Retro Gaming Australia

Independent video game books publisher Read-Only Memory, the house behind the recently published Sensible Soccer history book, has launched a new Kickstarter for a highly ambitious book covering the Sega Mega Drive.

Called Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, the book aims to be the ultimate retrospective for Sega’s widely loved 16-bit behemoth. It aims to be a definitive volume – they’ve got Sega on board to give them unprecedented access to the company’s archives and personnel. The book will include production artwork, interviews, development sketches, manufacturing plans and interviews with 20 Sega personnel, some of whom have never been interviewed before.

Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works is currently only available in hardback with a pledge of £30 (plus £15 for international shipping) with an expected delivery date of June 2014.

To close out our Mega Drive based Retro Gaming Theatre videos for 2012, I decided to drag out my favourite game on the system – Streets of Rage II.

The game has amazing graphics, fantastic action and the single best soundtrack of any game on the Mega Drive. Our video showcases the first full level of the game.

Cricket season is in full swing, so I figured we’d take a look at the second of two cricket games released for the Mega Drive – Shane Warne Cricket.

It’s not a terribly exciting game to watch, I’m afraid, but it was a marked improvement over the first game, Brian Lara Cricket, adding state teams, fielding errors and a little bit of a graphical makeover. Our video shows a handful of overs from an England v Australia match, with me controlling Australia and bowling.

Aladdin was one of the biggest surprises of 1993 – an honest to god high quality licensed game. Virgin, Disney and Sega teamed up to develop and promote the product, and as a result, it was one of the best looking, playing and selling games on the Mega Drive.

Our Retro Gaming Theatre playthrough gives you a sample of the first few stages on the game.

For the second episode of Retro Gaming Theatre, we’re taking everybody’s favourite video game dolphin out for a 20th birthday celebration. Revel in my ineptitude at nose bashing blue bottles, along with being bored with the game’s horrible labyrinthine level design.

Ecco the Dolphin was a moderate success for Sega. They ported the original game to the Master System, Game Gear and Mega CD. It also spawned a handful of sequels in Ecco II: The Tides of Time, Ecco. Jr and Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future.

Apart from inclusions in recent Sega collections, Ecco has been absent from the public eye since the PlayStation 2 release of Defender for the Future. Will his next appearance be in a video game, or in a can of John West’s finest?

Angry Birds is basically everywhere you look nowadays, and it has even made its way to the Sega Mega Drive – well, on an emulator anyway.

The fan demake, created by a Chinese developer going by the screen name zhengyaxin_8bit, gives the super popular Angry Birds a 16-bit makeover, and overcomes the lack of a touch based control scheme with a simple press and drag on the keyboard instead.

You can download the ROM for Angry Birds on Sega Mega Drive here – it is free and available now.

Source: Retro Collect

The Master System Converter (or Power Base Converter for our American friends) is an accessory for the Mega Drive that lets you play Master System games on the system. Is it magic? Nope – turns out the Mega Drive is actually backwards compatible with the Master System at the hardware level – all this converter does is push on a pin that tells the Mega Drive to boot in Master System mode. It’s still pretty neat, though.

Two more titles from the classic Wonder Boy series, Wonder Boy in Monster Land and Monster World IV (pictured), are launching on the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console service on May 10.

Wonder Boy in Monster Land is an action role-playing platformer developed by Westone and released for many systems including the Sega Master System , Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST. In Wonder Boy in Monster Land players reprise their role as Wonder Boy (now in a Medieval world) to rid the land of a fire-breathing dragon and his minions. The Sega Master System version of Wonder Boy in Monster Land was released on Virtual Console in 2009, however, it is the 1987 arcade version that Wii owners will get to experience anew from tomorrow.

More exciting is the release of Monster World IV, the sixth and final installment in the Wonder Boy franchise (though technically not part of the Wonder Boy series and exclusively part of the Monster World series). Monster World IV is a 1994 adventure platformer also developed by Westone and released for the Sega Mega Drive – only in Japan. This Virtual Console release is the first official release of the game outside of Japan. Featuring a female protagonist and Middle Eastern setting, Monster World IV sees players journey to save the Elemental Spirits and defeat the bad guys.

Wonder Boy in Monster Land and Monster World IV will set you back 900 Nintendo Points each.

Source: SEGA Blog

For many years, clone systems have provided an opportunity for players to relive their gaming memories without having to hunt down the original hardware. Usually these systems are unauthorised efforts, but that’s not the case with the Blaze Mega Drive, which bears the official endorsement of Sega.

The Blaze Mega Drive is hardly new, with the first models hitting in early 2009. It’s actually a rebranded version of the ATGames Firecore. The only difference between the two machines is that the Firecore has more games built in. Blaze has a tendency to switch the games so as to have multiple models on store shelves.

For $AU49.95, you get a small console with AV-Out, two 6-button pads and 15 built-in games Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Arrow Flash, Bonanza Bros., Columns, Crack Down, Decap Attack, ESWAT, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Golden Axe, Shadow Dancer (i.e. the usual suspects Sega digs up for collections) and Sonic & Knuckles. (continue reading…)

Luis Levy, Mega Drive enthusiast and PR extraordinaire has posted an article comparing the audio quality among the different Mega Drive variants – well, the major ones (in this case, Genesis, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3). He even highlights the difference between early and late version Mega Drives. Apparently things can also be improved by playing your games through a 32X.

I’d be curious to see what the audio difference is between the other units like the X’Eye, Aiwa and CD-X.

Via GameSetWatch