disappointing all the same, leading me to the unfortunate conclusion that AtGames won't make a proper Genesis because it simply can't. If the company hasn't gotten it right after ten years and a total hardware redesign, it just ain't gonna happen.