Andee

Wow, LRG are on a roll lately aren't they?

The version that's on Switch is playable, but it could use a good tidy up — the refresh rate is super choppy and the resolution is inconsistent across sprites and backgrounds

"Sometimes po-faced and pretentious, always with a heightened sense of its own importance" — it tracks that The Guardian put at number 1, then.

I'm eternally grateful that's not the design Nintendo went with.

in fact, it appeared there first before the game was released

I forget where I read this, but wasn't the story that Mean Machines commissioned Weston to do the cover specially for the mag, and then when Sega saw what he'd done, they were so impressed that they asked if they could use it for the UK version of the game?

Yet another reason why region locking needs to go straight in the bin

Man, Sega of America really had an aversion to using anything with the word "Mega" in their consoles and add-ons, didn't they?

@RetroGames Yeah, maybe not at the time (Sega really should have been focusing on the Saturn), but an all-in-one Mega Drive/CD/32X would be a really neat device to have sitting on one's retro gaming shelf!

As someone who was foaming-at-the-mouth desperate to see Final Fight come to the Mega Drive, I find it intriguing that they renamed the game "Last Battle" in the west. Whether that was intentional, or just a coincidence, kid-me was ALMOST duped into considering getting it, even though in my heart of hearts I knew it was meant to be rubbish. Glad I never did.

My favourite Street Fighter comic is still the Masaomi Kanzaki series from the mid '90s — it only features the original 12 characters, but it had a very focused plot, and a really crisp, expressive art style - I find most of the current UDON comics look a little too pristine and shiny

@Chocoburger I recently discovered that game just before the 3DS eShop closed — it's so much fun isn't it?

Looking at the level of realism/violence in games from that era is positively quaint. I wonder what his reaction was after seeing the insanely-detailed body horror of the more recent MK games.

Limited Run? More like Flimflam-ited Bum

Those first two Zelda games are crying out for a 16-bit style remake

Love me some Katamari — has to be one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a videogame, and have listened
to it constantly. Plus I'm so chuffed they re-released the original as we never originally got it in the UK.

@somnambulance I only finally got around to playing Wattam a few months ago — it's such a fun little diversion isn't it?

Maligned schmaligned, Street Fighter is an absolute hoot

The good news is that the movie is currently free to view on YouTube's Movies & TV channel, but only in the US.

Quick! Change the channel!

Incredibly, the ants agreed and duly removed all of the larvae to the new location – effectively cleaning up the controller as they went.

Thanks, ants. Thants.

If it's offensively bad, like Bubsy 3D, then yes.

@BulkSlash Yeah, it's much better than the aural massacre from the original game

@RetroGames They apparently tried something in 2004, but it never got picked up — I think the technology wasn't really there yet

https://www.knightmare.com/series/knightmare-vr

Oof! Hope they fix that refresh rate.

Now please bring the series out on modern consoles!

@JayJ as well it should!

I'm a little column A/B

Videogames have been a constant ever since I was about 4, so like with any song/book/movie there are gonna be unavoidable emotional connections to a period of my life, but I can chart that feeling to as recently as last year.

With consoles I definitely have a fondness for games that were designed around their inherent limitations and have always found it fascinating. For actual nostalgia though I'd say I lean more into arcade games, as that's something I simply don't do as often as I used to.

OutRun 2: "Hold my beer"

Resident Evil 2? Heck yeah

"in fact, it's still going strong even today, with 2023 marking the 35th season of the show."

Well, it's still going; "strong" might be debatable, though...

@Ristar24 Yeah, I absolutely cleaned up in there with all the (then reasonably-priced) DS and GBA games that were absolutely flooding the basement level of Game Focus. They even had a modded Saturn on display near the counter that I really shouldn't have hesitated to pick up before they eventually shuttered...

So that's why we've never seen it pop up on many retro collections — kind of like Sonic 3 in that regard.

I really felt that the series hit a massive peak with Wip3out — Fusion felt (rather like Angel of Darkness, as mentioned above), that they were basically starting from scratch with a whole new engine that not everyone was familiar or comfortable working with, and it really suffered from that. The Omega collection felt like a fine return to form, but Fusion really dinged my love for the series for a good long while, especially after how sublime I felt 3 was.

I'm sure if her children were raking millions in from eSports or Twitch sponsorships she wouldn't be so flippant as to what constitutes "life goals" - prat.

@Daze_of_Reality in hindsight, Alpha 1 always felt like a glorified demo of what Alpha 2 ended up becoming, so it was good that they went straight to it without charging punters twice, but I'm still astonished they managed to get it on the SNES at all (plus i didn't even find out it existed until the late '00s)

@Zenszulu I distinctly remember him being introduced to Mean Machines way back when — it's bonkers how he's still a regular weekly fixture in my gaming journalism absorption with DF Direct.

@gojiguy The graphics on the first game I don't think actually look that bad — it always had a slightly quirky proto-HD-2D look to it (although saying that, HD-2D has never really sat quite right with me), but I think having it be portable, and the japanese language option, might just tip it for me.

@gojiguy I've been on the fence about picking up the HD remaster of this — I read it released with some pretty noticable porting flaws. I'm assuming they were never ironed out?

@ralphdibny What a rip!

Ooo I still have a Scramble in my parents' loft — and I also noticed an Amidar in the banner image (basically a Pac Man clone), which I also have!

Genuinely curious to see who would spill nearly half a grand on a PS1 game.

I'm an absolute sucker for that '90s anime style — very evocative of the Zelda LttP instruction manual art.

@Gerald Yeah, I remember passing in FIFA feeling really odd - you'd need to hold B, push the direction you wanted to pass, then release — whereas in EA Hockey it was more of a quick and snappy tapping motion

@Zenszulu That's an interesting observation — and now you mention it, Robocod and Zool did indeed have very floaty jumping in them.

I never actually owned an Amiga, but Flashback and Lemmings were two of my favourite Mega Drive games growing up

Speaking of lapsed licences, can Sega please pull their finger out and get OutRun 2 Coast to Coast back on modern consoles please? Love that game.

We definitely got shafted in the UK for RPGs until the PS1 era — and even then many of the games in this list never made it to this side of the pond.

@Axelay71 Do you remember Game Focus that used to be on Goodge Street? They had a similar treasure trove of import games in the basement as well.

@KingMike Ah yeah, i remember a similar mechanic in Mega Lo Mania — where your little people would carry over from island to island, so without a fair bit of pre-planning you could totally cripple your chances of victory in later levels.

@KingMike What, did they not break it up into Fun/Tricky/Taxing/Mayhem sections?

I had the quite the surprise earlier this year when I completed Nier Replicant and saw Gary Harrod's name crop up in the credits — he's now an art director for the Square Enix marketing department — not a bad career he's had!

@samuelvictor Fascinating and thorough — nice one!

I'm not sure where I read this, but when the Mega Drive was first conceived, weren't Sega originally going to essentially use the same tech as the arcade boards that were being used at the time for games like Afterburner, Golden Axe and Out Run, thus creating an arcade perfect, super-scaler console? But apparently the manufacturing costs would have had each console coming out at something like £300 a pop, so they chose to strip them down in order to save money? We got a near-perfect arcade experience, but ever so slightly out of reach...

I'm not saying I would have been able to convince my parents to shell out three big ones on a console at the time, but it would have been quite impressive!

@samuelvictor I was always curious about scaling on the Mega Drive — I was under the impression that the SNES could handle sprite scaling, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised that it was only the background layer (hence why the boss screens on Super Mario World had a black background).

Would developers essentially have to manually draw a new, unique frame for each layer of zoom? Despite its slightly choppy frame rate, I remember Road Rash having some incredibly smooth scaling (on top of the undulating road), which I found very impressive for the time.

That's interesting about the redrawn animation for the Mega CD version of Time Gal — looking back at clips of it now it's pretty clear that they went down that route, but back in the day of magazine screen shots, my memory of it was how it looked in its original cel format.