Keio Flying Squadron (Sega Mega CD)

Developer:

Victor

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Release Date:

1994 (1993 in Japan)

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Systems:

Sega Mega CD

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing a shoot 'em up on the Mega CD!

I haven't really written about a Mega CD game since Popful Mail six years ago, and it's been a while since I've played a shoot 'em up as well. The trouble with shoot 'em ups, is they're either really hard, in which case all I end up writing about is the various ways I got my dude exploded, or they're really easy, in which case all I write is "I'm still shooting at things," and "I'm kind of bored now."

But I figured I should give you at least one proper old-school side-scrolling shooter this year, so I went with the game where you play as a girl wearing a 1960s Playboy bunny suit in 1860s Japan. I checked a list of games I've written about so far, and it's an under-represented sub-genre.

Oh here's some trivia for you, straight from Wikipedia: the December 1994 issue of Sega Pro CD magazine included a demo disc for the game that ended after the first level. But you can use a level select cheat to skip past the part that sends you back to the title screen and keep playing it to the end, because they secretly included the entire full game on the disc.

Demolition Man (Mega Drive/SNES)

Developer:

Alexandria

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

Mega Drive/Genesis, Mega CD, SNES

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This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at another movie tie-in! I hope it's better than that Stargate platformer I played a while ago. Though it will be a platformer, there's no doubt of that.

Demolition Man is a apparently one of just three games developed by Alexandria before they vanished in late 1995, with the others being Sylvester and Tweety in Cagey Capers... and Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings, which I wrote about way back in the days when I didn't write much. In fact I kind of sucked and so did that game.

Speaking of 1995, that's also the year that the game was released, which is pretty late for a 16-bit console game, especially one that's based on a 1993 movie. They weren't exactly striking when the iron was hot there. In fact if it'd come out any later then the dystopian future levels would actually be set in the past.

By the way I'm playing the Mega Drive/SNES Demolition Man not the 3DO game, which is one of those variety pack licensed film tie-ins that keep switching genre and are invariably terrible. Though it does have the genuine movie soundtrack and includes FMV clips of Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Jesse Ventura filmed exclusively for the game! The Mega Drive and SNES versions, on the other hand, don't. But what they do have is a title that literally explodes onto the screen letter by letter in little bursts of flame before a synthy guitar riff plays, and that's cool too.

Popful Mail: Magical Fantasy Adventure (Sega Mega CD)

Today I'm finally getting around to ticking another game off my insanely long and shamefully neglected Requested Games list: Popful Mail, on the Sega CD. I'm reasonably certain this has nothing to do with Pop'n Twinbee or Magical Pop'n, but the 'mail' part I'm not so sure about. I'm getting a mental image of an anime-styled platformer where I have to jump around a forest delivering letters to... I dunno, squirrels.

The US Sega CD version originally had a different name for a while actually, as it was going to be called Sister Sonic. The plan was to replace the cast with Sonic the Hedgehog characters, similar to how Super Mario Bros. 2 was a remake of Doki Doki Panic, but when news of this got out Popful fans managed to put a stop to it with a fan campaign.

Snatcher (Sega Mega CD)

By request, today I'm taking a quick look at Snatcher, Hideo Kojima's next project after he finished Metal Gear.

It was originally made in 1988 for the PC-8801 home computer, but only in Japanese (you wouldn't find many PC-88s outside of Japan). It took 6 years for the game to finally get an English release on the Mega CD, so that's the one I'm playing. All the other versions, MSX2, PC Engine, PlayStation and Saturn, are all in Japanese only.

The Misadventures of Flink (Sega Mega CD)

They didn't even need to write 'Psygnosis' on screen, I can tell it's one of their games just from the logo.

Jurassic Park (Sega Mega CD)

Adventures in Jurassic Park, part 7.

That's pretty understated compared to the other games. They didn't even add the red lines to the centre of the letters. The music's pretty bad though, it's a shame none of these games have used any of the John Williams movie soundtrack.