Retro Gaming Australia

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was meant to be Sega’s big game for 1993, but the project proved far too ambitious with the required cartridge size needed to house the game’s content simply being far too expensive to produce. They split the game into two halves – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, and hurriedly assembled a team to develop Sonic Spinball to go to bat in its place, eventually releasing Sonic 3 in March 1994 and Sonic & Knuckles in October 1994.

The Mega Drive version of Batman Returns was a kind of middling platformer that sold quite well, so Sega decided to have Malibu Interactive work on an enhanced version for the Mega CD. This version was praised for its new driving sections, but people still didn’t really care for the base game.

The Mega Drive wasn’t exactly an RPG powerhouse, especially when compared to the SNES, but it had a couple of games that could certainly hold their own. One such game was Shining Force II, a strategy RPG developed by a division of Sega that would eventually separate from the company and form Camelot Software Planning (best known for Mario Golf, Mario Tennis and Golden Sun)

Sega teamed up with id Software and Raster Productions to bring Quake III: Arena to the Dreamcast. It’s a pretty impressive port, but the best aspect was that you could play against PC players, provided that they ran a patch version that was compatible with the Dreamcast version.

It was a heartbreaking moment for RPG fans last generation when the plug was pulled on official translation plans for the SEGA AGES releases of Phantasy Star: Generation 1 and Phantasy Star: Generation 2 on the PlayStation 2. The remakes were considered to be the only good thing to come out of the SEGA AGES project under the 3D AGES venture.

Thanks to the hard work of a young lady by the name of Kyence, you can now enjoy Phantasy Star: Generation 1 on the PlayStation 2 in English (on a modded system or emulator, at least).

Two versions of the patch are available – one using the Japanese character names, and one using the English character names. You can get the patches here.

Kyence plans to tackle Phantasy Star: Generation 2 next.

In the latest episode of Retro Gaming Theatre, we threw on Alex Kidd in Miracle World, arguably one of the most popular games on the Sega Master System. I did pretty well when you consider that I haven’t touched the game in ten years.

Well, except when I managed to accidentally reset the console instead of pausing it, hence the abrupt ending.

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?

Phantasy Star IV is, to this day, the last traditional JRPG in the series, with the focus shifting onto online games with the next iteration, Phantasy Star Online. People tend to mourn this decision because Phantasy Star IV is arguably the best JRPG on the Mega Drive. A remake was planned as part of the Sega AGES 2500 series (which yielded remakes of the first two games) but was cancelled when Sega altered the direction of the series to focus on perfect ports over 3D remakes.

Evander Holyfield’s Real Deal Boxing isn’t bad as far as boxing video games go, but it’s a really simplistic interpretation of the sport. The sequel, Greatest Heavyweights of the Ring, is a marked improvement.