SEGA Game Reviews
Review Bleach: The 3rd Phantom (DS)
The first tactical RPG for the modern manga classic leaves some to be desired
The 3rd Phantom is the latest Bleach game on the DS and also the first to depart from the fighting game genre. Instead, Sega have produced a tactical RPG resembling Nintendo's Fire Emblem or Sega's own Shining Force games, with players moving characters like pieces on a...
Review Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing (Wii)
Constellation prize
The first hour or so you spend with Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, your brain rejects it, telling you it isn’t Mario Kart enough, or it isn’t Sega enough. You’ll wrestle with the wheel and tell yourself you could be playing Mario Kart Wii instead, but once you learn to go with it you find yourself having a blast...
Review Zaxxon (Virtual Console / Virtual Console Arcade)
One for the history books, but not for everyone
In 1982 Sega made a little gaming history with Zaxxon: the first 3D arcade game to use an isometric perspective – even more shockingly, it used sprite-based graphics at a time when 3D games were pretty much all being done with vectors. Whilst Zaxxon got a lot of attention due to its flashy graphics...
The DS' first retro sci-fi MMO
Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast was a genuine revolution: the first-ever online RPG for consoles, it boasted an advanced translation system, free online play and stacks of action. The GameCube saw Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I & II that expanded the original game with all-new areas, weapons, monsters and...
Review ChuChu Rocket! (Game Boy Advance)
The ultimate game of space cat and mouse
Around the turn of the millennium, Sega wasn’t doing so hot. Their much-beloved Dreamcast failed to ignite the sales charts despite being home to a plethora of fantastic new and original games as well as nigh-perfect (in some cases, improved) home conversions of arcade hits. It was with a heavy heart that...
Review Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll (Wii)
Rollin' rollin' rollin', get those monkeys rollin'
One of Sega's first games for a home console of former rival Nintendo was Super Monkey Ball on the Gamecube. It quickly became a favourite among many with its simple arcade gameplay and irrepressibly cute characters. Reception for the first Wii installment, Banana Blitz, was a bit mixed due to a...
Review Sonic & Knuckles (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
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...
Review Sands of Destruction (DS)
Yet another engaging DS Japanese RPG.
There's no denying that Nintendo's DS system has seen quite a few Japanese RPG releases over the years and is quickly becoming the system of choice for fans of the genre. Imageepoch, comprised of former developers of such legendary RPG classics as Xenogears and Grandia, have once again combined their talents to...
Review Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
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...
Sega’s African adventure bagged and tagged.
Jambo! Safari: Animal Rescue is a bold attempt at converting the popular Arcade title to something more palatable for the home audience. Quite obviously aimed at younger gamers, this conversion basically boils down to a few veterinary minigames tacked on to the central animal-wrangling gameplay sections...
Review Pole's Big Adventure (WiiWare)
Big, crazy, amazing
This game has garnered some attention - partly because it's from Sega and it's an 8-bit retro platformer, but mostly because it's filled with the wacky humour the Japanese have come to be known for. Despite having a large amount of Japanese audio text, the humour is mostly in the form of visual video game gags that should be...
Not quite out of this world...
Well, by now you'd have already seen our review for Planet 51 on the Wii, so it's time to see how the dual-screen version of the new extra-terrestrial flick fares. Did Sega manage to blast this out of the stratosphere of gaming delight or did its cargo jettison somewhere in the atmosphere of the mundane? Just like the...
Review Alex Kidd in Shinobi World (Virtual Console / Master System)
Does Sega's original mascot go out with a bang or a whimper?
Poor Alex Kidd. The pint-sized, big-eared wonder never really caught on as a mascot, although it was not through lack of trying on Sega's part. Alex appeared in a number of games featuring vastly different forms of gameplay and, with this last throw of the dice, Sega tried to pair the...
Join the space race!
Planet 51 is based on the animated film of the same name. It’s produced by Pyro Studios, the team behind the Commandos series, and published by none other than Sega, so it should be pretty good. The problem is of course that most film to game translations are cheap and badly designed. Does Planet 51 join them? Planet 51 is a...
Review Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
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...
Jambo! Now jam on outta here!
Animal games seem to be the big new thing, especially on the family-friendly Wii. You can't throw a Remote in a shop without hitting one these days, with every major publisher putting out their own take on the safari-vet-sim sub-genre. Jambo! Safari is Sega's entry in the virtual-wild-animal-game stakes, and a...
Too sexy for its shirt
When word leaked out that Sega's Sonic Team was working on a minigame collection for Nintendo's new DS system, many wondered why such a talented development group would be wasting their time creating something as trivial as a minigame compilation. Gamers got their answer with the release of Feel the Magic XX/YY (known as...
Review Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (DS)
Enjoy Winter Olympic fun on the move.
Refreshingly for a simultaneous release on Wii and DS, the handheld version is a completely different beast to its big brother: far from being a stripped-down conversion it’s a decent accompaniment to the Wii version, although one aimed at a completely different gamer. Where the Wii game looks to capture the...
Review Shinobi (Wii Virtual Console / Virtual Console Arcade)
Put on your ninja suit and rescue the kiddies once again!
After treating retro gaming fans to the delights of Revenge of Shinobi and Shinobi III from the Mega Drive / Genesis, it is only right that SEGA bring us back to basics and let us get our grubby mitts on the original arcade game from 1987 where this glorious franchise began. Considered to be...
Review Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (Wii)
For once, there's no bad puns - snow joke!
A few years ago, the unthinkable happened – Sega announced that Mario and Sonic were to put aside their 16-bit rivalry and join forces in an officially licensed Olympic game. Clocks ran backwards, dogs barked uncontrollably in the street and the whole world lay in danger. Then we played it, and saw that...
Review Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap (Virtual Console / Master System)
It's a trap!
Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap marks the end of the Master System trilogy. It’s a direct sequel to the wonderful Wonder Boy in Monster Land with the action starting out in the final lair of the last game. Unlike the original Wonder Boy, though, there are no loincloths in sight. Most Master System fans will consider this game to...
Review Wacky World of Sports (Wii)
Or should that be "Tacky World of Warts"? Maybe...
It’s a well-known fact that the Wii excels at quick-fire games – sports compilations and minigame packages abound, and amongst all those renditions of golf, tennis, boxing and the rest you’d have to assume there’s no sport on Earth yet to be rendered in glorious Wii-o-vision. Well, you would...
Review R-Type (Virtual Console / Master System)
Blast off and attack the evil Bydo Empire once again in 8-bit!
While we applaud Sega for bringing some of its most fondly remembered Master System games to the Virtual Console, we can’t help feeling that on this occasion it is a little bit pointless. After all, we’ve had a near arcade perfect port of R-Type on the TurboGrafx-16 since 2006, which...
Review Golden Axe (Virtual Console / Virtual Console Arcade)
Sega's classic fantasy side-scroller hits the Virtual Console in its original arcade form - but is it any good?
It would be fair to say that the expansion of the Wii Virtual Console to incorporate arcade releases has been extremely welcome, but it has resulted in one rather unusual side-effect: we’re seeing rampant duplication of titles already...
Review Phantasy Star (Virtual Console / Master System)
The starting point for a venerable roleplaying legend
Pity the poor Master System. South America and Europe aside, it just could not compete with the unstoppable NES despite superior technology and some cracking games. Among those titles is what could be considered the machine's killer app - a huge game with a matching price tag, which not only...
Review The Revenge of Shinobi (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
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...
Does High Voltage's much touted FPS manage to live up to the hype?
The Conduit has been hyped for quite a while. Announced over a year ago, the game saw delay after delay, did not get a publisher until late last year and suffered a few other minor problems. After all this time you'd expect the game to be fantastic, but is it really? The Wii doesn't...
Review Pulseman (Virtual Console / Sega Mega Drive)
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...
Definitely a tap you'll want to leave running
Miyamoto might not see the appeal in playing a game without holding a controller, but ex-Sega genius Yuji Naka can certainly think outside the box – or, more accurately, think on top of the box. For his first game since leaving Sega five years ago, Naka has crafted a game played entirely by tapping a...
Review Altered Beast (Virtual Console / Virtual Console Arcade)
Welcome to your doom!
There’s no two ways about it: Altered Beast is a terrible game. Even here, in a perfect conversion of the arcade original, it’s so horrendously stodgy and repetitive that it makes you wonder quite why anyone holds it in the slightest bit of regard. For those lucky few amongst you yet to engage in a little beast altering,...
