Retro Gaming Australia

In 1996 and 1997, Sega decided to port 3D accelerated versions of some of their recent big hit arcade games to the PC. One such game was Virtua Cop, which was also released in some places as Virtua Squad. Of course, there was no light gun peripheral for Virtua Cop, so it lost some of the magic, but the mouse proved to be a pretty good substitute.

Unless you were lucky enough to own an X68000, the Mega CD version of Final Fight was as good a home conversion as you were going to get. It’s not as heavily censored as the SNES version, has all three characters, and a pretty bitchin’ arranged soundtrack. It still loses a little bit of the graphical lustre of the original, though.

Over the past year, Sega has been transitioning away from the standard box product model, instead opting to make the most of their back catalogue through digital distribution.

Sega Japan has launched the website Archives Sega to catalogue all of the games that have been released digitally, from the SEGA AGES Online service through to the new Model 2 collection.

There are currently no plans to replicate the website in English.

Via Segabits

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.

Alien Storm is one of Sega’s oft-forgotten arcade games from the late 80s/early 90s. It’s a bit like Golden Axe with a few shooting sections, and some pretty cool alien designs.

Like Golden Axe, the Mega Drive version of the game had a few extra levels added for good measure, but the structure and flow of the levels is quite different. We play through the first four levels of the game in the video.

Ruffian Games, developers of Crackdown 2 for the Xbox 360, made the above prototype video as a pitch for a potential downloadable Streets of Rage sequel.

The video is obviously very rough (“pre pre pre Alpha according to the studio), but shows a bit of promise. Perhaps one day Sega will get off the pot and do something new with Streets of Rage.

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.

You should all be familiar with our next Retro Gaming Theatre participant – Sega’s arcade smash hit Golden Axe. This is the Mega Drive version – one of the first breakout successes on the machine. It’s not as pretty as the arcade game, but it has two extra stages.

I actually got really into this while recording the video and ended up playing through to (and defeating) Death Adder. We had to cut it there due to quota restrictions, which is kind of disappointing. One day I’ll have faster internets!

Taz-Mania is one of those platformers that looks great, but isn’t actually very fun to play.

Our latest episode of Retro Gaming Theatre takes on the Master System iteration of Wonder Boy. This is my preferred version of the game, probably due to the fact I played it first. We ended up skipping a couple of levels to make the video a bit more snappy – don’t judge us!