Tonight I started trying out all my new Sega Saturn games. The first one was Lemmings 3D. I like Lemmings, the old ones for Sega Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), so I figured this couldn’t go wrong. Lemmings, in 3D!! Just the thought of it was blowing my mind.. how disappointed was I…
This game was the biggest WTF-experience for me this year, how they were even allowed to release this kind of shit eludes me.. The graphics are horrible, however I guess they were restricted by the capacity of the Saturn, but I mean, there are better looking games for that console. The controls are indescribable, nothing makes sense and no matter what you are trying to press nothing happens that advances the gameplay. I just moved around the camera angle for 30 minutes and could hardly get that to work in my favor..
Why did they even try to make Lemmings anything other than a 2-D side-scroller, this is what works best for this type of game, why change something that was already good? They could have just enhanced the graphics and maybe added some quirky extra actions with the evolved Saturn controller that had more buttons?
Well just watch this video I made of the gameplay and you will understand why this game sucks ass…
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 =)
Retro Video Gaming 