#6-8: SEGA Arcade Classics(?)

Not too long ago, I acquired the PS3 version of SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for Americans). I mainly bought it to play the Shining Force and Phantasy Star series, but there are many other MD games I've never really cared about on there. Emily attempted to remedy this by picking three games in a row from the collection.

The first is Alien Storm, a simple brawler that I knew little about. Unusually for the genre, it also includes numerous shooting-gallery style sections, which are a neat break from the usual gameplay, if not particularly deep. The three characters seem extremely similar, so there's not much replay value there. Health packs are scarce, so reducing damage in every situation is important. Instead, there are plenty of Energy pickups; this allows you to use your full-screen attack but it also seems to have a passive strengthening effect on your normal attacks.

The game has 8 stages; on my first attempt I reached 6 but the gauntlet of bosses followed by an autoscroller finished me off. To compromise (the only brawler I'm any good at is Golden Axe) I changed the settings down to Easy and enabled a turbo-fire option which makes the shooting galleries trivial. I'm glad I did; while it was definitely a little too easy for me, the final boss took almost 2 minutes straight turbo-fire to destroy, which would have ruined my mashing finger. In summary, a decent brawler, but nothing special.

Next up was Tip Top (Congo Bongo to some). Technically Emily didn't pick this one, but I tried it out at random and guessed it would be very short, and I was right. Essentially, it's a lot like Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., except the perspective is isometric. One slightly different mechanic is that you can either climb onto blocks or jump; climbing is slower but consistent, whereas jumping is very difficult to judge correctly and will bounce you back if you hit the side of a ledge. There seem to be miscellaneous other ways to score points, like jumping off collapsing blocks, but the main way is to just keep progressing.

There are four boards with various hazards, and the gameplay loops after the fourth, though they add more enemies and so on. You've seen this set-up before. Again, it's not a particularly stand-out game (the home versions bombed horribly for some reason) but there's nothing really wrong with it other than the terrible sound. Play it if you're bored of Donkey Kong, I guess.

Third comes ESWAT: City Under Siege. This game is aggressively terrible and you should never play it. Nothing about it is fun. It's far too difficult, the graphics and music aren't any good, and it's too long for what it is. Bizarrely for a run and gun, it's also confusing in dull ways.

No, I haven't beaten it yet. I'll add another paragraph when I do.

The March of (Anti-)Progress

I'm not known for completing games with any great expediency. I'm not even known for completing games at all; my ratio of playing to beating games is very poor indeed.

With that in mind, I bought a collection of 49 games. It's called Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (PS3) here in Europe, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection in America. This contains a whole bunch of classic MD games, and also some terrible ones like Sonic Spinball. I'll talk about the few I've played so far here:

• Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle is somehow the fifth game in the series, despite looking like a Klik 'n' Play game made in a week. I find it incredibly dull to play, but I might beat it soon simply because it's not very long.
• Alien Storm is a brawler, not my favourite genre, but I've played it before a long time ago and it doesn't seem overly difficult.
• Altered Beast is a terrible brawler/platform thing which is unfortunately represented twice in this collection. Emily and I have been bashing at it but the stage four boss is giving us some trouble. However, it's super short so one day, it'll go down.
• Bonanza Bros. is an odd game; split-screen even in single player, it's something like an extremely simple forerunner to Monaco and Way of the Ninja. Haven't played much yet, have the feeling it will get very difficult later on.
• Columns doesn't have a campaign, only a high score mode, so I've marked it as Null on Backloggery. It's good enough I suppose, but I'm not a big fan.
• Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine however is one of my favourite MD games, and I beat it again as soon as I got the collection just for fun (and the trophy).
• Fatal Labyrinth is that oddity, a commercial roguelike. It's very simple and very ruthless. Down to level 10 so far; it saves every 5 levels.
• Flicky is a godawful arcade game which is painful on every level. I originally marked it Null for not having a real ending, but apparently the stages loop after a while so I'm going to have to slog it out. Only played briefly so far.
• Ristar is a charming platformer with good music and graphics, slightly marred by the overuse of terribly digitised samples. I don't think this one is a pushover.
• Shining Force: The Legacy of Great Intention is probably the first strategy game I played, on emulator when I was little. Despite being kind of dated, it still has some good moments and is quite difficult. Done a few battles.
• Sonic Spinball is a horrendously laggy mess with dreadful music and sounds.
• Super Thunder Blade is an autoscrolling shmup which has both going-forward and going-up modes. Not sure which I like least.

Despite owning a Mega Drive in my youth, I haven't played most of these games. However, I do know a fair bit about a lot of them, and almost all of them have excellent speedruns should I need some reference material.

I still have a lot of games to talk about; beaten and bought... some of these are from months ago!