Retro Gaming Australia

Something a little different.

Comix Zone was a late-era Mega Drive brawler developed by Sega Technical Institute. While it really pushed the system’s visual and sound capacities, the game proved to be rather short. The special CD mentioned in the advertisement differs based on your region – the PAL version has the actual original soundtrack, while the North American one has a dozen heavy metal tracks with little relation to the game.

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Uh, yeah.

The Sega 32X was an add-on designed for the Mega Drive with the intention of creating a stop-gap 32-bit gaming solution for those budget minded consumers that were not ready to step up to the Saturn, which was due for release the following year. Not such a great idea in hindsight. Overall, just 34 games were released for the troubled system, along with 6 games which used the Mega CD and 32X in tandem.

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An overlooked arcade beat em up.

Zombie Revenge is an arcade brawler developed by Sega AM1 for the arcades and later Dreamcast. The game is technically a side story to The House of the Dead series, even carrying the title Blood Bullet: The House of the Dead Side Story during its development. This ad is for the French release of the game.

Scary to think that it’s been 7 years since NFL games peaked.

Once upon a time, the NFL awarded licenses to any video game publisher who wanted them. There was a large market for video game football, and they wanted their share. Eventually, it came down to just EA’s Madden and Sega’s NFL 2K series. Typically EA would win the sales war, Sega would get better reviews, so Sega decided to do something different – release all of their new season sports games for $US20. While it resulted in a sales explosion for an awesome game, the NFL felt it cheapened the league’s image, so they approached EA with the offer of an exclusive license. Since then, the lack of competition has treated us to seven years of half-assed video game football.

An early hit on the Mega Drive

Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin was the webhead’s first 16-bit home console outing. The game was pretty unique in that you had to manage Spider-Man’s supplies of web by taking pictures for the Daily Bugle while on your missions. You could also head back to Parker’s apartment to rest – but time was a limited resource, as you had just 24 hours to prevent a bomb from destroying New York, and to rescue Mary-Jane from a pool of acid.

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In the latest issue of the Official Nintendo Magazine (the UK one, meaning you’ll see it recycled in our ONM months later), Takashi Iizuka, the producer on the upcoming Sonic Generations discusses how he believes it is difficult to please the Sonic fans who grew up with the original Mega Drive games.

“Our team are always trying to present new gameplay innovations so it’s hard to please fans who like the gameplay from the older games,” he says. “However, we have included the older gameplay as part of Sonic’s 20th Anniversary, so we think the fans of the older games will enjoy it [Generations] as well. We are also looking into continuing the Sonic 4 series which was released on WiiWare, and we’ll keep developing titles so more fans will enjoy the games.”

We’re not really that hard to please – just remember that the series is more about momentum based platforming, not pure speed.

Via Official Nintendo Magazine

Worth playing for the soundtrack alone.

Streets of Rage was one of Sega’s early success stories on the Mega Drive. Heavily influenced by arcade beat ’em ups like Double Dragon and Final Fight, Sega put its own spin by giving players more moves and access to a screen wiping Police backup attack. However, the reason why people consider the first game memorable (as the second game blew it out of the water) is the soundtrack – Yuzo Koshiro is a master of the Mega Drive’s sound chip. This ad is from the US release.

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