Andee

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.

@UK_Kev I've got a little pigeonhole-style shelf unit with all my retro consoles and a 32-inch TV on top — which I feel is a good size, and not so big as to make pre-HD era games look like poop. Also it's got a component-out, which makes Wii/GC games look super crisp

@UK_Kev I had one of those! Great aren't they? I did end up selling it once I got my PS4 because I found the text in most games far too small to read on the diddly 22-inch screen.

I've always had a soft spot for this one — even the notoriously sluggish port for the CPC back in the day had a really decent 8-bit rendition of the soundtrack, although the game ran like an absolute shaggy dog and had no business being on such an underpowered machine. Going from that to the Mega Drive version was a mind-blowing experience at the time.

@BulkSlash I had the Steel Samurai theme as my ringtone for the longest time

They're both ace in their own way — the game should have opened with an Outrun-style radio station changer for you to pick your track before the intro kicks in.

I was a little late to the 32-bit party so Croc passed me by — by the time I got my PS1 it came bundled with Crash 3 and a demo of Spiro.

Yeah, to echo a lot of comments here, growing up in the UK, the NES felt like much less of of a prominent console than the Amstrads/Speccys/C64s of the time — it wasn't until the SNES came on the scene that there was a more even split in popularity between it and the Mega Drive.

Altogether now...

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@no_donatello there, there are some really out of leftfield choice cuts on there. Did you get the handheld or the console? It's cool that carts play on both

Not trying to be a killjoy, I am genuinely curious --what exactly gives the Evercade the edge over something like say, a Switch that has a lot of these games available on the eShop?

Well apparently they are going to be using all the same voice assets from the original, which I guess saves them a hell of a job. Many of the original Japanese actors are no longer with us, which I imagine wouldn't go down to well if they were to recast.

@Poodlestargenerica well that's what I was thinking — why would they announce a port of the original version of 3 if Delta isn't going to be a complete ground-up redo in the style of the recent Resi games? Still, at least they're straight up offering a chance to play the original three (five if you count the MSX games) on modern consoles finally — best of both worlds

I'm intrigued to know to what extent they're taking the actual remaking of it — will they be using the same vocal clips from the original? That's a LOT of audio to re-record, if not. And will they manage to get David Hayter back to the series?

To echo a lot of sentiment here, easily my favourite thing to read growing up, it was very formative in shaping my general sense of humour.

@Poodlestargenerica because AVGN popularised it and people who grew up watching him now have disposable income.

@BulkSlash yeah, the lighting on AI-generated imagery just looks so flat and unfocused, like someone panicked and started randomly fiddling with exposure dials in Photoshop

I'd still love to see them port the original arcade version (and its sequel) to modern consoles. Is there still some legal consternation because of the voice samples that were nabbed from Rambo/Predator?

Yeah, Sonic really was like the victim child of two bickering parents. No wonder he turned out the way he did.

Why the hell has Um Jammer Lammy never seen any kind of re-release since its original PS1 version? I absolutely adored that game, much more so than Parappa

Randomly, I finished Nier Replicant a few weeks ago, and in their strange alphabetical credits roll (which I saw numerous times), whose name should I see crop up under "Creative Marketing Director"? None other than kitty-stroking crayon-wielding sad case Gary Harrod! Guy's done pretty alright for himself

I know people love Dragon's Trap, but I was very late to the party — never played it until the (admittedly beautiful) remake on Switch, and while I found it fun, I found the backtracking and the eventual "where do I go next?" vibe (I still haven't to this day completed it) a bit disheartening.

For me, WB in Monster World / WB V: Monster Land III (yikes with these naming conventions!) struck the perfect balance of chill metroidvania and Zelda/RPG-lite

Yeah, £35 for a 2.5 hour doco feels a little steep, as much as I'd like to see it.

I always loved Balrog's timely victory speech in Alpha 3, "If you fight like that again, I'll bite you ear off!"

This'll be one less reason to keep the PS3 plugged in, if it's true...

My thoughts exactly — unless there's some egregious technical/performance issue with a game, I'll always pick the Switch version over PS4/5

This looks decent — definitely has that distinctive Shredder's Revenge style, and the pixel art is really well done.

Did anyone catch the Toxic Avenger Musical stage show that ran a couple of years ago? That was an absolute hoot

@Gs69 oh the music on all three games was awesome — Thunder Force IV has so many genres going on in it as well, one of the subterranean levels has an almost lounge jazzy vibe it

Zero Wing passed me by on the Mega Drive, and to this day I've still never played it — Hellfire I really remember enjoying, but it didn't have quite the style and finesse of Thunderforce 3 and 4

@Axelay71 Yes, this a thousand times. Luckily some are available to purchase (Ape Escape, Syphon Filter), but not all.

@GlasgowGuy It is bonkers that Ridge Racer, arguably the game that most people owned, and associated with the original Playstation, isn't available to purchase/download.

I was but an Amstrad person, but luckily there was plenty of crossover with the Speccy, many of which played identically across both platforms — can't beat a bit o' Dizzy!

@Axelay71 Mean Machines kicked monkey ass!

"A revamped hit-stun to allow for more stylish combos"

That was a deal-breaker for me in the original game, that it was not possible to chain moves together — there were a couple of moves that hit twice, but Street-Fighter esque combos were off the menu.

I know I'm probably missing the point here, but wouldn't it be ace if M2/Sega released these games digitally on modern consoles? I know a lot of them are already available, but I'd love to have all of these (and the ones on the previous model) on my Switch, in one place.

Still chipping away at Phoenotopia Awakening — man that game is vast; just wish the fast travel was a bit better implemented, done SO much backtracking so far...