Yes, folks, we’ll be giving the Sega Mega Drive, known in North America as the Genesis, the same attention we gave the NES last month. While I had an NES and enjoyed it very much, the Sega Genesis is likely the console I’ve put in the most hours on, and as I’ve said before, I was on the Sega side of the fence for the Console Wars when it competed with the Super NES. There’s a lot to love about the system. In particular, I’ve always liked the unique sound that the YM2612 chip lent the music, not to mention some of the remarkable titles Sega self-produced for the platform. There was nothing wrong with the SNES, but if you were cool… you had a Genesis.

The Ooze

Sega/Sonic Team, 1995

I wanted to start with this one because I missed it as a kid, only to discover it years later, and it blew my fucking mind. You play as this scientist who finds out some grody stuff about his employer’s business. Your boss tries to kill you by exposing you to some gnarly green slime, but little does he know he just created one of the coolest protagonists for a video game ever. With what’s left of your humanity, you set out for revenge.

GRAAAAH! He’s so fucking cool, man. I can’t even be mad that I missed it as a kid because it was worth uncovering it years later and being jazzed as hell.

YOU PLAY AS A SLIME MONSTER. It’s as cool as it sounds. You slide around as an amorphous blob, able to do all the things a blob could do (move through tight spaces, etc.) and capable of whipping out deadly pseudopods to murder and devour anything in your path. Getting attacked reduces your mass, but turning creatures into ooze and subsuming them replenishes it. There are even power ups, despite the idea that you’re already pretty boss as a sentient ooze. The controls take a little getting used to, but once you’re comfortable, you’re really going to enjoy yourself. The soundtrack is really good, especially the first stage, the toxic dump. Really good digitized SFX as well, with some nice voice samples that come through crisp and clear. I shouldn’t even have to say that the graphics are incredible, but I will, because holy shit. It’s not just normal sprites for your ooze man; your character is composed of modular chunks of 16-bit slime that flow in a very “realistic” fashion. A lot of effort clearly went into this game, and it shows.

I give The Ooze 8 out of 10. It is what I consider a high quality game, giving you the total package when it comes to gameplay and the audiovisual experience.

The Terminator

Probe/Virgin, 1992

I really don’t care much about the third and subsequent films, but Terminator 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, among the best science fiction films ever made. I doubt many of you would disagree, especially since the first one is filled to the brim with that dark-neon 80s starkness that retrowave/synthwave fans adore (myself included).

Unfortunately, the Genesis game is a woeful sack of wet horse shit.

You play as Kyle Reese, first in the future (to get to the past) and then in the past (to save the fucking future). The game follows the plot of the movie, at least loosely. A lot of the game involves just slugging through areas and getting hurt with very little in the way of mobility, hoping for the little health tanks to drop from enemies. I don’t remember Kyle murdering hundreds of police in the movie either, especially not with a crazy rapid-fire shotgun. This game plays like a sloppy death metal album: just things smashing and being smashed together as you mechanically plow through it and hope you don’t die (or just stop caring, like I did).

I spent several minutes just fighting my way out of this dead end. Just constantly hurling grenades at buff shirtless cyborgs. It’s like trying to have sex to grindcore music. It becomes mechanical and you get mentally tired.

To be fair to it, I’ll mention a couple things they did really well. The dialogue scenes between levels are actually pretty cool, featuring only minor affronts to the English language and some very well-done, almost comic-book style presentation. Some of the later levels feature interesting elements and stipulations; the police station requires you to reach Sarah Connor before the T-800 does and is a fairly good attempt at capturing the movie’s intensity.

I just wasn’t impressed with the game as an overall end-product. With the money Virgin has, they could have published a much better game. Terminator gets 3 out of 10 from me. It was almost depressing how “throwaway” this effort seemed.

Devil Crash MD/Dragon’s Fury

Naxat/Technosoft, 1991

“Are you just using this as an excuse to talk about Devil Crash again?”

Yes. Yes I am.

It’s no secret that I love the Naxat “Crash” pinball series. Virtual pinball is a great way to pass time, and Naxat fucking nailed it with Alien Crush and Devil Crash. Unfortunately, my PC-Engine emulator is on the fritz, so I’ve been playing the Mega Drive version of Devil Crash (called Dragon’s Fury in its North American release for the Genesis) to feed the beast.

Nothing is really lost in translation from platform to platform. The game still looks gorgeous, rife with cartoon-occult schlock imagery and straight-up Halloween wickedness. The Mega Drive’s YM2612 handles the music well, although it doesn’t seem as “blended” smooth as it does on the TG-16. Small loss, though. Play is the same; in fact I even think the game handles a little bit better on the Mega Drive. That might just be me, though. I’m very good at deluding myself. (I even call myself a writer sometimes.)

She’s still there, and she’s still a real knockout. Hubba Hubba!

The only thing that bothers me about the MD port of Devil Crash is that they named the American version Dragon’s Fury and pointlessly watered down a lot of the weird occult content. I understand the motives and all, you want to protect your children from the nefarious secret Satan codes they put in the video games… but we were way too fucking soft about this kind of thing back then. You gotta know the Enemy to fight him, and the best arena for that is pinball. Put on the Armor of God and hit the paddles!

As a solid port and a great game on its own merit, I give Devil Crash MD 8 out of 10.

I will catch you in a day or two for part 2 of this one, folks. Stay Retro!

This Grab Bag is devoted to that idea. I’ve snagged three titles that, well-known or not, embody the absurdity so often encountered in classic (and, let’s be fair, modern) gaming.

Jail Break

Konami, 1986

Arcade

The basic plot of this one is that a small army of criminals have escaped from the jail/prison/whatever, and it’s up to one cop to stop their wave of violence. They’ve taken a bunch of hostages and inexplicably not just scattered across the country, working cohesively for reasons only guessed at. It’s your job to bring them all back in, dead or alive.

My best guess is that this is meant as an existential question.

As if to stress that last part, gameplay consists primarily of running forward, wildly firing your gun. Once in a while, a hostage will appear and call out to you in fairly clear digitized speech. Don’t fucking kill them. Kill the 1,000 identical shirtless dudes in striped pants trying to kill you. They all have iron balls on chains attached to their legs, but somehow are about as mobile as you. This is it. This is Jail Break.

Why, hello there, citizen.

Ridiculous Shit:

• You can get a bazooka and other weapons, you know, like cops constantly have somehow.
• Sometimes when you shoot a barrel, Batman pops out of it, and he’s got no shirt on.
• The female hostage with a baby yells “help, I’m over here” when it’s pretty obvious where she is… running straight towards you through a hail of gunfire.
• If you kill a bad guy who’s firing at you from a window, he momentarily turns into a nude woman.
• On the last level, the gate of the prison says “WELLCOME” above it in blood.
• Just like Circus Charlie, this shit continues forever. The Replay Burners video of it is over 5 hours long.

Toilet Kids

Bits Laboratory, 1992

PC-Engine/TurboGrafx-16

A pale horse if there ever was one.

Although I’m not particularly religious, I am often heard to quote the Book of John, Chapter 11, Verse 35. This game is one of those entries in our hobby’s history that spills the verse from my mouth like a font of woe.

A positively nightmare-driven spread from the game’s manual. This came from the mind of someone who belongs in a special cage. A rubberized one.

I’m unclear on the story being told here, except that it is disgusting and probably illegal. Some kid goes and sits on the toilet, presumably in the middle of the night (guessing by the darkness) and gets… whisked to a magical world of shit and piss. The entire thing is presented as a vertical overhead shoot-em-up that borders on spiritual devastation, at least for me. If you earnestly like this game, that’s your business, but I also hate you in a raw and instinctive way I can’t overcome. I’m sorry.

Ridiculous Shit:

• You are riding a flying Japanese-style commode through a mystical land of scatological references.
• Human butts on creatures that are universally far from human
• disembodied, uncircumcised dicks that fly forward, rotate toward you, and spray in offensive formation
• hippos that barf literal shit at you
• Almost every enemy is a butt, has a butt it shouldn’t, uses its butt to hurt you, or just hurls these perfectly round bullets of excreta (either actual literal dookie balls or mysteriously round orbs of piss) toward you like a scat-obsessed Galaga bad guy
• who did this
• why
• WHY

MC Kids

Virgin Games, 1991

NES

I’m not ragging on this one because it’s a licensed McDonald’s game. That’s fine. I understand the desire of businesses to market themselves however they deem effective. My feelings on it, for the purpose of this article, are largely irrelevant.

I want to do all of these things. This makes total sense. I am motivated. Let’s go.

This game is also pretty clearly an attempt to clone Super Mario Bros. 3’s gameplay from the ground up, and it’s not terrible in that respect… it’s just not a great imitation.

1. Who is this 2. What does he hope to achieve here 3. Why am I playing this

I don’t know… there’s just something surreal about this one, and it’s hard to put my finger on. It’s a combination of the above two mentioned elements, and a few others: maybe it’s the sometimes out-of-place enemies, the weird leering presence of Ronald everywhere, or even the harrowing journey through what looks like a “blood world” later on to reach Hamburglar’s hideout. Why would they put a kid through this?

Blood World. Easily recognizable as part of canonical McDonalds imagery.

Ridiculous Shit:

• You’re sort of solving a problem out of your pay grade; if Ronald and the crew can’t get Hamburglar’s raging addiction under control or at least stage an intervention, what the fuck are you supposed to do
• Sometimes it’s kind of like the enemies/hazards were tossed in as an afterthought; in fact, despite them, the game still comes across as Mario 3 Lite
• Hamburglar lives separate from the other McDonalds characters by way of what closely resembles a hellish world of blood

I can’t denounce these games fully, for to do so would be to exclude them from the spectacle that draws each of us in and hooks us. Part of the video gamer lives for action, but another part suckles at the teat of the bizarre and somehow draws nourishment. We dine on this fare, and we are (despite all notions of rational thought or common sense) thankful for the bounty of providence. In closing, may the world of video games never stop offering us the occasional absurdity. It would perhaps detract from the creativity inherent in the market, and result in a loss of vitality for video games. That’s scarier to think about than an entire game about McDonald’s or poop.