16-bit | Retro Video Gaming

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! ^_^

Making reviews and wanting to be able to record what I’m playing so that I can show through video what the games are like. This has turned out to be a difficult problem to solve, but today I managed to solve all my previous issues.. with a little help from my friends ;D

I started out trying to record with a film camera, filming the TV screen. This was crap. Crappy quality, shaky, bad angles, ugly sound.. etc. So i moved on to borrowing my boyfriend’s brother’s HDPVR, this worked on and off, didn’t work with my NTSC or japanese systems, only my PAL. The recordings got a constant humming in the background sound and it was also a hassle to connect the thing, cords from the HDPVR to the TV, to the laptop (not being able to use my stationary computer=inconvenient) and to the console. I then had to transfer the files from my laptop to my stationary to work with them.

After talking to some stores, I got convinced to buy a DVD recorder. This worked, but not with my NTSC or japanese systems.. also it was a hassle having to record on DVD’s then transfer the files to my computer and convert them to files I could use. The recordings also carried a constant humming sound in the background and the image was laggy..

However the DVD recorder purchase was not in vain. A friend advised me to get the Elgato Video Capture from the apple store.

When I first connected it to the system and straight into the computer it didn’t work. Apparently because the consoles have some built in anti-piracy code (according to my engineer friend). The image looked like this and froze immediately:

BUT when I connected it through the DVD burner into the console the image was perfect, no lag, and I could play the games straight on my iMac, while recording!

It doesn’t look too messy, not too many cords or machines to connect together, and best of all, the sound is perfect!

I’ve been playing a bunch of Streets of Rage on my iMac tonight, with headphones, and OMG that games’ music is just so awesome! This is what the image quality looks like:

This is totally ok for my purpose ^_^

Now I haven’t had time to try it out with my NTSC machines or the japanese yet, but I hope it will work o_O The Elgato is said to be able to take all formats, however I’m not sure if the DVD burner might f*ck it up..
I’ll update once I find out ^_^