Sega's Forgotten Motion Game: Sega Pods - Rerez

Sega is a company known for making tons of amazing video games and some of the best video game consoles ever. But in 1994 they wanted to do something different. They didn't just want to make another video game console or some random video game. Instead they decided to make a standalone system that completely operated by motion control. It's a little crazy but it does exist. Ladies and gentlemen this is Sega Pods.

This system looks like it's from the future or at least what somebody in the ‘90s would assume the future would have looked like. But really what this looks like is something aliens made if aliens wanted to make a game system. Now what you're looking at here is essentially a Simon clone but it's a little bit more complex than that. These little domes actually have sensors just beneath them and the sensors register your hand movements. Now this makes the gameplay a little bit more hectic because unlike a button push motion sensing just isn't that accurate. But even taking that into consideration this system registers your hand movements pretty well. Sega Pods has kind of an interesting feature. Now this system can be run by batteries alone which is fine but if you run it by batteries you can only activate one pod at a time which kind of sucks because it just isn't that fun to play. So what you have to do is you have to plug this thing up with an AC adapter off of a Sega Genesis model 2 or a Game Gear. And once you do that two pods can be activated and the games become a lot more fun and a lot more varied and interesting.

There are seven games in total on the system that are pretty much a variation on Simon. Each one basically adding a little bit more difficulty and there's even one that's kind of a two-player mode which is pretty interesting. But what makes this system really unique is the fact that unlike Simon which is limited to four buttons Sega pods has the ability to register different ranges of height. So with three pods with two different ranges of input you're pretty much looking at a device that's kind of like a six button Simon. An issue you might have while playing a motion control game like this is having the pods too close together. If they're too close together you have a very good chance of activating one of the pods by accident. So what they did was they designed the pods to be separated. A tiny little wire attaches to the center base and moves out to the left and right this way you can have a really good game without any worry about hitting the other pods by accident. Like I said there are seven different game modes on this system but unfortunately a couple of the games just aren't that good. The first game is just a free play mode so you can kind of get used to how these motion controls actually work. The next three games are just called lightning one, two and three and they're just progressively harder versions of Simon. And the rest of the modes are comprised of sequence matching and reflex gameplay which is essentially one of the pods lighting up and you having to move your hand over top of it to turn off the light as quick as you can. If you don't turn off the lights fast enough you lose but unfortunately there's only 59 points you can get in total and once you've gotten that there's no real incentive to go back and try and beat your score. Because well you can't. There's also some multiplayer modes on this thing but to be totally honest they're kind of boring because they just take the single-player aspects and just morph them a little bit. Each one of these game settings has an easy and a hard difficulty setting but I found personally that the hard mode was just kind of impossible to play. See the motion sensing thing on here can detect how high your hand is or how low your hand is but the sensing and the difference between your high and low movements just isn't accurate enough. The sensors seem to have no problem registering movement but when it came to actually sensing the height well sometimes it just didn't know how high or how low that movement was. So if you just set everything easy it just registers everything as a movement and it plays a lot better that way.

When I got this in the mail I noticed that two of the pods didn't work so I had to open it up and underneath when you actually open up the little bottom part there a little light bulb tray comes out and in there are actual light bulbs you can replace just in case one of them burnt out. See stupid me I thought this thing ran on LEDs but it didn't so it takes a lot of energy just to turn those light bulbs on and that's probably why they have to have an AC adapter plugged in just so two of these pods can work at any given moment. When I first turned on the system the speakers were really, really loud and the sound effects they chose for the pods are kind of annoying after a while. The only way you can turn down the volume is to hold your hands over all three of the pods and wait a couple seconds once you've done that you'll hear an audible note and the volume has been lowered. In fact pretty much everything you want to do on the system can be operated completely by motion controls. If you want to reset the system and go back to the main menu and hear all the games you just hold your hand over the center pod and just wait a couple seconds but if you ever want to turn it on or turn it off there's a switch at the back. That's the only time you ever actually have to physically touch this thing. Sega Pods is a really strange system and it's unlike anything Sega had ever made and I got to be honest I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. But once you're playing some of those modes like Simon it just becomes really addictive and really fast and well I really enjoyed myself. I know this is some kind of cheap knock off toy for kids but it's something unlike anything else you would see from Sega. And using motion controls in 1994 would have been really, really cool. So if you're a big fan of Sega stuff and you want to find something unique in their catalogue this is by far the most interesting thing they ever made in the ‘90s. Except for the Dreamcast because that one's kind of better.