Haven’t had much time to game this week, but some packages has arrived this week. Among these I got Dick Tracy for the Sega Mega Drive, which I realized I really wanted after reading about TheSegaDude’s new additions! The Japanese cover looked a little bit cooler with the Katakana though.. but at least I will be able to record when I play it since I got the PAL edition ^_^
I also got Ecco the Dolphin for Sega Game Gear, just because it was cheap ^^
And I found a game called Secret Command, don’t know anything about it yet, but I will try them all out tomorrow ^_^
I was E-baying a few days ago and found some interesting titles through one seller, and I just ended up buying a few extra since I was gonna pay shipping anyway…
So here’s what I got by mail today:
Battle Squadron, Skeleton Krew, Phantom 2040 and Wings of Wor.
I had recently lost an auction with Skeleton Krew so this was the game I was actually out looking for. It’s a really cool platform shooter or as they call it on the back cover “outeRAGEous blastfest!!!”.
It really does have some cool effects to it that are not usually seen in Mega Drive/Genesis titles. It kind of felt a bit like the advanced SNES games.
When the Boss appears he is hovering up and down and also sideways. It’s really well made, and they really manage to give a good three dimensional feeling to it. The controls are also smooth and easy once you get into them!
I only played through the first stage and saved the password, so I will make a longer review of this game later perhaps. =)
So after finding Skeleton Krew I browsed through the sellers other Sega titles looking for things I previously didn’t have, and looked up videos of the gameplay of the ones I found. I usually don’t buy Sega games without boxes, but after finding Wings of Wor and seeing the gameplay on youtube I had to have it!! And there were only cartridges of Wings of Wor on Ebay… I assumed it was rare..
I read a bit about it and found that the original Japanese version was called Gynoug, and there were complete Japanese versions of Gynoug on Ebay, however my Sega Mega Drive is PAL so I wouldn’t be able to play them.. So I figured that the Wings of War needed to be the PAL version. However, reading about it today on wikipedia it says that Wings of Wor was the north american version?! So I am now officially confused >_< Either way it worked when I played it on my Mega Drive.. (!)
I also briefly tried the other two games today to make sure they were in working condition. Phantom 2040 was horrible, no horrible doesn’t even describe it.. I will have to dedicate a whole angry post to it later, IF I will be able to put myself through playing it again >_<
And Battle Squadron was a mediocre shooter similar to many others. I will have to attempt it again though and perhaps I’ll grow fond of it, the back cover made it seem intriguing with Biotech Wingmen, Mutant Cybersnakes, Magno Strykers and MechnoGuardians! i didn’t get that far this time though.. Also it has the benefit of being 2 player. I love 2-player games so I can play simultaneously with friends ^_^
It seems like the Danish people have developed Battle Squadron, hooray for Scandinavia! ^_^
I got the games I ordered to my Sega Saturn. The games are: The Lost World : Jurassic Park, Wipeout 2097, Die Hard Trilogy, Gun Griffon, Tomb Raider, Black Dawn, Ghen Wars, Sega Ages Volume 1, Lemmings 3D, Panzer Dragoon II, Street Racer, Virtual On and Crackdown for Sega Megadrive (or Genesis as they call it in the US).
Most of the games I bought mainly ’cause they were extremely cheap, and that also most definitely means that they are crappy, but there’s a charm to playing even the crappy games sometimes, AVGN made that abundantly clear ^^
The only slightly pricier one was Panzer Dragoon II, I read that it was a great game though (the first one, but I assume that the sequel must at least be tolerable as well then).
I bought Crackdown to Mega Drive because it made me think of the Crackdown games for Xbox 360 (which I strongly enjoy), and deep down I was hoping that it was a long forgotten prequel to these games.. it’s most likely not though..
There was no picture of the Crackdown game when I ordered it, so naturally I googled it to see what it actually was. This is what I found…
I had seen this picture before, on some joke-site or something, and I thought: “For real?! Coooool! You fight a giant evil goat! And you’re playing as kickass 90′s Arnold/Jackie Chan wannabes with a sidekick chimp and… star troopers?!? AWESOME!”
Now.. google can be misleading sometimes. I of course got the boring PAL version. This made me go deeper into google’s black depth of facts and fiction and this is what I found:
The first one must be fake ’cause I only found one single picture of it on one single actual box cover. The second one appeared multiple times when googling the US version (Genesis) so it must be the official US release. The third one has Japanese writing in top right corner, so it’s the Japanese release. And the last one is the one I got… kind of resembles the first picture, evil guy in the back (but not a goat..), two armed guys in front (however no machine guns or Jackie Chan wannabes, instead caucasian blondes in colourful tights! AND NO MONKEYS OR STAR TROOPERS!!!) Damn.. that’s disappointing..
So I’ve tried playing Crackdown for Sega Megadrive, and it was actually pretty good. It had an intro telling the story of two agents having to plant special bombs. Best of all it has a multiplayer mode where you co-op through the missions, and good music. The gameplay was smooth and easy controls, you could sneak up against walls, shoot different weapons or knock out bad guys with your fists, and shoot in 8 different directions.
Downside.. the actual gameplay takes place in only like 1/4 part of the screen! What’s up with that?!? Do I RLY! need to know every tiny little detail about the different bad guys on each stage? Couldn’t the ammo and life info be displayed discretely in the bottom of the screen over the actual gameplay, like in any other game like Super Mario Bros for example? Well, apart from that it seemed like a good game. I’ll review the Saturn games later =)
