Latest Haul: Sega Saturn Stunner

This was a busy week for new retro game stuff.  As I mentioned in one of my Sunday posts, I picked up a couple NES games and a Genesis game.  On top of that, a recent eBay purchase arrived — a Sega Saturn Stunner ($9.99 plus shipping, brand new).  That, in and of itself, does not make for a very interesting post.  More importantly, it gives me a chance to tell a story and share some trivia.  And that is what blog posts are all about…

What it comes down to is that I finally dropped the dough on an accessory that I should have bought about 10 years ago.  I’m one of the many that adopted the Saturn when Sega was running its “Three Free Games” promotion.  If you’re not familiar with it, Sega packed in three free games with each Saturn sold during the 1996 holiday season: Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA, and Virtua Cop.  This was a fantastic deal and led to such good sales numbers that they ended up running the promotion for about six months when they originally planned six weeks!

Strangely, the box that the free games came in had a label promoting the deal which stated that the three games were a “$189” value.  $189?  Where the hell did that number come from?  Regardless of how it was promoted, it was very difficult to pass up a Saturn and three of its best games for $199.  So that’s how they hooked me.

But like I said, one of the free games was Virtua Cop.  Unfortunately, the package did not include the light gun that really makes the game what it is.  For one reason or another, I never decided to get one, so the few times that I did play Virtua Cop, I played it with the controller.  I actually got surprisingly good at the game like that, but really, it’s not the way it was meant to be played.

With my decision to start The Retro Review Project, I had the perfect excuse to finally break down and get the Stunner.  After all, how could I possibly give Virtua Cop a proper review without it?  Of course, now that I have the Stunner, that gives me the perfect excuse to get Virtua Cop 2 and House of the Dead… Collecting is a vicious cycle.