Ok here’s the thing: When I was a kid I lived in a Genesis household. We were only allowed to get one console and we ended up with a fucking Genesis. I’ll admit to the fact that the “Get Sonic 1 and receive 2 in the mail” offer was the deal maker but in turn it meant years of defending a console like you would defend your local sports team. You know, the ones with a team who would win a game here and there and look great when doing it but usually get beaten shitless and stupid by the opposing team? Yeah, that was me with the Genesis.
This meant that when some awesome game came out on the SNES we had to hope against hope that the game would somehow find its way to our console. Sometimes it did (Maximum Carnage, Earthworm Jim) and but more often than not it never found its way over. (Final Fantasy 2 and 3, Crono Trigger, Wild Guns, a fuck-load of etc’s) I guess most developers just didn’t understand and grasp the technology and likely didn’t want to slow Sega down while they struggled and banged their primitive heads against the wall, trying to grasp the fucking intricacies of Blast Processing. Like a broken orphan telling them self that daddy just got lost on the way home from the ice cream and puppy store 15 years ago when I was 11, that is the story that I am forced to stick by.
Regardless of all of this, while we didn’t always get a port of the games we wanted we still got “versions” of them in a sense. We’re talking games here that had the same licence, sometimes even same basic game, but flipped upside down on its ass like the goddamn inverted castle.
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Super Castlevania was a big game when the SNES launched and a marked a huge improvement in the series. We didn’t get any of that action. What we did get however was Castlevania: Bloodlines. The big thing that stood out about this game for me when I first rented it was that you could choose from more than one character. Technically this isn’t the first Castlevania game to do this (Dracula’s Curse on the NES) But it did make it the first Castlevania to have a character select screen from the offset.
You could choose from two characters that have the task of stopping an insane countess from resurrecting Dracula: John Morris who was your Belmont character only without the name, fought with the Vampire Killer (Also known as a “whip.”) He wasn’t able to attack in 8 directions like Simon Belmont in Super Castlevania but 5 directions wasn’t a bad number compared to most Castlevania games either. He could also swing from hooks using the whip. Your other choice for kicking undead ass wholesale was Eric Lecarde. Eric’s weapon was the spear, a weapon that would become a staple for pretty much every “Metroidvania” style game that came out later on. Eric could attack in 6 directions and do a charged jump that allowed him to access areas and paths that John couldn’t reach. Oh, and every time he dies his spear flies up in the air, falls back down and impales him. Like, every fucking time. Whether this is a badass display of not letting the enemy take you alive or just a mind-bogglingly consistent fuckup remains an issue of debate.
The graphics looked great for the Genesis and alot of detail went into the backgrounds and stages. The reflection of the stage and sprites in the water, the shattering windows when fighting the Hell Hound, the large multi-jointed bosses, all beautiful stuff.
And this is only the first mid-boss.
The music is pretty solid considering the limitations of the Genesis’ sound card. It’s better to hear for yourself so here are a few examples:
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.youtube.com/
The game played like your typical old-style Castlevania game complete with a clock tower stage with lots of gears to jump from, medusa heads to avoid and controllers to smash when one of those aforementioned heads knocks you off to oblivion and death when you’ve finally gotten to the LAST FUCKING GODDAMN PAR-*ahem* meaning of course that yes, this game was challenging. By which I mean this game, in proper Castlevania tradition, was pretty goddamn hard. You could lower the difficulty level but to get the full ending you had to at least beat it on normal. The game was only 6 stages but when you factor in two characters with different paths for each one it opens the game up and gives it some replay value.
Random fact: In the options mode play BGM 05 and SE073. Leave the options screen with settings left like this and start the game. Now whenever your weapon reaches level 4 the music will change to the old Castlevania theme, signifying that shit is about to get real...
...until one of those goddamn medusa heads hit you.
Mega Turrican
OK, the history on this one is a little tricky. Mega Turrican was developed by Factor 5 for the Genesis. Since they had trouble securing a distributor however, it was released for the Amiga (The console that the original two Turrican games were initially released on) in 1993, the same year that Factor 5 also released Super Turrican for the SNES. Now, a year later Data East picked the title up and brought it to the Genesis in 1994. This means we kids got a Genesis Turrican game made for us and released first (Woot Amiga!...show of hands? Anyone?) and we got to play it a year later. The people with an Amiga got to play at the same time sure but also, fuck those guys.
Did you follow all of that? No? OK, the jist of things is Mega Turrican for the Genesis was an awesome game. It actually shared alot of things in common with it’s Super Nintendo counterpart. Since Factor 5 made both Mega Turrican and Super Turrican they ended up using some of the same music as well as similar backgrounds.
The shitty part here however (at least for those of us with a Genesis) was that the SNES sound card was alot better so Super Turrican had better sounding music. Even so, Factor 5 managed to get a pretty sweet score to accompany the game.
Like Super Turrican, Mega Turrican gives you 3 weapon types with power-ups available for each type, obtained by means of colored orbs that come from item boxes scattered throughout each level. You had “Multiple” (Orange) which is your spread shot. “Rebound” (Blue) fires a stream of fire forward as well as two seperate blasts that bounce off the floor and ceiling. Finally “Laser”(Green) fires a powerfull green blast but only straight forward. You also get a missle attachment that fire slow-moving homing missles at nearby enemiest with infinite ammo (until you get your ass killed) and there is a shield power-up as well. To top it all off you can turn into a ball to get into hard to reach areas or evade bosses. It also drops a smart bomb which you have limited ammo for. (For those of you already drawing comparisons to some other games there, I’ll get to that in a minute.)
If Mega Turrican has one particular feature that really makes this one stand out from Super turrican it would be the grappling beam. Unlike the freeze beam you got on the SNES, the grappling beam let you reach areas that would otherwise be inaccessable. It could also be used for swinging from platform to platform as well as just swinging around like a monkey who somehow found a chandalier and refused to get his ass down.
I guess between the grappling beam and the ball and bomb moves I could be drawing alot more comparrisons for Super Metroid (and...shit. Yeah I suppose I am) but I’d also have to mention the other franchises you could say it borrowed from as well. The 4th level of the game is spent fighting Aliens. No, I’m not talking about some little generic green men here. I’m talking James “I made fucking made Terminator 2” Cameron’s Aliens. The boss of the level was a giant head that may not have been, but most certainly goddamn was the Alien Queen for example.
You could draw parallels here to Bionic Commando, Contra, hell even the final boss looks kinda like Galactus but being comparable in ways to any of these games is far from a bad thing. Except maybe Galactus...
Either way I was a huge fan of this game. Comparisons be damned! I put hours upon hours into this game and still pick it up time to time. It’s a little bit of everything with an awesome soundtrack and a good enough challenge to keep things interesting without pissing you off. It was so good actually, that even though it was made specifically for the Genesis, it was ported to the Amiga as “Turrican 3.” That’s right. The game was good enough to be used as a numbered sequel in the series. Mega Turrican is definitely worth a look if you find a ROM...But only as a backup of course. For your actual copy of the game that is. The one you actually purchased and owned as any other way of doing that could be illegal...
*cough* Moving along.
Contra: Hard Corps
I’ve heard alot of talk about Gunstar Heroes being Sega’s equivilient of Contra 3: The Alien Wars but I always thought this one was an equally good game just in different ways. Hard Corps takes place 7 years after the events of Contra 3 and follows a 4 member Contra unit who are sent to stop an unmanned robot rampaging through the city. There are two important things that should be noted from what I just said:
- There are 4 characters to choose from in this game.
While Contra Force for the NES may have been the first Contra game to do it, Hard Corps certainly did it better. You had 4 characters to choose from and you didn’t have to be in the second player port to play as any of them. There’s your standard male soldier Ray who will come in handy if you’re a fan of the spread shot (He’s the only one who has it) Sheena the female soldier, Fang the werewolf soldier with a chaingun for an arm. Actually wait, let us process that one for a moment. Werewolf Contra. Chaingun Arm. And.........
Fucking. AAAAAAWWWWWWSSSOOOOOOMMMMMMMME
.......OK! And lastly we have Brownie, the robot Contra who’s also the shortest. All you need to know about him is that you equip his yo-yo weapon and run balls-first into victory.
- This game has a fucking story.
Most early Contra games had little story outside of what you read in the manual and were more about endless bullet slaughter and over-the-top action sequences. This Contra has... well, OK it has all of that too. But thrown into the mix this time are cut scenes giving us mission briefings as well as parts where the action stops mid-stage to give us dialogue between characters and even puts us in the position of having to choose how to proceed in the game. There are parts in Hard Corps where you’ll be poised with the decision of where to go next. Will you go save the laboratory or will you chase after that guy who like, totally called you out on your manhood and shit? Oh yeah, there were fucking ramifications to your decisions in this one. The game didn’t recieve any awards for it’s storytelling but it was cool to see Konami trying something different with the franshise.
The game plays like your standard Contra although instead of having one weapon in each arm like in C3, each character comes with their own weapon set which (once gained by the usual method of bizzarre floating pod) can be selected on the fly. There is also an extra slot every one gets for the bomb. You know the one I’m talking about. The “Kill the shit out of everything but a boss” bomb. Yeah, Hard Corps had it too.
Hard Corps looks great on the Genesis with huge bosses and insane action sequence after insane action sequence thrown in the keep the pace frantic. (See: Really Difficult). They even threw some light voice work in there too. It’s nothing ground breaking but it was definately a nice touch. Also, if you had the japanese version of the game you got a healthbar (and yes that had to be bolded, italicised, and underlined. Contra is a series famous for one-hit deaths.)
The game may be missing those over-the-head sequences from Alien Wars but for what Hard Corps lacks in Mode 7 it makes up for in variety and replay value. A trait that another Konami game earlier listed in this article, Castlevania shares in relation to it’s SNES counterpart. The game sports a total lack of shitless guys killing scores of enemies but seriously, WEREWOLF WITH A MOTHER FUCKING CHAINGUN ARM!
Mortal Kombat
“But wait! That came out on the SNES too! Why would you go and say that?” Why? Why you ask?...
I won’t go into to too much detail on this one but that picture pretty much sums up the difference. Unlike Nintendo, Sega didn’t mind keeping all the hilariouly awesome fatalities and blood that helped make the series popular in check for their version. Seriously, in the SNES version Jonny Cage kicks (into?) you and Kano pulled out your grey, bloodless heart like the monster you are. Sub-Zero froze you then shattered you which I’ll admit wasn’t a bad substitute but it still didn’t make up for the lack of red stuff. The only thing that came off a character’s face when you smashed his/her face in was what could only be described as “sweat.” It’s like the SNES gave the Kombatants a fucking glandular problem.
There was one catch to getting 16-bit homicide on your Genesis however. There was a code. A blood code.
When you start the game you’ll see this odd little message pop up. Note how NONE of this actually relates to the story of the game. If you enter “A, B, A, C, A, B, B” during this screen though, you unlock the all the blood and proper fatalities. I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of the fact that you had to put in a code for the blood and proper deaths at the time. Considering the violence was what the big selling feature of this version was it always seemed kind of strange that they would hide it initially and basically tease you into finding out how to get the gore. At the same time though, screens like that one helped give the feeling that you were “in” on something. A dirty, very poorly kept, secret. You didn’t just get to have blood in the game, you fucking earned it.
Nintendo learned their lesson that there wasn’t as much money in the bloodless multi-valve organs business, so when Mortal Kombat 2 came around Nintendo put all the blood and violence back in. This pretty much levelled the playing field for MK games on the 16-bit consoles but, even with a code, it was still a small victory for Genesis kids at the time.
Well thats it for this one. We’ll be back soon but in the meantime let’s revel in simple pleasures in life. Ladies and Gentlemen, SWEAT AND GREEN BLOOD FOR EVERYBODY!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
