Can confirm, Road Rash was mindblowing at the time.
This was the first game that I remember playing for the 3DO, and it was really impressive for the time. But then again, the only games that I ever played for the 3DO on actual hardware were Gex! , Road Rash and Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed (yes, the original Road & Track magazine tie-in) . I never owned a 3DO, but I knew someone who actually did. I always thought Wing Commander 3 looked pretty good on the system too.
The 3DO and the Atari Jaguar were the two systems that got the ball rolling on fifth gen consoles. Though 3DO actually did make the claim that it was part of the 4th gen, so when they released the M2, they could be a generation ahead of everyone else. But it was an early 5th generation 32-bit machine. They launched at $700- $800 dollars Canadian, when they were new. They were expensive. Meanwhile, I never once saw an Atari Jaguar at retail anywhere in Canada. The distribution for the Jag must have been really bad, as it only sold like 200K units. While the 3DO sold like 2+ million. I have never seen an Atari Jaguar in person.
The 3DO really had its own identity as a console, as Trip really pushed its' FMV capabilities. It came out during the apex of the multi-media fad. So you saw a lot of live action actors and videos associated with the advertising. A fad that would die out by 1996.
The system does have some interesting capabilities with the Maddam and Cleo co-processors. I guess one of them was essentially an animation engine that could do a lot of things with animated sprites as well as render quadrilateral polygons. The machine could display FMV on any layer and even display video in polygons. Which was a specialty of the machine. But it was all a bit hamstrung by the lower clocked CPU.
The 3DO could handle transparencies and blend modes really well. This is something that it does better than the Saturn in many respects.
This example here, this game Offworld Interceptor (not the greatest of games), does have a better framerate on the Saturn, but it is using mesh transparencies, while the 3DO is actually displaying real transparencies as well as glowing (full bright) lasers and other effects:
Or Space Hulk, where the 3DO game has these additional transparent layers , I like how the radar takes up the whole screen and shrinks down. Of course the Saturn game runs faster. Space Hulk was made for the 3DO first and ported to the other consoles after. Same with Offworlrd Interceptor:
Interesting attempt at a console. But once that Playstation price was announced at E3, even Trip knew the 3DO was done. But they did have the M2 in the works to replaceit.. before that was cancelled.
