Mean Machines and Sega Pro review compilation mags



Sega Pro guide to Sega games Vol.4

Mean Machines tries to cover every Sega game

Here we have a quick look at two magazines that released a bumper collection of a year of their Sega reviews. Sega Pros The Complete A-Z of Sega Games from 1995 and Mean Machines, The Essential Sega Guide from 1993. The A-Z covers the early days of the Saturn (Victory Goal and Street Fighter the Movie both score 88%!) and the last death throes of the Game Gear and Mega CD, plus two arcade reviews for some reason. While editors Richard Leadbetter and Julian Rignall do their best to review over 350 Sega games between them, on the MegaDrive, Mega CD, Game Gear and Master System for the Essential Sega Guide.

Here are three pages from the A-Z, Brian Lara can still play a good game of cricket, has there even been a cricket game to match it since? I have never come across Revengers of Vengeance on the Mega CD but it looks interesting. Plus a look at AfterBurner on the 32X, great game. I will put up all the 32X reviews from this book when I get round to it. Eight games in all. (I know, I know!)
 

Ristar, a cut down but playable version for the Game Gear. Why hasn't poor Ristar been given a recent outing on DS or something? Indy 500 looks rather nice. The other arcade game reviewed was Rail Chase 2 and it got a Proscore of 85!

Considering they had so many games to get through, 374 in total, Richard and Jazza don't do too bad a job. The Game Gear gets the short end of the stick with six reviews per page. The Mega CD pics make it look even grainier than it actually was. While some of the pics don't even match the game being reviewed. Look at the screen shots accompanying Ghouls n Ghosts and Golden Axe Warrior on the Master System? Mistakes like this and some odd choices of font for the game names makes it look a very hurriedly done book in places.

Pit-Fighter 70%?? 'Amusingly Thuggish' are not the words I'd use to describe it. Poor Indy only scrapes a 47% but then Jack Nicklaus out does it with 42%, I didn't think it played too bad a game of golf, but Jaz is right it's no PGA Tour II.

John Madden games sold by the bucket load back then with each new year, and it improved every year too. Not like the phoned in updates you get today because it's the only game on the market. According to Mean Machines, '92 is the version you should pick up, getting a massive 95%. Rich calls Dick Tracy 'a pleasant change from the norm' and handing it 80%. The norm being a good game I presume! At the back of the book are a number of pages showing upcoming releases, if the hundreds of games reviewed that you could buy just didn't do it for you.

Pier Solar

2011 has arrived and it brings with it the long awaited release of the latest MegaDrive game, Pier Solar from WaterMelon. Who have spent many a long hour developing and working to publish this title. It was sent out to those who ordered it over Christmas, but as the weather was playing havoc with deliveries, I didn't receive my copy until the middle of January. The extra few weeks wait was not so bad considering it had been originally paid for in 2008! Pier Solar was due out for Christmas 08, but due to some hiccups it was delayed and pushed back until its release a few short weeks ago. Above shows the blister pack it came in and the letter and mini strategy guide that were included. I got the Pal MegaDrive box, you could also order a Japanese MegaDrive box or a red Genesis one, though the game plays on all versions.

This is one of the best put together game packs you will come across, really professional but still clearly a huge labour of love. Here is a pic showing what comes inside the box plus a look at the cartridge and the additional Mega CD, which includes the music for the game if played inside your Mega CD when playing the game cartridge (A First?). My MegaCD is stored away, along with my 32X, so will have to wait to see how it works. Putting the CD in your computer brings up extras such as photos, concept art and the musical score.

Along with the CD you get a poster, a sticker sheet, a flyer for an upcoming 32X game, some instructions in all the languages the game comes in. You also get a signed card showing what number of the game you were issued out of the initial 800 made. I got the magical number 42.

 

This shows a map from the game inside the strategy guide which is inside this mini Size magazine that also has some interviews and comments from the developers.

If you look closely you might just be able to pick out my name in the last pic! Everyone who paid for the Posterity package got a mention in the Pier Solar book at the front of the box. A very nice touch.

Apologies for the quality of the pics, only just got a new laptop, more on that in another update (Oh the trouble I've had!). So I haven't hooked up my scanner properly yet. Also the following screenshots are just quick grabs from my TV showing that I have played it, and will hopefully talk more about it when I get a good number of hours in. I think you'll agree it does look pretty good.

 

Here is a bigger shot of the flyer advertising Super Thunder Drive III, an upcoming 32X release. Although there is a belief that this game is a hoax, no-one having heard of Super Thunder Drive. But why would you bother promoting it? I hope it turns out the be the real thing. The 32X is short of games and as my legion of followers will know, it's one of my favourite systems. Plus is there an Easter Egg in Pier Solar if played through a 32X?

I have also picked up Blue Almanac for the Japanese MegaDrive, the only other game I've picked up recently to be honest. As you know this game was not released outside of Japan, but it is being translated by SuperFighterTeam, those of Beggar Prince and Legend of Wukong fame. They have renamed it Star Odyssey and it will hopefully be able to order soon.

Here are the websites, so check these games out for yourselves.

http://www.starodysseygame.com/

http://superthunderdrive.com/

Promises, Promises

Well it seems that my rejoicing at my newly fixed laptop was a wee bit premature. For not long after getting it safely home and beginning to catch up on all of my college work again, it decides to refuse to boot up. Another trip to the repair shop, followed by another few days of waiting, before the sad news comes through that the poor thing just wasn’t going to make it. The motherboard was fried. So I was once again totally screwed, having to complete my college assignments on the few minutes I could get on campus computers. This meant zero time to update this wonderful blog. I know I promised etc. etc. But I’m still hopeful of getting a shiny new laptop under the tree on Christmas morning, so keep those fingers crossed for me.

Fallout: New Vegas Special Edition goodies

Game wise the last few weeks have been dominated by traipsing around New Vegas. I bought the special edition that included a pretty good graphic novel, a deck of cards should you ever want to play caravan! A making of DVD, some casino poker chips and of course a big metal chip that Mr. House is so desperate to get his... erm... hands on. Overall worth the few extra quid, unlike some other special editions I could mention, Bioshock 2 being a particularly poor effort, and I have a record player! I guess I’m just tired of the same old art books. Anyways... before I started I went and finished all the downloadable content from Fallout3, just to be sure. Now I do think New Vegas is an improvement over that game, it’s just not that big of an improvement, so if Fallout3 was not your thing this won’t be the game to convert you. I would say that I am about 40ish hours in and just wandering around the map before I head to Hoover Dam where I presume I’ll have to choose sides and then the final battle will take place. I’m also on the lookout for my robot follower ED E, who is more than likely stuck behind a door somewhere. The game will take you by the hand over the map for every mission but won’t tell you where your followers are, very frustrating. More on this game as and when (read if) I finish it.

In the run up to Christmas I’ve been reminiscing over ones gone by. While struggling to pick out which were the best Christmases, one year I remember getting Wrestle Mania and the Real Ghostbusters for my good old C64, hours spent loading then reloading, bliss. Some years later I remember me and my brothers got FIFA 95 on the Megadrive, I’m sure I was the best at it. I also remember laughing that they bothered to include Qatar, surely the worst team in it, but no one is laughing now. It could have been the year after or maybe the next, I got Phantasy Star IV for Christmas, what a fantastic game. One of the best RPGs ever made in my opinion. Forget this online rubbish, make a Phantasy Star V! I also got a Menacer gun that Christmas, but the less said about that the better. Nothing like that happens these days. We are two weeks away and I know the snow has hit us and the weather has been terrible but it just doesn’t feel like Christmas, does it? If you want some nostalgic Christmas feelings, pick up the December issue of RetroGamer with its good old/new Oli Frey cover. Here’s a pic of my complete RetroGamer set and some of the Megadrive games I’ve been popping in the cartridge slot recently. I hope it brings back some memories, ... of when zombies were cool!

Before I sign off, let’s not forget that it’s Mario Bros. 25th anniversary, yippee!! But Mario is mad, because Nintendo have shoddily repackaged Super Mario All-Stars for the Wii. €30 for old SNES games of old NES games that you can download for less money from the Wii download channel? If you do get your hands on the Anniversary Edition, with a booklet and a soundtrack CD in a nice red cardboard box, resist the temptation to hold the game at arm’s length querying, “Is this it? 25 years? Really?” the back of the box says ‘Find out about the origins and development of Super Mario’ but the booklet, heavy on the –let, barely scratches the surface of any of the Mario games. While the soundtrack comes with a warning, ‘Caution! Cannot be played on a Wii console. Please use a CD player’ Brilliant, like my PS3 is it? Oh no wait that’s still broken, like my Xbox is it? My favourite track is No. 12 Small Mario Jump. It reminds me of a small Mario jumping, funnily enough. Oh Nintendo, Mario deserves better than this, he’s a gaming icon. I haven’t been this angry with Nintendo since they decided to rob me of all my stars from the stars catalogue, and they still email me every month saying how much more they are taking from me. Eventually I think I’ll end up owing them stars! Bastards!
Happy Christmas....

Broken Laptop and a Thousand Tiny Distractions

 Apologies, I am more than aware that it has been two months since I updated here. But let me explain, I have good reason, I really do! First off my laptop fell off the bed and bounced off the floor ruining the screen. I wish I had a more exciting or romantic story but alas it just fell off the bed. I went to all the usual shops seeing if they could fix it at a reasonable price. Half the screen had gone white from the hop it took. Can’t be that bad can it? Unfortunately they all were telling me that it would cost upwards of two hundred euro to replace the screen. That I would be better off buying a new laptop. And look, we have loads of laptops right here in the store for you to choose from! Bastards! Screw them; I’d make do with half a screen.
While all this was going on I was in the middle of processing my college application. I had thought I would be entitled to some sort of grant or maintenance or fees paid scheme but governmental bureaucracy can turn you from an optimist into a pessimist fairly quickly. I should get a degree in form filling and random pieces of information gathering. Long story short though, I was going back to college, so I pretty much needed my laptop anyways. Then I did what any man in my position would do. I put it off for as long as possible.

The hallowed halls of academia

As luck would have it though barely a week into college I saw that the students union fix laptops. What have I got to lose? I bring it in and it’s fixed in two days for just over a hundred quid? Makes you wonder where these electronic stores send off their repairs to be fixed? So, new screen, new college semester, new round of forms to be filled out. So all that has kept me occupied for the last few weeks. But I have my laptop back (all my stuff is on it!).
Now if only I could get around to fixing my PS3, yes it's still broken! It kind of shows that there has been nothing worth buying on it for months, well nothing that I couldn’t buy on the 360. After steadfastly refusing to buy the new Final Fantasy. I picked up Resonance of Fate on 360, Valkyria Chronicles 2 on the PSP among a few others which I will get into in another update. But the most surprising, in that it turned out to be enjoyable, was Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on the Wii. It can be finished in one sitting, there or there about, but did hold my attention throughout, it’s the only game I’ve finished in ages to be honest. I would recommend giving it a quick rent. You can play through multiple times doing slightly different things and as good as this sounds, I had intended to do it but lost interest, who does that kind of thing anyways?

Providing I get to stay attending college and don’t end up breaking my laptop again. I will endeavour to update this site even more frequently than I have been doing. I've got a few games to talk about and want to give my general impression of all those summer blockbusters that I wasted my money seeing in 3D! Plus while rummaging around at home I found some old Sega Power and Mean Machines compilation magazines, so will try and get some pics of those up soon.

Predators

Robert Rodriguez and Director Nimrod Antal attempt to give the Predator franchise back some cinematic credibility after the unpopular Predator 2 and the downright woeful Alien Vs. Predator movies. Twenty three years after Arnie nearly came a cropper in the wilds of Guatemala we find ourselves deep in the jungle again being hunted by predators even bigger than the one in the first movie. This time the jungle is on an alien planet where a race of predators has dropped off a random group of humans so that they can skin them for sport.
This film isn’t a reboot, the character Isabelle gives a full account of what happened in the first film and if you look closely you might spot the odd Alien skull lying around. It’s set in modern day but being on an inescapable alien planet means they could get away things that wouldn’t exactly mess with continuity. If the AvP world has some sort of continuity to maintain of course!
Okay it’s not a remake but does a pretty good job of trying to remake the first movie, gang of soldiers getting picked off one by one while looking for the thing that’s hunting them. Some scenes are very reminiscent of the first movie and very reminiscent of a lot of action movies in general. The plot does not have any huge twists and some things can be seen from a mile off. It’s a by the book action flick really. Raised to above average by the acting of some of its stars.

Adrien Brody as Royce is a lot better than I expected him to be, he does dip into his best deep ‘I am Batman’ voice at times but that aside he does a good job as de facto leader. Topher Grace is the understated, quite one. Yet you knew he was going to turn out to be the craziest killer of the lot. Alice Braga, last seen in I Am Legend, is the other of the longest surviving trio and does a solid turn as the only female in the cast. Rodriguez staple Danny Trejo makes an appearance but is dead after about ten minutes and I can’t remember if he said anything of note. Another character that kicks the bucket is Laurence Fishburnes Noland. He appears, says he has survived for ten seasons of the predator hunts then proceeds to lock himself out of his home and gets blown to bits by a predator, a very strange few minutes. They muddy the predator lineage with some predators using weaker predators as bait and Noland describing them as different as dogs and wolves. They hunt for sport where as in other movies it was hunting more as a rite of passage. Also there are not as many predators in this movie as the trailer would have you believe? While the scene with Royce caught in the predators sight is in the movie, it’s only one gun trained on him, not a dozen or so. Why are trailers doing that nowadays? All this being said I guess I was satisfied with Predators. It wasn’t as good as it could have been but it was better than it had any right to be. Action movie fans will get a kick out of it and Predator fans can feel they finally get a half decent movie they wouldn’t mind paying good money to see. But as Little Richards ‘Long Tall Sally’ plays over the end credits, it only serves to remind you that it isn’t as good as the original.

FIFA '96 32X

Here I get around to talking about a game that I got when I finally picked up a 32X during Christmas 1995. The 32-bit Megadrive add-on had been out just over a year, having seen a release the previous November. There was still only a handful of games to pick up for the system. I wanted FIFA because the previous years instalment on the Megadrive kept me occupied for months, what a great game that was. And with the awesome power hidden inside the £170 Sega mushroom add-on, I could sample the new virtual stadium technology without shelling out twice the price to get a 3DO or a Saturn.

Unfortunately to begin with the game didn't work. It would load up to the title screen then when I could get in, I would select quick game only for the match to start with a big green pitch and no players! So, I thought I must have put the 32X together wrong, but no, that wasn't it. Back to the shop for a replacement cartridge, again it refused to work. Next time I brought the 32X back to the shop. Then after about four weeks of waiting I got my, now working, 32X back. Finally 32-bit gaming was in my grasp.

After all this waiting, it's well into the new year now at this stage, the sense of disappointment when I finally got around to playing the game was massive. How could it all go so wrong? It had all the leagues, real player names, various camera angles to choose from. It was missing the commentary but that you can get over if the game played well. Which it didn't! Your players never seemed in control of the ball, you take a shot and the goalie would just dive slowly to the ground with ball in hand, no matter what angle the shot was from, while the camera shuddered to that end of the field to catch up. It looked awkward, untidy and above all unfinished. It was said EA released the game before the 32X became totally unprofitable just to make some money back on it and it was not in a 100% finished state.

Another nail in the coffin for this game was the inability to save your league. You had to sit through a whole season in one sitting. FIFA 95 on the Megadrive had four save states if I remember. On the Options screen you will see a Restore option at the bottom, click in and what do you see? A password input, but you only get a password during Cup competitions. Cups that might only last at most 5 or 6 games. What was the whole point of that?

Now after spending £45 on the game I was not happy, it was a broken mismash, it had the 16-bit intro and titles, while having a poor mans 32-bit ingame engine that didnt match the Saturn or Playstation versions. EA didnt trouble the 32X market again and it limped on for another year before it was all but forgotten. I picked up quite a few 32X games at the time, the next game I bought was the much better Star Wars Arcade, but I only knew one other person who had one. FIFA '96 was by far the worst in my opinion.

It was also only released in europe, it was advertised as coming out in north america but lucky for them they were spared its release. FIFA 97 found its way to all major platforms of the day, sadly the 32X was a only a major discounted, major disappointment by then. Oh what might have been?

Sonic The Hedgehog Sticker Album

A look now at the Sonic sticker album from 1994, back when Sonic was the only game in town and everyone and their mother was playing Sonic 3. Nowadays in 2010 there is a new Sonic sticker collection for us to get excited about (or not) as it seems to offer less game screenshots and more coverage of all the friends Sonic has acquired over the years. I remember when the addition of Knuckles seemed like too much.

But it got me thinking, there has been so many Sonic games released in the last ten years that it would probably be far stranger for people to see a Sonic game that didn't include a million wacky characters. For all I know Sonic Riders could have sold more copies than both Dreamcast Sonic Adventure games put together.

Wooooah there Sonic! By the end of the year we should be able to download Sonic 4, it looks pretty good from the videos and screenshots. Plus it only has Sonic in it, so far anyways, but it remains to be seen if this is a game like the Sonic games of old or a game that just reminds you of what you liked about those games while brazenly taking your money and blinding you with speedy HD craziness.

 

Sorry, where was I? Ya, the sticker book, its wall to wall Sonic game screenshots, almost, there are also some Sonic the cartoon stickers in there with the odd foil sticker. Not forgetting the 4-page pull-out poster that came in the centre of the book. At the back there is a puzzle page, containing a wordsearch, a maze and some spot the difference pictures.

I never filled the whole album, there is nearly always one missing on every page. So frustrating! So has anyone got any spares? Maybe I will pick up that new Sonic album if I come across it after all.

Thats it for the videogame related albums for now. Next up, I make an impassioned plea for help to complete my Saved by the Bell sticker collection!