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Let’s face it: everybody likes dinosaurs. After all, lots of them are big, fast, and vicious, and we humans have an innate fascination with any form of life that can so easily make mincemeat out of us. Steven Spielberg took advantage of our love affair with the beasts through his grand sci-fi flick, Jurassic Park; now the Genesis game, which is really only loosely based on the movie, tries its luck.
Sega of America’s foray into the fighting arena was supposed to take on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Whether it succeeds or not is subject to much debate, but one thing everyone can agree on is that it’s caused as much controversy as any of its competition. Read on and see if it’s worth all the hype.
Let’s get this out of the way first: Yes, this is yet another Sega CD “TruVideo” title, which means lots of full motion video and very little gameplay. That’s definitely the case here. NFL’s Greatest is a football game where you don’t control any of the players. Everyone knows that the real draw of sports games is being able to play as your favorite sports star and lead a team to virtual victory. It’s titles like these that tell why the Sega CD failed.
Genesis owners’ patience was rewarded with the Special Champion Edition, basically a port of the SNES’ Street Fighter II Turbo with some Genesis-exclusive features. While it wasn’t the killing Genesis players envisioned, it still did an excellent job bringing street fighting action to the ol’ black box.
While Revenge of Shinobi is regarded as one of the best titles early on in the Genesis’ life, there were a handful of problems I had with it to really keep it from becoming a gold classic. But Shinobi III fixes all of them and makes a marvelous game to boot.