MD Reviews, Mega Drive Reviews

Worth the wait

Originally released in 1994, Monster World IV is the final game in the Wonder Boy series. It's a very well-liked game and another great entry in the franchise, but there was just one problem: it was never released outside Japan. Until now that is, because SEGA has finally given the rest of the world a chance to experience the game,...

Online, but off-base?

It's taken five and a half years for an online Street Fighter game to reach Wii. In that time, Xbox 360 and PS3 owners have had five different SF online titles — six, if you count Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. Heck, even 3DS has Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition. Wii owners, for their sins, get an online-enabled...

From Russia with love

When you consider that he hasn’t starred in his own game since 2000, Strider Hiryu’s popularity in Capcom fan circles is impressive, which is largely down to the high regard in which players hold his 1989 coin-op début. Powered by Capcom’s CPS hardware, Strider was an arcade action platformer that redefined the genre;...

Lock-on, baby

It's widely known that Sonic and Knuckles (S&K) started out as the latter half of Sonic 3, but development constraints forced SEGA to split the game in two, putting S&K onto an innovative Lock-On cartridge that, when combined with Sonic 3, pieced the game back together into its original state. Now, with the announcement that...

Shinobi Joe is back, and this time he’s brought his dog

Shadow Dancer started out life in 1989 in the arcades as the sequel to the ever-popular Shinobi, which was a sizable hit for creator Sega. In the same year the company also released the rather excellent Revenge of Shinobi as an early title for the fledgling Mega Drive/Genesis. It strayed from the classic arcade formula by introducing an..

Groovy!

After creating the excellent Earthworm Jim videogame and subsequently making an awesome cartoon based on it, it was quite logical that Interplay would not give up on the franchise just yet. Not too long after the cartoon, they released Earthworm Jim 2, which was intended to be even better than the original game. As Queen Slug-for-a-Butt was...

A history lesson in the failure of PC-to-console ports.

Activision was the first to sell a mahjong solitaire (for lack of a better term) game for IBM PCs and Apple Macs in 1986 under the name Shanghai. They even got the programmer of the original game -- which was created on University of Illinois mainframes -- to do the programming and create backgrounds. That release was a big enough hit that a..

Joe Musashi returns in what is arguably the best ninja game ever

There’s a common assumption that a console’s best titles come towards the end of its lifespan. This is mainly because developers take time to get to grips with a new machine’s power and as a result you have to wait a couple of years before you see what each console is truly capable of. With this in mind, it’s rather ironic..

Will Pulseman's quality shock you?

Ask yourself this - what games have Game Freak actually developed? Many people will probably only answer with "Pokémon," but the truth is, before Pokémon was even created, Game Freak was responsible for a handful of unique titles of their own. Pulseman was strangely only released in Japan originally. It was temporarily available on the "Sega..

Galaxy Force II is another classic Sega arcade shooter that hasn't aged very well.

Galaxy Force II debuted as a Sega arcade release, using the same type of sprite scaling seen in Sega's other arcade title Space Harrier, and basically mimicked 3-D scrolling without the use of actual polygon graphics. While Sega's Saturn console would later get a nearly arcade perfect rendition of the game, Mega..

Can Harry Jr. fill his father's boots?

The two original Pitfall games for the Atari 2600 have become quite dated now – walking across a handful of endlessly repeating screens in the hope of finding treasure has lost its appeal. Activision once tried to "upgrade" the formula by allowing the Japanese developer Pony Canyon to make Super Pitfall for the NES, but that turned out so terrible..

The once quiet town of Xenobia is under attack by fierce, gruesome monsters and no one can stop them!

Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair might seem incredibly familiar to Virtual Console addicts because the game has technically already been released on Nintendo’s download service – in the guise of Monster Lair on the TG-16! The complexities of the deal regarding codehouse Westone and Sega have never..

Join a group of professional mercenaries to undergo secret missions, battling through enemy lines to go where no ordinary soldier would dare to go.

Once upon a time, back before Capcom officially started supporting the Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega acquired licence to reprogram various arcade classics produced by the developer. Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, Strider and Forgotten Worlds were all brought to the..

ClayFighter is a 2D fighting game in which the characters, as the name suggests, are made completely out of clay.

When Clayfighter was first released on the 16-bit consoles in 1993, claymation had never before been used in video gaming. While television shows and motion pictures had experimented with the technology to varying degrees of success, it wasn't until the guys at Interplay decided to make..

We've got much love for MUSHA!

Mention the name Compile to any serious shooter fanatic and you’re likely to be faced with a barrage of nostalgic ranting. The now defunct company was responsible for some of the finest blasters the video game industry has seen, including Super Aleste (also known as Space Megaforce), Gunhed and Zanac. Surprisingly, MUSHA (which stands for 'Metallic Uniframe Super..

While investigating Professor Stinkbaum's lab, Boogerman stumbles upon a strange machine that opens a portal to another dimension.

Almost everybody knows Earthworm Jim - But Boogerman, which was created inbetween the first two Jim games, is much less familiar. This is a bit unjust, as it's every bit as quirky and fun as the aforementioned series. Boogerman stars Snotty Ragsdale, a nosy millionaire..

Forgotten Worlds is a side-scrolling shooter, one of the first games to incorporate 360 degree aiming and shooting, a revolutionary feature at the time.

Forgotten Worlds was an interesting shoot-em-up arcade game back in the days. Not only was it developed by Capcom, it featured 2 player simultaneous play and a innovative control system were you rotated a second joystick on a 360 degree axis to..

In the year AW 2284, planet Motavia is once again plagued by strange biocreatures.

After two successful Phantasy Star releases, Sega decided to change things up a bit for their third release in the series Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom. The game featured more of a medieval look to it instead of the science fiction theme that had been such an avid part of the previous two releases and also..

Street Fighting SEGA style.

Back when Street Fighter II-mania was gripping the global gaming community, Capcom’s decision to release the first home port of the game on Nintendo’s SNES spoke volumes. This move showed that the company was backing Nintendo in the 16-bit war (up to this point all of Capcom’s Megadrive/Genesis games had actually been re-programmed by Sega under license and not..