Ripten Review: SEGA Megadrive Classic Collection Vol.1 (PC)
It’s a well-established fact that once, back in the long-long ago times, SEGA made good games. Fun, enjoyable software that rivaled Nintendo in terms of greatness and set the stage for the first ever console war. Having owned both a Super Nintendo and a Megadrive in my youth, I never had to get involved, but I do have fond memories of the time. Memories that SEGA are constantly trying to sell back to me.
Whether it’s a shrewd attempt at making people believe they actually have decent games to sell (beyond publishing Platinum Games’ titles) or a carefully calculated business move, I cannot think of a single modern-day platform on which SEGA has not re-released its “classic” games. Gameboy, Gamecube, DS, Playstation 2, Playstation Network, Xbox live arcade, Nintendo Virtual Console, iPhone – by this point I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find I could play Streets of Rage II on my microwave door.
So along comes the Megadrive Classic Collection, a four-volume anthology of SEGA’s golden years, to once again sell these games to PC users.
However, what they have yet to truly understand is that PC users have had access to these games for over a decade now, through legally dubious means and far superior collection releases. For here we are, halfway through 2010 and SEGA are only now selling ten legal game ROMs and an accompanying emulator for £14.99.
And that is literally all that the Megadrive collection is. The controls are as you might expect (although ASD is used in place of ZXC), save states are available via the Esc menu and the poor optimisation of direct game rips are present even here. The collection honestly feels like SEGA downloaded ten moderately popular games from the internet, burned them to a DVD and then sold them on as a collector’s disc, the only notable additions being the option to use a gamepad and an incredibly annoying disc-check every time you want to play a game.
This is not how a PC port should be done. I still own a copy of the Sonic 3 and Knuckles collection, and make a habit of reinstalling it every couple of years or so, purely because of how much better it plays than an emulated version. Not to mention I still hold on to my copies of Sonic R and Sonic 3D on the off chance I want to play something that is just as smooth and unentertaining to play as recent Sonic titles.
Even going beyond these annoyances, the collection is far from worth the money. As this is volume 1, all of the worthwhile games are to be found in later installments – no Streets of Rage, nor Gunstar Heroes, Sonic 3 and Knuckles or Shining Force. What is included is the clunky first generation of several good series, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Golden Axe; heavily dated games such as Vectorman (which may well be the most rage-inducing game I have ever played, owing in part to these controls) and one or two decent games (Ecco the Dolphin, Comix zone, etc.).
The only reason anyone should ever want to buy this software is nostalgia (which SEGA itself acknowledges, given the sales pitch for these discs is “Re-live the memories!”), and even then I would highly recommend getting them for another platform. If you managed to miss out on every single other re-release of these ten games and were a big fan of the Megadrive’s library, then by all means you should get this collection. However, it is worth noting that it offers nothing more than these games ever have, and does so for a questionable price.
Review by James Bannister
