Black Falcon Games

Final update!  This includes summaries for the last ten games, plus one for a game I just got last week, making for eleven total.  It’s nice to get this done, though playing all these Genesis games again has been great fun.  I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I’m leaning towards something about PC platformers…

Games covered in this update
—
Space Invaders ’91
Winter Challenge
Wiz ‘n’ Liz
Wolfchild
Wonder Boy in Monster World
[Monster World IV]
World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck
X-Men
Zero Tolerance
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
Zoom!

Space Invaders ’91 – 1 player.  This good but simple shooter and early-ish Genesis release is one of Taito’s many follow-ups to the original Space Invaders.  It may say “’91” in the title, but the original Japanese version released in 1990.  Oddly, unlike most other classic franchises which keep coming back, Taito has decided to make pretty much all Space Invaders games static-screen shooters.  Why not even one scrolling one?  That does make this game stand out a bit from most Genesis shmups, though, so that’s okay; it’s just a bit odd.  It has little depth or variety, but this is a fun little game.  This game has basic graphics, simple gameplay, and absolutely no options of any kind, but it is plenty of fun.  You just move left and right, and shoot up while dodging enemy fire.  The enemies can move a bit more to the left and right than you can, frustratingly, so dodging can be difficult sometimes; this is my only issue with the games’ design.  The controls are very responsive, though, thankfully.  There are a full 18 stages, each made up of two waves, so you’ve got to get through 36 waves of enemies to win, which is a good number.  Most stages have a flat plane you move left and right on, but a few have angled pits and such.  I wish there were more of those, as your fire shoots diagonally when you’re on a slope; nice touch.  Each enemy type shoots a different kind of shot at you, and they slowly move downwards.  If one reaches the bottom you lose, time to use a continue, if you have any left — you only get 5 hits per continue and 3 continues.  If you hit the faster enemies which move by at the top of the screen a powerup may drop.  You’ll want these, as they will give you powers such as a shield, homing missiles, a shot which clears an entire row, and more.  Very useful stuff.  The game has graphics as basic as its gameplay.  This game looks dated visually and doesn’t get much out of the hardware.  You’ve just got sprites moving over a backdrop, that’s about it.  The sprite work is okay, though, and I like the music.  It’s good and fits the game well, even if music tracks repeat often and technically are as underwhelming as the visuals.  Better presentation would have helped this game, but the simple fun gameplay shines through regardless, and I do like the variety of backdrops and enemy types.

This game is actually Taito’s second Taito’s second 4th-gen home console Space Invaders game.  The first one is Space Invaders Plus for the PC Engine (TurboGrafx).  That game released only in Japan, but I do have it.  It’s simple, but fun, and has an interesting branching mission structure on top of the traditional shooting gameplay.  It also has power-ups.  This game is somewhat similar to that game, but they are different.  First, this time the game is linear; no branching paths.  So, each game of this is longer, but they may have similar amounts of content.  This game gives you more hits per game but fewer continues, and given the longer length is probably a bit harder.  Gameplay in both is very similar, though.  You also still have powerups, though the specific types are different.  Both games do have an ending, but this game is a few minutes longer on average; not a huge difference there, but it’s something.  However, the PCE game also includes a full version of the original Space Invaders arcade game, while this does not, unfortunately.  I wish it had been included here too, because it’s a great classic.  Ah well.  As it is, Space Invaders ’91 is a good game, and I’m glad I got it.  Moving left and right, avoiding enemy fire, and wiping out all the attacking aliens is fun.  However, the graphics and sound are very bland, the game has absolutely no options or alternate modes, and everything is the same every time you play.  It’s a good game, but with better graphics and more content it could have been better.  Genre fans should pick this up; for anyone else, maybe get it if you find it cheap.  Pick it up if you like shooters and see it for a reasonable price.

Winter Challenge – 1-10 player alternating, on-cart saving (EEPROM).  Winter Challenge is Accolade’s winter equivalent to Summer Challenge, which I covered above.  This game released after that one, and has very similar presentation, but with winter olympics sports instead of summer, of course.  Again there are eight events here, and the game has polygonal 3d environments in many events, mixed with sprite characters and some 2d events.  The interface looks pretty much the same as Hardball III or Summer Challenge, but with some new graphics in the Summer Challenge opening ceremony, to fit the winter theme.  The graphics are good as before, but the framerate is still atrocous.  The featureset is the same as before, with 10 player alternating multiplayer and battery save which saves quite a few player names, and your best times for each event.  Good stuff.  The controls are also similar to before, in that it uses one main button plus the d-pad for all commands.  Sure, there’s nothing new here in presentation, graphical quality, sound, or features, but the game is built on a good base, so that’s fine.  Summer Challenge is a very good game for its time, framerate aside, and this is close to as good.  That game may be a little better, as this game has less variety and I don’t have the nostalgia for this game that I do that one as I did not own this game in the ’90s, but still, it is also a good game.

The most important thing here, though, are the events, which are all new.  You’ve got downhill skiing, giant slalom, cross country skiing, biathalon, ski jumping, speed skating (long track only, as short track did not exist yet), bobsled, and luge.  Versus Summer Challenge, this game has less event variety; two events have downhill skiing, two are on the sled course, two have cross-country skiing, and two others are stand-alone events.  All eight events are good, though.  Again, the game uses 3d graphics.  The biathalon target-shooting component is 2d, but the rest of this game is 3d.  This makes it very different from most other winter sports games of the generation; on 4th-gen consoles, only the Europe-only Winter Gold for the SNES is also polygonal.  That game does use a Super FX 2 chip for a better framerate than you’ll see in this game, but don’t discount Winter Challenge just because it runs slowly, it does play well.  The different groups of events each are quite different.  The cross-country events are the longest and slowest-paced.  You ski along by mashing the button hard but not too hard, as you have a stamina meter and if it goes too low you will slow down.  So, moderate your button-tapping sometimes.  The course is fully 3d, which is pretty cool for the time, and you will have to actually turn, you aren’t on a rail.  That’s great, it really adds something to this game versus others… just make sure to make those turns; the single-digit framerates occasionally make that tricky.  Yes, it’s a slow and “boring” event made slower by the very low framerate, and there is almost no audio during races, but I love loves cross-country skiing in real life, so I, at least, find it fun in this game.  The other events are faster-paced.  The two downhill events are similar to the cross-country ones, except you go in only one direction and need to go through the gates while you go down the hill.  That’s easy enough in Downhill, but the Giant Slalom is quite difficult; it might be the hardest event here.  Learning the course can be fun, though, and it looks nice for the time as usual.  This game is probably the first ever home-console polygonal skiing game, and it’s a decent first step, though titles on more powerful consoles are of course faster and not as hard.  The sledding events are probably the simplest ones here; just turn in the right direction at each turn, and make it down as fast as you can.  Unlike the other similar events these two are on the exact same course, so practice for one will help with the other.  Speed skating is also simple, just button-mash the whole time and turn at the corners.  Ski jumping is trickier, though; look up the commands for that one, it takes practice to not do badly at!  Once learned it’s not too hard, but figuring out how to land can be tough.

In conclusion, Winter Challenge is a good game.  The game has good graphics which really push the limits of non-enhanced 4th-generation hardware, eight events, can be fun to play, and will save your best times, championship in progress, and player names, too.  However, while the music is decent, there is no music at all during events, which can get dull.  Also, some events can get boring, and the events are much more similar than those in Summer Challenge.  I can easily see why most people would dismiss this game as a dated, boring relic, but I would say that it’s a decent, above-average game despite its definite issues.  Maybe give Summer and/or Winter Challenge a try, they’re interesting.  Winter Challenge is also available on PC.  The PC version has better graphics and framerates, but this is playable.

Wiz ‘n’ Liz – 1-2 player simultaneous, password save.  Wiz ‘n’ Liz is a somewhat odd collectathon platformer from Psygnosis.  It’s got a very ‘Psygnosis’ feel to the menus and style, but the gameplay is original.  This game is mostly non-violent, as the only combat in the game is the boss fights; normal stages are exclusively about running around trying to collect all the rabbits, or wabbits as the game calls them, and the powerups that they drop, before time runs out, not about fighting anything.  You can play the stages in each game in any order, but it does get harder as you go.  In between stages, you go to your house, and can combine pairs of items from the stages you just played in an early crafting system, for various bonuses.  You play as Wiz and Liz, two old wizards.  You’ve got mountains of wabbits to collect, but fortunately, despite their age they sure can move!  You zip around at a very fast pace in this game, and jump just as quickly.  The game has small sprites and only decent graphics.  The game has cartoony graphics with a very early ’90s European style and some okay music.  The game looks okay, but not great.  The fast-paced gameplay and constant movement keep things fun, though.  This game has three difficulty levels and three sets of stages to play, named similarly to those from Lemmings.  The game defaults to the highest difficulty, so I guess that is the expected one, and the others are easy modes.  Unlike Lemmings, though, each game of Wiz n Liz is fairly short.  It does have some replay value in that you can play the other two sets of stages, but each of the three feel VERY similar, with the same gameplay, the same backrounds, and the same boss at the end.  I think the stage layouts change, but the stages in this game are all very similar anyway, so variety is seriously lacking, though the game is fun enough that it’s fun to replay regardless.

The core gameplay of Wiz n Liz is of you running left or right in each stage.  Each stage is a couple of screens tall and a couple of screens long, so they are small.  Wabbits will spawn regularly throughout the stage, and you’ve got to collect them all as fast as possible.  Making things tougher, though, each time you touch one it spawns a powerup which then floats upwards from the wabbit.  You’ll have to jump to get the powerup, but collecting all of them will take a lot of time, which will definitely be a problem if you’re playing on the default (top) difficulty setting!  You need to get the first powerups in each stage to spell that stages’ magic word, but after that powerups are theoretically optional, though you’ll want things such as timer increases for sure, and bonus stars are nice too.  The timer isn’t just for the current stage, you see; instead it’s for the whole game.  If you used a lot of time getting every powerup in the early stages, you’ll run out of time later on for sure.  It’s a good system which balances challenge and fun in a quite well-designed way.  This game may seem conceptually simplistic, but there’s a satisfying amount of challenge here once you get into it.  You only have three lives until it’s Game Over, but there is a password displayed on the screen after every stage, so you can use those to continue if you wish.  It’s odd that there are passwords but no way to continue without entering the last password, but that’s better than the alternative!  For negatives, the main one is that the crafting system is annoying.  I almost always dislike crafting in games, and this one is no exception.  Each combination of two fruits results in a different thing happening.  Some give you nothing, some give you bonus time, some open bonus rooms around the house area you can go in, and more.  Things like the bonus and hint rooms are very useful to have, so looking up a list of combinations online, or making one yourself, is advised.  And as for that boss, they are not too exciting.  Do know that you need to hold down a button to hit them with a magic beam, so something beyond run-and-jump is needed, but not much more.  The core gameplay is the best thing here, but the bosses and crafting are mediocre.  The visuals are also average.  However, Wiz ‘n’ Liz is a fun, fast-paced game well worth playing.  It has one or two player cooperative play support, fast-paced gameplay, and nice, unique design as you decide how many of the items you can afford to jump for and frantically run around looking for wabbits.  This is a good game, and I really like that Psygnosis figured out how to make a mostly nonviolent platformer good.  Pick up Wiz ‘n’ Liz if you see it affordably.  Also available on the Amiga.

Wolfchild – 1 player.  Wolfchild is a solid sidescrolling action-platformer from Core Design.  This game looks very much like an Amiga port and has decent but average Euro-platformer graphics and not-great music, but it plays fairly well.  You are a man who is a werewolf, and in the game can transform back and forth between human and wolf forms.  There is no story in this version of the game; play the Sega CD version if you want an intro.  The CD version also added two new levels and makes some other improvements.  What’s here can be fun, but I do wish I had the disc release.  This is a conventional game in that you walk, run, jump, and slash stuff and explore levels as you make your way through to the end.  There are bosses after every couple of levels, and most stages have unique settings.  I like some of the settings and art, though it is mostly formulaic — the forest, the airship, the Alien stage, and such.  The game is a bit like a Turrican game, but nowhere near Turrican 2/Universal Soldier’s level.  Maybe my biggest issue is that only one of your forms, wolf form, is fun to play as.  Wolf form has a ranged shot, but human does not, and if you get hit a few times you’ll drop back to human form… ugh.  While you can take a fair amount of hits per life, in human form you can only attack at melee range, which is frustrating and leads to taking many hits unless you are VERY careful.  And apparently the Sega CD version lets you fire two shots at once in wolf form, while on the Genesis you can only shoot one while enemies take just as many hits to kill.  That would be nice here, though the weak human form is the biggest issue.  Sure, the game controls well, but you get knocked back a bit when you take a hit, and facing numerous enemies shooting at you with a guy who can’t hit them a lot of the time due to the very short range of your human forms’ attacks gets annoying.

Versus the Turrican games, Wolfchild’s levels are not as large or open, and there is usually only one main linear path instead of multiple routes through the stage.  I’m fine with that, and the stage layouts here are at least average and can be fun to explore.  You just need to figure out what the route to the end is; sometimes it is obvious, other times a bit less so.  The level designs here can be interesting, and figuring out how to get through the stages is fun.  There also aren’t any instant-death pits, which is great, but the many enemies and traps will drain health steadily, and health powerups are somewhat infrequent.  You have only three continues as well, and there is no saving, but you can choose how many lives you get per continue, up to six, and increase the difficulty if you want, but not decrease it as Easy is default.  Overall, Wolfchild is a decent platformer.  The game has some interesting stage layouts and challenges, but the average graphics, maybe below-average music, and frustrating human form hold the game back.  If you could stay in wolf form the whole time this game would be easier but more fun, but you can’t.  Ah well.  It is an average game, at least, and I can see how some may like it more than that.  Get the Sega CD version if you can, though, it’s better.  Also available on the Sega CD, SNES, Amiga, and Atari ST.  There is also a European-exclusive Game Gear and Master System version, but I imagine it’s different.

Wonder Boy in Monster World – Wonder Boy in Monster World is the third game in Westone’s Monster Land/World series of side-scrolling action-RPGs.  This version was published by Sega.  The series started as a spinoff of the basic side-scroller Wonder Boy, aka Adventure Island on the NES, but quickly superseded its originator, as Westone would not make any more games like the first Wonder Boy; instead they moved on to games like these, and the one-off autoscrolling platform/shooter Monster Lair. I love the Monster World and Lair games, but don’t like the original Wonder Boy much at all; it’s just too simplistic in ways that games like this vastly add to.  Monster World is a great series, and this is one of the best of the four Monster World games, too!  Wonder Boy in Monster World has good graphics, great art cartoony design, fun action, good music, plenty of challenge, and a good-sized world to explore.  You are Wonder Boy, a hero, and need to save the land from evil in this fantasy side-scrolling action-adventure game.  Your main weapon is a sword, but you also have limited-use magic and a shield for protection against ranged attacks only, as in some Zelda games.  You can get helpers who will follow you around as well, but all they’ll do is reveal extra money and such.  There are several, each with a different function.  None are really important, but I guess they’re occasionally helpful.  The game does not have experience or levels, but you will find or buy new weapons and armor as you progress, and find heart containers to add to your health bar as well.  The game takes place in a large semi-open world, and you travel from area to area killing monsters and helping people out.  Monsters all respawn quickly, which can be annoying but is also useful, as you will need the money they drop to buy things.  Grinding money from monsters is necessary here at many points, unfortunately, but the combat is fun so it’s not too bad.  You can only save at inns in towns; though there are special items which will refill your health when it runs out, try to save those for the bosses, you’ll need the help!  Remember to save when you can, for if you die you’re sent back to the games’ title screen and go back to your last save.  Harsh death penalty there.  There is also only one save slot, so don’t start a new game if you’re playing a current one!

This game is made up of an overworld with towns and dungeons scattered around.  Overworld areas mostly scroll only left and right, though some areas, mostly in towns, also have a height element.  Different sections of the world each have unique features and enemies, so there is more variety than in some past games in the series.  The series came a long way between the constant extreme repetition of the original Wonder Boy and this!  The game does reuse area concepts a bit too often in some areas and you can at times feel like you’ve been on slight variations of the same screen for the past three areas.  This is worse in the overworld than in dungeons, though, and most dungeon areas feel unique and interesting, which is great.  So dungeons are are interesting, but they are also tougher than the overworld.  Bosses in particular are quite hard in the US release; some bosses were made much harder than they are in the original Japanese version in order to make the game harder to finish, to foil renters I presume.  That’s a bit annoying at times, but this is a great game despite how much harder the boss fights are than the dungeons they are in.  Still, everything in this game is fun, even if I wish Sega hadn’t made the game harder.  Still, the dungeons can be really good.  Dungeons are not just complex, bland mazes, but instead have arranged traps, waves of enemies, and occasional branching paths to explore.  I like the variety of obstacles, puzzles, and enemies you face in this game, it really keeps things interesting even if the basic mechanics do not change beyond getting a new spell every once in a while.  Towns are small but important, since inns and stores are only found there.  Each town also has a handful of people to talk to, though not as many as in a full JRPG.  Similarly, the story is simple, but there is just enough of it to keep the game going.

The game looks good, too.  Wonder Boy in Monster World has a cute, cartoony fantasy-anime theme, though the cuteness of the world hides the high challenge within.  I like variety of settings, enemies, and bosses; each area has its own character and enemy types, and they all look good to great.  As in all of the Wonder Boy games the art design here is good, and it looks better than ever here probably thanks to this being the first Monster World game designed first for a 4th-gen console, instead of the other way around as with the TurboGrafx versions of the first two games.  The game does use parallax scrolling, but more of it would have been nice; there is none in most dungeons, for example.  Still, the game looks good to great.  Overall, Wonder Boy in Monster World is a great game.  This US release is much harder than the Japanese version, or the easier TurboGrafx CD version (where it is titled “The Dynastic Hero”), but it’s still great fun.  This game looks beautiful with its very well drawn, varied sprites, has a nice world to explore with plenty of hidden secrets and platforming and combat challenges to face, and a good-length quest to challenge.  This game might be the most popular Monster World game, and while all four games are great, I can see why this one did so well — it’s outstanding.  Definitely pick this game up if you like the genre at all.  Look into the other Monster World games too though, for various platforms; they’re all very good!  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.  The game is also available on TurboGrafx CD as The Dynastic Hero.  The game is the same (lower difficulty aside), but the sprites have been altered, as usual for the Hudson versions of the first three Monster World games.

[Monster World IV] – 1 player, on-cart save (battery).  Monster World IV is a great sidescrolling action-RPG form Westone, and the final game in the Wonder Boy / Monster World series.  The game has great graphics, music, controls, dungeons, puzzles, action, and gameplay; it really is very good in all categories.  Sadly, however, someone at Sega made an incredibly bad decision back in 1994 and decided not to localize this game, so on the actual Genesis, Monster World IV is Japan-exclusive.  And while I would like to get it, I don’t have that version.  However, while I probably will someday import the real cart, there is something better;  an English-language version, released digitally on WiiWare, PS3 PSN, and X360 Xbox Live Arcade!  This is one of the only previously Japan-exclusive classic games to get translated for an official release, and it was quite exciting when it was announced.  I got the game for WiiWare shortly afterwards.  I’m not going to cover every game I have in the X360 Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection but not on a Genesis cartridge, but this game I have to mention, both because I got it as a stand-alone release, because of the translation, and because it is part of a series covered in this list.

Anyway, Monster World IV is fantastic, similar to the previous Monster World games but probably better overall.  This time you play as a female character, so the “Wonder Boy” name is absent.  I like that they tried something different this time.  This isn’t the only Wonder Boy game where you can play as a female, as Monster Lair lets you play as one character of either gender, but it is the only one of the six with only a female character.  The game has an anime-fantasy-Arabian theme, so the game takes place in a desert kingdom and everyone wears middle eastern-ish dress.  The change of setting from the usual anime-medieval fantasy themes of previous games is nice, if probably inspired by Aladdin.  The game this time is much more linear than the previous ones.  You can still wander around, but the game has a clear structure: there is a main town, and you venture from there to a linear series of areas.  Each area is large, though, and the dungeons within those areas can be large and tricky.  Fortunately you will get maps for dungeons, which is a huge help.  The gameplay is similar to before, but you have a better shield now, as holding down will bring up a shield that blocks enemies as well as arrows.  This allows for more strategic combat, which is great.  Enemies can have shields too, so you’ll need to think about how to approach foes.  The other addition is your helper-creature Pelepegoo, who you can grab on to.  When you grab it (him?) you can’t walk, but can jump and will float while jumping.  Hitting that button again will double-jump, very useful.  You can also throw Pelepegoo, and this can reveal secrets and more.  The previous game had helpers ,but this game expands on the concept in nice ways.  Combat is fun, and so is exploring the levels and dungeons.  I like the level-based approach, it means I’m never wandering around an overworld unsure about what to do but instead can focus on the next challenge.  And yes, those challenges can be plenty tough.  This game is not as hard as the US version of Wonder Boy in Monster World, but it wasn’t made harder unlike that game, so it’s more like the challenge these games should be.  The dungeons have more puzzles than before too, including things such as statues you have to put into order based on verbal clues.  It’s great fun stuff.

Visually, Monster World IV looks fantastic.  The last game looked great too, but this one has even better visuals with lots of nice graphical effects including parallax, clouds, and more.  The art design is great and the sprites are large and detailed, and while the whole game has an Arabian theme, each area has a different setting, including a fire level, an ice pyramid, and more.  So yeah, the settings aren’t the most original, but it mixes things up a bit — a pyramid, for the ice level?  Haven’t seen that before.  The music is also really good, this game sounds almost as great as it looks.  Overall, Monster World IV is a great game with no major flaws.  Sure, the part where you have to throw Pelepegoo around to find hidden doors may be tedious, but it’s also clever and the level design has just the right amount of complexity.  This really is a great game, among the best in its genre for sure.  Definitely pick up Monster World IV, it’s fantastic!  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.  The best way to play this game legally is via the Wii WiiWare, PS3 PSN, or X360 XBLA re-releases, which are translated into English.

World of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck – 1-2 player simultaneous, password save.  World of Illusion, from Sega, is the sequel to Castle of Illusion, the classic early Genesis platformer starring Mickey Mouse.  This game builds on that title with a second playable character, two player co-op, passwords, and much better graphics.  The game may be a bit easier this time than before, but as much of that is because of the more forgiving setup, I think; the first game has limited continues and no saving, remember.  This is a pretty good game with very nice graphics and sound, great controls, lots of variety, and good stage designs.  World of Illusion is a very good game with a lot going for it, and you see that right from the start.  You can play as Mickey, Donald, or both of them in two player mode.  They use magical capes to attack, but you can only attack on the ground, and not while jumping.  The cape has a nice animation, though.  The two are mostly similar, but have some differences that mean that each one will be able to go in some areas the other can’t, which is nice and adds replay value, which is good in a game with only five levels and not too long a run time.  The game starts out in a fantasy forest level.  You bounce on things, magic away baddies with the cape, and such.  Every stage has multiple parts each with different settings, and the variety is great.  You’ll cross spider webs, balance on a trail a spider emits as it moves, swim under the sea in a bubble, and of course do your usual platform-jumping in forests and the like.  Again each character will see some different areas, and there are even some exclusive to the two player co-op mode.

I do have a few issues with the game, though.  The gameplay is good, but mostly straightforward.  There are some minor puzzle elements, but they are, as usual in the series, quite basic.  They do add something to the game, but not much.  Just make sure you know your characters’ moves, such as Mickey’s crouch (C plus down), you’ll need them.  Bosses are also a bit disappointing.  The multiple route elements are also mostly minor, though it’s great there is something to encourage you to come back to this game.  And beyond that, as good as this game, somehow it never grabbed me enough to make me want to write down the passwords and finish the game, despite its moderate length and not-too-hard difficulty.  The game is fun, but I haven’t been drawn in quite enough to stick with it; not sure why.  But still, I do like this game despite that, and I’ll play through the rest of it hopefully soon.  Despite it issues though, World of Illusion is a good sequel to Castle of Illusion.  It is improved over the original in a lot of ways, and I like the better graphics, co-op support, and password save, but despite that I’m not sure which of the two games I like more.  I’ve played more of Castle, but World is great too.  Both are better than any of Capcom’s three SNES Mickey games, or the Genesis version of the second one, The Great Circus Mystery.  Pick World of Illusion up, it’s a very good platformer that plays as well as it looks, and it looks very good.  There is a Japan-only Saturn port of this game.

X-Men – 1-2 player simultaneous.  X-Men is a fun but challenging platformer with beat ’em up elements from Sega.  I’ve never been a big superhero fan, but got this game last year because it’s fairly well-known and I wanted to finally give it a try.  You can play as four X-Men in this game, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Gambit.  Unfortunately no female characters are playable in this game; there are some, but only in support roles.  The game is mostly good, though.  You choose your starting character first, then set off.  You mostly run, jump, and punch or jump-kick enemies.  And there are a lot of enemies to fight, giving the game a somewhat beat ’em up-esque feel at times, though the levels are complex platformer stages.  The four characters are similar, but each has some unique properties, including some exclusive attacks and a character-specific special ability: Wolverine can bring out his claws for a stronger attack, Nightcrawler can warp around the screen and go through some walls, Cyclops can shoot eyebeams, and Gambit can throw stuff.  You can switch between characters during play, but can only do so a limited number of times per level, so watch out.  Each character has a separate health bar, but these do not recover between stages, unfortunately; instead you’ll have to find the somewhat uncommon health powerups to heal.  There is also some health in the Danger Room area you are in between levels, but this won’t be enough to heal even one character up to full, much less several if you took a lot of damage, and the game has no continues at all, so a lot of memorization will be required to make progress here.  The four support characters can be called out as well a limited number of times, though powerups will replenish them.  The most useful is the one who pulls you up out of pits, so falling in one is not instant death; it just takes off a bit of health, instead.  It’s a solid system, just a bit overly unforgiving for me; I, of course, dislike that so much memorization is required in a game with such a harsh penalty for dying.

The level designs in this game are decent, though not fantastic.  Levels are good-sized and exploration is required.  I’m fine with wandering around some, but occasionally I didn’t know what to do and it did get frustrating.  Still, levels are mostly linear, you just need to figure out what to do to proceed.  There are switches you will need to hit, platforms to jump between, and numerous enemies to beat up along the way.  I like the stage variety here, as many stages have different environments and obstacles.  There are also bosses, which can be tricky.  While stages are occasionally confusing, thankfully this game is not nearly as mazelike or frustrating as the Game Gear X-Men game is; I was afraid this game would be like that not very good game, but it isn’t, it’s much better.  In terms of presentation this game is on the good side of average.  X-Men has nice graphics with some fine, though not amazing, art design and good variety in stage settings and enemies.  The music is good as well, if you like that classic very chunky Genesis sound.  Overall X-Men is a good but difficult platformer with sidescrolling beat ’em up-style action and large levels to find your way through.  You will walk around, punch things, find the switches and doors, and make your way through the stages.  The challenge is to do that while taking the least amount of damage possible, because damage is not easy to refill once lost.  I like how you can switch between characters during missions, but more health-ups would be great, and no restrictions on how often you can swap.  The level designs are occasionally confusing as well, though it’s mostly okay.  The action feels good, though; this is a quality game on the whole.  The controls are responsive, action fun, levels interesting to explore, and graphics and sound decent if not the best.  I am not a superhero fan, but X-Men is a good game worth a look regardless of what you think of the license.  There is also a sequel which looks similar but maybe a bit better, but I don’t have that one.

Zero Tolerance – 1 player, 2 player system link supported.  Zero Tolerance is a first-person shooter on the Genesis from Accolade and developed by Technopop.  Yes, a FPS, on this system, without any addon chips.  As you might expect, this means that this game has a very low framerate.  While something like Summer or Winter Challenge is simple enough to be playable despite a very low framerate, this game is much more complex than that, and the very slow gameplay is hard to get over.  There are more issues than that with this game, though it has some good points as well.  The game is an admirable attempt at a Wolfenstein 3D-inspired FPS, and it’s one of a very few on the Genesis.  While the game made a bad first impression with its terrible framerate, small play window, slow controls with a VERY slow turn speed that makes turning around to hit an enemy behind you an agonizingly slow process, and boring, too-open level designs, after playing it again for this summary I liked it more than before.  Once you get used to it Zero Tolerance can be fun, at least some of the time.  In the game you play as a team of five special operatives trying to save the world.  They play more like lives than anything, though, as you can’t switch between them as you play, only when one gets killed.  Note that dead characters are gone and can’t be resurrected, but you are given a password each time you clear a floor, thankfully.  That’s good, but the game has only a couple of environments, so expect a huge amount of visual repetition.  There’s the space station, a skyscraper, and that might be about it.  On screen you have an area map with radar, the viewscreen, info about your characters’ stats, your health, your weapons, and the number of enemies remaining on the current floor.  A plus a direction jumps, ducks, or strafes, but none of these are often important in this game; you want enemies dead long before you need to strafe, and the strafing is, like turning, slow anyway.  B fires, and C switches weapons.  The controls work, apart from that terribly slow turn speed.  Visually, the game looks pretty nice for a 4th-gen FPS that doesn’t use any kind of enhancement chip, but the game doesn’t have forgiving aim assist like SNES Doom does, so hitting enemies can be frustrating as they move around quickly while you slowly try to keep up.  The key is to kill enemies before they get close to you; look at that radar closely if you want to live, close enemies are hard to kill!  Don’t just rely on the game screen, that radar map is crucial.  Many enemies only spawn when you get close enough to them, though, so watch out both ahead and behind.  After a few levels I did start enjoying this game some despite its issues.

The level designs themselves are another problem with this game, though.  Levels in this game are large, flat, and blandly laid out.  The level designs in this game are just so unintresting, and the game makes it worse by requiring that you kill all enemies in a level in order to get a password.  Maps are just made up of walls, doors, and enemies, and are very large and open.  There are no keycards, no locked doors, and no secrets, all of which would have been very welcome.  There are angle walls, so it has that over Wolfenstein, though.  I also really like that there is a radar onscreen showing your surroundings and enemies near you.  There is also a full-screen map showing a full map of the current stage; this screen also shows your passwords for completed floors.  Even so, though, the simplistic, lacking level designs manage to make Wolf 3D look good, despite that games’ own extreme level-design repetition in a game full of identical bland corridors.  Versus Wolf 3D, only the map saves this game; without it I’d have stopped long before I did.  But worse, this game released after not only Wolf 3D, but also Doom!  The Genesis could never pull off Doom, but I’m sure it can do better than this.  The developers tried, but their inexperience shows.  Requiring you to kill all enemies to proceed in a game where many enemies only appear if you get close to their spawn point is also a pain; have fun re-walking around the whole level looking for those last two guys so you can get the next password!  Oh, and while you could just run through a floor (stage) and try the next one as there is no gate on the elevators between them just like there isn’t on any doors, you can only get the password for the uncleared floor directly after the last cleared floor, so if you skip to two levels down and clear that floor you won’t know it or get a password until you clear the floor above.  There must have been a much better way of gating progress than something as frustrating as that can be.  Overall, though, Zero Tolerance is okay.  This game is clearly the team’s first attempt at a FPS, and it’s amateurish in some frustrating ways including the controls and level designs, and the slow speed is hard to get used to, but still, there is a decently fun core shooter here.  Zero Tolerance is an average game overall.  Maybe try it if you like the genre and know what you’re getting into.  Oh, there is also a 2-player versus mode, but it requires a link cable, two systems, and two copies of the game.  Needless to say I have not tried it, but it is cool that the game has such a feature.  There was also supposed to be a sequel, Beyond Zero Tolerance, but it was cancelled.

Zombies Ate My Neighbors – 1-2 player simultaneous, password save, 6 button controller supported.  Zombies Ate my Neighbors is a fairly well-known top-down comic-horror action-adventure game from Lucasarts.  In this challenging game, two very ’90s-‘tude protagonists, one a guy and one a girl, are tasked with trying to keep your ten neighbors alive against an onslaught of zombies across dozens of stages.  In each stage, you explore around looking for enemies to fight and weapons to collect to fight them with.  You can use a variety of amusing weapons such as the iconic acid-shooting Super Soaker-knockoff water gun, once you collect them, but they all have limited ammo so looking for stuff is important.  You have a health bar on screen and can move, shoot and switch weapons, use and switch items, and bring the radar up on screen, but there is no strafing or shooting in a direction other than the one you are moving in, unfortunately.  The controls are fine with a 6-button controller, but the game uses more than three button as it was first made for the SNES, so a 6-button controller is highly recommended.  Those would have been nice to have.  There are different kinds of zombies, and you’ll need different strategies for each.  Saving key weapons for certain baddies can be useful.  You’ll also collect items such as traps, keys, crucial health-refill items, and more.

Your main goal in each stage is to rescue all of the neighbors.  This is also crucial, for you’ll only have the same number of people to rescue in the next stage that you saved in the last one, and when all die it’s game over.  Oh, and while the game has password save, you only get a password every four levels, and worse, passwords do not save your inventory, they only let you start from that stage, so if you want to do well at this game the best way is to play it in one sitting and don’t mess up at all… tough!  While it is possible to get neighbors back occasionally, this is a slow process.  And of course, keeping them alive won’t be easy, as they are scattered all over the map, and levels are complex and full of obstacles, including water pools, walls, and locked doors.  Zombies will keep spawning in, so you need to use effective strategy on each stage to keep yourselves, and the neighbors, alive.  The clever and unique stages are the main highlight of this game, and they, above anything else, are what makes this game so interesting and worth seeing.  Still, it is memorization-heavy.  That radar is very helpful, but still, you will need to learn exactly what to do in each stage and then execute well in at least each set of four levels and maybe the whole game in order to succeed.  It’s a punishing game and I haven’t stuck with it enough to get anywhere near the end; the game gets hard after a while.  The design is good, though.  It’s tough, but good.

Visually, Zombies Ate My Neighbors looks pretty good.  The cartoony art design looks great, with amusing characters and neighbors and cartoon-scary zombies and other foes.  The color depth is reduced versus the SNES, but still, this version looks good too.  The main issues with this game are the difficulty and degree of memorization required, downgraded graphics from the SNES, you really need a 6-button controller, and as good as it is it’s no match for Lucasarts’ PC classics of the early ’90s, but the strengths are much more significant.  The game has good art design and music, but it’s the gameplay that is best.  Exploring each level, finding the neighbors and figuring out how to get to them, and collecting the many great weapons and items is great fun.  This game is particularly good with two players, for sure.  Both do need to stay on the same screen so you need to work together, but good cooperation makes the game easier and more fun.  In the end this is a good to great game that I would highly recommend if it wasn’t so expensive now.  If you can afford it definitely pick the game up for either the SNES or Genesis, but otherwise, get the SNES version for Wii Virtual Console.  Lucasarts’ best games of the ’90s are all PC games and there they made some of the best games ever made.  This game is not that, but it is a very good game, deservedly one of Lucasarts’ most prominent console efforts of the decade.  I certainly recommend it.  Also available on SNES.  The SNES version is also available on Wii Virtual Console, but this version is Genesis-only.

Zoom! – 1-2 player alternating or simultaneous (simultaneous in Competition mode only).  Zoom! is a classic arcade-style action game inspired by the early ’80s title Amidar.  Just like that game, and sort of like another classic arcade game, Crush Roller, you go around a single-screen maze and need to walk along every path, like Pac-Man but with filling in lines instead of collecting stuff.  Also, in these games you do need to go over EVERY line in order to win, instead of just collecting specific dots like in a Pac-Man game.  As in Amidar but not Crush Roller, each time you surround a box on the screen it colors it in differently, by making it flash in this case.  Once all boxes on the screen are flashing, you move on to the next stage.  So, even though sometimes certain enemies can erase your lines, if you already surrounded that box that doesn’t matter; they can’t take away filled boxes.  This game differs from its predecessors in its additional movement options, lower difficulty, and isometric perspective.  Zoom! is a fun little game and eventually gets tough, but it the difficulty scales up slowly, and the game isn’t as punishing as Amidar.  The game is a LOT faster than that sluggish classic, though, which is nice.  The title is accurate, you really zoom around the screen quickly.  I like the fast movement, but sometimes it will kill you as you zip past the point you meant to turn before you can hit the button.  You also can shoot backwards with a button, but your shots only knock enemies backwards, not kill them.  This makes things tricky when the screen gets crowded with enemies in the later stages.  The angled perspective also can make it hard to see exactly where you are sometimes, though usually it’s not an issue.  And yes, you can only shoot back, not forwards.  Still, it’s a useful function sometimes, particularly when an unmoving enemy is in a key point you still need to go over.  On the good side though, there are also powerups to collect which give you points, invincibility, and more.  The game is much more good than bad.

In the game you play as a cute cartoon creature, perhaps a bit Pac-Man inspired but animal-like.  The game is comprised of six levels, each broken up into six single-screen stages.  You have infinite continues from the beginning of the current level, but not from the current stage so there is some challenge here, as you do die in one hit.  Level maps do eventually repeat but with more enemies so there are not new layouts for every stage, and I wish that the game had saving as infinite continues but no saving is one of the most annoying kinds of continue systems, and the graphics and sound are not great, but still, Zoom is a fun little classic arcade game and I like it.  The visuals and music are good enough to do, and the basic mechanics are solid.  The isometric grid looks nice enough in that classic sense, the sprites are decently well drawn, and the music is alright.  The game also has two multiplayer modes, either alternating in the main game, or competing against another player in a special mode.  You can choose between either two controllers or switching back and forth on one controller for the alternating mode, which is nice.  In summary Zoom is a fun classic-style arcade game, and I like it.  Sure, this game has a few issues, but it’s a fun little game well worth picking up for cheap.

Whew… finally done with this update.  Been busy, but this one is done now!  15 summaries this time. Only 20 more to go…

Oh, I improved the Task Force Harrier EX summary from last time. Look at it again, I left out some important points before.

Games covered in this update
—
Taz in Escape from Mars
Technoclash
Technocop
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Hyperstone Heist
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters
Thunder Force II
Tinhead
Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure
Toki: Going Ape Spit
Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics
Trouble Shooter
Truxton
Turrican
Twin Cobra
Tyrants: Fight Through Time

Taz in Escape from Mars – 1 player.   Taz in Escape from Mars is a decent platformer. It is a somewhat average game, but is a huge improvement over the first Genesis Taz-Mania game, and holds up much better.   This game is a lot like the first one, but with some crucial improvements.   As before, you play as Taz.  He was kidnapped by Marvin the Martian for his zoo, so you start this game in that great classic Looney Tunes “space” setting of Marvin the Martian’s Mars.  There are six settings in the game, though, some on earth and some in space, and each has two levels then a boss.  The graphics are again good, and looks a lot like the first game but with new settings, enemies, and such.  I’ve always really liked the Looney Tunes space stuff, so the setting here is great, though it is odd that a couple of levels are on earth and the others on other planets.  The graphics are only a bit improved over the first game, but the large, detailed sprites look great, and the environments look good enough.  The music is also improved over the first game; it’s at least decent this time, thankfully.   As for the gameplay, this game mostly plays just like the original.  As before, Taz is huge on the screen, runs around, jumps with an annoyingly floaty jump, spins into a tornado to attack, and has lots of stuff to eat to refill your health bar, some items which heal you or give you a powerup and others that hurt you.  Most importantly, blind jumps have been dramatically cut back on. However, the blind jumps over death pits are entirely, 100% gone!  Yes, there aren’t any bottomless pits this time. Instead you might land on spikes, an earlier part of the level, or a path that leads back to an earlier part of the level.  That can be annoying, but it’s a vast improvement over the constant unfair deaths of the original!  You can look up and down a bit as well, to see platforms a bit below you. Sure, you still can’t see far ahead, you’ll constantly get hit and lose health, and the controls are slippery, but this is a decently good game.

The levels are, in classic Western platformer fashion, large and mazelike.  You need to find and eat the exit sign in each level, and it’s usually somewhere at the far right end of the stage, but it’ll take plenty of exploration to find the way.  Exploring the levels can be fun, and the stages are reasonably well designed.  There isn’t as much to collect in this game as there is in some, but the 1-ups, health ups if you need health if you need it, but the main goal is to find the end, not collect everything along the way.   That’s fine.  The game may be fairer than its predecessor, but it is still easy to lose lives.  This game isn’t as hard as the first one, but it is a challenge.  First, you have limited continues and no saving.  Worse, when you use a continue, you restart the whole world, not just the level.  That means get game over at a boss and you go three levels back to the first stage of that environment.  That’s too cruel!  Overall, Taz in Escape from Mars is an average game.  The game looks great and the levels can be fun to explore, but the loose controls, the constant damage you’ll surely take as you run into enemy or spike after enemy or spike due to how fast you move particularly when spinning, and the harsh game over punishment hold it back. This is an alright game, though, and platformer fans might want to give it a try.  After playing the first game I was not expecting much from this one, but it surprised me.  Also on Game Gear; that version is very much like this, but with smaller graphics of course.

Technoclash – 1 player, password save, 6 button controller support.  Technoclash is an interesting top-down action-adventure game published by EA and developed by Zono Incorporated, the studio that would go on to make the weird Sega Saturn title Mr. Bones. You are a mage, Ronaan, and he and his three male friends are fighting against evil robots and their living henchmen who invaded his world from a machine-ruled Earth.  The concept is sort of mages-versus Terminators, and that’s kind of cool even if it isn’t the most original thing.  There are story scenes at the beginning and end of each level, and sometimes during levels as well, telling the continuing plot.  I do like the concept here, mages-versus-robots isn’t something you see as often as you might think, particularly with the mages as the good guys.   In terms of gameplay, this is mostly a top-down action game, though there are also adventure and light RPG elements.  The game has a linear, level-based structure, and doesn’t have the open world of a Zelda or Shadowrun.   I’m fine with that, though; well-designed conventional levels are just fine with me, and for the most part that is what these are.  Levels are good-sized and increase in size as you progress through the game, and instead of just getting to an end point, in most stages after the first one you have to accomplish some objective, whether it is finding certain items and taking them to key points or destroying specific targets, for two examples from earlier in the game.  You always fight with an AI companion by your side, bringing either your warrior or mage friend along each time.  The game has a password save system, and you can alwaqys see your password on the pause screen; though it will start you back from the beginning of the current level, it is great to have it there.  You have limited continues for some reason, but thanks to the passwords this doesn’t matter much.  The game is hard enough that you will die quite a bit, but not so hard that you’ll be likely to give up.  They are moderately helpful and do automatically attack enemies, but you will do most of the fighting yourself.  The game has decent to good graphics; it doesn’t look amazing, but has a solid comic-like style.   The music is solid, but mostly average.

Now, this is an action-packed game, but that isn’t because of your movement speed; Ronaan moves quite slowly, so if you do get lost and have to backtrack it can get tedious.  Fortunately on the pause menu you can scroll around the whole level as Ronaan’s hawk familiar, a feature which can be helpful.  It won’t necessarily help you find all the objective items, as they are often hidden, but still, it’s better than nothing. You spend most of your time in this game wandering around and fighting enemies.  Now, touching enemies won’t hurt you; only their shots will.  This makes combat sometimes a somewhat silly affair, as you and the badguys keep bumping eachother, trying to hit the other.  It’s fun, but certainly isn’t the most polished combat system.  When fighting, while you have a staff swing on the A button, like most mages you mostly fight with magic.  You’ve got 9 offensive and 4 defensive spells available, and will need to make effective use of all of them to succeed.   You use your currently equipped attack spell with B, and open a quick menu to switch between the 9 with C. Each is represented with only a single letter, so remember which is which.  Your basic bolt-shot attack is infinite, but all other spells are limited-use, recharged with pickups that litter the game.  The four defensive spells do not have a hotkey, so you need to either have a 6-button controller or pause to use them.  The Mode button uses Heal, and X, Y, and Z use teleport, invisible, and float.  As with the offensive spells, defensive abilities are limited use and you need to find powerups to refill them, so don’t waste heals.  You will see all spells from early on, so you don’t really unlock more as you go, unlike many action-adventure games.  You do get health-expanding powerups after beating level bosses, but that’s about it for permanent powerups.  The game works as it is, though, and mastering the spells will take time.  You also will collect key-cards and some powerups for your companion, but no other items.  That’s fine though, managing 13 spells is tricky enough!  In addition to the basic straight shot, you also get a lightning shot, timed mines, a screen-clearing attack, and more.  Due to their limited nature you can’t use them all as much as you might like, but this does make you think a bit about what to use, which is good.  Overall, Technoclash is a fun, quality action-adventure game.  This game is not nearly as polished and brilliant as a Gauntlet IV or Zelda game, as the messy combat, sometimes frustrating wandering-around-lost stuff, tough difficulty level as you get farther into the game, and limited better spells but combat is mostly fun despite that, and I like the spells and story.  Technoclash is a good and under-rated game that genre fan should definitely play.  Make sure to use a 6-button controller, though.

Technocop – 1 player. Technocop is an awful, but somewhat infamous, sidescrolling action game from Razor Soft, a studio who tried to make their name more on controversy than good gameplay. See, in this game, when you kill people they explode into bloody puddles! Wow! That sure makes up for the bad, frustrating level designs, subpar controls, bad driving segments between action levels, poor audio, and generic action, right? … No, it really doesn’t. So, in each level you explore around increasingly large and mazelike levels, trying to kill or capture all the badguys with your bullets or net-gun, reach the target goal area, beat the boss there, and then get back alive. Yes, you have a non-lethal net gun you can use if you want, but it doesn’t matter which you use, it’s all the same here. You don’t get more weapons, just the few you start with. Mostly due to the awful, annnoying level designs full of annoying respawning enemies as you wander around lost the game gets hard fast, and once you run out of your few lives you don’t get any continues. It’s not worth it at all.The driving side of the game really is awful, too. It’s a very, VERY basic Outrun-style game, except with only one car, only straight roads with no turns, a gun, and few, really bad looking trackside objects. There is no music while driving, only bad car-engine sounds. Overall, this game is pretty awful in every way other than badly-outdated shock value. Don’t buy it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Hyperstone Heist – 1-2 player simultaneous. Konami’s TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist is the only Ninja Turtles beat ’em up on a Sega console. It is a good game, but is incredibly unoriginal. The story is a rehash of TMNT III: The Manhattan Project with some slight changes, the levels are reused from previous TMNT beat ’em ups, and the basic gameplay comes straight out of TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, with only a few, very minor, changes. Versus Turtles in Time, this game has slightly less good graphics and doesn’t have the throw-at-the-screen move, and there are only five levels in this game, but it does have some strengths as well. This is a fun, classic Konami beat ’em up. It’s unoriginal, but is mostly good. Hyperstone Heist has two player co-op, allows four enemies on screen at once, plays very well, looks and sounds good, and is an easy, fun little game to blast through here and there. There’s nothing new here, but it plays well.

I have one big problem with this game beyond the almost-entirely-rehashed content, though: the level designs are the worst and least interesting in any of Konami’s isometric TMNT beat ’em ups. Unlike either arcade game or TMNT III for the NES, all stages in this game are very basic paths to the right. There are no sections where the stage jogs up or down, almost no areas with multiple terrain heights, and many fewer interesting ways that enemies come onto the screen, too. For instance, in TMNT III, the sewer level has a raised path on the side, and the sewer water below you can also walk in. The level turns up and down, as well. The TMNT IV sewer stage isn’t quite as good, but it still has some of those elements. In this game, however, sewer stages are a straight, flat path to the right. Some seem to be full of water, but instead of walking through it like you should, the turtles and enemies walk on water in the sewer and cave areas as if it’s just blue ground! It’s absurdly stupid. Even dumber, right after one of the walking-on-water stages, the turtles are traveling over the sea… this time on hoverboards. Um, shouldn’t they have those in all the water stages, and not just one? Also, in the street stage you can’t jump up onto the dumpster, or anything else, in this game. All stages occur on one flat plane, with VERY few obstacles in your path beyond a handful of traps in a few stages. Sure, this game mostly looks good, but it’s lazily done. The game has a boss-rush only three levels into the game, too, so you refight the first three bosses midgame instead of playing through new content. Lazy stuff. There are a few traps to avoid in the final level, but apart from that the stages in Hyperstone Heist are basic and incredibly lazy in design and visuals. The music is great classic Konami stuff, but it is pretty much entirely just remixes of Turtles in Time’s soundtrack, so there’s nothing new here musically. At least it’s good, though.

Fortunately the gameplay, at least, is better. This game plays just like the other Konami TMNT beat ’em ups of its time, but with maybe slightly better fighting action. The game runs without slowdown even with a full set of 4 enemies on screen, which is nice. Also, while that throw move was removed, some other minor moves were added. Most of the time you will be whacking or jump-kicking enemies, though; as with most beat ’em ups this is a very repetitive game. For the genre, though, it plays great. The action is fast and fun, hit detection is accurate and the game never feels cheap or unfair, each of the four turtles has a slightly different style, and the variety of enemy weapon types is good too. The good to great gameplay is HH’s saving grace, and makes this a pretty good game despite its issues. It is an easy and short game, though. Turtles in Time is also pretty easy and short, unlike the challenging NES games, though. Hyperstone Heist is actually a couple of minutes longer than Turtles in Time, but it feels shorter because TiT has no padding so it stays engaing throughout, while this game is padded with that annoying fight-the-old-bosses-again stage in the middle. As with the SNES game, it’s hard to play this game and NOT finish it, unless you play on Hard or reduce the number of lives and credits you get! You can do that, and the game does force you to restart the whole level when you get a Game Over, but still, this game is quite easy. Overall, TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist is a good, but disappointing, game. The game controls well, the combat feels great, and the graphics and music are pretty good, issues above aside, but the lacking stage layouts, complete lack of anything not copied out of the other TMNT beat ’em ups, low difficulty, paucity of stages, and lazy design all hold it back. I like this game overall, it’s good even if “blue ground” is the first thing I think of when I think Hyperstone Heist. I like it a little less either arcade game, TMNT III for the NES, or Turtles in Time for the SNES, but it is good. The high price the game sells for now is an issue as well. If you find it affordably absolutely pick this one up if you like the Turtles or beat ’em ups, but for the price it goes for now, maybe pass… it’s good, but for that price you can do better.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters – 1-2 player simultaneous. TMNT: Tournament Fighters on the Super Nintendo is a very good fighting game, among the better on that console. So this game is just as good, right? Or at least close? Unfortunately, no. TMNT Tournament Fighters for the Genesis is a somewhat disastrously bad disappointment. As flawed as Hyperstone Heist is, at least the core of the game is great fun. This game, however, is not so lucky. Tournament Fighters on the Genesis has subpar graphics, few characters, AI that is way too hard, limited continues in the story mode, very limited two-buttons-only controls with poor design decisions on top of that, and more. Instead of a great 6-button control scheme like the SNES game or better Genesis fighters, here you get one punch button, one kick button, and that’s it. That’s pretty bad, but worse, there aren’t even really variants of each button! The Neo-Geo Pocket Color has only two buttons, but fighting games on that system play great, and how hard you push the button activates attacks of different strengths. Here, punch does your punch attack, kick does your kick attack, and that’s it. You can’t even combo attacks together, because they made the bizarre decision to have some invincibility after each hit to block that. The collision detection is poor as well, which doesn’t help at all, and helps out the overly-difficult AI. There are special moves in the game, with a random mixture of activations taken from various popular fighting games without much consistency. The gameplay here is a mess, and totally ruins the game. In contrast, the SNES game is pretty much as SFII knockoff, with moves, graphics, and game systems very similar to that classic. It works great together. This game tries for something a little different, but fails badly at it.

The game does at least look good and sound okay, though. TMNT Tournament Fighters has pretty good graphics with a variety of weird sci-fi locations to fight in, eight characters each with a different look, and a cool, dark visual aesthetic. I like the graphics here, everything looks good. It’s a different style from the SNES game, and that might look better overall, but it is competitive. The music is solid, though it isn’t among Konami’s best work on the Genesis. Games like Rocket Knight Adventures or Contra Hard Corps have much better music than this. I don’t know if any of the music actually comes from the show, either, which is unfortunate. On another note, as in the SNES game, the character selection is a bit odd. You have the four turtles, April O’Neil and Casey Jones, and two random comic-book characters. The SNES game also has several comic characters filling its roster. Why those and not some of the other more popular characters from the TV show? Did they not have the rights? If so, that was a mistake, it’d have made all of these games better. It’s interesting, but odd, that the SNES and Genesis games have different playable side characters, in addition to the Turtles. I do like that April O’Neil and Casey Jones are playable, as this is April’s only playable outing in a ’90s Turtles game, but it is unfortunate that April is in some random oversexed miniskirt outfit; it doesn’t fit her character.I like the idea of playable April, but she should have been in her usual outfit, not this pointlessly oversexed one.

But anyway, the decent graphics and sound can’t come even close to saving this disaster. There really isn’t much good I can say about this game outside of its visuals; the gameplay is just too badly flawed, with the overly limited moveset, iffy special move selections, absurdly difficult AI that is so hard that until you’ve gotten good at the game winning even a single ROUND is a challenge, limited continues in a game in a genre which almost never has such a thing, bad collision detection in a genre that demands this be just about flawless, and more. Sure, there are worse Genesis fighting games than this, but I don’t own those games myself; of what I have, this is the worst. Overall, TMNT Tournament Fighters for the Genesis is a bad, disappointing game. Don’t bother with it unless you’re a serious series fan. The NES version of TMNT Tournament Fighters might be even worse, but you wouldn’t expect a good fighter from the NES, while the Genesis can do far, far better than this. Play the SNES game instead, it’s very good.

Thunder Force II – 1 player. Thunder Force II is a good, but early, shmup from Techno Soft. This game released in 1989 and it looks simple compared to its sequels, but it plays well. Unlike its sequels, this game has two different gameplay styles, top-down open areas to fly and shoot things in, and standard horizontal-scrolling shooter sections. The graphics are early, but solid; this game does not look great, but for an early release it looks fine. Sprites are decently drawn, but somewhat simple; the art design is not nearly as great as it would be in the sequels. Also, the game has only some parallax and few other visual effects. The game looks okay, but does not really impress. I like the look of the top-view stages more than the horizontal ones, perhaps because there the graphics look more dated compared to this games’ amazing-looking sequels, which are exclusively side-scrolling. This games’ side-scrolling levels look and feel dated compared to its sequels’. I like the gameplay in the top-view levels more than the horizontal ones, for sure, though both sides of the game are good. The music is also good, though the voice samples are comically low-quality and unintelligible.

The top-down levels would not return in later games, but unlike some people I do like them. They remind me of a simpler version of the mid ’90s PC game Zone 66, which of course released years after this game, but I played long before this as this isn’t a game I remember playing back then. In these levels, you need to destroy a series of bases in a space surrounded by floating walls. You can fly in all directions, but can’t stop moving forward in whichever direction you are flying in. The walls will kill you, so you need to destroy ground bases and shoot switches to advance. The game has a Xevious-like ground-attack system in the top-view stages, so you have normal shots for air enemies and bombs that hit a set distance in front of your ship for ground turrets and bases. This works better here than in Xevious, Dragon Spirit, and such because you can fly in all directions, so you can chip away at bases, do hit-and-run attacks, and more. As much as I dislike this system in shmups, here I don’t mind it. Plus, it’s only in the free-roaming top-view stages; the side-view stages don’t have anything like it, thankfully. Anyway, you start with only two basic guns, a double-forward shot or forward and backward shot, but as in its later sequel Lightening Force (aka Thunder Force IV), you can power up weapons and get numerous special weapons from powerups. All weapons are good in their own ways, and I like the variety. However, unlike its sequels, in this game you lose ALL powerups if you die, and return to only the two basic guns. It’s very harsh, and that makes this game harder. You also do have limited continues, so finishing this game will take practice for sure. It’s a fun challenge, but I haven’t beaten the game yet, though I did get farther than usual when playing it for this summary. While you try to destroy the bases and the turrets that guard them, endless waves of air enemies will attack you. You move fairly quickly, so zipping around, picking away at a base until finally you can kill it is fun. Each top-down level plays very differently, too. The first is a series of rooms connected by gates, the second a large open area, the third a narrow, constricting cave with a linear path, and more. I like how differently each of them play. There is always the repetition of having to find and kill four bases in every ground mission, never another kind of target, but there is some nice variety despite that. I quite like this half of the game. For anyone else who likes this side of this game, look up Zone 66 on the PC; it’s like this, but expanded.

As for the side-scrolling levels, though, they are more conventional. In each you fly along, avoiding obstacles and killing enemies, until you reach the boss. Beat the boss and you win. These bosses are pretty tough, and it’s easy to lose a lot of lives in these levels; they are much harder than the top-view stages. I find most deaths in this game occur in side-view stages. Some stages and bossfights go on a bit too long, too, considering how simple and repetitive each stages’ background environments are; this game does not have the variety of its sequels. Still, the levels are mostly well designed, and contain some interesting challenges such as barrages of missiles, closing gates you need to stay ahead of, and more. The levels have some good parts, many of which the sequels improve on. Overall Technosoft was a good shmup developer, and this is a decent game. It is not one of the best in the genre on this shmup-rich console, but it is a good, above-average game that is well worth playing. The main flaws are that it is dated and sometimes frustratingly difficult, particularly in the boss fights, but the top-view missions are pretty good and the shmup sections are mostly fun. Truxton is the best shmup released on the Genesis in 1989, and this game is no Truxton, but it is worth a play. Also available on the Japan-only Sharp X68000 computer; that version is supposed to be a bit better, and has intelligible speech samples too.

Tinhead – 1 player, password save. Tinhead is a good Sonic-esque platformer from Spectrum HoloByte. Oddly, even though this game was made by a British developer, it only ever released in the US, and only on the Genesis as well. This feels like something that should have been on the Amiga also, but it’s not. Tinhead has cartoony graphics in that classic early ’90s British style and huge numbers of items to collect as usual in such games. The art design is unoriginal but looks good, and there is good use of strip parallax in the background for multi-layer scaling. You play as the little robot Tinhead, on some quest to save the universe or somesuch. The character design is decent, though not amazing. Enemies are varied as well. The music is also decent. It’s not really pushing the hardware, but I do like the tunes, they are well-composed. Overall, presentation-wise Tinhead is not exceptional, but is above-average. The gameplay is similar.

Indeed, Tinhead’s gameplay is above-average for sure; this game plays a lot better than any James Pond games, for example! Tinhead mixes its core Sonic influence of fast-paced platforming with shooting, so you kill enemies here by shooting them instead of jumping on them. The controls are good and precise, which is important in this kind of game. The game does have physics, but you’ll usually go just where you want. You will automatically keep jumping if you hold the jump button down, so I often found myself accidentally bouncing upon landing, but that’s a minor issue. As for your gun, you can fire it three directions: straight, upwards at a diagonal angle, or downwards, bouncing along the ground. The A button switches between the three shot directions, and the other buttons shoot and jump. Having to switch manually, with only one button, is a bit awkward, but you do get used to it. The diagonal-down shot is great for everything other than air enemies, I find. Because of how fast you move it is easy to run into enemies, but the game gives you five hit points per life, levels have plenty of health powerups, there are no instant death pits, and the game has password save with new passwords every couple of levels! Yeah, this game is a lot more forgiving than a lot of Genesis platformers, and I like that. You can just have fun with this one, instead of suffering as much as in some other games in this genre on the system. The game definitely gets harder as you go along, but it’s a fun challenge.

As for those levels, they are good-sized, open, and are full of secret paths, alternate routes full of stuff to get for points and powerups, and hidden bonus areas full of even more stuff. There are only four settings, with six levels plus a boss in each one, but all look and sound good and do feel different. There are also lots of enemies and spikes, but again, it’s fantastic that this game has no instant-death pits. In a game as fast as this or Sonic they are frustrating, and these designers knew it. As for the volume of stuff in the levels, while I don’t always love it, I like collecting if the act of collecting is fun and the game actually rewards you for it. This game does that. Sure, score in a game which doesn’t have a battery or such to save a score table doesn’t really matter, but the powerups can upgrade your weapon, give special items such as a bouncy-ball you can jump high with, refill your health, give you extra lives, and more. They are worth getting. The fun core gameplay is what makes that fun, of course. Tinhead is a good fun game, as you explore levels, look for powerups, shoot the badguys, and figure out each levels’ challenges. Sure, the warp tubes, spikes, speed, and physics are a lot like Sonic, but the weapon system makes this game distinct and works well. Tinhead is a good, often overlooked game that’s well worth picking up. It’s too bad that it never released in Europe, this is quality stuff.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure – 1 player, password save (20 characters). Buster’s Hidden Treasure is a conventional side-scrolling platformer from Konami. In this game you walk, run, and jump as Buster, the main character of the Tiny Toon Adventures cartoon from the early ’90s. Konami made Tiny Toon Adventures games for the NES, SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy in the early ’90s, and this is one of those games. Most are platformers where you play as Buster only, this game included. This is a sizable game with many levels and lots of platforming challenges. When compared to the SNES Tiny Toons platformer, this game is longer and has more levels, the reverse of most Konami Genesis games, but doesn’t look nearly as great and feels more conventional. The SNES game has only six stages and doesn’t have saving, but its levels use its unique mechanics heavily; see my summary of that game for more. In this game, though, most stages are just normal walk-to-the-right, jump-on-stuff platforming. You can wall-jump, and eventually this is required, but most stages don’t use it. Your jumping controls are good and precise, though, thankfully. There is a lot of stuff to collect in each stage, including carrots as your basic pickup, various ‘bomb’ type powerups, and some other things that must do something or other. If you want to just go straight to the end stages won’t take too long, but if you want to collect more stuff they’ll take longer. I like that, and I also like that many stages have multiple routes, with a more pickup-heavy but trickier to stay on route above and main, sparser path below. After every three levels there is a boss stage. Bosses are conventional, jump-on-their-head affairs. They’re decent enough, though the SNES game has some more inventive bossfights.

Visually, the game has good but not great graphics. The sprites look pretty nice and closely resemble the show’s art style, which is great. I like the little touches like cans you can trio over, too. However, the backgrounds are a bit bland looking and don’t come close to the SNES game; this definitely looks dated in comparison. Levels repeat graphical elements a lot, too. Between the average gameplay and somewhat bland visuals I wasn’t too impressed by this game at first, and I haven’t seen much to push it above average, either. The music is similarly good, but not Konami’s best. The rendition of the series’ main theme is good, but most of the rest of the tunes are original. It’s quality Konami work for sure, but they can do even better. I should also comment on the save system. The password system helps reduce tedium by not forcing you to play the whole game in one sitting, but unfortunately you need to get a Game Over to be shown your password, and they are an inexplicably long 20 characters! Why in the world are they so long? That makes no sense. Still, that’s better than nothing. Overall, Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure is a fun, average to slightly above-average platformer. On the plus side I like that this game breaks from Konami’s usual “too few levels that are too long” formula on this system, and the gameplay is solid and levels often fun to explore and find stuff in. However, the formula does start to get old after a few levels, and this game does nothing new or original. It’s just another decent but unspectacular mascot platformer, pretty much, better than many licensed games but not as good as the greats of the genre. If you find Buster’s Hidden Treasure for cheap, go ahead and pick it up; it’s certainly fun enough to be worth a play, particularly for platformer fans. Don’t expect anything amazing, though.

Toki: Going Ape Spit – 1 player. Toki is an okay but flawed side-scrolling platform-action game. It’s sort of in between a platformer and a run & gun. Based on a Taito arcade game, this Genesis port is a pretty good version of a not-great game. The game has several issues, worst of them the overly high difficulty level and abysmal music that’s among the worst on the Genesis, but there are also some things to like here, even if I more dislike than like this game. You are a man who was turned into an ape called Toki. Naturally you have to rescue your girlfriend as well as turn back to a human again. You can walk, jump, and as the name suggests, spit things. Spitting is your main attack, and you can shoot left, right, up, or diagonally up in either direction. Unfortunately you cannot attack downwards or diagonally down, which is a problem in many stages in this game. There are many powerups, most of them time-limited weapons. After a while you’ll go back to just your default shot. I wish the powerups weren’t limited, it’d be more fun that way. You can kill enemies by bouncing on their heads, but you’ll need to be very accurate to kill them without dying yourself. You do have jump control, but your jump distance is short and it’s easy to mess up jumps. Grabbing on to swinging ropes is also a lot harder than it should be. Mario this is not, that’s for sure, to Toki’s detriment. If you get hit even once you start the whole stage over, frustratingly.

Stages are not too long, but still, this adds a lot to the challenge. The one hit kills and frustrating level designs are a real issue here. There are eight levels, each with several stages and then a boss. Some levels are vertical, others horizontal, and others have some movement in both directions; it’s a mix. There are some interesting stages, but the gameplay is mostly similar throughout. The one exception is the water level, which is probably the most fun stage in the game, even if it is fairly easy. The game starts out okay, but by midway it’s almost too annoying to continue with due to cheap enemy placements killing you out of nowhere, random deaths from when you touch an enemy just barely wrong, the harder bosses, and such. On the default setting this game is quite hard, but you can make it easier. There are four difficulty levels, and you can change the number of lives and continues, though infinite is not an option, and how many points you need for a 1-up. At the easiest setting this game is beatable, and I did finish it that way, but even there it was a pain to finish due to the high frustration factor and stunningly terrible music. I don’t want to play this again anytime soon. As for the graphics, they are very average stuff, with mediocre art design and bland backdrops. Some areas look nice, but this is mostly average-at-best stuff. The music is, as I said, atrocious. Excepting only the water level, there is only ONE song that plays during all non-boss stages of the other seven levels, and it’s about fifteen seconds long and awful. Even if the arcade game is like this, this is inexcusably annoying, and ruins what little fun factor this game has. The menu, end, water level, and boss themes are tolerably okay, but the main level theme is awful and it’s like 95% of what you hear. Overall, Toki is a below average, maybe bad game. It does have some decent moments, but ultimately is more frustrating and aurally atrocious than it is worthwhile. Probably don’t bother with this one. Arcade port. Other ports of the game are available on the NES, Lynx, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and iOS. There is also a cancelled Atari 7800 version some people have a copy of.

Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics – 1-2 player simultaneous. Tom & Jerry: Frantic Antics is a mediocre licensed platformer. As this game was released by usually-terrible publisher Hi Tech Expressions I expected the game to be awful, but while it is subpar, it isn’t the absolute disaster I was expecting. So yeah, that’s good, I guess. At least it’s better than Sega’s abysmal Game Gear game Tom & Jerry: The Movie! This game has some serious flaws, though, the too-high difficulty perhaps chief among them. In Frantic Antics, you play as Tom, and need to cross many difficult levels as you loosely follow the plot of the movie. In two player mode, one player plays as each of the two. Unlike that GG game, though, there’s no sign of the other character most of the time in one player mode; even though that game is bad and so short and easy you’ll beat it in your first try in maybe fifteen minutes, at least it is a chase game, fitting for this chase-centric series. This is just your average platformer. Your average, excessively difficult platformer, with sometimes-iffy controls, limited lives and continues and no saving. So yeah, it has problems.

The graphics are nice, though. the levels are large and full of stuff to collect, level layouts are average, and the controls aren’t that bad. Tom is a bit skiddy, but you do get used to it with practice. This game doesn’t look amazing, but everything is decently well drawn. Tom looks like Tom and the enemies like characters who maybe could have been in the show. Backgrounds are familiar environments as well, including the backyard, inside the house, and the like. The sprites are a bit large for the screen, and this causes occasional blind-jump problems, but they aren’t as frequent as in a Taz-Mania, thankfully; generally you can see where you need to go, the challenge is getting there without dying. While Tom can take multiple hits against normal foes, falling in a pit kills you of course, and only a couple of deaths and you start the whole game over. Levels are long, too; even just beating level two will be quite a task, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s worth it. While I did like this game at first, with its nice graphics, large levels to explore, and lots of stuff to collect, but the high difficulty drags it down. And while there is a two player co-op mode, it is flawed as if one player goes off screen they are frozen in place and the one on screen has to backtrack to find them. Two players on one screen in a platformer is hard to do well, but this solution can be tedious. If you could save, instead of constantly having to start the game over from the start, this game would be better, but as it is, Tom & Jerry: Frantic Antics is probably best only for series fans or people who like hard games. Also on SNES.

Trouble Shooter – 1 player. Trouble Shooter is a very good horizontal shmup with several original elements to it. This game has good anime-styled artwork with a comic sci-fi-anime theme, good graphics and sound, a pair of female protagonists who you both play as at the same time, a simple story told in between-level cutscenes, multiple hit points (a rarity in Japanese shooters!), a nice difficulty curve as you progress through the game, and multi-direction shooting. In the story, the protagonists are on a mission to rescue a young kidnapped prince. So yeah, in this game the girls save the guy, a reversal from usual. Your two characters each control differently, and move mostly together. Their sprites are large and so is your hitbox, but the hit points and large, slow-moving bullets help a lot. If you’re paying attention is is possible to avoid damage. The main character, “Madison” as she was renamed to in the American version, is the one you directly control and the one who can take damage. She can only shoot to the right, and is the only one who can collect powerups and power up her weapon. The second character, “Michelle”, follows the main one at a slight delay. She can’t collect powerups or directly take damage, but can fire either right or left, and switches directions when you press C. This is very useful, because enemies attack from both sides of the screen. You’ll often be switching directions back and forth. You also have a bomb attack, with four different types to choose between.

This is a well-balanced game with good level designs, some interesting boss fights, and as much variety as you’ll usually see in the genre. Some level themes are the expected ones, such as a requisite giant-battleship stage that has to have been inspired by R-Type, but in addition to the more standard waves of enemies you also face sections such as a shaft full of spinning blades. The stage designs are great, I really like the varied obstacles and settings. Bosses each have specific weak points, and finding how to fight each one is fun stuff. They’re all very well-designed and amusing. The game starts out easy, but it gets tougher as you go as good games do. Try to stay alive! It’s easy to build up a lot of hit points early on in the game with the health-ups available there, but if you lose them you’ll be in trouble, as the later stages have fewer health-ups, and you get only two continues. In that way this game very much rewards repeat play, but still, it is easier than many Genesis shmups, and is one of the few Genesis shmups I have beaten.

Visually, Trouble Shooter has good, though conventional, graphics. The game has solid graphics with good art design, good use of parallax, and minimal if any slowdown. It doesn’t use any hardware-pushing techniques, and does look somewhat dated visually, but that is in part because of the early ’90s look of the anime art here, in a game where large character sprites are on screen at all times; the art design is clearly a product of its time. The game also never tries to put a lot of stuff on screen at once, perhaps part of how it avoids slowdown. The large characters and bosses are quite well-drawn, though, and the backgrounds use multiple layers of parallax. The music is also good. It isn’t the most memorable stuff, but I do like the music here. Overall, Trouble Shooter is a good game with a lot going for it. I like the gameplay, level designs, challenge level, art design, choice of female protagonists, and more! It is a little dated in some ways, and isn’t super hard, but that’s fine with me. I wish people today could get it for the couple of bucks I got this game for back in ’06, but even for its current prices, the game is absolutely worth getting. This game is one of the more original, and better, shmups on the Genesis. The game also has a sequel, Battle Mania Daiginjou, which sadly did not release in the US.

Truxton – 1 player. Truxton is a popular, and very good, vertical shmup from Toaplan released in 1989. This is one of Toaplan’s relatively few space-based shooters; most of their games involved airplanes flying over a planet, but this is a sci-fi game. A popular classic, this early release is the best shmup, and quite possibly the best game, released for the Genesis in ’89. The game has decent to good graphics, a fantastic soundtrack that still sounds great, and five big levels to blast through. This game is HARD, though. The Japanese title of this game is “Tatsujun”, which means “Expert”. And you will need expert skills to get anywhere near the end of this game, particularly above Easy difficulty! You die in one hit in Truxton, and enemies move fast, shoot quickly, and regularly come from behind. Of course your whole ship is vulnerable, and don’t ask for a shield; there isn’t one. Shields are for games which don’t call themselves “Expert”, I guess. You’ll need to memorize everything to stay alive. You have three different weapons to choose from, a spread shot, a strong straight shot, or a weak homing shot. Each has its uses, but while it takes longer to kill things, at times the homing laser is invaluable against the frequent groups of larger, miniboss-like foes. There are also powerups for superbombs, extra lives, speed-ups, and weapon upgrades. One weapon powerup does nothing, though; you need more. Five weapon-upgrade powerups upgrades your weapon once, and five more upgrades it again. I think that’s the last upgrade, but I’ve never managed to get 15 without dying, so I’m not sure. Each time you get five the meter empties. And when you do die, you get sent back to the last checkpoint. And if you die right at a checkpoint, you may be sent back to the LAST one! This isn’t the only Toaplan shmup which does this, but it can be very frustrating. You also lose most powerups, of course: your bombs reset to three, speed to slow, and weapon to the basic gun. You do keep your weapon powerups if you have one to four, though, so that is nice. The controls and hit detection are right on. If you die, it’s your fault. Of course the bullets are small and sometimes hard to see, and I’m terrible at reliably dodging waves of small bullets, but it is your fault.

Though later Genesis games would push the hardware more than Truxton, this game does look pretty good. The sprites and backgrounds all look great. This game has very good art design. Your spaceship and the many alien crafts you’ll shoot down all look pretty nice. Even if technically it is similar, in terms of art design this game looks a lot better than other Toaplan games like Kyuukyoku Tiger or such! There are only five levels in this game, but each one is very long and varied. Many ’80s shmups have a lot of repetition, but Truxton does a great job of mixing things up just enough to make each encounter feel different. The game is hard from the start, so the difficulty curve isn’t as pronounced as it is in some shmups, but it does get even harder as you get deeper into it. Miniboss and boss enemies have one small flame appear on their sprite when at 1/3 damage and two flames at 2/3rds, too, which is really helpful for gauging how damaged the tougher enemies are. The soundtrack is also, as mentioned, fantastic. The music here is a good rendition of the music from the arcade game, and sounds great today. It doesn’t push the Genesis sound chip like a late release would, but it sounds fantastic regardless.

The game has some nice options, too. There are three difficulty levels, and in Easy you have infinite continues! That’s awesome, and makes the game beatable by anyone. There are also fewer bullets to contend with in Easy. Normal is a bit tougher, and more importantly has limited continues, and Hard gives you very few continues. That’s a nice curve there to cover most player skill levels. The game has a bunch of loops, too, something not present in other versions of the game. If you keep playing after beating the game, you’ll see a new ending each time through a full five loops. Of course, it gets slightly tougher each time. It’s great that there are actual rewards for people dedicated enough to get that far. Overall, Truxton is an outstanding shooter and easily is one of the best Genesis shmups. This is a must-have classic. And as hard as it is, the Genesis version is actually the easy version of Truxton! The arcade game is even harder, and the PC Engine (Turbografx) port… oh man, that’s just an insane, near-impossible nightmare. On the PCE the enemies shoot much closer to you much more often, making the game incredibly, incredibly difficult. I’m not good enough at bullet dodging to deal with that! If you can beat this game on a higher setting you are indeed an “expert” at shmups, but if you can beat that one you’re a master. Myself, I’ve only beaten this game on Easy, but at least that’s something. The PCE version is quite expensive, too. This US-released Genesis game isn’t cheap, but it’s reasonably priced and is worth the money. Make sure you get it. There is also an arcade and FM Towns-exclusive sequel which is just as good or better than the first game, and has an even more incredible soundtrack. It’s really too bad it never got a home port to a more popular platform!

Turrican – 1 player. Turrican is the first game in what would become a moderately successful series. This first game is seriously rough around the edges, but some of the elements that would make the later games great are here. It is, however, the worst Turrican game by a good margin; while I love the four other main Turrican games, this one isn’t so great. It is not quite as bad as some say, but it is a flawed game. So, Turrican is one part Euro-platformer, one part Metroid, and one part Contra. You are Turrican, a futuristic space marine type off to save the world or some such; there is no story in the game. You’ve got a ball form like Samus, arsenal like Contra, and large, collection-heavy levels like a Euro-platformer of the day. You do have a health bar, but it drains quickly and enemies’ attacks are often cheap and hard to avoid. You have no hit-flash, sound, or invinciblity while taking hits and your health bar drops fast, so you can lose lives in an instant if you aren’t paying close attention. This health system is one of the biggest things Factor 5 improved on in their work on Super and Mega Turrican, but it’s an issue here. The game also has blind jumps over death pits, something its sequels get rid of. I’m very glad the later games don’t have this, but in this game it is a problem. The game is long at 16 levels, and you have only a couple of continues to beat the game with before you’re starting the whole thing over. I’ve never gotten anywhere near the end, and only the dedicated ever will. This game can be fun while you’re alive, but the frustration factor gets high sometimes. Visually Turrican looks okay. It’s got nothing on Mega Turrican’s beauty or visual effects, but this is an okay-looking port of the computer original. The audio is similarly decent, but downgraded versus the Amiga. This is mostly a solid port, though.

Overall, Turrican is an interesting one. The console ports of this game are generally hated, but the computer original is popular among European gamers who played it on the C64, Amiga, and such. But as much as I do agree that Turrican II (aka Universal Soldier on the Genesis; see below) is a very good game, this one is not nearly on that level. With a too high difficulty level, limited continues with no saving, mediocre graphics and music, blind jumps, and constant deaths due to the health system, Turrican is flawed. Even so, I do like this game overall. Turrican has good controls, a nice variety of weapons, some of that Turrican charm, large levels to explore and find huge amounts of stuff in, and a lot of variety in level designs and bosses. Turrican is a good but flawed game, though its sequels would significantly improve on its formula. I know a lot of people hate this game, but it might be worth a try, if you’ve got an open mind. Amiga port, also on Commodore 64, Game Boy, and TurboGrafx-16. The other two console ports both have some cut levels, but this version is complete and has better graphics too, so it’s by far the best console port of the game.

Twin Cobra – 1 player. Twin Cobra, aka Kyuukyoku Tiger, is a classic late ’80s vertical-scrolling shmup from Toaplan. One of Toaplan’s most popular games, this game nails the balance between challenge and fun in a way that its predecessor Tiger Heli (arcade, NES) failed to reach. Kyuukyoku Tiger is a great and difficult game, but it plays well and is lots of fun even if it’s hard. This version of the game, though, is somewhat unfair, has some odd design decisions, and is not as good as the arcade original or the sadly Japan-only PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) port of the game. As much as I like this game, I can’t really recommend this version, it’s kind of broken. The core of the game is the same as other versions, though. You control a helicopter and need to destroy the enemies. This will be an incredibly difficult mission, though, as the game is good-length for its genre, you die in one hit and as in most Toaplan shmups there is no shield, and the enemies are merciless. Toaplan was one of the best shmup developers of their day, and the great enemy patterns, tough but fair if you have memorized everything challenge, and interesting bosses make this game great. The graphics are mediocre at best, but do look like the source; the PCE version looks no better. Sprites are somewhat small, and the backgrounds are basic and don’t look great. They look okay, but that’s it. Audio is similarly good, but nothing amazing. Toaplan’s greatest skill was gameplay, more than graphics or sound. I do like some of their music, including some in this game, but the system can do better.

This version makes one big change from the arcade and PCE versions, though: it zooms in a bit, and makes the powerup-dropping ships incredibly difficult to kill. Now, on the PCE, the powerup-dropping ships are fairly easy to kill. If you start shooting them at a reasonable time, they’ll blow up and drop their powerup. On the Genesis, however, if you don’t start shooting them immediately after they appear on the screen, you have no hope of destroying them before they desend too low on the screen to still be shot without them getting you first! It’s just absurd, and makes the game a lot harder than it should be. There are some other zoom issues with enemies as well, but it’s worst with the powerup ships. And this is a big problem because you need a LOT of powerups to reach full power, and lose all powerups and get sent back to the last checkpoint upon death. The game does give you continues, the number of which varies depending on which difficulty you choose, but because you get sent back, it’s very hard on any setting. The continue system is really odd, though — if I’m understanding things right the game gives you more continues, not less, in the higher difficulties, and fewer continues in the easier ones. That doesn’t make much sense. Continues are not everything, though. On the PCE you only get two or three continues, far fewer than the dozens in the highest settings in this game, but because that game is a good port and not messed up, it’s easier to get farther in that game than it is this one. It’s still a very hard game and I haven’t gotten anywhere near the end on any system, but that version is a lot more fun to play. Do play Twin Cobra, it’s a fun game and, in Japan at least, a great, influential classic… but pass on this version. The graphics are pretty much the same on both platforms, but the closer zoom and busted powerup-ship system makes this game too frustrating for its own good. Stick to that import-only PCE version, or get the easier and simpler, but decently fun, NES version; that does have a US release. Sadly no home port has the co-op multiplayer of the arcade game, so the arcade version is best. Arcade port, also on PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) and NES.

Tyrants: Fight Through Time – 1 player, password save. Tyrants: Fight Through Time, also known as Mega-Lo-Mania in Europe, is a “god game” style real-time strategy game in the Populous style, but simpler. You control one of four deities, trying to conquer lands through many historical periods. This game was Sculptured Software’s attempt to do a game in this genre, and it does work, I just find this kind of thing sort of boring compared to the real-time strategy genre proper as we know it from Dune 2 and on. God games just don’t have enough interaction! I’ve never cared for Populous, and this game has even less to do than that game. Still, this game is okay, and is somewhat original for a Genesis game. So, in this game you play as one of four deities, all trying to conquer a series of maps. You can’t directly control your people, though; instead, all you can do is set people into various jobs, including research, building, the army, or such, and drop armies into territories on the map. Map territories are large, like the spaces on the map in a board game like Risk, and even in a battle, all you can do is just put armies in a space and then sit back and watch. The main gameplay here is just adjusting where you use your people, in the various options on the sidebar, and choosing what to prioritize between the weapon types available to research and such. That stuff is a fun part of grand strategy games, but here it’s the whole game, unfortunately. You also have to choose how many people to bring with you into each map, though, and this element is kind of interesting. In each stage of the game you have three maps to win, and only 100 people to work with between the three of them… and you can’t reuse people once they’ve been sent to a map, so you need to carefully consider how many are needed on each map. That is kind of interesting. There are passwords to save your progress as well, and thankfully they aren’t absurdly long.

The visuals here, however, are fairly basic. The game looks okay, but the sprites are miniscule and telling your and your enemies’ people apart is difficult to impossible, during battles. This same developer also made the game Cannon Fodder, and you see that in how small these people are. The art design is average at best. For audio, the music is generic stuff, but the game does have a lot of fairly clear voice samples. The four different deities you can play as all have quite a few lines. This does add to the game. Still, overall, Tyrants is a bit too simplistic. I want to actually set building locations and tell the troops where to go, not only direct research and military operations on the most general level. I didn’t really like a Populous game until the third one, which is a fairly traditional RTS, for example. This simpler game probably fits the limitations of 4th-gen consoles better than the console versions of Populous do, but while this game is okay, I don’t find it nearly as fun as better, PC-only strategy games are. Strategy game fans might want to give it a try, though, some will like this. There is also a PC version of this game, under the same title here in the US. Overseas only, as Mega-Lo-Mania, the game was released in Europe on the Amiga, and Atari ST and in Japan on the X68000 and FM Towns computers. Europe and Japan both got a SNES version as well.

The ‘controversial’ review this time is obvious, it’s that I don’t like Strider.  Beyond that, Summer Challenge is worth mentioning; it’s good, and very rarely mentioned. I guess most people probably don’t like Summer or Winter Challenge as much as I do, but I do think they’re good games.

Games covered in this update
—
Strider
Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns
Sub-Terrania
Summer Challenge
Sunset Riders
Super Battleship
Super Hang-On (Sega 6-Pak)
Super Monaco GP
Super Monaco GP II, Arton Senna’s
Sword of Vermilion
Syd of Valis
Target Earth
Task Force Harrier EX
Taz-Mania

Strider – 1 player.  Strider is a popular classic arcade platform-action game from Capcom.  This Genesis port is by Sega, but they did a fairly good job translating over the arcade game.  Unfortunately, as much as many people like this game, I don’t.  This is not a game I remember playing back in the ’80s or ’90s, and the game has aged pretty badly.  Strider on the Genesis has only okay graphics with massive amounts of flicker, very glitchy collision detection, often frustrating controls, only a handful of levels, and an annoyingly high difficulty level.  This game isn’t even average, much less great.  The game is ambitious with its original, very angled level designs and a very mobile character, and I can see why people who played it in 1989-1990 would think highly of it because of that, but it hasn’t held up.  The Genesis can do vastly better than this, and would as its life went on.  Visually the game is also dated.  The game has some decent use of parallax, but otherwise the graphics are below average compared to later Genesis games.  That flicker particularly gives away its early release.

So, you play as Strider, a ninja.  The game is set in a future where the Soviet Union still exists, and is still evil, apparently.  The story doesn’t matter much though; you’ve got people to kill.  Strider moves fast, and attacks with a big sword-sweep which hits a good distance ahead of you.  You can grab onto any wall or ceiling and move along those surfaces, and the game really emphasizes this as levels are full of angled walls, ceilings and walls to grab onto, and more.  It is a fast-paced game, and you’re usually moving forward and fighting new foes and bosses.  The controls are very ‘sticky’, in that you automatically grab onto any wall, ceiling, or platform you touch.  There are plusses and minuses to both this game and Shinobi III’s systems, of either auto-attach or manual button-based attach control in games with this much free movement, but while it can be frustrating at times when you’re having trouble getting where you want because of something else in the way, I think I like this system more.  The jump itself is bad, though — you have very little air control, so you pretty much just land where you were going to before the jump started.  This is not good and makes the game harder.  The glitchy graphics, collision-detection issues, and flicker all hurt too, and combine to really hurt this game, and are a major reason I’d call the graphics not so great.  Overall, I do not find Strider very fun to play at all.  You die fairly easily and have limited continues, so the game is hard, and with controls and visuals this flawed, I’ve never wanted to seriously try to beat this game.  I did get farther than usual when playing for this summary, but I still don’t like the game much.  Strider is not a bad game, but it is over-rated unless you have nostalgia for it.  Maybe the arcade version is better, I don’t know and don’t think I have ever played that version, but this one is more bad than good.  I guess that the very angled levels were unique for the time, as you’re rarely just moving along flat ground, but newer games are much better than this in every way, and those nagled platforms cause some of the frustration too, thanks to weird jump and attack angles, collision issues, and more.  Arcade port.  There is also a Turbo CD (Arcade Card required) port that was only released in Japan.  It has a new, exclusive level or two, but has no parallax and runs at a lower framerate.  Ports of the arcade version are also available on newer platforms, first on the PS1 included with Strider 2, and also in newer Capcom collections as well.

Journey from Darkness: Strider Returns – 1 player.  Strider Returns, by Domark, is a European platform-action game using Capcom’s Strider name and license.  Most people hate it, but I find this an okay little game.  This game has little to do with the original beyond the name, though.  This game is bigger, slower-paced, and much more conventional than its Japanese forbear.  Strider Returns is just your average European platform-action game, really… but it is a competently made one, and doesn’t have most of the major flaws of the first Genesis Strider game.  You play as Strider again, and walk around, chopping up enemies with your big sword as you collect powerups and try to find the exit in each level.  Now, this game is flat, but levels do have a lot of verticality, and you are often jumping between many higher and lower platforms, tree-limbs, and more.  I like that, it keeps things interesting.  Enemy placements are also good, and you can kill them before they hit you if you’re paying attention and attack them once they appear.  The annoying, precontrolled jumps do return, but in this games’ more normal-feeling levels, it works better than in the first game, and in places like the level full of laser gates actually is somewhat helpful, as you quickly learn just where to jump from in order to not be hit.  Levels are large, and this is a tough game, just as hard as the first one.  The levels are at least average in design, and probably are above average.  I like most of the stages here, and the game is fun to play and explore.  Each level has a different setting, and they’re all good.  This game has only average graphics, but it doesn’t look bad.  The music is similarly okay, but not great.  Overall though, Strider Returns is an above-average to good game.  I like exploring the levels finding secrets and the best path, and I like the large levels as well.  By turning Strider into an average Euro-platformer, I (and next to no one else) think that Domark improved on Capcom’s game.  Yes, it is much less ambitious, original, and unique, but it’s a better, more fun to play game.  Still, though, I’d only recommend it to those with a degree of tolerance for European games of the era; this game plays quite differently from Japanese or American games, and it shows.  I sometimes like and sometimes dislike European action games on the Genesis, but this one is alright.  Also on the Amiga.

Sub-Terrania – 1 player.  Zyrinx’s Sub-Terrania, or Subterrania, is a fantastic gravity shooter, in the vein of Gravitar or Solar Jetman, but better.  Indeed, this game is one of the best ever in this genre.  In these games, you play as a spaceship in enclosed caverns.  The game has gravity, and your ship slowly drops towards the ground unless you hit the forward or back thrusters.  You have limited fuel, though, so you need to be careful and plan your moves.  You also have health, and lose health when shot, when enemies touch you, or when you hit the ground too hard or touch the ground at anything other than a straight-on landing.  Control in this game is a delicate balance of hitting both thruster commands, shooting, and avoiding the walls, while also trying to accomplish your mission objectives.  This game has only eight or so levels, but each is large and has multiple objectives to accomplish.  Sub-Terrania is, indeed, a very difficult game; I have never finished it, or even gotten close to the end, despite how much I like it.  The game has no continues or saving, unfortunately; when you run out of lives, that’s it, start over.  When you combine that with the tough stages, replay and memorization are really important here.  Your health goes down quickly and health and fuel refills are few and limited within each stage, so it is easy to lose lives.  You need to be careful if you want to get through.  The challenge may be high, but every level is interesting and different in some way.  The first two missions are straightforward once you learn them, but the third is a bit tricky; looking up what to do in a walkthrough might be a good idea, if you’re stuck.  Regardless of the challenge, this game is incredibly fun to play.  I really like how much variety there is, and the game controls extremely well once you get used to it.  The different weapons are balanced well as well.  You can only shoot straight ahead, but each gun feels different.  On Easy you keep weapon powerups once collected, but on higher settings you lose a level of weapon power when you die, so the difficulty you choose affects more than just the strength of your enemies.  It’s great that Easy really is easier, beginning players may need the help.

This game isn’t only about gameplay, though; it also looks good and sounds great.  Sub-Terrania has a techno soundtrack from Genesis sound-chip master Jesper Kyd, later of Adventures of Batman & Robin fame, and this soundtrack is really good too.  It’s a definite strong point of the game.  The graphics are also pretty good; though all levels are in caverns and many enemies repeat throughout the game, at least the different ones each have different-looking walls and backgrounds, and each boss is unique.  The ingame graphics are quite well drawn and detailed, and I like all the little touches added to your surroundings.  Sub-Terrania is not quite the technical marvel of Zyrinx’s other, later Genesis game Red Zone, but while it does not use fancy graphical techniques, it is a pretty good-looking game for the system anyway.  It also has better gameplay than Red Zone, which counts for a lot; that game is interesting but flawed, while this one is just great.  Sub-Terrania does have a significant learning curve, as your ship moves quickly and it may seem hard to control at first, but with practice you will get used to it.  It is important to remember to use both thrusters, instead of just the forward one; that back thruster is very useful!  Also, learning the momentum system is vital.  Don’t accelerate too much, and get used to rotating quickly to fire at something in a tricky location, then back to straight to land and repeat the process once you take off again.  Once you get the controls down, learning each mission is the next step.  Even if you use the helpful GameFAQs guide for the basics of what to do in the more complex missions like the third one and its multiple different mirrors you need to reflect a laser with, actually executing on that will be a challenge!  Overall, Sub-Terrania is a very good gravity-shooter, probably my favorite game in this little subgenre of the ones I have played.  This is a great game that’s worth playing for sure.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Summer Challenge – 1-10 player alternating, battery save to cartridge.  Summer Challenge is the first of two olympic sports games from Accolade.  This game doesn’t have an official olympic license, but it does have good gameplay and unique design for the time, quite unlike the terrible licensed olympics games on the Genesis. I first got the PC version of this game in the ’90s, and thought that it was fun.  So, after seeing how great the Genesis port of Hardball III turned out, I decided to pick up this game, and its winter-themed sequel, as well.  These games have some issues, most notably the framerate, but are good games despite that.  The framerate is an issue because this isn’t a 2d game.  Instead, your sprite characters are in full, flat-shaded polygonal worlds!  It’s a very different look from any other games like it on the system, and framerate aside the choice works.  I really like that the sports actually look somewhat like the real thing.  Sports like cycling or kyaking wouldn’t be nearly as good in regular 2d!  The game has a somewhat limited selection of only about eight sports to play, and some are similar such as the several track events, but all are solidly done.  Aesthetically, this game looks a lot like Hardball III, until you get into the events that is.  I like the graphics and art design, they aren’t anything great but look good.  The sprites are all good-looking and detailed, and those polygon environments work well, visually at least.  The menu system is clearly copied right out of that game, which is great.  The audio and graphical design are also similar, the 3d graphics in this game aside of course.  And again the game has battery save.  You can’t save during an event, but events are short and the game will save your progress between events while playing a tournament, so that’s fine.  Most games in this genre didn’t have battery save back in the early ’90s, so it’s a very nice thing to see here.  Control-wise, the game has a one-button-plus-a-dpad design, much like Hardball III, but despite this has fairly familiar controls for those used to Track & Field-styled games.  As with most such games, in many events you either mash a button, or alternate between pressing two buttons or directions.  There’s always a lot of button-mashing in this genre, and this game is no exception.  The controls are good enough, though, once you learn each event.  Multiplayer is alternating only, but it’s great that it is present and for up to ten players, and with many of these events it had to be alternating.  You can save your stats to individual player files thanks to the battery, if people make good times in events.

There are eight events here.  First is Archery.  This is a 2d event, without the polygons of most of the rest.  You have to shoot at several targets, waiting until the cursor is in the center as it bounces around.  Try to hit the button at the right time to win!  This is the easiest event, and while it can get old, it is nice to have something not hard to win at.  Hurdles will be tougher; the only track event here is 400 meter hurdles.  You run by alternating directions, and jump with the button.  Getting your timing down is tricky, and if you hit a gate you’re eliminated.  Javelin is also here.  You build up speed with the buttons, then hit throw at just the right timing.  it’s simple and fun.  High Jump is harder.  You’ve got to run and then This event is usually one of hte harder ones in games in this genre, and that is the case here.  Definitely practice to get the timing for the multiple jumps down.  Pole Vaulting is in the game as well, though the boxart is of a pole-vaulter so it better be, and timing the pole can be tricky.  I’d probably have rather seen multiple running races over two jumping ones, but ah well; at least they are better here than in some of these games.  Next is Kayaking, a sport almost never seen in ’90s olympics games.  This sport shows off the 3d graphics well, and also the poor framerate.  I highly recommend practicing the course before trying it in tournaments, but it is pretty fun once you do.  I like racing games, and it’s great to see this slightly more conventional racing game appear in this title.  It is unforgiving, though — just like in a real olympics, miss one gate and you’re eliminated.  Speed-cycling is also here.  You’re racing on an angled track in a velodrome, trying to get around the track as quickly as possible.  The framerate here is bad, but the gameplay is simple — just button-mash, while watching your strength gauge.  It’s alright.  And last, this game has Equestrian.  Yes, another sport almost never seen in this kind of game is present here.  You ride your horse along a course, trying to stay on the course and make all of the jumps along the way.  It’s tricky, but I do like it, I guess.

Overall, Summer Challenge is a quite interesting game.  This game is partially a conventional track & field game, and partially something new, with polygonal graphics and several sports never seen in other games in the genre.  I do wish that the framerate was better, it really is down near the single-digits, more sports would have been nice, and in-event music would have been cool, but otherwise I quite like Summer Challenge.  The Hardball III-esque Accolade stylings are great, and the actual game is good.  This game is no Hardball III, it’s only above average to good, but it is one of my favorite track & field games ever, for nostalgia reasons partially I’m sure, but also for its good gameplay and design.  Also on PC and Amiga.  The PC version is best, with higher-resolution graphics and much better framerates.  This Genesis version is pretty good for the hardware, though, and contains all content from the PC original.

Sunset Riders – 1-2 player simultaneous.   Konami’s arcade Sunset Riders game, also available in slightly modified form on the SNES, is a great run & gun action game.  Easier than Contra and with some fantastic wild west themes, the game is a lot of fun!  I’ve liked Sunset Riders ever since first playing it in arcades in the early ’90s.  It has a cool style to it you didn’t often see then.  Unfortunately, this is not that game.  Instead of porting over the SNES game, Konami decided to make a low-budget, mediocre spinoff title here.  This game just screams of the lower budgets of most of Konami’s Genesis games, and it hurts it a lot compared to the other Sunset Riders titles.  Despite that it is a fun game, but the ‘real’ Sunset Riders is a lot better.  The graphics here are downgraded, the music okay but not as good as on the SNES, the speech samples have mostly been cut from the game, and half of the level settings and bosses are gone as well.  Sad stuff.  Sunset Riders is a wild-west themed side-scrolling run & gun shooter.  You play as two cowboys, Billy or Cormano, and have four bosses to take down in eight levels.  Yes, that’s down two characters and four bosses from the arcade/SNES game.  The levels are all-new as well, and far less well designed.  Where in the arcades and SNES Sunset Riders has short, tightly-designed stages that keep the tempo up and are always changing, Genesis Sunset Riders stretches out each of its four locations into two whole levels each, and then has constant repeated graphical elements within each stage.  You pass by the same buildings again and again and again in the first couple of stages, for example, it’s so repetitive in a way that the original Sunset Riders wasn’t at all.

There are lots of enemies to face, and the game controls well and is fun to play, though, so it’s not all bad.  All major enemy types from the arcade game return, and this game has less censorship than the SNES game too, as Indian regular enemies and scantily-clad women are in this game, but not the one on Nintendo.  There is still some censorship, though — as on the SNES, the female enemy type from the arcade game has been replaced with a guy, and the beer-drinking scenes have been removed from the certain doors that had them.  Instead, every single door has a scantily-clad woman, and there are like ten times more doors in this game than the original thanks to all those repeated level elements, so the absence of that other animation is made painfully apparent as you see it again and again.  The four bossfights that are here are good and play like they should, though at least one has a location change.  As previously mentioned, though, the bosses’ voiced catchphrases have been removed, and replaced with just text.  Cheap!  And that’s this game in a nutshell.  The missing content, new, somewhat boring, and far too repetious level designs, and downgraded graphics and sound really hold back what is otherwise a good little game.  Sunset Riders for the Genesis is a fun game, and I do like it.  The game controls great, sounds good, and blasting through waves of wild-west baddies is fun.  The game is kind of easy as I have beaten it repeatedly, but it’s a fun easy, and there are higher difficulty settings if you want that.  The co-op play is good as well.  However, the game just has too many major limitations to recommend for anything above a quite low price, and this game is somewhat pricey now.  Only get Genesis Sunset Riders if you’re lucky and see it cheap; otherwise, save up for the more expensive, but great, SNES game.  That game is far better than this.

Super Battleship – 1 player, password save (Super mode only).  This terrible, huge disappointment has two modes.  First you have classic Battleship, a digital re-creation of the classive board game… for one player only.  Because of how Battleship works you can’t have two players on the same screen, but still, it is disappointing that you can’t play this against a friend somehow.  This mode plays just like Battleship: first you place your various ship types on your grid, then fire at the computers’ grid trying to guess where their ships are, taking turns along the way.  This version has you make three shots per turn instead of one, oddly, but does not have the added alternate shot types of NES Battleship.  I also can’t get past the absent multiplayer, that flaw kind of makes the whole thing feel pointless.  The graphics here are bland and subpar but aren’t terrible, and the music, where there even is any, is forgettable.  There’s really no reason to ever play this game in classic mode; you can find better Battleship games in many places, I am sure.  NES Battleship may also be single player only, but at least it has progression, many levels to beat, special weapons, and more.  This has nothing beyond the not-so-great feature that you shoot three shots per turn.

There is a second mode here, though, Super Battleship.  It tries to be something more… tries, and fails.  This mode is a turn-based naval strategy game.  You choose one of several scenarios, and have to try to beat an enemy fleet with your own fleet of ships.  Each different ship type has different stats and weapons, and movement and firing ranges also.  Interestingly, ships can only move like a ship — that is, forwards and back either straight or at a curving angle only, no sideways moves.  That more realistic movement is by far the best thing about this game, but doesn’t make up for the otherwise seriously lacking gameplay.  Combat is somewhat arcadey, as once two ships engage you move a cursor around and hit the fire button to shoot at the enemy.  It’s harder to hit enemies than it is for them to hit you, it seems.  Naturally.  You also have only a limited quantity of each weapon type, so if you miss with one it really does hurt.  Scenarios are surprisingly difficult, and getting good enough to actually beat them didn’t really seem worth it to me.  This is a painfully slow game with bad graphics and little audio, and it takes a lot of turns for ships to get close enough to actually attack… and then I get crushed.  If you do stick with it there is a fifteen-plus mission campaign with password save, but I’ll probably never see that.  With time you may start winning, and it is good that each ship type is quite different, but is a game this slow-paced, boring, and lacking in fun really worth that kind of time?    I’d say not, myself;  Super Battleship is a bad game that I find unbearably unfun to play.  Pass on Super Battleship, it’s terrible.  Classic mode is kind of irrelevant, and Super mode is tedious and no fun.  This game made my 10-worst-Genesis-games-I-own list for a reason.  Also on SNES.

Super Hang-On (Sega 6-Pak) – 1 player, password save.  One of the first racing games on the system, Super Hang-On is a barely playable mess thanks to some of the choppiest ‘scaling’ seen on this system.  This game is right down there with other early Sega titles like Super Thunder Blade and Space Harrier II in how bad the scaling looks, and it’s really unfortunate because this is otherwise a pretty fun game.  This game has two modes, a recreation of the arcade game, and an original mode with more progression and features.  The basic gameplay is classic linescroll racing, Sega-style, and it’s fun but very difficult.  The two main issues this game has are the very high difficulty and, worse, the horrible graphics.  Lots of games on classic consoles effectively use linescroll graphics to simulate movement, but here the flipping colors as you go fast looks TERRIBLE.  I think that playing this game for this summary gave me a headache, because I was feeling fine earlier, but had a headache a while after playing this game — and I am NOT one to have such issues, even the Virtual Boy usually isn’t much of an issue.  The way the screen blinks back and forth between two colors is atrocious.  This is the most eye-hurting linescrolling I’ve ever seen.  The sprite ‘scaling’ is pretty bad too, and contributes to the headache-inducing visuals.  Flipping between differently-sized sprites is the only way to do scaling on a system like this, but Sega’s solution early in the Genesis’ life looks pretty bad as the sprites bounce around constantly in an unpleasant fashion.  Between this and the linescrolling background, this game looks incredibly choppy.  The sprite-work is classic, solid ’80s Sega stuff, but your bike aside it’s hard to make out many details.  The music is average and forgettable, and isn’t anywhere near the level of Outrun’s classic tunes.

Ignoring the visuals, Super Hang-On has that classic Sega arcade racing gameplay, and it’s good, the insanely high difficulty aside.  You control a motorcycle, and drive fast as you try to avoid all the obstacles and reach the finish line.  When you reach max speed, pressing C will turn on a turbo-booster for additional speed; this is essential.  It’s tough but fun and can be addictive.  There are two modes, Arcade and Original.  In arcade mode you take control of a superbike and try to beat all of the circuits in the game.  The first has six track segments, the last 16.  There are hugely overlong passwords if you manage to beat a circuit, but I haven’t managed that yet; between the graphics and the unforgiving gameplay, I always lose.  You get only one chance at each circuit, there are no continues here within a circuit, and if you crash even once at any point you well might not finish.  Unlike Outrun or beyond this game has no difficulty settings either, so you can’t ease up on the super-tight timer.  Playing for this summary I almost finished the first circuit in Arcade mode a couple of times, but didn’t quite manage it.  Original mode takes place on the same tracks, but you start with a weak bike, and have to upgrade or replace it via money you win in circuits.  I don’t like the starter bike in Original mode, it’s not much fun to control.  It is nice that they added a mode with some real progression and a money system, though, that’s something Sega usually left out of their home racing ports in the ’90s.  And you can save your progress here with those same too-long passwords.  This mode might be even harder than arcade mode, though, and as with arcade mode, I’ve never gotten far enough to get a password.  Given the atrocious graphics issues the game has, I’m fine with that.  If you want to play a good version of Super Hang-On, play a port of the arcade game, or play Super Hang-On 3D for the 3DS, a 3d port of the arcade version with added 3d and options.  The arcade game and its 3DS port are both good fun stuff, without the serious flaws of this version.  This Genesis game, however, is only for the masochistic.  It’s in the Sega 6-Pak, so it is worth having since the collection is great, but don’t waste much time on this version of the game.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Super Monaco GP – 1 player, password save.  Super Monaco GP is a somewhat average F1 racing game from Sega.  While the game has fairly simple controls, the style is more simulation-like.  This game is, for the time, somewhere in between arcade and sim.  Now it would surely be called an arcade game, but it’s trying to be a more ‘realistic’ one.  For example, there is an unfortunate lack of any music during races.  That makes the game somewhat dull and less interesting than racing games with music, but the gameplay here is okay.  You play from an in-car perspective, presumably also to be more realistic, and your car is visible around you.  This means your view is a bit closer in than the usual behind-the-car viewpoints most racing games use, so you have a bit less visibility.  Tracks are also named for and have layouts based on real F1 courses, though this style of linescroll racer never looks quite like the real thing; real tracks don’t have only smoothly-turning curves with lines of objects by the sides of the road.  That’s fine, and I have no interest in F1 I have enjoyed some simple linescroll open-wheel racers.  It is nice that there are quite a few tracks.

However, despite the simple gameplay, Super Monaco GP is a hard game and has a decent-sized learning curve.  You have to learn the braking in order to get around these tracks, and that is a problem because I prefer the kind of racing game where you rarely have to brake, and can have fun instead of playing something more ‘realistic’ like this.  The game looks fine for its time; it does not really impress, but isn’t bad-looking either. Versus the above game this game has a slower sense of speed, but maybe partially as a result the image holds together a lot better.  It is obvious the system doesn’t have hardware sprite scaling, but for a linescroll game this game looks average.  The game controls fine as well; you have gas and brakes, and the challenge is learning to use each in the right points on each track.  For modes, there’s a single-race mode or a championship.  The other racers’ names are all fictional, but that’s okay.  You have to qualify for each race before you race it, and if you do well enough you can progress and get a password for the next track.  I find this game boring, though, so I’ve never put the kind of time into it that would be required to not finish last every time.  Overall, I prefer a simpler, more arcadey game such as the Game Gear Super Monaco GP game over this more challenging one.  This is an average to below-average game and I do not find it fun or much worth playing, but it’s not bad.  If it sounds like your kind of thing, definitely give it a try; this is a solid game for its time and genre.  Enhanced arcade port.  There are other ports of the arcade game on lots of systems, but none have this versions’ added content, I don’t think.

Super Monaco GP II, Arton Senna’s – 1 player, battery save to cartridge.  Super Monaco GP II is a sequel that does not stray far from its predecessor.  Indeed, this game is basically the same as the first game, but with Brazilian F1 star Ayrton Senna’s name and likeness all over the menus.  Senna talks to you, and did consult with some elements of the games’ design.  Senna died in a race in the early ’90s, sadly, but this game was developed before that.  The game has more tracks than before, and the Senna GP is interesting.  YOu start out on some tracks Senna himself laid out, apparently for go-karts in the real world though here you only have F1-style cars, and then move on to real F1 tracks if you are successful.  I like the addition of battery save; yes, the battery can die on you, but long passwords are annoying.  The graphics look similar to the first game, but with some minor improvements here and there.  This is at least average-looking for a linescroll game on the Genesis; it’s no Outrun 2019, but it’s no Super Hang-On either.  The audio is, as with the first game, mostly absent; in-race you only hear the car engine. I really wish there was music.  There isn’t much else to say about this game, though.  It is another somewhat simmish arcade racer, with challenging tracks that will take some time to learn the correct gas and brake patterns in and semi-realistic, and thus somewhat boring for me, gameplay and presentation.  It’s a decent, average game, and is a bit better than the first one, but I can’t see myself ever really getting into these games.  You might, though, so do give at least one of the Genesis Monaco GP games a try.  Both are very cheap.

Sword of Vermilion – 1 player, battery save to cartridge.  Sword of Vermilion is an interesting, and solid, action-RPG from Sega released early in the Genesis’s life.  This game covers multiple perspectives, including overhead, first-person, and side-scrolling, but has some very dated design elements.  The core gameplay is good, though.  This is a fantasy game in a generic fantasy world.  You are a young man whose father just died due because of evil forces.  So, you’re off to avenge him and stop the badguys.  It’s a basic plot, but it works.  Of course, you start in a small out-of-the-way town and the degree of threat scales up as you progress.  This game starts out in town.  You explore towns from an overhead view, and towns have various shops, people, houses, and churches where you save your game, like usual for the genre.  You have to do everything by a menu on the C button, though, and the interface is archaic.  You’ll need to open the menu to talk to anyone.  It’s even worse in dungeons, where you need two separate commands to get items out of treasure chests!  And of course, the game closes the menu after the first command.  Don’t forget to pick up that item after opening the chest, or you won’t have it.  On that note, when you leave town, the game turns into a first-person, tile-based RPG.  In the overworld and dungeons you move from space to space in mazelike worlds.  There is a map on the side of the screen, thankfully, but it doesn’t fill in as you go.  Instead, unless you’ve talked to someone who gave you a map for that area, you can only see your location and the eight spaces around you, and nothing else.  Make sure to talk to everyone in each town to get those maps!  And dungeons don’t have maps, so you’ll just need to learn those layouts.  Worse, when you enter a dungeon, you will need to use items which emit light, such as candles or lanterns, or the screen is completely dark.  These only last a limited time, however, so you need a lot of them… but you can only have eight inventory items at a time, so good luck with that.  Fortunately your equipment doesn’t take up space in your item inventory, they are separate, but only eight spaces is not enough when you need both health and light items.  Argh.  And the encounter rate is very, VERY high, as well.  Sometimes you’ll fight, turn left, and fight again!  Yes, it can be that bad.

So yeah, the game has some issues.  Fortunately, though, the combat is fun.  When you run into an enemy, the game changes back to a top-down view in a single-screen battle arena.  In that way it’s a bit like Faria on the NES, though you only ever face one enemy type at a time in this game, there just are often a lot of them.  The combat is fast and you can chop through the badguys easily.  Your sword will be your main weapon throughout, but once you get deeper into the game you also get some magic spells.  You can only equip one at a time, which casts with a button-press in battle, but these fireballs and such are helpful.  You have to buy spells from stores, so you get to choose which ones you want, and which to equip.  It’s nice that there is at least a little choice in this mostly-straightforward game.  The game will get repetitive for sure, but it’s decent fun even so.  If you reach a boss, the game has yet another perspective: side-scrolling battles.  These are simple, but do make the game even more varied.  Also, perhaps due to the crazy-high encounter rate and fun combat, this game doesn’t feel nearly as grindey as other RPGs of the day.  If you explore everything, you should be able to handle each new area.  It does let you go into areas beyond your level, but follow the townspeoples’ suggestions and you should be okay.  Your health is filled up when you level up, too, and if you die you aren’t dumped back to the main menu, but return to the nearest church minus half the money you had.  That’s kinder than some games.  The game has decent graphics and sound, too.  Sure, it looks and sounds like an early release, this is definitely not one of the best-looking Genesis games, but it looks fine.  Overall, this is a decent to good action-RPG with okay graphics and sound, variety, and simple but fun, combat.  The game is simple and lacks depth, the light system and absence of good mapping in dungeons is a problem, as is the high encounter rate and very dated interface, but it is good overall.  Sword of Vermilion is a good game worth a try, but do expect a somewhat dated experience.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Syd of Valis – 1 player.  Syd of Valis is a superdeformed, or SD, remake of Nippon Telenet’s game Valis II.  You are once-normal earth schoolgirl Yuuko, or here in the US version “Syd”, off on a quest to save a fantasy world from evil yet again.  The Valis series was somewhat popular back in the early ’90s, particularly on the Turbo CD, but there are also three Valis games on the Genesis, and I have this one.  As with all Valis games, it is a frustrating and annoying game that is not much fun to play; I don’t like this series much, as I said in my summaries of SNES and Turbo CD Valis IV previously… and those games are both better than this one.  So yeah, it’s not very good.  It isn’t terrible either, though, just subpar and at times frustrating.  Syd of Valis has nice, cartoony graphics, and I like the SD art style.  Levels are varied in both settings and designs, as well.  As always in the Valis series, though, enemies attack at high speeds from all directions, so memorization is key.  I’ve always disliked this twitch-bombardment style of level designs you see in Valis games, it’s not fun.  This time, though, if you fall in a pit you just lose a bit of health and bounce back out, so at least you can’t die from falling in pits; that is nice.  However, you have NO continues in this game, and unlike the TCD game, there is no saving either.  That’s really unfortunate, in games as frustrating and twitch-memorization heavy as Valis games saving is essential, I don’t want to have to play levels I’ve finished again.  This game has only one playable character, unlike Valis III or IV, but you do get different costumes to wear and weapons to equip as you progress, and can switch between them at any time in the pause menu.  Each has different stats, so switching weapons sometimes is a good idea.
The story is similar to the Turbo CD game, just condensed for cartridge form and redone with cuter SD graphics.  It’s kind of silly at times, which is odd for Valis, but it does work.  However, it doesn’t have the same impact that the Turbo/PC Engine CD games do, with their voice-acted cutscenes and such.  The music is alright, but can’t match CD audio of course.  Overall,  Syd of Valis is a below-average, annoying game.  It is playable, and I do play it every once in a long while, but can’t really recommend the game.  If you could save and continue, instead of having to start the game over every few times you mess up, it’d be slightly better, but even then you’d still have that same not-that-fun core Valis gameplay.  So yeah, I’m not sure about this one; Valis is a series worth a try, and if you see this for a few bucks maybe pick it up, but it’s not all that great either.  Oddly, my cart has an odd issue — while it works fine when played in my Genesis with 32X attached, if I remove the 32X and then plug the cart in, all I get is a black screen.  It’s been like this ever since I got the game, and I’ve never heard of such a bizarre issue; this isn’t a 32X game!  I imagine no other copies are like this.  This game is only on the Genesis, but other Valis II games, with different level layouts and design, are on other platforms, including the Turbo CD and Japanese computers.  The TCD version is also not too good, but I’ve never played the computer original.

Target Earth – 1 player.  Target Earth, or Assault Suits Leynos in Japan, from NCS Masaya, is a very good, but very difficult, sidescrolling mecha shooting action-platform game.  The eight missions in this game tell a story of an Assault Suit mecha pilot, you, who must save the world.  So yeah, teh story is cliche, but there is actual text and conversations during the game, unlike most such games of the time.  This makes the world feel more alive.  This game is the first game in the Assault Suits series which also includes Cybernator for the SNES and more.  I got Cybernator years before this game and found it good but not great, so I didn’t have the highest of hopes for this game.  However, I like it a lot!  Target Earth is indeed extremely difficult, but it is also quite good, and better than Cybernator in my opinion even if its visuals are far worse.  Assault Suits Leynos 2 for the Saturn (Japan only title) is probably the best of the three, but this is a good game.  The only challenge is, how much of it will you see without that invincibility cheat which thankfully does exist?  However far it is, it’s worth the effort.  Your mission starts on Ganymede, as the base you are defending is attacked.  You’ve got to defeat a large enemy carrier before it gets to your base and destroys it, while dealing with many regular enemies as you go across the rocky landscape towards the boss.  Your mech, or assault suit, is small on the screen, but the art design is good and as detailed as the small size allows.  Enemies are varied in size, from the small regular foes to big, half-screen-filling bosses.  There are a great variety of environments as well, from the rocky first area to outer space to a giant space station.  I like the variety, and the stages are very fun to play.  Levels often consist of you moving towards a goal while an infinite spawn of basic enemies comes at you, but despite this work great thanks to the good combat and movement.

Indeed, your robot controls well.  You can move, jump, and fly in the space mission.  You move fast, which is great, and control is precise.  You can shoot left, right, or up; the upward shot is very useful, as many enemies are airborne.  You have a bunch of weapons to fight the enemies with.  You start out with a basic gun with infinite ammo and several other guns with limited ammo that refills between missions, and unlock more based on your score.  So, if you play better, you get better weapons; this encourages repeat play, to figure out ways to score more points and get better weapons earlier.  All weapons other than the basic gun have limited ammo, and you can only take so many weapons and armor items into each battle, so between missions you’ll need to carefully choose what to take.  It’s a nice strategic element which adds to the game.  The game is harsh and unforgiving, though, and even though you have a lifebar it is easy to die, particularly to bosses.  And when you do die, you get only a few lives and then it’s back to the beginning of the game; no continues or saving here, sadly.  If you want that, get the PS4 remake, Assault Suits Leynos.  I haven’t played it, but it looks good and faithful to the original.  I think it’s a Japan-only release so far, though, unfortunately.  As for this version, though, there is a lot to like about Target Earth.  The game has small, simple graphics, but the art design is good, and the game plays quickly and runs well.  Levels are varied and fun, and I like that there is an actual plot here, and varied missions.  The games’ intense challenge relies too much on memorization and replay, and the graphics aren’t as good as later games in the series, but even so this is a very good sidescrolling action game I very highly recommend.  Use the cheat codes if you want, but don’t miss out on Target Earth, it’s great!  There is also a PS4 remake of this game in Japan.

Task Force Harrier EX – 1 player. Task Force Harrier is a bland-looking and subpar vertical-scrolling shmup from Treco developed by UPL. You fly a plane, presumably a Harrier, on a mission to defeat lots of enemy forces. As in some Namco shmups, this game has separate bombs and bullets, and many ground enemies will only be hit by the bombs. The game starts out over a snowy landscape, and the first few levels are thus near-colorless, with white backgrounds and grey aircraft and vehicles. As much as I love snow, it’s an incredibly bland look here. Eventually you have some ocean and city/base missions, but the graphics here are bad and color is limited, the blue water aside. You just move left or right and shoot, there is no real variety or depth to this game. Enemies come at you in basic patterns, shoot them and avoid their fire. The enemy patterns, bullets, movement, graphics, sound, nothing is interesting or great. The gameplay feels inspired by Xevious and Twin Cobra (Kyuukyoku Tiger), but isn’t nearly on the latter games’ level of quality; the enemies and bosses are more generic in both looks and attacks, the music is worse, and more. The Xevious point is an important one to expand on, though. I have never much cared for the separate ground and air attack bomb-and-bullet systems found in Xevious, Dragon Spirit, and such. I’m fine with multiple weapons, and air and ground targets which are hit by different weapons, but the limited range of your bombs in these games is really annoying! I should be able to hit enemies from anywhere below them, not only halfway up the screen where you’re too close to their bullets. So that this game copies that attack system is a definite negative for it. As an aside, the bullet-and-targeting cursor system found in RayForce and its sequels or Soukyugurentai (on Saturn and others) also isn’t something I have ever liked all that much; it’s not awful, but normal bullets-only shooter design is better.

So, the basic design here isn’t for me. Even beyond that, though, while it is not terrible, this game gets boring to play in a hurry. This just isn’t a good game, as levels are bland, the difficulty uneven, bosses unimpressive to the point where sometimes I couldn’t tell if a boss was a miniboss or final level boss, and the music is forgettable to bad at best. I got this game for cheap, but disappointed me thanks to tedious, repetitious gameplay, unfortunate choice to us the Xevious bomb system, mediocre-at-best level designs, monochromatic white-and-grey or grey-and-blue color palettes for too much of the game, and more. Task Force Harrier EX is a below-average game only worth considering if you really love shmups and want to play all the shmups on the Genesis, love Xevious and such, or like shmups and find it for dirt cheap. If you do get it though, go in with very low expectations. I paid only fifty cents for this game, and I’m still not sure if it was actually worth it; it’s kind of bad. Arcade port.

Taz-Mania – 1 player.  Taz-Mania is a successful but awful platformer from Sega.  This game is based on the early ’90s cartoon of the same name starring Taz, the Tazmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes, and his family.  The game did well, surely because of the popularity of the show, but of all the Taz games released that generation, this is one of the worst; only the first Game Gear game is definitely worse.  Taz-Mania has pretty good graphics with large sprites that look a lot like something out of the Looney Tunes or the Taz cartoon, so it makes a good first impression.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up at all beyond that.  Taz can run fairly quickly, jump a good distance, and spin into a tornado to move even faster and attack enemies.  Most enemies stand no chance against your tornado spin!  You have a health bar, too, though that won’t help with the games’ innumerable bottomless pits.  Many items are scattered around the levels that you can eat, and some will heal Taz while others will hurt him; you’ll need to learn which is which.  Walking slowly into an item, or some enemies, will allow Taz to eat it, while spinning into one will blow it away.  That’s all fine, but the level designs here are among the most frustrating around!  Between the skiddy controls and constant frustration due to more blind jumps and random pitfalls than almost anything on this system, Taz-Mania stops being fun somewhere around the middle of the first level.  At least in the first stage you can see where you’re jumping to, though, even if it’s frustrating due to the slippery controls and because it’s not always clear where you need to go.  Some waterfall spouts send you straight up into a wall of spikes, while another is a vital way forward, and nothing tells you which is which.  This is that kind of game.  The blind-jump-heavy jumping puzzle in level two is even worse, with multiple long blind jumps to make, but at least it’s over solid ground, so as you fall again and again you can keep trying.  Later on the game isn’t always as kind.   You do get three continues in this game, but there’s no saving so you’ll be redoing the game from scratch often.  This is a VERY memorization-heavy game, and it’s not the fun kind of memorization.  I hate blind jumps!  I’m sure I will never get anywhere near the end of this game, it’s not remotely worth the effort.  Oh yeah, and while the graphics are good, the music is kind of bad.  If you could see where you are going and the controls were better this game could have been good, but it isn’t.  Pass on Taz-Mania; don’t replay it and hurt the memories of it you may have of the game from the early ’90s.  Instead, play the sequel.  It is a vastly better game and fixes most of this games’ biggest issues.

14 this time.  Getting closer to the end of letter S…

Games in this update
—
Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sonic & Knuckles
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Sonic 3D Blast
Sorcerian (J)
Space Harrier II
Spider-Man — X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage
Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety
Splatterhouse 2
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time
Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition
Streets of Rage (Sega 6-Pak)
Streets of Rage 2

Sonic 3 & Knuckles – 1-2 player simultaneous, cartridge save (FRAM in the Sonic 3 cart).  Sonic 3 & Knuckles is Sega’s best game ever, and one of the great platformers as well.  S3&K has great graphics and music, a lot of variety, very good level designs, a long quest for a Genesis platformer, a solid difficulty level, saving so you don’t have to start over every time you play with six save slots available, the series’ best bonus minigame, and so much more.  This game is built on the back of its sequels.  The gameplay, including physics, controls, level design concepts, and the rest, is very much like the previous two games, and Sonic 2 in particular, but improved in little ways.  The controls are as good as ever, but the characters have more moves now, and there are three characters to play as.  The levels are classic Sonic stuff, focused on speed and challenging platforming, but they are bigger and even more fun to explore than before, and there are more secrets to find as well.  You now get Chaos Emeralds by finding giant rings which are hidden around each stage.  Each level has several, and you’ll need to look everywhere, try to walk through seemingly solid walls, and more to find them.  Some are obvious, others well-hidden.  I really like this; getting rid of the requirement to have 50 rings in order to go into the bonus stages was a very good idea and it improves the game.  The Blue Spheres minigame is great, too, better than those in its predecessors.  You play from a third-person view behind your character, and navigate a maze of blue, red, and bounce spheres.  Your goal is to touch all blue spheres, which turns them red, without touching a red one.  If you hit a red sphere you fail the bonus game and are sent back to the main game, but if you turn them all blue, you get an emerald.  If you make a square of blue orbs red by going around the outside edge only, the whole square will turn into rings, and you get continues by getting enough points in bonus stages.  Continues are useful despite the save system because they let you continue from the checkpoint you died at, instead of the beginning of the zone, so you will have a bit of an easier time at the end of the game if you play the whole long game in one sitting than if you play it in parts.  You can get through the last level with practice even without continues, though, so the game works great either way.

This is a long game, and there are 12 zones, two acts per zone in all zones except for some of the last ones, bosses at the end of every act including a miniboss after each first act and a Robotnik fight at the end of each second act, and 14 emeralds to find.  Yes, 14; getting the first seven unlocks Super Sonic, and the second seven Hyper Sonic.  Getting all 14 in one run would be a real challenge, but fortunately the game does save how many you’ve gotten.  Until you beat the final boss on a save file you are locked to the current stage, but once you win, you unlock a level select.  At this point you can go back, get all the emeralds, then come back to the final level and play the real final fight, which requires all emeralds.  All that effort is worth it, because it’s a great, epic final battle!  There are many checkpoints along the way, and like in Sonic 2, if you touch one with enough rings, a warp to a special stage will open.  These are not the Emerald stages, though, of course; instead they are three separate games where you can get points, rings, and lives.  One is a slot machine in a Sonic 1-style rotating area; the second has you hitting a dial to knock gatcha-style balls out of a machine to get the prizes inside; and the third is a terrible one on these lightning orbs where I always immediately touch the rising line.  There is a trick to it, but I’ve almost never managed to avoid near-instant failure.  Ah well, it doesn’t matter much.  As for the main game, many of the setings along the way are pretty great.  This game has more stages which actually change as you progress than before, including areas where sand filling in behind you as you try to escape in the tombs, the ground itself is moving upwards, crushing you if you don’t get out of there fast enough, and more.  The large levels have some minor puzzle elements as well which you can usually engage with or ignore.  One level has these simple elevator-lifts that let you go up a level of platforms, but you can choose to use them or not.  In another, you have to stand on a giant spinning, flying top to fly around and find the route forward.  This part is pretty cool, flying through the air on a giant top is fun.  And there’s more.

The game has short cutscenes, as well.  Once again Robotnik is doing evil stuff and you need to stop him.  In the Sonic 3 half, new character Knuckles works as your main antagonist.  He’s an Echidna, and guards the Chaos Emeralds, but has been conned by Robotnik into thinking that Sonic is the real villain.  After messing with you to make your route longer all game, at the end of Sonic 3, Robotnik’s true evil is revealed, and in Sonic & Knuckles, Knuckles became playable for the first time.  Of course, in the combined game you can play as Knuckles from the beginning, not only in the second half.  As described above in Knuckles in Sonic 2, Knuckles has a shorter jump height, but can glide and climb walls.  His powers make playing the game more fun, for me.  Tails now can fly anytime, which is great.  Tails is sort of ‘easy mode’ here as a result.  Sonic is mostly the same, but does have some new powers: he gets additional abilities from the games’ three powerups.  In addition to the water-bubble orb from Sonic 2, there are now also lightning and fire orbs.  All three characters get the basic function from these, but Sonic gets an exclusive second ability from each as well, such as a double jump from the lightning orb, on top of the basic it-attracts-rings power.  There is even a boss fight that plays differently if you have Tails in the game.  So, all four play modes, Sonic, Sonic & Tails, Tails, and Knuckles, are distinct and play differently, for additional replay value.  This game does multiple characters right, in a way that its 3d sequels would often fail to match.

The game also sounds great.  For the Sonic 3 half, the soundtrack was mostly composed by the famous pop artist Michael Jackson and his songwriting team.  However, the game released shortly after Jackson’s first child sexual assault allegations, which is probably why Jackson’s name does not appear in the music credits.  His team does, though, and it has been proven that his songs are indeed in the game.  I’ve never been a Michael Jackson fan at all, but it is an interesting story.  The Sonic & Knuckles half was composed by the usual Sonic composers, and it’s also great.  The whole soundtrack is very good, and is more technically impressive than the first two even if the original main theme is probably the most memorable tune from the series.  The graphics are similar but a bit more detailed than before, too, and I think that they get slightly better in the second, S&K half of the game; those six months were used well.  For negatives about this game, there are few.  First, there are still places where you can randomly die for no fair reason because of crushing objects, or impossible-to-avoid obstacles or pits, or such.  That stuff is always frustrating even when you have a bunch of lives stocked up.  Yes, it’s a staple of most all Sonic games, but it is annoying.  And second, the final boss once AGAIN has no rings after the final checkpoint.  The game doesn’t take rings away that you have entering the (first) final fight, oddly, but you only get one chance per game at this boss with rings; die once and it’s back to the usual ‘fight this really hard boss with no rings’.  Things are different in the real final battle, but unless you get all 14 emeralds in one run, beating that ‘final’ boss may be tough.  It is worth the effort, though, and this game isn’t as hard as the first one.  Overall, Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a classic which holds up extremely well.  Sonic Team found a fantastic formula with the original game, and this one shows the concept in its best form.  S3&K is not quite the equal of Super Mario World, my favorite platformer ever, but it is high on the list after that game.  It’s a great, must-play game.  Also available on PC.  That is the first version of the game I owned, back in the late ’90s, and it’s also great.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games, though it is worth noting that this combined game are often skipped over; only a few platforms, such as Wii WiiWare, actually have the full S3&K experience available.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 – 1-2 player simultaneous, cartridge save (FRAM).  Either because the game was getting too large to reasonably fit on one cartridge or in order to make more money, Sega decided to release their third main-series Sonic game in two parts.  First came this game, Sonic 3, in early 1994, and then came Sonic & Knuckles about six months later at the end of the year.  That latter game has a cartridge port on top of the cart, allowing other games to be connected to it.  This ‘lock-on technology’ allows for Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to be combined into one massive game, Sonic 3 & Knuckles.  That game is the biggest and best Sonic game of them all.  This is the first half of that, so it’s a must-have, but not on its own.  Sonic 3 is fantastic, as I describe above, and is the only Sonic game with Michael Jackson music for those that care about that, and there are eight save slots available in this game versus the six in S3&K, but alone you have no playable Knuckles, and the game feels a bit short, with a shorter length and no final boss fight as great as the ones in the previous games, or S3&K.  On the subject of those save slots, though, the two sets of save slots are separate, but S3&K will remember your progress from Sonic 3, I think, so those slots are copied to the new ones I guess.  S3&K progress is not copied back, however, understandably.  Sonic 3 is a very good game, but play the full game, not just this half of it.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Sonic & Knuckles – 1-2 player simultaneous,  has cartridge save when locked on to Sonic 3, via Sonic 3’s save chip.  Sonic & Knuckles is the second half of Sonic 3.  The graphics and gameplay are exactly the same as before, just with new levels.  This time, you can play as Sonic or Knuckles.  Knuckles was introduced as a rival in Sonic 3, but this time he’s playable and on your side.  I’ve always liked playing as Knuckles, he has some great moves Sonic doesn’t.  When you lock this cart on to Sonics 2 or 3, you can play as Knuckles in Sonic 2 and in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which is great.  Unfortunately they couldn’t get Knuckles into Sonic 1 because of engine changes, but still, it’s great that it works in Sonic 2.  Sonic & Knuckles on its own, however, is a bit disappointing.  The game is a bit short, Tails isn’t playable without lockon, and you can’t save if you don’t have Sonic 3 locked on, annoyingly!  S&K is great fun, and I like its zones a lot, indeed maybe more than Sonic 3’s, but it’s the second half of a game, and you want to start from the beginning.  There is no better case of ‘better combined than separate’ than Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.  Both games are pretty good on their own, but individually I don’t think I could rank either one above Sonics 1 or 2.  Combined, though, they exceed them.  S3 and S&K are so much better when put together!  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.  Sonic & Knuckles is in lots of compilations that do not include Sonic 3, probably because the absence of saving makes it easier to deal with in things such as those licensed Genesis portables from AtGames which don’t support any saving and have a bunch of built-in games.

Sonic 3D Blast – 1 player.  Sonic 3D Blast is an isometric platformer developed by Eurocom and published by Sega in 1996.  This late Genesis release is controversial, but unlike some I do like the game.  I have finished this game on the Genesis, and I mostly enjoyed it along the way.  The game plays from an overhead angle, and you move Sonic around in three dimensions.  Yes, you only play as Sonic in this one.  You can jump and spin-dash, though your spin is a lot slower-moving in this game.  The slower pace of most of this game is surely one of the things a lot of Sonic fans dislike about it, but I’m fine with the game as it is.  Speed is fun, yes, but a slower-paced, more deliberate game can be great too.  In each level, your goal is to find all of the Flickies and then bring them to a goal ring.  So, yes, the game is a series of collection quests.  I don’t mind this, myself; both style have a place.  Each level is broken up into two parts, and you’ve got five or so flickies to collect in each part.  You’ll be wandering around levels, looking for flickies and rings, for quite a while in some stages, until you’ve learned their locations.  Backtracking and exploration are central to this game.  Levels are large and non-linear, so the game is not just about getting from point A to point B as it usually is in this series.  So yes, this game is very different from previous Sonic games.  And yes, it isn’t quite as great as the Genesis Sonic games are.  While 3D Blast is a good game, it’s not an all-time great like those are.  Even so, it is a good game and it is fun to play.

The game has pretty good graphics and solid music as well.  Aurally, the game has good music, but it isn’t as great and memorable as the main series on the Genesis. The graphics are similar, but perhaps better.  The game clearly wasn’t done by Sonic Team, but the look is Sonic-like, and doesn’t look like a generic Euro-platformer or something; the developers clearly were given assets from Sega of Japan to work from.  Each world looks different.  They are the usual settings, including forest, cave, ice world, and such for locations, but all look pretty good.  This is a late release for the system, and it looks it.  The flickies make a return from their game Flicky, which I haven’t played much of.  Sonic has always been saving the small animals that Robotnik uses to power his machines, and you’re doing that again here.  They follow Sonic around once rescued, which is kind of cute.  Sometimes this actually matters in game strategy, as a flicky is rescued if it touches one of your flickies, which can bounce above you on springs for example.  In addition to the main game, 3D Blast has a bonus game as well.  In order to enter a bonus stage, you have to find characters such as Tails or Knuckles hidden around the levels.  If you get to one of them with the required number of rings, you go into a bonus stage.  Here you are running towards the screen on a twisting track that stretches in front of you.  The perspective here uses some nice graphical tricks, and the bonus stages are fun.  They can be tricky, though, as there are raised platforms to jump to, pits and spikes to jump over, and more.  Just like the 2d games, I’ve never gotten all of the rings in a single play through this game.

The level designs in Sonic 3D Blast are good.  Levels are designed to be fair, and aware of the challenges of jumping in isometric 3d, this game has few to no instant death pits.  There are spikes, but they just make you lose your rings like usual.  Instead of pits, you usually just fall to a lower area and have to go around and try the jump again.  You can die, but this makes the game much better than it would be if it was loaded with instant-death pits.  While the open, exploration-focused stages can be annoying if you can’t find that one Flicky hiding away somewhere, most of the time finding how to get to all the Flickies while staying away from or defeating badguys is fun.  Collecting rings and looking for bonus stages also is good fun.  The game isn’t Sonic-fast, but it is good and well designed.  However, it is unfortunate that the game doesn’t have saving.  While good, and not one of the harder Sonic games, Sonic 3D Blast is a somewhat slow-paced game, and it can get boring after a while.  It’s really unfortunate that even in 1996 Sega STILL didn’t understand that games need to have saving!  It’s unfortunate, and does hold the game back.  Still, overall, Sonic 3D Blast is a good isometric platformer.  The game looks nice, controls well, and is fun to play most of the time.  Yes, it isn’t 2d Sonic, but anyone who likes some exploration and collection in their games as I do definitely should play this game, it’s a fun one.  Other people should try it, and see if they like it or not.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.  There are also Saturn and PC ports of the game released in the 1990s.  They have CD audio music, improved graphics with some quite nice CG-rendered sprites and backgrounds, and new bonus minigames, slightly different but both 3d takes on the tube-running minigame from Sonic 2.  The Saturn one is in polygonal 3d, though the main game is of course still sprite-based, while the PC version uses sprites.  The PC version also adds a save system, thankfully, though for some insane reason the Saturn one doesn’t.  However, getting the PC version running on a modern PC might be tricky; it has issues on new OSes.  If you can get it to run, though, it’s probably the best version of the game, though the Saturn bonus game might be best.  Still, the Genesis version is also fun, and it’s definitely worth playing.  While I have all three versions of the game, this is the only one that I’ve beaten.

Sorcerian (J) – 1 player, battery save to cartridge.  Sorcerian for the Genesis, released in 1990, is a conversion by Sega of the Falcom computer game of the same name.  This Genesis version is mostly a port of the computer original, but has some new missions included.  Sorcerian is one of several side-scrolling action-RPGs made by Falcom.  Originally released in the 1980s, this later port has improved graphics and those new missions, but the graphics are still dated and basic with very small sprites and subpar art design, it’s hard to play for the non-Japanese speaker, and I’m not convinced by the gameplay either.  Despite this, for some reason I got several Japanese versions of Sorcerian, including this and the Turbo CD version.  This games’ box-art is great, but the game, not so much.  If you are going to play this game, there are guides for the main menu options, but figuring out what to do in some quests may be tricky.  At least there is some help for that menu, though;  The main menu has a good 12 options, all in Japanese text, and you’ll need to use and understand all of them and their submenus.

Sorcerian has two elements, the missions, which is mostly simple and straightforward, and the aforementioned menu system between missions.  Here you create characters, buy items and equipment, develop magic towards the games’ over a hundred spells, build character stats, and give your party members regular jobs.  There are four classes, fighter, wizard, elf, and dwarf, all male or female, available.  Now, by “jobs” I do not mean classes, Final Fantasy style; I mean civilian occupations you choose in a menu back at base, in order to make money and build their stats.  These jobs are different from the characters’ class, and some jobs are gender-specific.  As characters do jobs they build stats.  So, these are not full-time adventurers like in your usual RPG, they need other work too.  This unique system is a centerpiece of Sorcerian’s design, and it’s kind of odd.  Characters will age as you have them work and go on missions, and eventually get too old to continue adventuring.You can always create new characters, though, and you have three save slots in this game and quite a few characters allowed per file.  There are a lot of professions available, each with different rewards, and eventually I’m sure this element of the game becomes required in order to progress.  Of course, figuring out any of this is difficulty through the language barrier, even with a guide; I haven’t gotten deep into this game.

When you choose a team and enter one of the ten available missions, you’ll notice how tiny the sprites are.  This game was originally an 8-bit computer game, and it shows.  While the graphics are improved over the original and the added parallax scrolling is appreciated, Sega had to stick with the small sprites in order for everything you need to see to be visible, but still, the game looks dated and ugly.  The music is average; it’s nice, but nothing great.  Characters do move quickly, though, in that classic Falcom way, so gameplay is fast.  For controls, the d-pad moves your whole party, with one leading and the others following; Start is a menu for selecting a spell, quitting the mission, and such; A switches the order of your party; and B and C have all characters use magic and weapon attacks, respectively.  Characters of different classes have different attacks, so some have magic while others use melee or ranged weapons.  If a character runs out of health they die, though you can resurrect back in town between missions, but if you stand still you will recover health and mana.  Enemies spawn at the edges of the screen and attack quickly, so if you’re not over-leveled, battles can be tricky even with all the ranged attacks.  The fast-paced combat is simplistic, but is probably the best thing about the game.  It feels very Falcom-like, similar to something like Ys III but with multiple characters.  There are also people to talk to in the missions, so you’ll need a guide sometimes to figure out what to do if you can’t read Japanese. Your goal is to beat all ten missions, but you can keep going after that if you want.

Overall, Sorceriean is an okay but odd game.  While the action can be fun, the game has little depth in-game and gets repetitive quickly.  And in town, there is a huge language barrier making doing much of anything a challenge even with a guide.  The bland, tiny graphics are not appealing either.  Falcom fans who can read Japanese will surely like this, but for the rest of us the getting to the overall-average gameplay may not be worth the hassle.  If you want to play the game in English, Sierra did release versions for the PC.  It has worse graphics than the Genesis or Turbo CD versions, but at least it’s in English.  Other versions of Sorcerian in Japanese are available on the Turbo CD, MSX, PC-88/98, and Sharp X1.  The later Turbo CD version is similar to this one but with some different missions, no parallax but improved ingame graphics apart from that, and better, CD-quality music.  There are also sequels and a remake for the PC and Dreamcast, again in Japan only.

Space Harrier II – 1 player.  Space Harrier II is a rail shooter, and a sequel to the great Sega arcade game from several years earlier.  This game has gameplay identical to the original, but with new stages to shoot through.  You are the Space Harrier, flying forward as you shoot a wide variety of colorful and weird creatures and objects.  The original game is a real masterpiece and one of the all-time great rail shooters.  The later 32X version is also fantastic.  However, this game is kind of bad.  Space Harrier II is one of the first games released for the Genesis.  That is important to keep in mind, but even so, the horrendously choppy graphics make this game very hard to play.  As with Sega’s other early scaler-style games on the Genesis, Space Harrier II has horrendous software scaling.  As always the game uses differently-sized sprites the system flips between as you get closer to things, but some games are much better than others at making this look smooth.  This game, like Super Thunder Blade or Super Hang-On, fails to do this acceptably.  The sprites bounce between sizes in a way which looks awful, and gameplay is very choppy even beyond that.  Space Harrier II was one of the first games I got for the Genesis when I got the system in ’06 and I was hopeful that this followup to an arcade game I love would be good, but it isn’t, at all.  The sprite-art does look decent to good in still pictures, but as soon as you see it moving it looks awful.  Gameplay is much more difficult than it would be with scaling sprites, too, since the lack of smoothness drags everything down.  Space Harrier II is a frustrating, ugly-looking game which is not worth playing even for serious series fans.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Spider-Man — X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge – 1 player.  Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an extremely difficult platformer from Acclaim.  This multiplatform title is a crossover between two major superhero universes, and you play as both Spider-Man and four X-Men: Wolverine, Storm, Gambit, and Cyclops.  The game has okay but slightly smallish graphics, average music, and good controls.  The game doesn’t look great, but I do like the varied settings, and it’s reasonably well drawn.  “Difficult” is the operating word here, though.  The first level in the game is a level where you play as Spiderman and have to disarm some bombs in the correct order before time runs out.  It’s not difficult with some practice.  After beating it you go to a level select where you can choose between all five characters.  Each has two levels to try to complete, designed just for them in a unique setting.  These stages are all much harder than the intro level, and dying is easy.  If you get through all that through some miracle, there’s a final level, I believe, where you face the main villain here, Arcade.  Each character has their own powers, such as web-swinging and wall-climbing for Spiderman, throwing cards for Gambit, slashing things (including walls, as well as enemies) for Wolverine, eyebeam blasts for Cyclops, and flying for Storm, making each set of levels different, even beyond the different settings.  Storm’s flight-based stages are the most different, but all characters are distinct in both movement and in combat styles.  The game has solid graphics, okay though imperfect controls, and decent music.  It can be fun to play.  Levels are varied, and are large in that Western platformer style.  You usually have an objective beyond just reaching the end, so in the first level Spiderman has to reach a bunch of bombs before they explode, for example.  You’ll need to play each level a bit to learn what you should do in it and where to go, and the learning process there is fun, and is helped by the good level designs.  Levels here are large and open, in that classic Western platformer fashion, but the stages are reasonably fun to explore and are mostly well laid out.  Difficulty aside this game is above average.

However, the game has one major flaw: it’s absolutely insanely difficult!  You get three lives and no continues or saving in this game.  That’s it.  There are no cheat codes to help you out, either.  There are some rare extra lives to be found, but with at least a dozen tough levels to get through, Arcade’s Revenge is a somewhat stratospheric challenge.  It’s a shame, too, because based just on the core gameplay, this is probably my favorite of the Spiderman or X-Men games that I have played on the Genesis.  I don’t find the Sega CD Spiderman game all that fun, and the two Genesis Spiderman beat ’em ups below are average at best as well, and the Genesis X-Men game is okay but also has issues.  This game, however, really is good sometimes.  Sega’s X-Men game has better graphics, but this game controls well, and the combat is good and levels are fun to explore.  I like the variety between the different characters too.  Searching through the levels looking for stuff and beating enemies is fun.  With a password save system and continues, it’d be a pretty good game.  Playing a game this difficult with no continues or saving is extremely frustrating.  This game is a fun platformer, but beware the difficulty level.  Maybe play it in an emulator with savestates, or something.  Overall I do like this game, it’s good, but beware!  Also available on SNES, Game Gear, and Game Boy.  I also have the Game Gear version, and it’s a downscaled version of this same exact title, just as difficult as it is on the Genesis.

Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage – 1 player, 6 button controller supported.  Maximum Carnage is a decent-looking, but subpar, beat ’em up published by Acclaim.  In this game you play as Spiderman and Venom, each in separate levels, but not both at the same time, as for some dumb reason the game is single player only.  The game has nice-looking comic-book-style cutscenes, but the story feels rushed and confusing.  I presume it makes sense for those who know the comicbook storyline, but I’ve never cared for superhero comics, and just in this game things happen too quickly to make sense.  This is a beat ’em up, though, so that’s not a big problem; this genre is about hitting people, not following a plot.  The game has large sprites, decent but not great graphics with okay backgrounds but somewhat ugly, super-’90s punks for enemies.  The art design leaves something to be desired.  There are a handful of different enemy types which repeat a lot in different colors, as usual.  The music is average, too.  Gameplay is also average at best, though it is a bit harder than it reasonably should be.  and the controls are much less precise than they are in Sega beat ’em ups.  It often feels like you take unfair hits because of the sometimes-iffy controls, though there are just enough health-ups to keep you alive if you don’t mess up much.  If you do, though, it’ll be Game Over fast, because you get only one continue for the entire game!  The game does have some variety and can be fun to play, and beating it will be a challenge for sure.  This game has more negatives than positives, overall, though.

Levels usually just scroll to the right, freezing on each screen until you beat the enemies there as usual in the genre, but sometimes you have to climb buildings instead.  You can climb on walls and swing on web-lines in this game, you see.  The 6-button controller is useful because the web-swinging function requires a button combination, but with the 6-button pad the Y button lets you use it with one press.  The wall-climbing segment in level two is very frustrating and I’ve lost many lives there, though a sometimes I get lucky and get past it.  It is far too easy to be knocked off the wall and back down to the ground!  The regular beat ’em up segments are better, but are average at best.  You have several moves you can do beyond basic punches and jump-kicks, and with C you can grab enemies long-distance or use a shield, both of which are very useful moves.  Those large but badly-drawn enemies constantly attack from both sides, though, and it can be hard to not take damage, and you can’t take much damage before you lose a life.  The game has no difficulty settings either, and you only get that one continue.  You need more than that in a game this hard.  Overall, the high difficulty, flawed controls, absence of badly needed co-op play, and frustrating wall-climbing segments hold back an otherwise average game with okay graphics and sometimes-fun action.  Spider-man and Venom in Maximum Carnage is below average.  Maybe pick this up if you like Spiderman; otherwise pass.  The bright red cartridge might be the best thing about this game.  Also on SNES.

Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety – 1-2 player simultaneous, password save, 6 button controller supported.  This second Spiderman isometric beat ’em up from Acclaim is a lot like the first one, but with multiplayer, smaller graphics, and passwords between levels.  The web-swinging element of the game also seems to be gone, but you can still climb on walls, though.  The rest of the game is similar as well, just a bit zoomed out, perhaps to better fit two player characters.  A lot of people greatly dislike the graphics of this game compared to the first, and I see their point, but the art design is similar; it’s just smaller.  This game does look worse than the first one, but enemies look bad in both games, not only this one, and the heroes here don’t look too much worse.  If this is what it took to get multiplayer in I don’t mind much, but both games could have used better graphics.  Since this game is co-op, you now can play as either Spiderman or Venom in all levels, which is nice.  The story presentation is weaker than before, though, as now the intro is mostly text; the comic-book cutscenes are gone.  The story was confusing before, but this is not better.

Ingame, the controls are the same as before, which is not good.  You still take damage far too easily, but the enemies feel even more aggressive now, and I take damage even faster than in the first game; this game is absurdly difficult.  Indeed, where I’ve rarely beaten the second level of the first game, I don’t think I’ve ever beaten the FIRST level of this one!  And I have tried; it’s just unfairly hard thanks to how many enemies attack you from both sides at once.  There isn’t much you can do in that situation other than take damage, unfortunately, and it’s frustrating.  If you ever do manage to beat a level at least you will get a password, thankfully — and that is great, passwords are quite rare in 4th-gen games in this genre — but getting to that point is harder and less fun than it should be.  Versus the first one, putting in a password system helps, but does not entirely fix, the games’ somewhat broken difficulty level.  Enemy graphics are a bland assortment of nameless thugs, too, as enemy names, present in the first one, have been removed; this game looks and sounds average, and that’s it.  Some of the songs, such as the intro music, are good, but others are kind of bad.  Overall, Separation Anxiety is a below-average disappointment.  The game fixes some of the first games’ problems, but not enough of them, and introduces some new ones, so it’s hard to say which of these two games is better overall.  The first one may be for one player, but this one obviously is for two.  Better yet, though, play something better, such as the Streets of Rage games below.  As with the first one, this game is only for big Spiderman fans, and even they probably will be disappointed.  Oh yeah, and the game is in a regular black cartridge too, not the bright red one of the first game.  Also on SNES and PC.

Splatterhouse 2 – 1 player, password save.  This second game in Namco’s horror-themed action series is a side-scrolling beat ’em up with a bit of platforming.  Just like in the first game for arcades and TurboGrafx-16, the second Splatterhouse game is a memorization-heavy sidescroller.  You walk to the right, hitting enemies or jumping over obstacles as you go, and your goal  is to memorize exactly when you have to hit each button to avoid taking damage.  Gameplay is simplistic and quickly gets boring; I don’t like this game that much.  It’s not awful, but definitely is not good.  You play as Rick, a bulked-up muscleman with a mask on who looks like a horror movie villain but here is the hero, and need to save your girlfriend from a mansion full of monsters.  There are new areas and foes to see as you progress, but the game also has a somewhat consistent visual look to it.  The graphics and sound are fine, but nothing great; in visuals and music this game is average.  I dislike horror movies and never watch them, so all the references to popular horror movies mean little to me, but the overly simplistic and repetitive gameplay definitely means something.  As much as I like isometric beat ’em ups, when you flatten them down to a single plane games usually get too simple to stay fun, and this game is no exception.  The numerous traps and pits to jump over  give this game a much stronger platformer element than most beat ’em ups, but it just adds to the required memorization.  You do have a health bar in this game, there are weapons to find as you progress, and if you beat a level the game does give you a password to start from the next stage, and those features are both welcome, but it’s still a difficult, and boring, game.  I got to the second level back when I bought this game for cheap in 2006 or so, and never have gotten past it, not because it’s impossible or something, but because it is just challenging enough for me to not find it worth the effort.  Still, Splatterhouse 2 is an okay game.  Yes, it’s a pure memorizer to a degree beyond most platformers or beat ’em ups and it’s pretty difficult, but the game has variety, nicely-drawn graphics, and some conceptually interesting bosses to fight.  Overall, though, it’s a poor and tedious well-below-average game, and considering that it now goes for a crazy-high price, save your money and don’t buy this game, you’d be wasting your money.  This is a game a lot of people like more than I do, though, so maybe try it if you think it sounds interesting.  I think it’s kind of bad, though.  The game is available on Wii Virtual Console; if you MUST buy it, get it there.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — Crossroads of Time – 1 player, password save.  Star Trek DS9: Crossroads of Time is a mediocre and frustrating puzzle-adventure game from Novotrade that was published by Playmates.  As much as I love the TV series, this console game is not my thing at all.  This game is one part Prince of Persia and one part annoying maze-exploration puzzle game, and I dislike both elements of it.  You play as Benjamin Sisko, commander of the space station Deep Space Nine, and questionable things are going on that you’ll need to investigate.  The game controls very much like Prince of Persia, so C+forward jumps forward a set distance, Up jumps up to grab on to a platform above provided that you are facing the right way and are lined up just right, Down ducks, and hitting down several times will drop down a level, provided you’re facing the right way and such.  You also have items, and switching between and using them doesn’t always work well.  The controls are clumsy and frustrating; I’ve never liked PoP-style game controls.  Give me standard Mario or Sonic platformer controls any day!  Combat is even worse, if you need to fight with your fists.  While the phaser, once you get it, will drop basic foes quickly, trying to fight by punching them controls badly, is no fun, and will result in you taking as many hits as you give out.  The graphics here are dark and average looking, but at least the sprites are somewhat recognizable as the characters from the show.  The music is fine, but not great.  The presentation here is average but decent enough, it’s the gameplay that is a problem.

The level designs and gameplay are the worst thing about this game, though, particularly once you get past the station-exploration segments between action missions and get into a mission.  Those station exploration parts can be a bit confusing, but just talk to everyone and go everywhere and you’ll find your way eventually.  In missions, though, you may have a time limit, an overlarge stage to explore, and no clear way to progress.  After a while stuck in the first level I gave up and looked at a walkthrough video online; I had missed an invisible phaser that I needed, apparently.  After getting stuck again in the much, much larger second level, I gave up on this game.  You do get passwords between levels, which is good, but this game needed better level layouts and game design.  I could go back to that walkthrough and figure out what I was missing, but playing a game that way isn’t rewarding or fun, and and the game doesn’t give you enough, or any, clues to help you figure out what you’re supposed to be doing on your own.  There is no quest-log, no pause menu with info, or anything; just a vague mission, and a level to explore.  You do have a tricorder which can can to find certain item types, but good luck actually getting to them.  Stations can move moving platforms around which you can then stand on and control, and I’m sure later in the game there will be some quite annoying mazes with these as well.  This game feels designed to annoy and confuse the player, and I don’t like that.  I like mazes, but in a maze you know what to do, the challenge is to get through!  Here you don’t really know what to do, and with controls and design as subpar as they are in this game I don’t want to stick around and figure it out.  Star Trek DS9: Crossroads of Time is a subpar disappointment that borders on bad.  Pass unless you’re a big Prince of Persia fan who likes confusing games with bad controls.  Also available on the SNES.

Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition – 1-2 player simultaneous, 6 button controller supported.  Street Fighter II’: Special Champion Edition is a port of several versions of Capcom’s great classic one-on-one fighting game.  This has always been my favorite home port of pre-Super SFII.  It’s a great game!  Some time after Nintendo got its exclusive port of Street Fighter II, in mid 1993 Sega and, in Japan only, NEC also got versions of the game for their platforms for the Genesis and PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16).  Nintendo also got a second release on the SNES, SFII Turbo.  This Genesis version is the best version of home SFII available at that time, though, in my opinion at least.  With good graphics and music, great controls provided that you have some 6-button controllers, fast, accurate gameplay, all twelve playable characters, eight levels of turbo available right on the main menu, two different versions of the game playable, and almost everything from the arcade classics, SFII SCE is fantastic!  Really the only issue with this fantastic game is that you need to have six-button controllers, but really, for anyone who doesn’t, just buy some.  You won’t regret it; the Sega version of the 6-button Genesis controller is one of the best and most comfortable controllers ever designed.

The gameplay here is very accurate to the arcade original.  There are two modes here, for SFII’: Champion Edition and SFII’: Hyper Fighting, aka SFII Turbo.  Each mode has some different character colors available, though each character only has two colors per mode unfortunately, and some balance changes I believe.  More importantly, only the latter has turbo-speed options available.  All 12 characters are present in both modes, as Champion Edition added the 4 minibosses as playable characters on top of the 8 characters from the original game.  All of the moves are in both modes as well, though there may be slight differences.  Characters in this game only have a few moves each, so it’s not nearly as difficult to learn a characters’ basic moveset as it is in a more modern fighting game, which is nice.  The controls are great, and the gameplay is about as fast as it is in the arcade.  Indeed, with eight levels of turbo available, this version of SFII can play very quickly indeed!  Actually playing the game at max turbo is difficult, but it’s am amusing way to play the game for sure.  On the SNES you need a code to get over three levels of turbo, and the max is not quite as fast as it is in this game, and all other SFII games on 4th-gen systems don’t have even that many levels of turbo, so this is the fastest 4th-gen console version of SFII.

The game really does look nice, too.  This is the only 4th-gen console version of SFII with the original SFII arcade intro in the game.  It’s a very short little scene, but it is cool to see.  It’s weird no other version had it, but they don’t.  Ingame, while the graphics have, of course, been simplified from the arcades, the game doesn’t feel quite as stripped-down as Samurai Shodown does; SFII holds up better on the Genesis.  Some graphics have been simplified, so for instance there are now only two elephants in the background in one stage instead of three and only one or two background laters per stage, but everything important is here.  The music is very accurate to the arcade as well, within the limitations of the Genesis of course.  Whether the Genesis or SNES music sounds better is a matter of opinion, as both sound great.  This version may sound a bit more like the arcade game than that one, though, which is nice.  Overall, SFII Special Champion Edition is a great game.  Because of how many versions of SFII there are for so many consoles this game probably isn’t a must-have, but it is a great version of the game and one of my personal favorite versions of SFII.  Really the only bad thing I can say about it is that I like the characters added in Super SFII, so as much as I like lots of levels of turbo, I like the added characters even more.  Still, apart from that SFII SCE is fantastic, and it’s certainly a must-play game, at least.  Fighting game fans should certainly have it, and anyone else should consider getting the game.  It’s one of the best versions of a classic this side of the original arcade game.  Arcade port.  Versions of these games are available on many other consoles, including the TG16 for Champion Edition and the SNES for Hyper Fighting (Turbo), though no other version is exactly the same as this one.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Streets of Rage (Sega 6-Pak) – 1-2 player simultaneous.  Streets of Rage started one of Sega’s more popular series on the Genesis, at least among its fans.  The game is an isometric beat ’em up with a modern-day street-crime theme, and as with most games in the genre, you move from screen to screen punching everyone out as you try to save the city from thugs led by the evil Mr. X.  There are three playable characters, two male and one female, and each has slightly different stats.  The game has two player co-op, as you hope for in this genre.  Inspired by Capcom’s classic Final Fight, Streets of Rage takes that game and improves on it in pretty much every way.  While Final Fight is good, Streets of Rage is better.  This game has good graphics for an earlier Genesis game, good, precise controls, a fantastic soundtrack that is in the top tier for the system, and decent graphical and enemy variety.  The game is mostly great, but it does have a few drawbacks, most notably a very annoying, and hard, boss-rush section in the last level, dated visuals versus its sequel, and mostly straightforward corridors for levels.  I’ve never finished the game due to how tough the final level is.  Even so, this game is one of the better beat ’em ups out there.  Streets of Rage is a straightforward and repetitive game, as this genre almost always is, but it’s one of the more fun beat ’em ups around… or would be, if not for its all-time-classic sequel.  This game is a pretty good game, but that one is better.  Still, both games are worth playing.

As mentioned this is an earlier Genesis game, and it does look rougher than its sequels visually.  Sprites aren’t large or as detailed as in the second one, and environments are fairly simple.  All stages in this game are either horizontal corridors, excepting only the one elevator level.  A few later stages do have traps or pits, to give the game a bit more variety, but its sequel or Golden Axe have far more interesting stage layouts than this game.  The basic controls are simple: you can walk, jump, jump-kick, and use a superbomb move which has a backup police car shoot a rocket-launcher at the screen, damaging all enemies present.  You can’t use that last move in the last level, just to make things even harder.  There are a few moves beyond those basics, including a backwards kick on punch+kick and some grab and throw moves to give the game a bit more variety, and that is appreciated.  All moves control well, and the fighting action is fun, at least through the second-to-last stage.  As with most beat ’em ups, regular enemies come in a handful of constantly-repeating varieties and are mostly easy to beat, while bosses are much harder.  The bosses in this game include a tricky guy who breathes fire, a tall guy with some weapons, and many more.   Between the hordes of enemies and tricky bosses, you can’t win this game just by mashing attack; some strategy is required.  I do like that, but sometimes it’s a bit frustrating.

Overall, Streets of Rage is a very good game.  The game looks nice, sounds fantastic, and plays well.  The basic fighting gameplay here is great fun, and is better than classics such as Final Fight or Golden Axe based on the mechanics, even if I love Golden Axe’s fantasy setting the most over this.  Streets of Rage game is difficult and having to beat bosses without the bomb is annoying, and the level layouts are mostly too much of a straight line, but this is a great game in almost every category.  With either one player or two, Streets of Rage is a must-try classic.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Streets of Rage 2 – 1-2 player simultaneous.  One of the best beat ’em ups ever made, Streets of Rage 2 is one of the all-time classics!  This game takes its predecessors’ foundation and builds on it.  This time the graphics, level designs, gameplay, enemy variety, music, and controls are all improved.  Streets of Rage 2 is fantastic in all of those categories, and more besides.  Once again, Mr. X is causing trouble.  He kidnapped one of the guys from the first game, and the other two characters plus the kidnapped guys’ little brother and a big muscleman are off to rescue him, and stop Mr. X as well.  It’s a simple plot, but it works, and I like that it’s not a girl kidnapped like in most games.  There are eight levels to fight through, and four difficulty levels available.  You only get two continues, but even so, the difficulty levels really make a big difference.  On Easy the game isn’t hard to finish, but on the higher settings it will take skill and practice to get anywhere near the end.  This game is easier than the first one, particularly on Easy, and it’s appreciated.  It’s still plenty tough on the higher settings.  This is not a long game, but for the genre, the length is just about right.  The game ends just when it should, and every level is fun and very well designed.  The controls are also great.  They are very responsive and precise, and there are a good number of moves to use beyond the basic ones.  Each character has some character-specific special moves.  While this game is still repetitive, it has more variety than earlier beat ’em ups.  There are also weapons to use, including knives and pipes, for some added fun.  The ‘bomb’ attack from the first game is gone, but the added moves make up for that.

Indeed, I really like the level designs here.  While most stages are a path to the right and this game does not have Golden Axe-like pits in the stages, unfortunately, the several elevator segments excepted, there are parts where the screen moves in a diagonal direction, and there are many screen transitions, doors, stairs, and such along the way.  The graphics are very good as well, and this really helps keep things interesting.  You aren’t just looking at the same backgrounds all the time, but instead environments change regularly and each look quite different and very well drawn and detailed.  There are some nice surprises too, I was not expecting one of those elevators to be there when I first played the game!  There is as much enemy variety here as you’ll find in the genre, too.  Enemies are more different than in some beat ’em ups.  There are little guys, dominatrix women, big fat guys who can breathe fire, guys on motorcycles who zoom in and try to run you over, and more!  The game re-uses many bosses as regular enemies too, which really helps with the enemy variety.  You have to be constantly on your toes in this game, and can’t just get into a basic rhythm because of the different approaches for different enemies.  Of course you punch them, but you’ll need to jump-kick the motorcycle and flying guys, run from the big guys when they attack and then hit them when you can, use the fantastic ‘sweep’ attack (press two buttons together) to hit people on both sides of you when surrounded, and more.  Enemy AI is good, and enemy placements keep pacing just right.  And even though this is a game about fighting modern-day thugs, there is an ‘alien’ and a ‘pirate’ area as well, with the excuse that both are rides in an amusement park you travel through.  I really like them, they add to the game for sure.

The soundtrack in this game is a legendarily great one, also.  The game has a very good videogame-soundtrack score.  While this is not my very favorite kind of Genesis soundtrack, techno soundtracks like Adventures of Batman & Robin or such are, it is a very good soundtrack which adds to the game for sure.  SoR2 has some memorable music, and it pushes the music chip, too.  Overall, Streets of Rage 2 is a very good game in every category.  The game is well-balanced, fun, easy on Easy and yet hard on Hard, is just the right length, has varied environments and enemy types, more moves than early beat ’em ups, four playable characters who each play differently, has good graphics and outstanding music, and just generally maybe the best overall gameplay in any beat ’em up ever.  I much prefer Golden Axe thematically over this game’s sometimes bland modern setting, and that counts for a lot, but I do have to admit that Streets of Rage 2 has the better, more complex, and more evolved gameplay, and is the better game overall.  And the best of other developers in the genre, including TMNT III (NES), my favorite Konami beat ’em up, and Shadows over Mystara (Arcade), my favorite Capcom game in the genre, probably don’t quite match up to this game.  Streets of Rage 2 is a must-play classic for everyone, regardless of if you like beat ’em ups or not.  This game is available in collections and digital re-releases of Sega’s Genesis games.

Finally, got another one done.  Don’t expect too much from the Shadowrun summary, I didn’t get far into that game due to its high learning curve, but the rest of these summaries are of games I’ve played quite a bit of.