#8 Second Samurai



1994, Vivid Image for Psygnosis.

There are a lot of action platform games in the Megadrive library, this one comes quite late on in the consoles lifespan. Sequel to ‘The First Samurai’ which was a much better game than this.

I just cannot get the hang of the jump distance in this. There are jumps I’m clearly supposed to be able to do easily and I can’t. I feel like I must be missing some sort of ‘jump higher’ input sequence, but I can’t find anything about that in the scans of the manual.

The combat is pretty decent at least, a nice variety of moves and some good chunky sound effects. I’m not entirely sure why this one appears to start off with you beating up cavemen and apes though.

Bonus points for having a two player mode, and having the second player be a woman (though it does lead to the options screen having the entry ‘woman: in front’ or ‘woman: behind’). Some very strong music from 16 bit legend Matt Furniss as well.

Sadly even a level where you ride a dinosaur couldn’t keep me interested, gave up after about 40 minutes.

Here is said dinosaur riding level:



The two player mode is a little weird, the second player is positioned in the foreground and interacts with their own set of enemies that player one can’t hit. That’s why the dinosaur is so far up the screen there, it’s leaving room for the other player.

Dino looks cool.

I watched a video of the top 20 Megadrive action platformers the other day, and Risky Woods and Second Samurai both made the list. I'd not heard of them until that video, then here you are playing them.

Both in the top 20? That surprises me.

I think I’ve got another 5 or 6 of them in the box yet, and I know at least one of those is meant to be pretty good...

Probably going to try something from another genre this evening though, I have two more overly ambitious fighting game ports to go yet (and one really good fighting game where it’s in the box cause I have the pal version which is region locked so I can’t make it run the right speed, which kinda ruins it)

I assume Vectordean handled the MD port of Risky Woods, because that’s a Dinamic game, the Spanish team responsible for such notoriously brutally frustrating titles as Game Over and Army Moves.

#9 Primal Rage



1995, Ported to the Megadrive by Probe.

Much of the spectacle of the arcade machine is lost in translation, the Megadrive just isn’t up to the visuals of arcade hardware by this point in the 90s. It plays fairly ok, 6 button pad support is welcome.

I’ve never really got on with the way the specials work in this game, you have to hold down multiple buttons and then do the joystick moves. On a pad it means holding it in a kind of horrid claw grip. You try and hold down X and B on an MD 6 button pad easily...

The visuals are very noisy, however they’ve chosen to take the arcade digitised stuff down to this resolution and colour depth hasn’t really worked. The Mortal Kombat conversions did a better job of that.

It’s definitely better than Rise of the Robots at least, but still only held my attention for 30 minutes

#10 The Terminator



1992, Probe for Virgin Games

Now this one takes me back, I never had it for my Megadrive back in the day but I had friends who did. The visuals and audio are spot on. I tried to get a better screenshot but the games pause mode turns the screen off, and you die too quickly if you stand still for me to get a shot...

Because this game is hard. Even turned down to the easiest setting it’s incredibly difficult. Everything hits hard, most of the enemies get back up a few seconds after you down them. No continues. No extra lives. No passwords or level select cheats.

Probe did a lot of games of this ilk on the platform, and while this isn’t the best of them, you can see where they build on this for Alien 3 and the games that came after that that really are excellent.

But this one is just that bit too hard to be fun for me. 40 minutes of getting kicked around by Arnie was enough.

I was gonna say it looks a lot like Alien 3, which I loved on the Master System.

Very busy with work at the moment, but I expect to get a few more of these done over the weekend.

Fun thread, keeping tabs on this. Very enjoyable to read!

I finish work for the year this week, so expect me to get back into doing this. There’s still at least 30 games in the box so I won’t even finish this year... and I’ll probably buy more.

I’ve got a few that I’ve tried that won’t start, so those will need a deep clean (examples: fatal fury, a hulk game, a tennis game...)

I think I’m going to go with Roadblasters next though...

I don’t own any of these games and don’t have a reference point for a lot of them but don’t let my silence be interpreted as disinterest.

This thread is absolute gold and I’m sure I speak for a few others when I say I really look forward to your next game!

Yeah this is a great thread, love stuff like this.

#11 Fatal Fury



1993, Takara for SNK

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, on the one hand Neo Geo games don’t port down to the Megadrive that well. But on the other, this is one from pretty early on in the Neo’s life.

It’s a pretty decent port, albeit of the clunkiest and least polished game in the series. Without the sprite scaling it’s not so clear when you’ve changed to a different horizontal plane, and in losing a button from the Neo it’s harder to play.

But it’s competent enough, and at this point it didn’t have a lot of competition. It’s pretty hard though, even on the easiest setting, that SNK cheap AI is in full effect.

It’s widely assumed that Fatal Fury was inspired by Street Fighter 2, but the two games were actually in development at the same time. It was actually SNK trying to build on the original Street Fighter by letting you pick from three fighters instead of one.

I do recommend watching the ‘Terry Bogard Legacy’ vidéo series Maximilian did recently on YouTube for a proper look at the series and it’s history. But this only held my attention for the minimum 30 minutes.

#12 The Adventures of Mighty Max



1994, WJS Design, for Ocean.

I vaguely remember the cartoon, I think I’d just slightly outgrown this sort of show at the time. The presentation around the game here is great, some really strong splash screen art...

The game itself is awful. Your character’s jump is almost the height of the entire screen, and is incredibly fast. You can’t do any kind of lesser short hop. The massive height means almost every jump you’re doing is to something off screen you can’t see yet.

The enemies don’t die from your attacks, they’re just stunned. They’re also all very tiny and very fast moving. It took me a while to work out what I was even supposed to be doing...

You have to carry various bits of junk to the exit portal. You can’t jump while carrying one, which means the game is essentially a set of puzzles as you try to work out how to get the junk to the exit. So you’re either bounding around out of control, or completely defenceless and unable to jump.

I really did try to give it a fair chance, but it’s just mechanically busted in ways that are unforgivable. 30 minutes that dragged...

#13 Psycho Pinball



1994, Codemasters

Finally, a good game! It’s extremely heavily inspired by the ‘Pinball Fantasies’ series that DICE did on the Amiga, but there are worse things to take as inspiration. There are four tables here...

You can play three of them on their own, the best of these is a one with two full sets of flippers called ‘The Abyss’, but they’re all pretty decent. The fourth table is a special one, if you play that you can transition to the others.

It suffers from the same issues the DICE games did though, the low resolution of the hardware means you’re zoomed in quite far in order to have any actual detail, so planning shots takes more practice.

It’s also straight pinball, none of the monsters wandering the play field of a game like Devil Crash or the recently released Demon’s Tilt. But it’s one of the better pinball games on the platform I think.

Played for about an hour but I’ll likely go back to it a fair bit. My cart also has Micro Machines on it, but that doesn’t really qualify for this thread (and I own it’s better sequel anyway)