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Taking it's main inspiration from the MegaJet's popularity, Sega of America decided to create and release it's own portable Nomad. Codenamed Venus, the Nomad became the first fully-operational handheld by Sega since the Game Gear.
The Nomad came equipped with a somewhat impressive set of features, most notably it's 3.25 inch LCD screen (Full colour LCDs were in their infancy during this period, despite LCD having been developed for some time) and had the battery slot which used six AA batteries (The same as the Game Gear). You could also purchase an A/V cable and connect the Nomad to a television, the same way you had to with MegaJet, to allow it to be a more versatile games machine and the Nomad and TV acted like seperate screens to allow the Nomad player their own line of vision. In keeping with the MegaJet inspiration, there is also a secondary controller port on the bottom of the Nomad to allow for multiplayer gaming. The Nomad did, however, have Sega's repeated fatal flaw. Battery life. Despite Sega's portable systems being much higher in technical quality than Nintendo's Gameboy series, the smaller and longer living Gameboy played more to the travel-laden gamers (Which was really it's purpose as a portable games machine). Using six batteries, you could play for up to 30 minutes before the batteries died. That's a huge amount of cost (Roughly £8 per half hour) for such a short space of gaming time. Adding to this problem were the development of rechargeable AA batteries, and the power differences (Ni-Cd gives 1.2V and Nomad preferably required the 1.5V of alkaline power. Ni-Cd batteries need to be bled empty before recharging, and the more advanced Ni-MH AA batteries were not yet developed). The Nomad was compatible with all the Mega Drive additions, such as Mega CD, 32X and Power Base Convertor (For Master System gaming), they all required special third party rigging in order to be used, or cutting apart the shapes of add-ons/Nomad themselves so they fit. Not alot of people were up for chopping into their system, especially at $180, and as such these capabilities were rarely taken advantage of. Despite lowering in price by about $100 by it's death, the interest in N64, Playstation and Saturn all eclipsed the Nomad's efforts, and any want for it as a portable system went down the drain when people discovered it's incredibly low battery life. A shame, because the Nomad was quite unique in itself, but short-sightedness on Sega's part (again) on the issue of battery life killed it. |
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