Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Well Played

E3 is almost here, and as promised, Sega has revealed all of the games for its upcoming Genesis Mini. Here's what's on tap for America, courtesy of the official Sega Genesis Mini web site:

Ecco the Dolphin
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Space Harrier II
Shining Force
Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
Toejam & Earl
Comix Zone
Sonic the Hedgehog
Altered Beast
Gunstar Heroes
Castle of Illusion
World of Illusion
Thunder Force III
Super Fantasy Zone
Shinobi III
Streets of Rage II
Earthworm Jim
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Contra: Hard Corps
Landstalker
Beyond Oasis
Ghouls 'n Ghosts
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Golden Axe
Phantasy Star IV
Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition
Mega Man: The Wily Wars
Sonic Spinball
Vectorman
Wonderboy in Monster World
Virtua Fighter 2
Alisia Dragoon
Columns
Dynamite Headdy
Strider
Kid Chameleon
Light Crusader
Monster World IV
Eternal Champions

and here's a couple of extra surprises for good measure:

Sega Tetris
Darius

It's an excellent selection overall, barring a few questionable choices like the doomed to fail port of Virtua Fighter 2 and Sonic Spinball, which helped get the ball rolling on the infamous "Sonic Cycle" of hopefulness followed immediately by crushing disappointment. About two thirds of the titles are repeated in the Japanese version of the console, with the more Western games replaced with Genesis ports of Snow Bros. and Slap Fight, among others. 

Personally, I find the Japanese selection more appealing... they're getting Rent-A-Hero, Assault Suits Leynos, and Yu Yu Hakusho, and we're not. However, several under the radar Genesis games are coming to both territories, including Gunstar Heroes and Alisia Dragoon, one of my favorites from the early 1990s. It's nice to see that game finally getting some love after all this time, even if it's not quite as good as I thought it was back in 1992.

But let's talk for a minute about the two games released exclusively for the Genesis Mini. Sega Tetris is a retooled version of the Mega Drive game that was nearly blotted out of existence by Nintendo and its exclusivity agreement with ELORG, the technology branch of the Russian government. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexey Pazhitnov is free to license his game to whoever he pleases, giving Sega a chance to release Sega Tetris without interference from its rival. 


However, that wasn't good enough for M2. Word on the street is that they're going to rewrite the code to make it more faithful to the Tetris arcade game. No, not the one Atari did, but Sega's own version, released in Japanese arcades and full of digitized backgrounds that look like Windows 3.11 wallpapers now, but must have been impressive thirty years ago.

Darius is an even bigger surprise. Sega could just as easily have given us the Genesis port of Sagaia, which was finished a quarter of a century ago and given straight eights by EGM's review crew. However, they decided to give us the original game instead, most likely due to its popularity in Japan. M2 is taking the credit for the port, but a recent Kotaku report suggests that they just bought the code from a hobbyist programmer named AC Hidecade, who was already finished with a Genesis port of Darius. The icing on this already strange cake is that Hidecade wasn't the only one working on a Genesis version of Darius... RaelX16 had posted an early work in progress of his OWN port on YouTube years ago! Curiouser and curiouser...

Anyway, the Sega Genesis Mini is scheduled to be released on September 19th, roughly a month after the thirtieth anniversary of its US launch. It'll cost eighty dollars, and just like the original, you can accessorize it with useless plastic junk that just takes up space. (No, I'm still not over that whole 32X mess. I don't care that it was twenty-five years ago.)

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