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My favourite Mega Drive games

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From a request on RLLMUK, my favourite ten games for the Mega Drive.

Virtua Racing
Three tracks, one car, minimum of content, £60. Utterly amazing and worth every penny. Magazines warned that it wasn't as good as the arcade game, but that didn't matter - the freedom it gave in terms of being able to steer any way around the circuit and not be shifted to the edge of the screen - it felt like the future.

Sonic 2
I won this in a competition in Mega. Release day came, and I had no Sonic 2. A week later, no Sonic 2. Another week, and I had a letter from the magazine apologising for the delay. I eventually got the game a month and a half after everyone had completed it - and yet I still love it. My favourite Sonic game, just.

Street Fighter II Special Champion Edition
When combined with the six-button pad (which I still feel is the epitome of digital pad design), this is the perfect fighter. I spent hundreds of hours on this; I even got a new Mega Drive (replacing my original Japanese model, as SC2 was region-locked) just to play it.

Aladdin
Far better than the SNES game. The rug ride level has one of the most memorable tunes in any game, and I can still remember where to go to get the genie's heads.

Micro Machines 96
A toss-up between this and MM2, but the courses on this are just a bit better. Amazing with four players.

Shining Force
I'd never played a strategy RPG before this; I've still not played one as good. An involving story, great characters and well-balanced gameplay.

NHL Hockey '93
I didn't play ice hockey. I'd never watched a match. None of my friends ever had either. Why, then, was this game so routinely played whenever we went to each others' houses? You felt so stylish grabbing the puck and slaloming up the pitch before shooting and scoring - later versions may have added four-player but they felt a bit too clunky and heavy.

Toe Jam and Earl
If you play it now, it feels so slow and awkward. How did I ever have the patience to complete it? I did, though, several times over. Special mention must go to level zero, where TJ&E get to bathe in a hot tub.

Quackshot
The Disney platformers were almost all great. I feel this is the best of the bunch, though Castle of Illusion is very close behind.  I don't think of Aladdin as a Disney platformer for some reason; it's a film licence.

The tenth place goes to Road Rash. And Desert Strike. And Populous. And Mega Lo Mania. And Mega Bomberman. And Thunderforce III.  Too many great games!

Oh, and the two-player mode of Lemmings was genius. 

Lego City Undercover: an expanding city

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I've now completed 10% of the game, apparently, but I'm not sure what that measures.  There are huge numbers of collectibles and random tasks to carry out in the city, such as finding certain boulders, blowing up silver statues, capturing aliens, and so on. The map is huge and I've not really worked out where things are yet.  There are areas I've not been to and then last night I found out that there's a sewer system as well ...


Some of the sub-missions are quite daft.  I was robbing a bank in order to get into a criminal gang, and one of the tasks I had to perform was to clean the floors.


This was just a little daft, and also rather frustrating as it wasn't obvious what I had to do next - I was running around the inside of the bank worried that the police were going to turn up, when in fact I should have been getting onto the automatic mop.  It controlled like a pig, too.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Wii-U)

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Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate box artI’m going on a bear hunt! I’m looking for a scary one! As the song goes. Well, I certainly did find a scary one – he’s an Arzuros and his picture is down the bottom there. For this quest, I had to weaken him to a point where the tranquiliser would be effective. This involved wailing on him with dual-blades for a good twenty minutes. The trouble is, the animation is so flawless that it was kind of upsetting to do. Okay, at the start of the level he’s all drool and rage and swipey claws, but by the time I’d worn him down a bit he was limping from area to area and falling over when he tried to charge. Poor beastie.

Arzuros

Anyway, consider him captured. Now – I’m off to farm Great Jaggis to upgrade my armour…

Oh – also, the ability to move the savegame between the 3DS and Wii-U (and back again) is awesome. As long as you remember to move it back again when you’re done :)

Thomas Was Alone: blocks with personality

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I'm not sure how I feel about Thomas Was Alone. Its basic graphic style doesn't subtract anything from the gameplay, and in many ways it enhances the story and narrative, with faceless blocks being given ordinary names. The narration explores the thoughts of these blocks and is really well written. Parts of it have made me laugh a lot.

Claire needed to come up with a superhero name. 'Claire' was rubbish.

But the actual game feels pretty uninspired. The idea of each level is to get all characters into defined positions. Different blocks have different properties - Claire, for example, can float on water. None of the puzzles are particularly taxing, however, and often I'll get to the end of the level before the narration has finished. I can appreciate the style of the game, but it's not the most engaging thing to play.

Papers, Please: sending people off to die

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Quite a grim game, it must be said, and difficult as well.  You play as a border control official in a 1980s communist country, and must verify passport details and grant or deny access.  As you work through the game, the complexity of your task increases - entry tickets, entry permits, work permits, ID cards, fingerprint searches, X-ray scanning ... all of this serves to slow you down, you make mistakes, and you serve fewer travellers in a day.

And serving fewer travellers is bad, as you get paid per traveller and it's not just you relying on your salary.  You will find yourself faced with choices over who gets the needed medicine, and whether food is affordable.  Couple this with days ending early due to terrorist attacks, and you may soon find yourself alone.



The game's currently in beta and ends after a few days.  There are some intriguing plot narratives which start to open, with people asking you to refuse entry to a certain individual to protect them, cards passed across with secret society details, and husbands and wives broken up.  There's a repeat character that turns up with fake details each day, and I'd be intrigued to see if he ever gets everything together.

It's brutally hard to keep your family well, and for the final game I hope there's an easier mode (maybe unlocked after playing the main difficulty, which highlights the difficult conditions in those countries at the time) where you're not expected to earn quite as much.  Even after much practice, the third day still saw me with virtually no savings to carry forwards.


I recommend that you all play this at some point, whether it's now or when it's eventually released.  Details can be found at http://papersplea.se/.