Games Beaten 2019:1. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Switch2. Alex Kidd in The Enchanted Castle
Switch3. Streets of Rage
Switch4. Vectorman
Switch5. Galaxy Force II
Switch6. Flicky
Switch7. Phantasy Star 2
Switch8. Sonic the Hedgehog
Switch9. Altered Beast
Switch10. ESWAT: City Under Siege
Switch11. Columns
Switch12. Virtua Fighter 2
Switch13. Kirby Star Allies
Switch14. Katamari Damacy Reroll
Switch eShop15. Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee!
Switch16. Octodad: Dadliest Catch
Switch eShop17. Sword of Vermilion
Switch18. Decap Attack
Switch19. Golden Axe
Switch20. The Revenge of Shinobi
Switch21. Beyond Oasis
Switch22. WarioWare Gold
3DS23. Shining in the Darkness
Switch24. Kid Chameleon
Switch25. Streets of Rage 2
Switch26. Bio-Hazard Battle Switch *NEW*
27. Super Thunder Blade Switch *NEW*
28. Gain Ground Switch *NEW*
29. Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom Switch *NEW*Bio-Hazard Battle
Bio-Hazard Battle is the lone shmup on the Sega Mega Drive Classics collection, and it’s one I’ve seen mixed thoughts on. It seems to be a thoroughly 6 to 7 out of 10 game by most peoples standards, and I wasn’t that excited by the thought of playing it. The game has a real ‘American Sega’ look to it too, reminiscent of the likes of Sonic Spinball or The Ooze, which makes it feel very low quality to me. And yet, I had a pretty fun time with Bio-Hazard Battle.
You can choose from 4 bio-weapon monsters to play as in the game, each of which has a different combination of attacks when collecting the games power ups – there are 2 variants of the red, green, blue and yellow power ups. All of the enemies in the game also generally have an organic feel and it’s quite a unique aesthetic for a shooter. This is good, because it’s otherwise not an especially impressive looking game, but I manages to get by through it’s interesting concept nonetheless. It does have some nice use of parallax on occasion though.
The audio also manages to mostly get by on the same merit – it’s honestly not especially great, and it definitely has that American developed Mega Drive game sound, but the odd noises it puts out kinda work for the bio-science theme so it’s passable.
Difficulty wise, Bio-Hazard Battle is relatively forgiving for a shmup of its era, but it still offers a challenge. There’s a few interesting setpieces on display, like a fun rollercoaster stage for the 2nd level and some giant flowers in the jungle stage, but mostly it’s a fairly straightforward game with an interesting aesthetic. I’m not sure I’d disagree with people’s assessment that it is a 6 or 7 out of 10 kinda game, but I guess I’d caveat that with ‘but it’s quite a fun 6 to 7 out of 10 kinda game.
Super Thunder Blade
This is the game I was dreading getting to on the collection, because Super Thunder Blade is complete and utter tosh. It’s based on the honestly quite decent Thunder Blade arcade game, only it takes everything that made that game interesting and butchers it, with boring, monotonous gameplay lacking in spectacle, incredibly disappointing graphics and performance, stiff controls, bland level designs and terrible music.
You pilot a helicopter through 4 levels, destroying tanks, planes and more as you go. Each level is divided into a 2 segments – a classic Sega scaling shooter where you fly into the screen, and then a top down segment that plays a little bit more like a classic shmup. Both are awful. In the scaling mode, the scaling of enemies is incredibly choppy, and your helicopter is super slow to react to anything making dodging enemies become a game of just flying in circles as you’re too slow to react otherwise. This is fine in open areas – enemies just shoot at where you used to be, making the game a breeze, but a few levels offer environmental hazards to crash into and these will cause no end of pain. This is made worse by the terrible jerky scaling – you’ll try to line yourself up with gaps only to massively misjudge where it will be as it appears 20 yards further forward in an instant and kills you. Firing back is equally bad – you shoot bullets forward constantly but these are weak and hard to hit with, meaning they’re basically useless in this mode. You also shoot 2 homing rockets which will do all the real work, and which mean that aiming is unnecessary.
Top down mode is also bad. Your helicopter is still slow to move, but your bullets fire fairly slowly too meaning your bullets trail after you as you move. Nothing interesting or exciting happens in these segments, and they’re over in no time.
And thankfully, that’s the case with the game in general – 4 or 5 (it’s been a while since I actually beat it) mercifully short (but very difficult – I used save states because fuck playing this legit) stages and it’s over. And you will thankfully never need to inflict Super Thunder Blade on yourself again. I was glad to be done with theoretically the worst game on the collection – but despite it’s awfulness, I actually think it’s only the second worst. Kid Chameleon was equally as awful, but Super Thunder Blade is 30 minutes as opposed to Chameleon’s 3 hours, so I’ll take the smaller amount of shit any day.
Gain Ground
The best way to describe Gain Ground is ‘interesting’. I’ve never played a game quite like it before, and I’d be very surprised if there really is anything out there that is similar. It’s an odd kind of strategic action game where you take a cast of characters throughout history to clear out levels and progress. Levels can be beaten in one of 2 ways – either progress all your characters one by one to the exit area of the map, or kill all the enemies on the map. You start with 3 characters at the beginning, so it’s not unreasonable to try heading for the exit at first, but as your cast of characters grows, winning by rout becomes much more reasonable a task than trying to run 20 characters to the exit one at a time within a time limit.
Each character can shoot around themselves by default, although they use different weapons to do so. However, they also come with a secondary fire which works differently for each one. Some only shoot upwards, some shoot to both sides simultaneously. Some shoot low to the ground but others arc upwards allowing you to hit enemies on raised platforms or over the other side of walls. Characters also move at different speeds and have different firing rates, so choosing the best character for the level is essential. Unfortunately, if you having the Viking choosing the best character is easy, because it is him. He can shoot his bow in all directions and it arcs over walls, plus he has the fastest move speed, so he is undoubtedly the most useful in nearly all situations. However, if a character dies in a map, then the only way to get them back is to rescue them as the next character and get to the exit without dying – if that character dies too, the first character is now gone for good. Luckily, you can also find additional captives in later levels, including some repeat characters if you lose someone good.
And so, like I said, Gain Ground is interesting. You choose characters carefully, optimising between saving the best characters for later or using them frequently because they’re so good. You analyse how the levels will benefit or hinder each one. Gain Ground is interesting. It’s just a shame it’s not much fun. The game is slow paced, ugly and without great music. Levels feel samey, and either method of winning takes too long for how simple the game feels. Gain Ground is noteworthy for it’s experimentation, but it’s really a game you can probably skip. Not one of Sega’s best.
Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom
Phantasy Star is an odd one for me. The Master System game is one which I thought had aged incredibly well for its era, and which impressed me for the system it was on. The Mega Drive sequel felt like a slog and a step down from its impressive predecessor, despite seemingly being quite a popular title. And now I come to the 3rd title, the so called black sheep of the bunch. I actually find it interesting because people say it stands out for feeling like it backed away from sci-fi influences – but I don’t really see it. Yes, the towns look more classic RPG, but within the first 30 minutes you recruit a cyborg to your team and walk through a fancy cyber tunnel fighting robots.
The main gimmick of Phantasy Star 3 is the generations system. The game starts with you on an adventure with an intial cast of characters, but at the end of the short adventure (maybe 5-8 hours long?) you are given the choice to wed one of two lady friends and create a sprog. The game then continues 18 years later with your main character now being your first characters son, with one of 2 storylines dependent on who you married. This choice happens once more at the end of that generation for a set of 4 optional 3 part stories which lead to the ending. This is a cool system, but I found it to be sorely under-explored. There needed to be more revisiting of towns and seeing new developments, changing landscapes, reoccurring characters. Instead the story is super duper duperlight and only a handful of party members seem to crop up in multiple stories. A real missed opportunity.
However, one thing that has been drastically improved in this game is the grinding. Phantasy Star 2 featured endless amounts of grinding for money and exp, but PS3 massively streamlines this. Level ups come quickly and frequently, and the story being divided up into 3 different parties makes it feel like a briskly paced title to play through overall.
The game has some interesting ideas – I liked being able to pass down artifacts via your cyborg party members between generations, and I liked the generations system a lot. There’s a very odd but unique system where you can balance your magic focus to specialise in certain spells. Unfortunately, that backfires because they balance status curing spells by making them less likely to work at lower levels – seeing as poison is the only status effect in this game and it’s horrendously common, you’ll be spamming the antidote spell 10 times to try and actually make it work.
Graphically, the game is really not great looker for the system. It’s clear that the game was rushed to completion based on the visuals and many other elements – so many ideas seem like they’ve not been fully fleshed out yet. The music is also often considered weak and I generally agree, but there’s a few highlight tracks, including the title theme.
My overall summary for Phantasy Star 3 is that it’s better than it has any right to be, but worse than it both wants to be and should be. It’s a fairly enjoyable title despite it’s many flaws, lacking story and very basic gameplay, but it also feels like it wanted to do so much that it never got to do. I wish they had been given more time, budget and memory space to work with, because I’d love to see the Phantasy Star 3 that could have been. As is, I would say it’s another disappointing sequel to a game series that started off as a genre defining masterpiece and, at this point, only a few years later, is feeling underwhelming and stale.
