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2009 has been a great year for Genesis hardware. No fewer than three different machines were released during the past twelve months, and most of them are portable. We’ve already covered the Genesis Portable system, but did you know an SD card-compatible version with six buttons was released in Brazil? Well, there was, and it’s called the MD Play. Released by none other than TecToy, it has some interesting features the American and European versions lack.
Licensed games rarely work. Usually, the train wreck software that accompanies a movie is a total failure due to horrible gameplay or just an uninspired cash run banking on the property’s name (hello Transformers movie games!). Sometimes, however, developers get it right. Spot Goes to Hollywood was a game that showed signs that the industry was beginning to understand that justice could be done to marketing gimmicks, and it was successful enough to be released during two hardware generations at once. Though the isometric perspective might put off some gamers, this is definitely a neat little platformer that should definitely be played.
Genesis fans are well acquanted with Electronic Arts’ James Pond series. The Amiga-friendly fish had a total of four outings on Sega’s über console, the last of which was simply massive. Featuring over a hundred levles and a Super Mario World-like world map, it took Agent Pond on a mission to stop Dr. Maybe from crippling the world’s dairy industry by mining the Moon for cheese. Seriously. We have a full review of it for you, so please chedder out. Sorry, I had to try and slip at least one cheesy joke in. Ha! See what I did there?
Arriving shortly after Rebel Assault and Star Wars Chess (both for the Sega CD), Star Wars Arcade was a 32X release, and it arrived half a decade after the Genesis debuted. Considering the how strong with the Force the SNES was, one has to question why Lucasarts would snub Genesis owners. Bunch of nerf herders! Still, SWA wasn’t bad, just hard as nails. We’ve taken another look at the game in our latest installment of Double Take, and we’ve even brought some screen shots of the ending, something most people will probably never see from actually playing the game.
Rise of the Robots will forever be known as a blueprint for poor game design pressed to silicon, and aspiring game designers need look no further when studying the perils of graphics over gameplay. A button-mashing nightmare that had no technique or fighting style at all, the entire experience was an exercise in frustration and usually left the player both exasperated and boiling with rage. The ironic part of all this? Rise of the Robots was ported to a zillion consoles and actually received a sequel. Note to Acclaim and Mirage Technologies: creating a second turd as an act of contrition for the first does not make things right; it makes a pile of turds.
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