The 16-bit Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis) was released in Japan 30 years ago today, on October 29, 1988. Happy birthday!
Much like when I wrote a little about the PC Engine at 30 or the Famicom at 35, I’m not here to give a history of the Mega Drive, which you can find anywhere, but I will bore you with some of my favorite things about the console.
Today is the second anniversary of Retro Game SuperHyper! Happy birthday! Continue reading “2 Years!”
At the risk of featuring too many PS4 games in recent posts (what can I say, they all have a retro connection or I wouldn’t be talking about them), Sega’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (aka Hokuto no Gotoku) was released in the US this week, to the gleeful delight of combined Fist of the North Star and Yakuza fans everywhere. How wide or slim the overlap of that particular Venn diagram is, I don’t really know. But I’m wedged in there myself, and when this game was first announced, my head almost exploded like one of Kenshiro’s unfortunate opponents.
FotNSLP/HnG (it’s a long title either way, I don’t even know how to abbreviate it for this post) is just the latest in a really long line of video games based on the classic manga/anime property, Hokuto no Ken (lit. “Fist of the North Star”), dating all the way back to the ’80s when the manga was current and the show was actually airing on Japanese TV. Some of the games are good; many are not. And out of the dozens of HnK games released, only a handful were released outside of Japan. Let’s take a look at some of the good ones, shall we? (Perhaps I’ll do another post about all the not-so-good FotNS games someday, and call it “You’re Already Disappointed” or something.) (Don’t steal that, I just came up with it.) Continue reading “You’re Already Having Fun”
On August 21, 2018, something that nobody thought would ever happen did, in fact, happen: Shenmue I & II were re-released in HD for current consoles and PC. Continue reading “I’m in the Shen-mood”
I seem to keep writing these posts where I stick up for things that other people seem to be down on, like Riding Hero or Castlevania II. I briefly thought about renaming these articles “Shut Up It’s Awesome” and making it a series, but nah.
Anyway, today I’m here to lavish praise upon another oft-maligned facet of this diamond that is the videogaming hobby, and that is the Sega CD! (Mega CD in Japan and Europe, where the Genesis was called the Mega Drive.) Although this expensive add-on for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive became mostly infamous for grainy FMV (full-motion video) games like that stinker Sewer Shark and the notorious Night Trap, and derided for crapping forth Marky Mark: Make My Video upon the world, one needn’t look too far past those turkeys to find some unique, important, and pretty damn hardcore titles that the serious gamer really shouldn’t miss. Continue reading “For the Love of Sega CD”
Having been introduced to videogames through arcades and the Atari 2600, I have largely lived my gamer life feeling that videogames should be played with joysticks. I mean, naturally I’ve gotten used to control pads, and I do think that the SNES controller and the DualShock are two of the best game controller designs of all time, and there are plenty of games with control schemes that cannot be executed efficiently on an arcade-style joystick setup. But I’ve always been a sucker for adding arcade sticks to my consoles; to me, there’s always been something better, more formal, more serious, more proper about using a joystick whenever possible. Continue reading “Joystickery”
And by “archives” I mean all the boxes of stuff I pulled out of my storage unit when I cleaned it out last month.
Let’s see what we got here…
We’re right smack in the middle of summer and the weather — even here in Wisconsin — is bright and sunny. The hot sun, blue skies, puffy clouds, and sparkling water always remind me of Sega’s road racing classic, OutRun, and its opening level driving along an idyllic summer beach.
It sure is a shame that I suck at OutRun. Continue reading “Summer OutRunnin’”
I’ve read lots of books on video game history. Some have been engrossing page-turners and some have been a bit amateurish and bland.
I’ve just finished Console Wars by Blake J. Harris, which I’d heard a lot about recently. The book is a somewhat dramatized account of the marketing battle between Sega and Nintendo in the 16-bit era.
If you were around in the early 1990s, you no doubt remember the Genesis vs SNES “war” that raged across the battlefields of magazines, TV, and school playgrounds. (“Genesis does what Nintendon’t” should definitely ring a very loud bell.) Continue reading “Gamer’s Library: Console Wars”
Revenge of Shinobi (aka The Super Shinobi) is the game that absolutely defines the Sega Genesis to me. I had a friend who was an early adopter of the Genesis, and that first wave of games such as Altered Beast, Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, and Golden Axe were enough to thoroughly impress those of us who had grown up on Atari and Nintendo. But to me, Revenge of Shinobi was at the top of the heap. Continue reading “Video Vinyl: Revenge of Shinobi on Data Discs”
