Toejam & Earl (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Today on Super Adventures I'm inflicting my first impressions of ToeJam & Earl upon the world, though I get the feeling that the world probably has a much better idea of what this is than I do. I've never played it, I've never really seen it, and all I know about it is that it's described as being a roguelike, and that people apparently bought enough copies of it at the time for it to get a couple of sequels.

One thing I'm certain of is that it's not based on a cartoon, though that title screen made me double check. Nope, these two debuted exclusively on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, and pretty much stayed there until the third game in the ToeJam Trilogy ended up landing on Xbox a decade later. I guess the developers determined that the SNES just wasn't sufficiently funky.

Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis/Mega Drive) - Replay

Super Adventures in Gaming Replay 2014 - Game 3

With a distant rumbling that sounds more like screechy irritating static, rises the lavender fortress of the Fatal Labyrinth! Again!

Today I'm going to take another look at this classic Sega roguelike on the Genesis/Mega Drive. Though I don't mean I'm literally going to take just one glance at it and then turn it right off like I did last time, I promise.

Despite being a first party Sega title the game doesn't start with my beloved 'say-gah!' jingle, but just this once I can forgive them for not including it as the game is tiny. There's around 128k of content here, eight times less than your typical Genesis/Mega Drive cart. In fact this is even smaller than the average Master System game, though there's a good reason for its diminutive nature and that's because the game was actually a download only title in Japan.

Seriously, you'd connect a 1200 bit/s Meganet Mega Modem to your Mega Drive (only 47 times slower than 56k) and then download the game onto a Sega Game Library cart. Or more likely you wouldn't, as it was never released in the West and nobody bought the device in Japan. Even the home banking keypad add-on couldn't make the poor Meganet into a success! Sega eventually had to admit defeat on this one and redesigned the console in later revisions to remove the EXT modem port entirely. And that's the story of what the EXT port was for.