Virtua Racing at a 99 percent discount.

[Lastcallhall]

virtua racing was the perfect rental game in its day. high cost of tapes (recent release vhs tapes were often 99 dollars or more) were the reason why video rental stores came to be in the first place.

in the early to mid 90s blockbusters were in virtually every neighborhood, and there were countless mom n pop video stores around the country.

Those didn't last long once Blockbuster reared it's ugly head in my neck of the woods. Off the top of my head, I can think of 4 stores in my immediate area that were affected by the rise in rental chains:

-Video Castle (formerly video visions) - this was the building that Blockbuster bought and took over in the late 80's/early 90's - pretty basic stuff.

-Curtis Mathis - This was more an electronics store, but man, they had the best stuff! There were game and watch games always on display and they rented you NES games as well. The coolest part about this store was that you could preview games for 5 minutes before you rented them so you always knew what game you were getting yourself into.

-Double Feature Video - This was my second home growing up. This place always had the latest games and movies, great prices and a huge selection. I was heartbroken when I rented videos from them on a Friday, and on Monday to return them, there was a closed sign asking everyone to take their rentals to Video Castle, as all of our accounts had transferred there. Video Castle became Blockbuster a few mere weeks later. I always suspected that Blockbuster had bought the building beforehand, along with DFV, and was testing out the waters before launching their name brand.

-Video King - This was right around the corner from DFV, and was usually my last resort in getting a game if the other three stores did not have the title I was looking for. It was smaller than of the other stores, but they had some pretty obscure stuff like imports, and bootlegs, IIRC.

A big part of my childhood was taken away once BB came into New Mexico. I know it's a little messed up, but I break out into a huge grin when I drive by the building where the now boarded up Blockbuster once stood. Karma's a bitch.

[kool kitty89]

Games were pushing $70 back then and the SVP chip ran a premium. $100 makes sense to me.

Several other games (on SNES and Genesis) went closer to $100, some went up to $100 before VR too (which actually would have been more expensive due to inflation) and many of those examples had no added hardware on-cart (unless you count battery+SRAM).
Almost none of such games stayed near that price for long, mostly just near launch. (Phantasy Star IV launched for $100 and DKC was expensive at launch too)

Given that VR used double the ROM (2MB/16Mbit) of contemporary Super FX games (and 2 MB SFX2 games wouldn't appear until 1995), that's more perspective for things. (plus the Super FX had been in production longer, so economies of scale would be a factor too -the more you make, the cheaper it is)

SVP was meant for polygons. DOom SVP would have sucked.

One of S16's tech heads will contradict me with a 10 page post.

It's not meant for just polygons . . . it's a general purpose DSP coprocessor that could assist in a number of other things. (scaling/rotation, ray-casting, texture effects, sound mixing/decompression, graphics decompression, etc) It's not a CPU, so it can't do some of the things the 32x's SH2s can do on their own (many things would need 68k assistance by comparison), but it's actually faster at some things than an SH2. (not to mention a hell of a lot cheaper)

Whether or not Doom would have sucked is a separate matter though. (and depends on your definition of "sucks" . . . like significantly smoother gameplay and higher resolution than on the SNES, but worse color -grainy and/or posterized) The Sega CD could potentially have handled a reasonable conversion of Doom as well though. (neither would be true ports like the 32x/PSX/Jaguar/3DO/etc, but optimized remakes of the game like the SNES)