Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 for Sega Dreamcast
Oct 20, 2019 8:00:24 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Oct 20, 2019 8:00:24 GMT -5
I used to view video games as disposable entertainment. Once I got a Sega Genesis in 1995, I gave away my NES and all my games to my friend Ricky in 1st grade. When I got a Nintendo 64 in 1998, I let my mom take my Sega Genesis to Goodwill. I didn’t take care of my video game boxes, either. The packaging to all my N64 games got smashed and torn up. I would read and re-read my game instruction manuals until they were in tatters.
This changed in 2003 when I found the website “Game Grandpas” run by Ryan Genno (long since changed to Video Games 101.) His website had a picture of his Sega Saturn collection spread on the floor. I can’t overstate how this low resolution, compressed jpeg imprinted on me. I think subconsciously I expected to snap out of it later. All my interests up until then (Pokemon, Beanie Babies, even Lego) had been fads that came and went. But it’s 2019 now and at almost 30 years old I’m still on fire for old video games. Maybe this says something how adolescence is such a formative time for most people. I’ve heard that we become who we’re going to be for the rest of our lives between the ages of 12 and 14. My continued enthusiasm for this hobby seems to support this idea.
In summer of 2004 my whole family and I went on vacation to the beach. We were out in town looking at shops and found an overstock store. I don’t remember a single thing on that store’s shelves except for an entire wall of brand new Sega Dreamcasts for $15 each. 14 year old me wanted to collect every gaming console ever, so I paid for one and took it home.
I had a lot of fun with my Dreamcast. The demo for Dead or Alive 2 made me realize the Dreamcast’s graphics really were superior to the N64’s, something I never quite understood from TV commercials or in-store demos. Chu Chu Rocket was cute, although not much fun to play solo. I mostly enjoyed it as a party game with other people. Shenmue swept me off my feet. It had an almost fetishistic level of in-world detail. I had never seen anything like it before. Sometime around Autumn of 2004, I bought Sega Smash Pack for my Dreamcast, a disc which includes the following games:
• Altered Beast
• Columns
• Golden Axe
• Phantasy Star II
• The Revenge of Shinobi
• Sega Swirl
• Shining Force
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Streets of Rage 2
• Vectorman
• Virtua Cop 2
• Wrestle War
By then I hadn’t yet re-acquired actual Sega Genesis hardware. Also I could be mistaken but I feel like in those days there were fewer video games per household. I’ve heard before that the revenue of the video game industry itself has grown since 2004, indicating more people are buying more games. Also in 2004 there wasn’t really such a thing as steam sales, free monthly downloadable games included with online service for XBOX or Playstation, or indie games. My contention is that games weren’t quite as common and plentiful back then, so 12 games on one disc seemed like such a great value at the time, even though most of them were 16-bit.
Vectorman was a title I originally received with my Genesis on Christmas of 1995. I’ve noticed people who didn’t grow up with Vectorman don’t seem to revere it like those who played it as kids. Vectorman doesn’t seem so amazing in 2019. But by 16-bit standards, there’s so much going on even in the first stage that’s such a phenomenal display of audiovisual spectacle. A stormy sky looms in the background. Each cloud is a separate parallax layer. Flags whip with surreal fluidity, lending credence to a turbulent wind that isn’t really there. The lighting is artistic and thoughtful, with shadows and highlights carving depth out of the indubitably flat scenery. Vectorman’s body even darkens when he runs underneath of a platform, reinforcing the illusion that he’s physically present in the environment.
Vectorman’s gameplay never rises above the “move left to right, beat a boss, repeat five or six times” recipe from those days. But it’s so full of flourishes and special effects that downright breathtaking on a 16-bit console. Almost everything that made Vectorman so spectacular is obsolete now. But that particular set of limitations had its own grammar and vocabulary, forming a unique language. One day my Dad remarked, “That looks CHEESY compared to what we have today!” I felt like I was enjoying a foreign poem or song that didn’t rhyme in English, making me powerless to explain to him in English what made it so clever.
This “language” and its many nuances are the reason that I fell in love with several other titles on the Sega Smash Pack even though I had never experienced them before. For example, I was completely unaware of Streets of Rage 2 when I owned a Genesis from 1995 to 1998. I never saw it at another kid’s house, at an in-store demo, or as a rental from Blockbuster. Yet I fell in love with it the very first time I played it in 2004 despite having no prior nostalgia for it. The side scrolling beat-em-up genre was a commonplace fixture of 90’s gaming that all but evaporated once 3D graphics took over. Whenever my Mom would take me to Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, I would barely play the machines that awarded tickets to get prizes at the front counter. I would spend all my tokens playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, fighting ninjas on the streets of New York.
The violence in Streets of Rage 2 is so gratifying. Punches resound with reassuringly crunchy noises and round house kicks send bad guys flying. The power ups, such as knives and loose plumbing bars, often prove even less effective than fists. But stabbing a dude in this game has a certain subversive appeal. I’ve noticed people who don’t ordinarily like video games really warm up to Streets of Rage 2. It’s approachable in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Pac Man, with clearly telegraphed rewards and hazards. In Streets of Rage 2, your score serves no purpose, but it’s still hard to refrain from picking up shiny coins and dollar signs for points. You even restore health by scarfing apples and entire cooked turkeys from trash cans. That bewildering yet self-explanatory logic is refreshing.
Like Vectorman, Streets of Rage 2 looks quaint by modern standards but is actually quite stellar for its time. A more average looking 16-bit game would be something like Kid Chameleon, which was more detailed and colorful than the typical NES fare it aimed to usurp. But there’s no denying KC had a certain drab, flat appearance, almost like an ancient Egyptian engraving. All of Streets of Rage 2’s art oozes with illustrative finesse. I’m certain they enlisted artists with a competent understanding of human anatomy and poses, color theory, and perspective. Streets of Rage 2 also has one of the most amazing soundtracks on the Sega Genesis. A lot of Genesis games would fall back on the default sound drivers, resulting in serviceable yet samey music. But in SoR2, the instrumentation is so full of variety and pizazz. It’s easy to get lost in all the beats and melodies weaving together, despite the primitive underpinnings of its FM synthesis.
The one title on the Sega Smash Pack I spent the most time playing had to be Shining Force, an RPG where you control soldiers on a grid to fight the forces of evil in a swords and sorcery world. Originally my friend chibby introduced me to this game when we were around 13 years old. He had it on the Sega Smash Pack for PC. I don’t think I ever saw it at his place, though. He would just describe it to me with such lively enthusiasm that made me want to play it so badly. I especially liked the way he described unlocking extra characters to join your party, such as conversing with a random bush to recruit a powerful ninja hiding inside.
The Sega Genesis was all about putting the arcade in your house. Therefore most of its games were heavy on action and light on letting you permanently alter anything in the game world. So an RPG on the Sega Genesis seemed so exceptional to me. Up to that point I had never played a Genesis title with 20 hours of gameplay before. Having since played Langrisser II and Fire Emblem for the Famicom, today I can tell that Shining Force is a very easy game. But it’s still great.
Shining Force’s graphics don’t look like 16-bit sprites at all, they look like storybook illustrations. My favorite thing about SF’s graphics was how the perspective would change when one of your fighters and an enemy would engage each other. It would change to an overhead view with lavishly detailed backgrounds that changed depending on they were fighting (forest, field, ruins, etc.) The perspective was so dynamic and really made things “pop”. I actually resented Phantasy Star II, the other RPG on the Sega Smash Pack, for its comparatively bland battle scenes. The perspective just looked so flat, and I hated how the background was a generic blue grid, regardless of the environment where they were fighting.
I really liked SF’s soundtrack, with the FM synthesis mimicking orchestral horns and violins. The melodies are all super catchy. It’s impossible not to hum them for years afterwards. SF is also full of random fun flourishes, like one part where you need to get someone to cast a magic spell to transform you into a chicken in order to enter an otherwise inaccessible area. It’s cute and I get the feeling the game’s creators enjoyed themselves.
Revenge of Shinobi was another game I first heard about from chibby. The first time he showed it to me he grinned and said, “You’ll flip out for this game.” In the 90’s I never knew the game even existed. After stage one, I knew this game was “Sega Genesis” to the core. It’s full of random stupid stuff games used to do that they don’t do anymore now. Bosses change color to telegraph how much damage they’ve taken. Crates are inexplicably distributed everywhere for you to break and find power ups, or sometimes bombs that blow up in your face for no reason. Some enemies block your attacks, but they do so with dumb boolean logic, making it easy to trick them. You fight ninjas, samurai, soldiers, a brain in a jar trying to kill you with lasers, the terminator, and literally Godzilla. Revenge of Shinobi is what you would get if you asked 7 year old me to come up with a video game.
Revenge of Shinobi isn’t as visually grandiose as the other Genesis games so far. But its stages are so full of variety and cool set pieces, like a waterfall where you must balance on rocks jutting from the water; an airport where flipping in the air will make you land in front of or behind a fence with enemies to contend with on either side; an airplane full of armed soldiers an bay doors that randomly open to eject you outside; and a vertical skyscraper stage where you must climb to reach the top of the stage instead of traversing left to right. There’s just so much to do and see, so re-playing it never feels tiresome. I could never beat this in 2004, though. I didn’t manage that until 2018. It’s really hard. Also the door maze at the end is miserable. The soundtrack is excellent, although I’ve said that for so many of these games that it’s starting to feel repetitive.
I only have one other specific memory about this game. In 2004 my Dad asked if I’d ride somewhere with him to help him with an errand. Along the way I was describing Revenge of Shinobi to him. I was excited about it and described the game to him as “one big ninja fest.” He had a bemused look an said something like, “One big ninja fest, huh?” I don’t really think he shared my enthusiasm, but he was trying to show interest as best he could.
The last game on the Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast I want to cover is Virtua Cop 2, a light gun game. Like Streets of Rage 2, VC2 belongs to a genre that used to be such a big deal in the 90’s when arcades were still relevant and then declined in the 2000’s. I had never played VC2 up to that point, but I could remember when Area 51, Time Crisis, and House of the Dead were commonly seen in arcades. So I warmed up to VC2 right away despite having no prior experience with it.
VC2 feels similar to Revenge of Shinobi in that each stage feels different and fresh, so I never tired of playing it over and over again. You start in a jewelry store full of thieves, then move on to a high speed car chase and a big building with bad guys randomly popping out of the windows like a lethal game of whack a mole. When I was talking about brief, action packed arcade games designed to give you quick thrills and eat your quarters, this is what I meant. I loved the interactive and destructible the scenery. Monitors crack and fall from the ceiling when shot; ATMs shatter and start blinking; glass jewelry cases fly into pieces; chandeliers fall apart. During car chases you can shoot the tires of criminals’ cars, making them crazily spin out and fly off the road. One moment stands out to me, which is the kitchen on the cruise ship. There are a dozen or so counters covered in fruit like pineapples and watermelons. If you shoot the fruit, it splatters and flies into pieces, witch each chunk bouncing around individually. It’s completely pointless, but at the time I thought that was such a lavish amount of detail, especially for an old arcade game. I always had to shoot as much destructible scenery as possible.
VC2’s takes its DNA from classic arcades like Dig Dug or Asteroids, where the point was to play skillfully and maximize your score. So, VC2 is full of incentives and hazards. Civilians foolishly throw themselves into harm’s way, pleading, “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT!” and discouraging a “Shoot first, ask questions later.” attitude. Some bad guys will shout “HEY!” and briefly expose themselves without actually shooting you. But if you react quickly enough to shoot them, you’ll earn points for it, which is surprisingly difficult. As a teenager I played this so much that I memorized everything. I could get pretty close to shooting all the criminals that shouted “HEY”. One day I got bored and try to kill all the civilians, even random ones that were only visible for a few frames, like pedestrians walking over an elevated foot traffic bridge during a car chase. It was quite challenging.
The remaining games on the Sega Smash Pack were:
Altered Beast - I did play and beat this. I thought it was interesting but shallow. I never held it in very high esteem.
Columns - I spent some time playing this but found it boring. To me it seemed like an inept attempt to contend with Tetris for the Gameboy.
Golden Axe - I liked this a lot. It’s very charming and feels like having an arcade in your house. But after a while I felt as though it was basically the same game as Streets of Rage 2, except less polished. When I came to that conclusion I stopped playing it.
Phantasy Star II - It irked me how this game’s graphics were worse than Shining Force’s. I also remember it being very punitive. So, I turned my nose at it.
Sega Swirl - I liked this more than Columns. It got some play time from me.
Sonic the Hedgehog - I played and possibly beat this version. I remembered it from childhood, so I liked it.
Wrestle War - This did not interest me. I couldn’t have played it more than 5 minutes.
Not long after that (maybe early 2005) I got an actual Sega Genesis and Sonic 1, Streets of Rage 2, and Vectorman. I began to notice the music and sound was quite different on actual Genesis hardware. I couldn’t perceive this at first, but when I tried going back to the Smash Pack, the audio did not sound right to me. This is common criticism today of the Sega Smash Pack. Genesis audio emulation is supposedly difficult to do correctly. Unfortunately Sega failed to nail this aspect 100% on the Dreamcast.
But the Sega Smash Pack was still instrumental in letting me get into this hobby when I didn’t yet have an original Sega Genesis or any game cartridges. Compilations of old games have come a long way since then, although they all still have compromises, the most common ones being audio or input latency. Ardent retro gaming fans will argue that this means that things like the Sega Genesis Mini or the Sega Genesis Classics compilation are worse than an actual Genesis and therefore not worth buying. But if a compilation disc or plug-n-play system with demonstrably bad emulation could be my introduction to retro gaming, it could be anyone’s.
This changed in 2003 when I found the website “Game Grandpas” run by Ryan Genno (long since changed to Video Games 101.) His website had a picture of his Sega Saturn collection spread on the floor. I can’t overstate how this low resolution, compressed jpeg imprinted on me. I think subconsciously I expected to snap out of it later. All my interests up until then (Pokemon, Beanie Babies, even Lego) had been fads that came and went. But it’s 2019 now and at almost 30 years old I’m still on fire for old video games. Maybe this says something how adolescence is such a formative time for most people. I’ve heard that we become who we’re going to be for the rest of our lives between the ages of 12 and 14. My continued enthusiasm for this hobby seems to support this idea.
In summer of 2004 my whole family and I went on vacation to the beach. We were out in town looking at shops and found an overstock store. I don’t remember a single thing on that store’s shelves except for an entire wall of brand new Sega Dreamcasts for $15 each. 14 year old me wanted to collect every gaming console ever, so I paid for one and took it home.
I had a lot of fun with my Dreamcast. The demo for Dead or Alive 2 made me realize the Dreamcast’s graphics really were superior to the N64’s, something I never quite understood from TV commercials or in-store demos. Chu Chu Rocket was cute, although not much fun to play solo. I mostly enjoyed it as a party game with other people. Shenmue swept me off my feet. It had an almost fetishistic level of in-world detail. I had never seen anything like it before. Sometime around Autumn of 2004, I bought Sega Smash Pack for my Dreamcast, a disc which includes the following games:
• Altered Beast
• Columns
• Golden Axe
• Phantasy Star II
• The Revenge of Shinobi
• Sega Swirl
• Shining Force
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Streets of Rage 2
• Vectorman
• Virtua Cop 2
• Wrestle War
By then I hadn’t yet re-acquired actual Sega Genesis hardware. Also I could be mistaken but I feel like in those days there were fewer video games per household. I’ve heard before that the revenue of the video game industry itself has grown since 2004, indicating more people are buying more games. Also in 2004 there wasn’t really such a thing as steam sales, free monthly downloadable games included with online service for XBOX or Playstation, or indie games. My contention is that games weren’t quite as common and plentiful back then, so 12 games on one disc seemed like such a great value at the time, even though most of them were 16-bit.
Vectorman was a title I originally received with my Genesis on Christmas of 1995. I’ve noticed people who didn’t grow up with Vectorman don’t seem to revere it like those who played it as kids. Vectorman doesn’t seem so amazing in 2019. But by 16-bit standards, there’s so much going on even in the first stage that’s such a phenomenal display of audiovisual spectacle. A stormy sky looms in the background. Each cloud is a separate parallax layer. Flags whip with surreal fluidity, lending credence to a turbulent wind that isn’t really there. The lighting is artistic and thoughtful, with shadows and highlights carving depth out of the indubitably flat scenery. Vectorman’s body even darkens when he runs underneath of a platform, reinforcing the illusion that he’s physically present in the environment.
Vectorman’s gameplay never rises above the “move left to right, beat a boss, repeat five or six times” recipe from those days. But it’s so full of flourishes and special effects that downright breathtaking on a 16-bit console. Almost everything that made Vectorman so spectacular is obsolete now. But that particular set of limitations had its own grammar and vocabulary, forming a unique language. One day my Dad remarked, “That looks CHEESY compared to what we have today!” I felt like I was enjoying a foreign poem or song that didn’t rhyme in English, making me powerless to explain to him in English what made it so clever.
This “language” and its many nuances are the reason that I fell in love with several other titles on the Sega Smash Pack even though I had never experienced them before. For example, I was completely unaware of Streets of Rage 2 when I owned a Genesis from 1995 to 1998. I never saw it at another kid’s house, at an in-store demo, or as a rental from Blockbuster. Yet I fell in love with it the very first time I played it in 2004 despite having no prior nostalgia for it. The side scrolling beat-em-up genre was a commonplace fixture of 90’s gaming that all but evaporated once 3D graphics took over. Whenever my Mom would take me to Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, I would barely play the machines that awarded tickets to get prizes at the front counter. I would spend all my tokens playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, fighting ninjas on the streets of New York.
The violence in Streets of Rage 2 is so gratifying. Punches resound with reassuringly crunchy noises and round house kicks send bad guys flying. The power ups, such as knives and loose plumbing bars, often prove even less effective than fists. But stabbing a dude in this game has a certain subversive appeal. I’ve noticed people who don’t ordinarily like video games really warm up to Streets of Rage 2. It’s approachable in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Pac Man, with clearly telegraphed rewards and hazards. In Streets of Rage 2, your score serves no purpose, but it’s still hard to refrain from picking up shiny coins and dollar signs for points. You even restore health by scarfing apples and entire cooked turkeys from trash cans. That bewildering yet self-explanatory logic is refreshing.
Like Vectorman, Streets of Rage 2 looks quaint by modern standards but is actually quite stellar for its time. A more average looking 16-bit game would be something like Kid Chameleon, which was more detailed and colorful than the typical NES fare it aimed to usurp. But there’s no denying KC had a certain drab, flat appearance, almost like an ancient Egyptian engraving. All of Streets of Rage 2’s art oozes with illustrative finesse. I’m certain they enlisted artists with a competent understanding of human anatomy and poses, color theory, and perspective. Streets of Rage 2 also has one of the most amazing soundtracks on the Sega Genesis. A lot of Genesis games would fall back on the default sound drivers, resulting in serviceable yet samey music. But in SoR2, the instrumentation is so full of variety and pizazz. It’s easy to get lost in all the beats and melodies weaving together, despite the primitive underpinnings of its FM synthesis.
The one title on the Sega Smash Pack I spent the most time playing had to be Shining Force, an RPG where you control soldiers on a grid to fight the forces of evil in a swords and sorcery world. Originally my friend chibby introduced me to this game when we were around 13 years old. He had it on the Sega Smash Pack for PC. I don’t think I ever saw it at his place, though. He would just describe it to me with such lively enthusiasm that made me want to play it so badly. I especially liked the way he described unlocking extra characters to join your party, such as conversing with a random bush to recruit a powerful ninja hiding inside.
The Sega Genesis was all about putting the arcade in your house. Therefore most of its games were heavy on action and light on letting you permanently alter anything in the game world. So an RPG on the Sega Genesis seemed so exceptional to me. Up to that point I had never played a Genesis title with 20 hours of gameplay before. Having since played Langrisser II and Fire Emblem for the Famicom, today I can tell that Shining Force is a very easy game. But it’s still great.
Shining Force’s graphics don’t look like 16-bit sprites at all, they look like storybook illustrations. My favorite thing about SF’s graphics was how the perspective would change when one of your fighters and an enemy would engage each other. It would change to an overhead view with lavishly detailed backgrounds that changed depending on they were fighting (forest, field, ruins, etc.) The perspective was so dynamic and really made things “pop”. I actually resented Phantasy Star II, the other RPG on the Sega Smash Pack, for its comparatively bland battle scenes. The perspective just looked so flat, and I hated how the background was a generic blue grid, regardless of the environment where they were fighting.
I really liked SF’s soundtrack, with the FM synthesis mimicking orchestral horns and violins. The melodies are all super catchy. It’s impossible not to hum them for years afterwards. SF is also full of random fun flourishes, like one part where you need to get someone to cast a magic spell to transform you into a chicken in order to enter an otherwise inaccessible area. It’s cute and I get the feeling the game’s creators enjoyed themselves.
Revenge of Shinobi was another game I first heard about from chibby. The first time he showed it to me he grinned and said, “You’ll flip out for this game.” In the 90’s I never knew the game even existed. After stage one, I knew this game was “Sega Genesis” to the core. It’s full of random stupid stuff games used to do that they don’t do anymore now. Bosses change color to telegraph how much damage they’ve taken. Crates are inexplicably distributed everywhere for you to break and find power ups, or sometimes bombs that blow up in your face for no reason. Some enemies block your attacks, but they do so with dumb boolean logic, making it easy to trick them. You fight ninjas, samurai, soldiers, a brain in a jar trying to kill you with lasers, the terminator, and literally Godzilla. Revenge of Shinobi is what you would get if you asked 7 year old me to come up with a video game.
Revenge of Shinobi isn’t as visually grandiose as the other Genesis games so far. But its stages are so full of variety and cool set pieces, like a waterfall where you must balance on rocks jutting from the water; an airport where flipping in the air will make you land in front of or behind a fence with enemies to contend with on either side; an airplane full of armed soldiers an bay doors that randomly open to eject you outside; and a vertical skyscraper stage where you must climb to reach the top of the stage instead of traversing left to right. There’s just so much to do and see, so re-playing it never feels tiresome. I could never beat this in 2004, though. I didn’t manage that until 2018. It’s really hard. Also the door maze at the end is miserable. The soundtrack is excellent, although I’ve said that for so many of these games that it’s starting to feel repetitive.
I only have one other specific memory about this game. In 2004 my Dad asked if I’d ride somewhere with him to help him with an errand. Along the way I was describing Revenge of Shinobi to him. I was excited about it and described the game to him as “one big ninja fest.” He had a bemused look an said something like, “One big ninja fest, huh?” I don’t really think he shared my enthusiasm, but he was trying to show interest as best he could.
The last game on the Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast I want to cover is Virtua Cop 2, a light gun game. Like Streets of Rage 2, VC2 belongs to a genre that used to be such a big deal in the 90’s when arcades were still relevant and then declined in the 2000’s. I had never played VC2 up to that point, but I could remember when Area 51, Time Crisis, and House of the Dead were commonly seen in arcades. So I warmed up to VC2 right away despite having no prior experience with it.
VC2 feels similar to Revenge of Shinobi in that each stage feels different and fresh, so I never tired of playing it over and over again. You start in a jewelry store full of thieves, then move on to a high speed car chase and a big building with bad guys randomly popping out of the windows like a lethal game of whack a mole. When I was talking about brief, action packed arcade games designed to give you quick thrills and eat your quarters, this is what I meant. I loved the interactive and destructible the scenery. Monitors crack and fall from the ceiling when shot; ATMs shatter and start blinking; glass jewelry cases fly into pieces; chandeliers fall apart. During car chases you can shoot the tires of criminals’ cars, making them crazily spin out and fly off the road. One moment stands out to me, which is the kitchen on the cruise ship. There are a dozen or so counters covered in fruit like pineapples and watermelons. If you shoot the fruit, it splatters and flies into pieces, witch each chunk bouncing around individually. It’s completely pointless, but at the time I thought that was such a lavish amount of detail, especially for an old arcade game. I always had to shoot as much destructible scenery as possible.
VC2’s takes its DNA from classic arcades like Dig Dug or Asteroids, where the point was to play skillfully and maximize your score. So, VC2 is full of incentives and hazards. Civilians foolishly throw themselves into harm’s way, pleading, “PLEASE DON’T SHOOT!” and discouraging a “Shoot first, ask questions later.” attitude. Some bad guys will shout “HEY!” and briefly expose themselves without actually shooting you. But if you react quickly enough to shoot them, you’ll earn points for it, which is surprisingly difficult. As a teenager I played this so much that I memorized everything. I could get pretty close to shooting all the criminals that shouted “HEY”. One day I got bored and try to kill all the civilians, even random ones that were only visible for a few frames, like pedestrians walking over an elevated foot traffic bridge during a car chase. It was quite challenging.
The remaining games on the Sega Smash Pack were:
Altered Beast - I did play and beat this. I thought it was interesting but shallow. I never held it in very high esteem.
Columns - I spent some time playing this but found it boring. To me it seemed like an inept attempt to contend with Tetris for the Gameboy.
Golden Axe - I liked this a lot. It’s very charming and feels like having an arcade in your house. But after a while I felt as though it was basically the same game as Streets of Rage 2, except less polished. When I came to that conclusion I stopped playing it.
Phantasy Star II - It irked me how this game’s graphics were worse than Shining Force’s. I also remember it being very punitive. So, I turned my nose at it.
Sega Swirl - I liked this more than Columns. It got some play time from me.
Sonic the Hedgehog - I played and possibly beat this version. I remembered it from childhood, so I liked it.
Wrestle War - This did not interest me. I couldn’t have played it more than 5 minutes.
Not long after that (maybe early 2005) I got an actual Sega Genesis and Sonic 1, Streets of Rage 2, and Vectorman. I began to notice the music and sound was quite different on actual Genesis hardware. I couldn’t perceive this at first, but when I tried going back to the Smash Pack, the audio did not sound right to me. This is common criticism today of the Sega Smash Pack. Genesis audio emulation is supposedly difficult to do correctly. Unfortunately Sega failed to nail this aspect 100% on the Dreamcast.
But the Sega Smash Pack was still instrumental in letting me get into this hobby when I didn’t yet have an original Sega Genesis or any game cartridges. Compilations of old games have come a long way since then, although they all still have compromises, the most common ones being audio or input latency. Ardent retro gaming fans will argue that this means that things like the Sega Genesis Mini or the Sega Genesis Classics compilation are worse than an actual Genesis and therefore not worth buying. But if a compilation disc or plug-n-play system with demonstrably bad emulation could be my introduction to retro gaming, it could be anyone’s.
