Console Crunch #6 - Game Sack

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack and we are finally finally doing an episode on the sega genesis i can't tell you how many times i've seen comments in our episodes like when are you going to cover the genesis do the genesis well you know what we're not going to have any more of that are we joe i mean because the time is finally here and yeah let's just get right into it with an overview from joe the sega genesis video entertainment [Music] system [Music] sega's true 16-bit console launched in japan as the mega drive in october of 1988. for trademark reasons the name was changed to genesis for its august 1989 launch in north america however it kept his mega drive name when it launched in powell territories in 1990 sega promised arcade quality games compared to the wimpy 8-bit consoles that we were used to and it absolutely delivered sega brought us into the next generation with high definition graphics and a controller with not just two but three action buttons eventually the system got an amazing six button controller [Music] in order to achieve its unprecedented arcade-like quality the genesis was supplied with a 68 000 cpu running at 7.67 megahertz it also had an 8-bit xylox z80 at 3.58 megahertz for backwards compatibility and also ran the sound in many games it had a resolution of 224 pixels high and either 320 or 256 pixels wide it's got 512 colors with 61 of them on screen 80 simultaneous sprites and stereo audio with 10 channels of sound six of them being fm powered by a yamaha 2612 sega released a powerbase converter which allowed you to play your library of exciting master system games on the console using the internal 8-bit z80 cpu many other outstanding peripherals for the system were released like the sega cd and the ill-fated 32x the console also had many revisions both externally and especially internally many of the later revisions produced very low quality sound compared to the earlier models there were more than 700 official games released for the system with some very ambitious new ones still being released to this day overall the console is still on the market in some countries in one form or another and has sold well over 30 million units worldwide [Music] all right man really cool i mean what else is there to say awesome video well there is a lot more to say because what is the system without games and without further ado let's get into those games the first game we're going to check out is altered beast since it was the original packing game for the genesis it's a fairly faithful part of the arcade you play as a roman centurion who's been brought back from the elysian fields by zeus to rescue athena from the evil neph how he got his hands on her we'll never know but i do like the cut scenes neff is pretty tough so you'll need a little extra power to be able to take him down each level has these white two-headed wolves that will release a spirit ball when you kill them you'll turn into a beast with the third one there's a different beast for pretty much every level and each beast has different powers that are actually fun to use well more or less i really don't like the bare spit bubble attack though it's cool that it turns enemies to stone but other than that it's just little spit anyway this is still a fun game to play every now and again but it's damn short [Music] next is dynamite duke originally by sibu kaihatsu in this side-scrolling game you take control of this ugly bastard colonel duke rip him but you can call him dynamite duke though duke is special as he's half human and half bionic with a lethal right arm it plays sort of like cabal or wild guns only different as each level automatically scrolls to the right you'll be machine gunning down all sorts of bad guys tanks helicopters and turrets don't worry about ammo since you'll find enough along the way by shooting random objects this is cool and a little hard to control but the real fun starts at boss fights duke also has the ability to punch and kick bosses when they rush at him i like the idea but again it's a little tough to control luckily you have the dynamite duke lethal arm thingy if you get stuck in a bad situation with a boss or on a level just hold in the punch button to charge up the dynamite meter once it's charged and you let go you do a fairly lethal punch i like this game as there really isn't anything else like it in the library [Music] [Music] donald duck even got his own exclusive game on the system called quack shot this action platformer is a bit different and will have you doing a lot more than just going from the start of a level to the end you'll get to a point where you can't progress and from here you'll need to call your airplane piloted by your nephews they'll take you to another level where you can find what you need so you can keep making progress these can be a key or plungers that you can stand on to reach higher areas you know that plunger gun always bothered me in this game instead of killing your enemies it just stuns them so you can get by without any harm it's not very satisfying but you know what can you do you do have other weapons such as the popcorn gun but you have to collect ammo for it and it runs out very quickly all in all it's a fun game that controls well looks good and plays solid if you're a disney fan like me then you must have this game for your collection [Music] the genesis was known for its action games and it had tons of great ones it received great ports of arcade games like capcom's ghouls and ghosts this is still my favorite entry in the entire ghosts and goblins franchise it's a really early game so it's not as good as it could have been on the system but it's still awesome [Music] or how about strider also licensed from capcom you certainly weren't gonna find a port of the arcade version on the nes or the super nintendo that's for sure it's clunky and weird but definitely in a good way it's also short and very easy just like my first girlfriend be sure to make an effort to try this one out [Music] the revenge of shinobi was an evolution of the arcade game and it added lots of strategy and great music you also had a new double jump to master and now you have to worry about conserving shuriken that is unless you know the secret you weren't gonna beat this one the first time you played it but it's worth coming back to again and again [Music] shadow dancer followed that up and it's a lot more arcadey than revenge of shinobi and since it has one hit deaths most people really don't bother with this one but really everyone should play it it's extremely fun [Music] and let's not forget about shinobi 3. this one is the true follow-up to revenge of shinobi it's also an amazing game in its own right and better than most other ninja games on pretty much every [Music] platform we can't forget beat em ups because the genesis had streets of rage the first game really helped the genesis stand out at the time as it was two-player simultaneous where his final fight on the newly released super nintendo was single player only streets of rage 2 really upped the ante as ancient took over most of the development and it's still one of the best beat-em-ups of all time streets of rage 3 sure wasn't any slouch either hell any game where you can punch a bulldozer is a-okay in my book yeah i know i've mentioned that before but it feels awesome of course lots of third parties were on board to help out like konami rocket knight adventures was a great new ip and it had tons of potential the initial entry here is great but unfortunately konami didn't put as much effort into the follow-ups they did however put a lot of effort into contra hardcore this game is absolutely insane if you thought contra 3 on the super nintendo was tough you haven't seen nothing this one offers branching paths and multiple endings and also crazy extreme fast moving graphics that well frankly put the competition to shame you've got to try this one out for yourself they even brought castlevania to the genesis castlevania bloodlines is kind of quirky in a lot of ways like having gems instead of hearts but it's still castlevania and it's still awesome you're able to play as one of two characters and since this is on the genesis is packed with a little bit more tude and plenty more gore than it would have been on other systems the music here is amazing as is usually the case with castlevania games everyone should own six copies just in [Music] case [Music] and of course we can't forget treasure treasure was formed by a group of employees who got sick of konami's nonsense so they made their own company and created their own kind of nonsense and gun star heroes here is their unique take on the run and gun formula for the most part it works out really well and it's extremely fun all the way through well almost [Music] and of course there's also alien soldier visual shock speed shock sound shock now is the time to the 68 000 heart on fire and that's all you need to know about the game's story sadly this one wasn't released in north america you play as some sort of super chicken and the game is basically just a run and gun boss rush in fact it makes contra hardcore look like a baby game set on easy actually this one can get a lot easier once you learn it you're invincible as you dash and you can do that as much as you want you get a single life and then it's game over it's brutal but once you get the hang of it it's awesome keep using that continue feature you're gonna need it all right man this is a total solid library so far i mean a lot of awesome action type games yeah but there are some racing games so why don't you tell us about those okay [Music] okay joe let's talk about racing games outrun is one of the best arcade racing games out there and the genesis port is pretty good you drive a ferrari and you must reach the checkpoint before time runs out or it's game over apparently every other car on the damn road is also racing to beat checkpoints have you ever seen a normal car or truck going 170 plus miles per hour what makes this game so special is that at the end of each stage you choose which way you want to go left is easier while ride is harder and of course each stage has its own background which is cool and keeps the racing from getting stale all in all there is a total of 15 different stages for you to experience not only that but there's four music tracks to pick from that's right there's a new tune exclusive to the genesis version the original three are really good and they're long enough that they don't loop i love arcade racing games and this series is the pinnacle the only somewhat questionable thing about it is that it uses the japanese stage layout versus the more common international one why there's even a difference i don't know [Music] if you're looking for another exciting arcade racer then there's hard driving the excitement never stops and the polygons are super fast and smooth just kidding this game is neither smooth nor fast as the genesis is doing all the work itself but the console got a little help later on for virtua racing this cart uses the svp chip in fact this is the only genesis game that uses a helper chip and probably for good reason as this title was a hundred dollars brand new at the time this game looked amazing and seeing the genesis run polygons like this was just jaw dropping looking at it today it's really aged luckily the game is fun and the racing is pretty intense your car controls well and it won't take long for you to get that great feeling of cornering and flying down straightaways the downfall is that there's only three tracks which seems pretty slim and even if you win a track you just get a game over it's too bad the svp chip didn't take off as this was a decent first title [Music] and of course the road rash games are combat racing games your goal is to get to the finish line in first place which will mean a lot of punching and kicking opponents out of your way the first road rash was a great surprise and was easy to just pick up and play it feels so good just to beat the crap out of everyone as you're flying down the road toward the finish line winning races gives you money that you can use to buy faster bikes the game is great fun but i'll be honest i'm not a fan of the soundtrack road rash 2 is what you'd expect in a good sequel more of the same action with slightly better graphics and refined control not that the control needed to be refined since it was already good to begin with i love the ability to steal your opponent's weapons be it a chain or a club a plethora of new tracks and more bikes to be purchased makes this game different enough that it never gets old but what did get old was the music as is slightly better but i'm still not a fan then came road rash three i wasn't really pleased with the direction they took graphically they decided to digitize all the characters it was a popular thing to do at the time but it just looks clunky and ugly and the lighting of the characters looks unnatural the good thing is even though the character graphics are bad it still plays in controls just as well as the previous games this entry has you racing all over the world not only can you buy new bikes but you can upgrade your current one and i gotta say it again although the music here tries to match the country you're racing in it just isn't good it doesn't matter though since the racing is so fun the music is really just background noise if there ever was a series of games to be called an instant classic this would be one of them there would be absolutely no way that we couldn't mention sonic the hedgehog in a genesis video neither dave or i are the biggest fans of the character but we certainly don't dislike his genesis appearances sega knew that they needed a fun mascot to help people identify with the console and the company so they went hard to work internally and eventually settled on sonic his first game was really good and it definitely helped catapult sega into the realm of cultural awareness and profitability you're a blue hedgehog and your goal in this game is to go to the right well except when you go to the left or up or down it's definitely not as simple as just holding right and jumping sometimes as some people would have you believe the game is very easy to get into and eventually it was included as a pack-in with the genesis console itself this was a great idea to help sell systems and sell systems they did [Music] sonic 2 of course came next and improved on a lot of stuff from the first game like adding a spin dash also the game was less repetitive with only two zones per stage and they added tails who i've got to admit i've never really been fond of at all thankfully you can turn his ass [Music] off then sonic 3 came along and i always felt that the graphics were grittier in this one sonic is also now cross-eyed and looks much worse in my opinion but it still plays like a sonic game and now you can get new power-ups in each stage and you can even save your progress then sonic and knuckles was released and it could be played as a standalone game but the main selling point to this one is that you could attach sonic 3 to it for one giant adventure basically this is what sonic 3 was originally supposed to be with all of the stages intact the level design here is really good and very well thought out more good news is that the game doesn't really feel repetitious at all multiple zones are treated like big single stages and exploring is highly encouraged though the graphics are grittier like i mentioned they're still really good and have some cool effects here and there the music ranges from extremely boring and mundane to outstanding it's almost as if a talented and very famous pop star worked on some of the tracks and some other guy worked on the rest also you could attach sonic 2 and play his knuckles in that game as well it's definitely a cool idea and sonic and knuckles attached to sonic 3 is usually considered the definitive sonic the hedgehog experience [Music] in 1996 sega released sonic 3d blast which was surprisingly not developed by them instead it was made by traveler's tails this one is a little bit odd and kind of overwhelming at first you run around big isometric stages killing enemies and taking their flickies you need to deposit all of the flickies at the rings to gain access to the next part of the stage it all feels very maze-like especially at first but it doesn't take too long to get used to the play mechanics the thing that messes me up the most of course is the isometric view still this game has amazing graphics with tons of cool effects i mean look at the scrolling underneath the bridge that sonic is running on yep it's scrolling exactly like axle on the super nintendo genesis does [ __ ] well i guess the super nintendo does too but that doesn't count it certainly doesn't help my argument what am i saying i mean yeah go genesis blast processing yeah even the music is fantastic and some of it would reappear in sonic adventure on the dreamcast at the end of 2017 the programmer of this game john burton released a director's cut patch offering many new tweaks and features to make the game better the additions are beyond the scope of this particular video but it's still extremely cool that the original developer went back and did this and it's definitely worth playing i've recommended john burton's youtube channel game hut before but if you haven't checked it out be sure to do so yes there's still one more sonic game on the genesis but i'm gonna let dave talk about that one in a few seconds [Music] and here's the black sheep of the sonic library on the genesis sonic spinball i say black sheep because a lot of people don't like it and it seems that the ones that do like it don't want to admit it personally i like it and i'm not afraid to say so in this video pinball game you bounce sonic around trying to find three emeralds on fairly large play fields typically you have to unlock the area the emerald is located by triggering something after you find all three emeralds you fight a boss and move on to the next level there's little bonus rounds in between boards that are a nice addition i actually find the game fairly easy to control and with a bit of effort you can make some skilled shots to me the only downfall is the music which isn't good at all each board has its own theme but the tracks are short and very repetitive oh and the game only scrolls at 30 frames per second so it can look pretty choppy compared to the other sonic games but if you like video pinball this one may be worth your time here's pulse man by game freak you know the people that made pokemon or something like that anyway this action platformer is pretty intense and was never released physically in north america it did show up on the sega channel though and the wii shop you play as pulse man who can channel electricity through his body he uses it as a weapon and he can also use it to pinball off the walls and ceilings allowing himself to get to higher platforms and kill enemies along the way it takes a bit to get used to controlling him but once you start getting the hang of it the game becomes really fun each level has lots of hidden areas that hold icons to collect for health and other things always seek out health icons since pulse man can only take three hits before he dies if you haven't noticed already the game is super colorful and the background graphics are just plain crazy at times almost to the point where they're more distracting than enjoyable still a fun game and if you do get a physical copy of this you'll need a game genie and a code to play it on a us system [Music] how about some echo the dolphin adds some variety to the genesis library developed by novo trade you take control of echo as he tries to figure out what happened to his dolphin pod you'll meet many different types of sea life along your way some are friendly and ready to help you and some are not friendly and would rather you just die not everything is easy in the deep blue of the ocean and you'll have to figure out puzzles along the way most are pretty easy but some will have you scratching your head echo has both a life bar and an air bar the life bar will deplete when you get hit by enemy fish not a problem since all you have to do is eat small fish to replenish it air on the other hand is harder to come by the developers did a good job though of putting little pockets of air here and there and it's always nice to find these right before you run out of oxygen [Music] echo had a sequel called tides of time there's a lot more of the same here and that's not a bad thing but there's some new stuff here as well the puzzles get a little bit harder and there's a lot more enemies that you'll have to fight or avoid i like taking echo through the warp gates back in the day this looked amazing and even today it still feels really good playing through these parts the one thing about these games that i'm not a fan of is the music and that's probably because i heard the soundtracks for the sega cd installments before i played the cartridge versions [Music] lastly there's echo junior which is geared towards the younger kids you can play as young echo or one of his two friends it has similar play mechanics like the swimming and the sonar but you can't eat fish because you don't want to have little echo killing things in a game for kids right i'm not sure how much kids would really like this one though is it still slightly cryptic in what you need to do all in all these are decent games that are worth a try just for the fact that they're different the genesis was home to a lot of shooters especially early in the console's life in fact we did an entire episode a while back featuring each and every shooter for the system or shoot-em-ups as some people call them let's look at some of the more notable shooters like musha this one was released in the us by a publisher called seismic but it was programmed by compile or compile compile in this overhead vertically scrolling title you take control of a mech it plays similar to the other titles and compiles a lest series you collect little p icons to power up your main gun you also have different sub weapons that you can collect as well as little options that you can store these options not only help your firepower but they also protect you so keep collecting those p icons every chance you get to keep enough in reserve really good graphics for a four megabit cart as well as amazing music will help you understand why this game is so desired and therefore so costly these days one very important series on the genesis is thunder force by technosoft thunder force 2 was a launch game for the console and it was definitely my favorite of that batch it features free roaming top down segments which confused and turned off a lot of gamers but i enjoyed them it also had side scrolling stages which was a first for the series the music is amazing especially for such an early title with lots of power and bass [Music] thunder force 3 sure kicked things up a notch with even better gameplay and design gone are the top view stages and the game is better for it now you keep all of your weapons after you die except for the one that you were using when you got hit the graphics have improved and so has the music however this is an entry-level shooter and it's super easy anyone can beat it with their eyes closed but that doesn't mean you won't have a great time [Music] and of course in my opinion thunder force 4 is the pinnacle of the entire series this was technosoft's first and only 8 megabit cartridge and they squeezed a ton of stuff into this rather small amount of memory the weapons are more balanced this time around and so is the gameplay it's not easy by any means but it's absolutely beatable if you practice this game feels much more mature than parts 2 and 3 yet still very much a part of the same family amazing graphics absolutely phenomenal music and outstanding gameplay not only make this the best shooter on the genesis but perhaps one of the best shooters ever made this one was released in the us by sega and the name was changed to lightening force they must have been on drugs or something but did you know that before that tengan was actually planning on releasing this game and keeping the name thunder force 4 and also keeping the same box artwork as the japanese mega drive release yeah it's true the issue is that sega had the first right of refusal and sadly for the gaming community they didn't refuse still be sure to play this game no matter what it says on the title screen [Music] if you want something a little bit more down to earth and not set in outer space there's always fire shark in this one you fly an airplane fight bad guys and you never even leave the planet it plays like a lot of other toy plan shooters but what really makes this one stand out is when you fully power up your fire weapon i mean wow but it's still a really fun vertical shooter even if it didn't have that crazy weapon dude i can't believe how strong this freaking library is i mean look at those shooters indeed they are amazing aren't they oh yeah but we've still got more to go and let's talk about one of your favorites game ground yeah i love that game [Music] game ground is one of those games that really isn't anything special to most people for me on the other hand i simply love this game i love the ridiculous plot where the people of the future of gonsaf so the government creates a computer program to help people learn to fight for survival the computer goes berserk and captures everyone and now it's up to three warriors determined to survive and help save their fellow men and women the game is simple as all you have to do is get your people to the exit of a single screen board certain stages will have captured people that you can rescue and use on future boards some are good at killing enemies that are higher up while others have long range shots that can go across the whole board so yeah there's a tiny bit of strategy to be had here it also helps that the game has a good soundtrack definitely a great game for your genesis [Music] hide library kids and hide your wife as the handiest grubbiest character ever wrist star this title came out in early 1995 and a lot of people overlooked it since it was right before the release of the saturn this dude is all hands and that's not a bad thing this unique take on a platformer is fun and easy to get the hang of he uses his hands and long arms to dispatch enemies and bosses he also uses them to grab onto walls and trees to make his way across levels and to avoid spikes and other pitfalls the levels are all well designed to take advantage of the clingy gameplay they're pretty big and there's lots of things to discover the music is pretty good as there's more than a few tunes with catchy melodies restart does have a few digitized voices but god they sound like crap play with me no thanks if you have a genesis i recommend finding a copy of this one if you like strategy rpgs then the genesis has you covered not only are there great games like master of monsters and warsong but also shining force this one was originally released in 1993 and it took the world by storm well maybe it didn't but it sure swept me away the awesome cover art really made me want to battle skeletons and all other sorts of medieval characters i love everything about this game since it's so easy to get into battling enemies is fun and straightforward as each of your characters has a set amount of spaces they can move in an attack range there's a nice variety in characters and as you advance in the story you meet more that will join you they're all interchangeable and it's up to you who you want to send into battle it won't take long for them to start leveling up and getting more powerful this is one game that i wish were longer than it is i felt like i was just getting warmed up when i was fighting the final battle [Music] it's okay though since sega released shining force 2 a year later again i fell in love with this game mainly because it was more of the same sega didn't change anything in terms of control so it's still super easy to navigate the menu system is straightforward and everything is labeled so there won't be any confusion you do have to watch the computer move its own characters around the map but it does it as quickly as possible with very little annoyance there's slight upgrades to the graphics with a bit more animation during battles the music is still pretty darn good and i like it just fine for these games when people ask me to recommend some good genesis games these are usually some of the first ones i talk about while the genesis didn't have nearly as many rpgs as a super nintendo that doesn't mean that there weren't any good ones on the system the three most prominent jrpgs were the fantasy star series fantasy star 2 was an early title and also the sequel to the most popular game on the master system it takes place 1 000 years later and introduces us to a lot of different characters that we can have in our party there were some disappointments like only being able to fight on a blue grid background when the original game featured lush graphics in the battle scenes also the amount of grinding that you need to do is pretty high it's a well playing fun game but the story is often very sad regardless i've played through it completely at least three or four times and even today recording the gameplay footage i found myself wanting to keep going because it is kind of addictive once you figure out how it all works which isn't that difficult by the way [Music] fantasy star 3 came out only a year later which is extremely quick for an rpg sequel while this one doesn't feature the science fiction setting of the first two games and feels really out of place it's still worth playing through the battles are fast and peppy though there's not much animation still there are multiple endings and like i said it's worth playing [Music] but a few years after that we finally got fantasy star 4 the end of the millennium and this is the sequel that the fans deserved it takes everything that was good about the previous games and makes it better you have the zippy battles from fantasy star 3. you can see the characters attack like in fantasy star 2 and you have really nice battle backgrounds like in fantasy star 1. it also had 24 mega power yeah you guys were waiting for me to do that in this episode weren't you the story even acknowledges events from the previous three games which made me enjoy it even more everything is also much more visual this time around with lots of character graphics popping up during the dialogue and the battle macros that you can create really make the random battles and boss fights a lot more fun this is one of the very best rpgs that i've ever played and you are absolutely missing out if you haven't tried it especially if you like rpgs follow gamesack on twitter at gametech and at gamesac dave on instagram at gamesac official and check out our patreon if you want splatterhouse in my opinion is one of the most underrated series out there the genesis got two entries starting with splatterhouse 2. this title is a great sequel to the first game the evil mask that you wear has a mind of its own and is beckoning you back to the house to save your girlfriend jennifer the action is basically the same as the first game where you punch and kick your way through tons of enemies to finally reach a boss fight at the end of a level at times you can pick up weapons which are great and it's always satisfying seeing an enemy split against the wall after you hit it with a 2x4 and i really hate that rick drops his weapon at the end of a level instead of taking it with him i still love the creepy graphics and the soundtrack greatly adds to the scary atmosphere this is just an excellent game that's fun to play in full of different patterns to memorize [Music] splatterhouse 3 came out a year later now i was all pumped up for more of the same style of action i mean you have a great formula why change it up well namco did just that and this entry is now a side scrolling beat em up with a twist you must fight rooms filled with ugly fleshy pus oozing enemies the twist is that you need to reach and defeat the boss within a time limit and for someone like me who likes to scavenge rooms for items a time limit does not bode well there's multiple paths that you can take so always consult the map along the way rick will pick up crystals or will fill a power meter he can unleash this power to become stronger and do more damage it's ideal to save it for a boss fight if you can the story is horrifying and i like how it plays out between rooms and levels with digitized graphics not quite what i wanted in a sequel but honestly is pretty good [Music] [Music] you know sonic wasn't the only one with two'd on the genesis both toe jam and earl had a ton of it and their game oozed that 92 that everyone loved their first game had the pair searching a randomly generated earth looking for pieces of their spaceship yes this is earth as you make your way around this overhead world you find many bizarre enemies who would love to hurt you even though your characters are insanely slow it's still really easy to avoid these baddies you'll also find presents just laying there for the taking these are the most enjoyable part of the game since they contain things that could either help or hurt you [Music] not long after this sega released toe jam and earl in panic on funkotron this time the game is presented as a side-scrolling platformer earthlings hitch to ride with toe jam and earl all the way back to planet funkotron as you'd expect these humans are making a mess of the place so it's now your job to collect them in jars and send them back to earth earthlings will hide behind objects so you need to shake things to find them the presents are back but they're far less interesting as they mostly carry porn store on the rare occasion they'll have something useful still the game is decently fun and has a lot of humor which i like how about wonder boy in monster world don't let the cover of this game fool you because it's actually quite a fun game to play monster world is well infested with monsters and the queen needs your help to eradicate said monsters and make it a nice place to live in again to do this you'll need to fight your way through hordes of enemies that all carry money collect that money since you'll need it to buy the usual stuff a hero needs like better weapons armor and items that'll make his quest winnable monster world is a huge interconnected land that's fairly easy to navigate each area is loaded with colorful graphics and catchy music wonder boy controls well and if i'm allowed one minor complaint is that i'd like to have the swords and spears have a little bit more reach when you're attacking other than that this is a great game and a great addition to the series and also to the genesis library [Music] there's a bunch of amazing games that most people never think much about anymore that are only on the genesis games like alicia dragoon from game arts in this one you're assisted by several different helper dragons but you can only choose one at a time they level up independently and have their own life bar and yes they can die it's very stylish and you want to make sure that you explore everywhere you can [Music] or games like green dog okay well probably not so much green dog but you know i had to bring it up in this episode how about landstalker treasures of the king's hole in this isometric action rpg you're looking for the fabled treasure because you are a greedy bastard there's lots and lots of fun exploring to be done here the incredible 3d graphics are created by the all-new diamond dimension system so you know it's good the music is also quite enjoyable in this one however the control can be a bit weird sometimes because of the perspective still not a whole lot of people mention this very often and it's absolutely worth checking out [Applause] light crusader from treasure is mentioned even less often this one has a very medieval feel to it oh my god what is he doing to that cow stop it you start the game looking for people who have gone missing from the town this one also uses an isometric view however it doesn't use the diamond dimension system which is probably why it's talked about less than landstalker this one is a bit more arcadey and i feel that the control is slightly better than landstalker though it can still be goofy sometimes but really it's not bad at all [Music] did you know that the first good ghostbusters game on a console was on the genesis that's right this side-scrolling action platformer certainly wasn't the first ghostbusters game but it was the best one for a long time programmed by compile you can choose to play as egon ray or peter as you battle the supernatural yeah winston isn't in here and that sucks it's actually the game's biggest flaw but everything else is superb from the level design the controls the visuals and especially the music this one is best played with the controller that features rapid fire [Music] the best version of gauntlet is on the genesis called gauntlet 4. but do you know the story behind this one basically a few guys in japan ported the arcade version of gauntlet to the x 68 000 at their house just for fun and word has it that they just eyeballed it not even looking at the source code then they showed it to tengan of japan since they figured they had the rights to gauntlet tengen suggested that they port the game to the mega drive if they wanted it published tangent japan really didn't know what to do with it so they sent it to the us where it landed on the desk of nintendo champion chris tang while he was certainly impressed he didn't think that there would be much of a market for a version of gauntlet on the genesis with fewer features than the nes version i mean that version had music a password system an ending all things that the arcade version did not so he wrote up a design proposal that requested the addition of many features like a quest mode shops currency to buy things multiple endings and the like many months later it came back with most of his requested features in place he was blown away those guys in japan really wanted this gig i mean this was their first game so they were happy to make the changes in order to get something actually published eventually an amazing soundtrack was added from hitoshi sakimoto and masaharu iwata the voices were still really rough though so earl vickers who did the sound for the original arcade game came in he ported the voices over directly from the arcade to the genesis with much better results after that the game was finished up chris wrote the manual and it shipped oh and those guys in japan who ported this game over by hand well these days they're known as m2 you might recognize them as the masters of porting as they've brought countless stuff to the 3ds switch and other platforms gauntlet 4 was their first big break so a huge shout out to chris tang and tatangan us for giving them that chance chris would go on to win the rock the rock sega world championship two years later in 1994 his skills at sonic and knuckles could not be matched he was presented with a giant check for 25 thousand dollars by ceo tom kalinski which i would have loved to see him try to deposit at a drive-up teller window at a bank chris is still in the industry today developing fun and exciting new games as you see dave and i trying out here it's coming and it's gonna be good [Music] you know chris is a really cool guy it was it was really fun to meet him in person and hang out with him play his game he's just an all-around cool dude so agreed but there you have it there's the genesis library it's not all of it of course but some of the most amazing games you're gonna find anywhere on any system can be found on the genesis absolutely the genesis is very very special to me in fact uh for most of the games in this episode except for the ones dave played i used my own personal genesis that i got back in 1989 so it was really fun and what are some of your favorite genesis games what do you think of the console as a whole let us know in the meantime thank you for watching game set [Music] so [Music] okay i'm pissed off i got less than 10 seconds in this whole episode i swear game sack is getting way worse and between you and me they were already some pretty shriveled up sacks to begin with what do these other games have that green dog doesn't alter beast how dumb green dog doesn't need any altering get the hell out of here sonic the hedgehog the genesis needs only one mascot and that mascot is green dog streets of rage there ain't no rage on the streets of green dogs see ya fantasy star four you honestly think you're special because there's four fantasy stars well i can make more than four green dogs attack that's right green dog is the only game you need for your sega genesis and or mega drive [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamestack in this episode we're going to take a look at the various mini style consoles that they've been coming out with recently yeah there's quite a few of them and are they worth it is it something that you want is it something you own already i don't know let's take a look this is the nes classic edition i got pretty lucky when this was released and i was fourth in line at target for the five systems that they had in stock being a self-proclaimed nintendo fanboy i was very happy to get this thing even though i have a physical copy of every game that's pre-loaded on the system you can tell nintendo put a lot of effort into making this thing as it looks and feels just like the original system just shrunk down the detail on the system is really nice even though the lid to the cartridge slot doesn't open you're still going to try and lift up the door when you handle the system the only things that are different are the controller inputs which now match the nunchuck input on the wii and the back has a usb jack for power and an hdmi output which gives you 720p video and it comes with both cables the system retails for about 60 dollars and only comes with one controller this was a really bad choice by nintendo you can buy another controller for ten dollars but the problem is being able to find one but what's nice is that it's the same size and feel of the original controller oh and the cord for the controller is seriously about three feet long unless you're sitting at a table with a tv right in front of you you're going to need a long hdmi cable to make up the difference inside the system is an r16 system on a chip in an armed mali 400 mp2 gpu naturally when you power on the system you're greeted with some nice happy music that plays while you're selecting which one of the 30 games you want to play each game has the original artwork and tells you if it's a one or two player game the list of included games is pretty strong but there's always a few that i look at and wonder why they were included like galaga and pac-man sure they're great games in their own way but i would have definitely picked other titles or how about castlevania too was that really considered a classic title it's famous for certain reasons such as the ability to make the player feel completely lost and hopeless at many points in the game but i wouldn't call it a classic while we all know the music is classic for sure and should be enjoyed by everyone but why not castlevania 3 instead other than that you can't go wrong with the majority of the titles here you have the games that you'd expect to be here like all three super mario brothers titles and i'm glad they're here because they're great but how about games like mega man 2 is probably the best game in the series there's also super scene the original contra might have been a better choice but super c is also a great entry or maybe some ninja guided yes please it's such a great game i'm glad that gradius was included or gradius to some people it's definitely impressive graphically and still a fun game to play basically every genre has a game included here even sports games are covered with the greatest sports title on the system techmobile one of the best features here is that you can quit a game at any time and create a save state so like if you have to drop a major poo in another town just create a save and when you're done just come back later and start off exactly where you left off you have a few display options to choose from which might enhance your gameplay there's a crt option which adds scan lines and changes the color of the display to emulate a crt honestly i'm not a fan of this one though there's a 4x3 option which puts the game in its original aspect ratio but this mode has slight shimmering artifacts during horizontal scrolling due to the non-square pixels and finally there's a pixel perfect option which displays the game with square pixels this doesn't have any shimmering but as you can see it feels a bit too skinny so no matter which mode you choose there's going to be trade-offs you can scan a qr code with your phone which will take you to nintendo of japan's website and let you read the instruction manuals for every game here you can also hack the system and add your own games just as long as it all fits within the 512 megabytes of space that's on the unit i also bought the famicom mini yeah i know you're wondering why i'd do something stupid like that so let me tell you why well firstly because it looks really cool secondly it comes with two tiny controllers that are attached to the unit itself just like the real thing thirdly there's a handful of games that are here that aren't on the us release there's yi kung fu which isn't fun at all atlantis no nazo which also isn't fun river city ransom which is definitely fun solomon's key which is an entertaining puzzler bumping sumo which is surprisingly better than i thought it would be and probably the sleeper hit is downtown niketsu march store uk i don't know how to explain this game other than that you're in a race and you do whatever you have to do to reach the finish line in first place a great idea for a game and why didn't it get released in the us the only bad thing about this system is it doesn't come with an ac adapter so you'll have to use the one from your nes or snes classic or plug it into a random usb slot somewhere anyway both are worthy purchases and i'm glad i have them [Music] all right dave the nes classic is cool i can see why people really love this thing but what i don't like is the way nintendo handled the release of it yeah of course that was just crazy on their part of not having enough systems out there i'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just didn't think it was going to be worth it and uh oh i know i think they knew exactly what they were doing i i'm probably gonna have to agree with that because yeah they just wanted to build up high demand and they did that indeed so let's get back to another mini system this is the neo geo mini from snk it was released in the latter half of 2018 and includes 40 built-in games to play in fact it's quite a good selection of games for the most part a bit more on that later the system comes with a usb cable for power but you'll need to provide your own mini hdmi cable if you want to play it that way the unit itself is cool it's shaped like a miniature arcade cabinet it even comes with marquee stickers that you can attach if you want what's more is that you can even play the games on the little screen though sadly the system doesn't have a battery so it's not truly portable and i've gotta say the games actually look fairly good on this little screen the sound is a bit tinny through the built-in speaker but you can attach headphones or a line out cable if you'd like the controls however suck the joystick has a very large amount of travel which makes it feel slow and there are no micro switches the action buttons are laid out as a c b d in that order and it's just awful in fact when i first saw pictures of this back when it was announced i knew it would be bad but nobody could comprehend what i was talking about when i mentioned it to them here's the deal gamers are used to the jump button being to the right of the action button i mean it's just one of those universal things but on this the jump button is to the left of the action button and it just isn't right i don't know what they were thinking or why they did it this way however you can buy a separate controller and attach it to the system this is modeled after the neo geocd controller with two distinct differences first and foremost is that the joystick thingy no longer has any micro switches like the original does and it has a very long travel distance making it feel slow just like the joystick on the unit itself secondly they changed the button layout compared to the original and honestly in my opinion this is a huge improvement over the original neo geocd controller the jump button is now lower than the action button on your thumb just like holding a super nintendo controller so using this to play the neo geo mini makes a big difference although it'll never feel quite perfect you do eventually get used to the weird non micro switched pad anyway you can hook this system up to your tv via hdmi and it displays in glorious 720p and i've got to say the video quality kind of sucks it's like they blurted a bunch and then put a sharpening filter on that and cranked it all the way up it's bad here's how metal slug 5 looks on a real neogeo playing an rgb through the framemeister and here's how it looks on the neo geo mini looks so delicious there are a few different modes you can choose for video but they all look awful and they don't give you an option for clean pixels nor do they give you any scanline or crt style filters but how does it compare to the switch that came before the switch aka the neo g0x well the neo geo x only outputs in 480p has tons of screen tearing the sound isn't even in sync and only has a small selection of games so the neo geo mini is better in pretty much every regard however the neo geo x has a cool micro switch joystick that's pretty nice fortunately the mini doesn't seem to use a stolen emulator like the neo geox did and whatever they're using here runs much better like i said before there are 40 games to play here we're looking at the international version which has fewer one-on-one fighting games and more metal slugs i'm kind of disappointed that they went with top player golf instead of neo turf masters actually i'm quite disappointed you should be too i am impressed though that they included some goku 3 which is pretty good other great games included are mark of the wolves which is possibly the best fighting game on the platform last blade 2 which is a nice weapons based fighter and the original shock troopers which never got an official home release on the real system i've already talked about the controls in the visuals well how about the sound it's hit and miss it's decently faithful to the original games but certain games are way too loud and over modulated especially the metal slugs they're so loud that you'll be hearing quite a bit of distortion okay again i recommend using the external controller to play the games here i was even able to do the special moves in the fighting games though it did feel kind of weird sometimes it should also be noted that most of the games on here including all of the metal slugs are the censored versions with grey sweat instead of red blood though curiously there is red vomit in metal slug 3. however some games like samurai showdown 5 have red blood but samurai showdown 2 doesn't you get green blood if you press start and select simultaneously you'll be taken to a menu where you can change things like the screen stuff exit the game and most importantly save your game you can save anywhere during the game exit out come back later reload and you'll start from the very same frame that you left off on overall there's plenty of games here and enough variety to keep you busy for a while unfortunately there's no way to add more games at the time we're making this video who knows what the future holds though you also can't update the firmware which means they can't fix the bad video and sound quality of this thing that really is too bad at over a hundred dollars currently we really can't recommend this one unless you're not bothered by the video sound and control issues somehow keep trying snk maybe one of these days you'll get it [Music] right [Applause] [Music] bonus that neo geo is actually kind of impressive i didn't think the screen would be that great on that little thing and it's actually pretty darn good yeah the little screen is actually really nice yeah too bad it's when you output it to tv it's not nearly as good yeah oh well what are you gonna do well what we are gonna do is take a look at the snes mini here's the super nintendo classic edition everything about it looks like the original system from the color to the writing to the little led light right in front one thing i like is that the controller ports have a cover to look exactly like the snes controller ports once you open that cover you see the actual ports for the controllers of course the back is going to look different and now has a jack for the usb power and the obligatory 720p hdmi output the system comes with an hdmi cable and a usb cable with the plug adapter the controllers are the same size and feel exactly like the originals which is awesome the cords for the controller are longer than those on the nes classic but still shorter than the real deal at least it comes with two controllers this time though when you turn the system on you're greeted with the same style of upbeat music that nintendo is known for on their later generation of consoles it's so nice it just makes you want to play games and boy does this system have games 21 games in all and there's something for everyone nintendo didn't hold back and put lots of heavy hitters on here yoshi's island mario kart super metroid kirby's superstar and zelda just to name a few they even went all crazy and put earthbound on it collectors hoping that their copy of the game would let them retire in a small mansion in southern california are probably completely pissed everyone else who simply just wanted to play it were ecstatic and rightly so because it's an excellent game they even included the unreleased star fox 2. this game was completely developed and then ditched to put all resources on the n64 title and let me tell you it's a quality game that's very enjoyable and i'm happy it finally got an official release but to unlock it you have to beat the first level on star fox one no big deal since you're probably going to be playing more than that anyways then you have amazing games from third party developers like contra 3 and my favorite super nintendo game of all time super castlevania 4 from konami from capcom you have mega man x and super ghouls and ghosts there's so much good stuff on the system how could anybody be sad at what they see the internal hardware is exactly the same as the nes classic with the same cores gpus and linuxes but you may ask dave how do the games play are they glitchy and stretched and stuff well let me tell you they're just fine and i've had no problems with any of the titles that i've played on the system just like the nes classic you have the same three display options for your viewing pleasures unlike the nes classic though you have a handful of different borders you can put around the screen anything from an old stereo speaker setup to a city skyline to the much preferred solid black another new feature that i found interesting is the rewind feature say for example you're playing donkey kong country and you're on the mine carts you see some bananas that are hanging low but you want to try to collect them anyway you try to get them but instead fall to your death it's not a big deal because you can use the rewind feature to go back to a point before where you died and with the touch of a button you start playing again from that point and look this time around you get those damn bananas and stay alive and of course the save states are here as well and lastly you can scan a qr code into your phone and pull up any of the instruction manuals from each game these are basically scans of the actual manual which i think is cool since it has all the original artwork that you'd find while flipping through the pages out of all these retro systems this is my favorite and the quality of titles included makes it worth the 80 purchase price and in 15 years if a yellow is like my snes i'll be even happier you can hack it to add more games like the nes classic but it's more restrictive due to the types of helper chips that some games have and why not compliment my snes classic edition with the super famicom classic edition it looks and feels amazing like nintendo's other classic consoles and again has a handful of different titles that weren't included on the us release you have super formation soccer which might be fun if you wanted to spend some time with it there's also the puzzle game panel day pawn or as we know it here tetris attack then you have fire emblem which is cool it's naturally all in japanese but if you've played other games in the series you can find your way around and my favorite is goemon which is a very fun platformer from konami these games aren't a selling point for most people but for collectors it's cool to have this system as a showpiece in their collections [Music] all right again the snes classic is a really good thing but only 21 games compared to 30 on the nes what the hell dave what the hell hey you're asking the wrong guy you got to ask nintendo what the hell but of those games those are like 20 of them are awesome freaking games so yeah that that 21 the 21 game was horrible i mean i would have picked something what is your 21 game i don't know what was it uh secret of man i would have probably put something else in there oh i think people like secretary i'm sure they do but this is just personally me yeah okay okay let's get to something a little interesting for us okay this is the c64 mini from retro games limited not the commodore 64 mini the c64 mini this comes with a little c64 an ancient style usb joystick a usb cable for power and an hdmi cable which gives you 720p video this currently retails for around 70 or so and includes 64 built in games i like the mini screen as it gives you a screenshot of the game a little bit of information about it as well as the name of the programmers and the musician who worked on it the games run on an emulator called x64 from vice 2.4 i've got to be straight with you guys i have absolutely no nostalgia for the commodore 64. and i've never used one or played any of the games until now so please be aware of this during the review anyway the included joystick is horrible just awful it's actually worse than an atari 2600 joystick there's really no comfortable way to use it you can't plug in other usb controllers either at least not any that i personally own but more on that in a bit playing some of these games is more of a chore than anything especially with this joystick you just can't be precise at all which makes many of the games very unenjoyable some games though like chip's challenge are playable even with the clumsy joystick basically you run around collect all the chips avoid the traps and make your way to the exit the stages get cooler and cooler as they go on [Music] there's a version of basic on here but since the keyboard on the unit itself unfortunately isn't real you'll have to hook up a usb keyboard or use the virtual on-screen keyboard and speaking of that a lot of games require the use of a keyboard before you begin playing so you'll have to enable that virtual keyboard there as well there's some loading here and depending on the game it can be kind of slow there are a few different display modes and the crt options have the faintest scan lines you ever did see there's also two different 4x3 modes because 4x3 is a different shape in europe i guess actually that makes sense though since the commodore 64 hooked up to regular tvs instead of computer monitors so the slower pal sets would display it a bit wider due to the slightly higher resolution of their screens as for me i just stuck with pixel perfect mode i'm glad that they give you these aspect ratio options the sound seems fine and the sid chip sounds like the sid it's an acquired taste i can see why people like it the good news is that if you upgrade the firmware which is really easy to do you can play pretty much any game you want if you load it from a connected usb drive like ghosts and goblins here which is absolutely horrible on this system you have to press up to jump despite the joystick having like 90 buttons they even changed the music for some incomprehensible reason but they did that a lot back in the day [Music] oh and most roms i find have useless headers and trainers on them i guess they figured that everyone wants to cheat it really makes these games a pain in the ass to start though and i'm glad that the days of headers and trainers for roms are gone at least i thought they were because of this most games will want copious amounts of information input via the keyboard before you begin with only two usb ports and both of them occupied you might have to swap between the keyboard and joystick use an active usb hub or resort to the virtual keyboard more than you'd like still the ability to play most roms does make this device a lot better even if it is a hassle sometimes another important thing that the firmware update did for me is allowing me to use my usb saturn pad and wow now i can do marginally better than i could before anyway unless you have hardcore nostalgia for the commodore 64 or just old computers in general i really can't recommend it if you're unfamiliar with the platform this isn't going to get you to love it if you do like the c64 though then this is actually a pretty cool little thing [Music] all right the c64 mini is definitely interesting it's probably nothing i personally would want to own even though i do really like these mini consoles but i can see how people like it and would want to buy it yeah like i said if you're into the commodore 64 it's absolutely worth checking out yeah anyway let's finish this up here's the playstation classic from sony i reluctantly bought this one knowing full well the issues it has even when i was at the cash register at target the dude behind the counter was looking at me like are you sure you want to spend 100 bucks on this turd but being the good employee that he is he let me make my own mistake inside the box you get the console and two controllers which helps the pane just a little bit there's also an hdmi cable for 720p output and a usb power cable but there's no ac adapter for that power cable and you need that power adapter to run this thing as you can't just plug it into a random usb port like you can with the nintendo classic systems at the stiff price tag it should have come with one anyway the console itself looks amazing it's truly a miniaturized playstation and not a single detail is missing i almost wish there was one tiny little memory card sticking out of the left slot for a more authentic feel the controllers are usb and are the original model and not the dual shock ones it would have been nice to have analog controllers since some of the games included are compatible and play better with it but anyway the controllers feel great and look exactly like a real controller connector is plugged in and not a usb controller internally the system is powered by an entry-level arm cortex a35 quad core with an integrated power vr ge 8300 gpu let's move on to the games the system includes 20 so-called classic titles and honestly i can only count seven games on here that i'd call classic and even these have issues that make you question them for example as many of you know i love jumping flash it's a great first person platformer that's loads of fun to play and last time i checked i still live in the usa which follows the ntsc standard so why in the hell is the pal version of jumping flash on here this sucks because the game is slightly slower than what i'm used to but i did manage to find one single thing positive about the pal version it has extra cutscenes that the ntsc version doesn't have this isn't the only pal game on here oh no the other games that are pal are battle arena to shinden cool borders 2 destruction derby grand theft auto oddworld abe's odyssey resident evil tekken 3 and tom clancy's rainbow six cheese sony nearly half the games on here are pal anyway other good games on here include metal gear solid which will always be a classic final fantasy 7 which i actually enjoyed quite a bit back in the day rayman which is still an awesome 2d platformer super puzzle fighter 2 turbo is a great puzzle game with your favorite street fighter characters and it's loads of fun to play in multiplayer and ridge racer type 4 is a quality racing game with an excellent soundtrack though you obviously can't use analog controls with it here or how about resident evil director's cut i love the b movie quality live action scenes a lot of people like tekken 3 and is a good choice for the system i'd prefer it at the proper speed though but maybe that's just me the rest of the games are just mediocre at best does anyone really have fond memories of battle arena to shinden or how about tom clancy's rainbow six or even the original grand theft auto i have no fond memories of that and i'm definitely not creating new ones now if you really wanted to make this thing attractive why not put in crash bandicoot or tomb raider or tony hawk or even castlevania symphony of the night unless you're a hand-drawn 2d game on the system your graphics haven't aged well the polygons of the time were not smooth with lots of rough edges the games upscaled to a modern resolution are even more jaggy and rough looking than ever you'd think that sony would have given you some display options to help smooth things out a little bit maybe a scanline filter to help recreate a crt probably would have helped in the settings menu for the system you'll find no such thing i honestly wonder why the settings menu is even here the menu system for the games is decent all the games are displayed on a wheel and you can see the cover art for all the titles at any time each game has its own memory card for saves in one spot for save states the menu system has no music so besides your button pushes it's just dead silence there's no cheery feeling like when you're playing one of nintendo's classic systems it's just there existing and no more i can't believe that sony thought this thing was worth 100 besides the design of the system itself they put absolutely no effort into the final product and it shows as of this video barely anyone has purchased one of these and they're being sold for only 25 dollars at some locations maybe even less by now also some people are working on hacking this and they've been able to change the pal games to run in ntsc and they run fine so why are pal games even on here in the first place it just makes no sense i really hope this stings sony and if they decide to pursue a ps2 classic follow nintendo's lead and do the right thing [Applause] [Music] geez dave nine of the games are pal no dual shock for especially the games that use it like metal gear ridge racer four a very questionable list of included games i mean what the hell was sony thinking yeah sony put absolutely no effort into this and it shows and it's definitely a cash grab yeah cash grabs has pissed a lot of people off me included um i hope you didn't buy one and now you don't need to exactly and it hurts me to say this but it definitely feels like nintendo other than the way they're handling the release of these systems are the only ones that are doing it right yeah they're they're putting a lot of love in their systems i mean right down to the menus to screensavers and all that stuff i mean they thought it through they did a good job anyway what do you guys think of these mini systems let us know and in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] dave what the hell are you doing joe i am so excited about the upcoming game boy classic that i made a mock-up of it and i'm playing tetris on it i'm doing really good well dave why play this when you can play the ginormous nes wood carved edition it's all built into the controller let's play some mega man you take care of the jump and action buttons i take care of the d-pad let's go all right i'll try it this isn't working joe i i can't play this [Music] but this is more like it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game sack it's time to check out the analog mega sg it's a fake genesis and as you may or may not know there are a lot of different types of fake genesis out there but analog is a little bit different they pride themselves on accuracy on compatibility and just all around kicking ass so is this as good as a real genesis or better [Music] the from analog this console comes in four different color varieties and it's available from analog's website for 190. you get the console a master system cartridge adapter a spacer mat for the sega cd an hdmi cable a usb cable for power as well as an ac adapter for that usb cable the console itself has two atari style controller ports so that you can use any genesis controller that you want and because it's a genesis it features a headphone jack on the side there's an sd card slot which will allow you to jailbreak the system and play pirated games in the very near future but for now it's just how you do your firmware updates inside of the mega sg you'll find an altera cyclone v fpga powering everything and not much else you can also get a wireless 8-bit dew or 8-bit doe 6-button controller when you buy the system if you want for an extra 25 bucks more on this later powering on the mega sg you're greeted with a menu that should be somewhat familiar if you've ever used any of the other consoles from analog you can run your cartridge play ultracore which is an unreleased game until now adjust your various settings and tools which allow you to enter game genie style cheat codes and test your controller if you're seriously that bored like analog's other consoles this one offers resolutions of 480p 720p and 1080p and as always there are a ton of options for you to mess around with in order to customize your picture and sound presentation especially when you enable the advanced mode if you prefer a 4x3 for 16x9 mode which you should you'll want to go into the scalars option to make sure h interpolation is enabled and v interpolation is disabled this will greatly reduce the shimmering during scrolling on games that have a resolution of 256 pixels wide compared to the more common 320 pixels wide if you choose 4.5 x height then you'll want to make sure v interpolation is enabled as well just be careful because these check boxes are kind of backwards you actually check them if you want to disable the interpolation there are just so many options and it's all up to you and of course you have other stuff like this stupid x-ray filter that analog keeps including in their consoles because they think it's funny seriously there should be speedruns of games using only this filter and yes there are plenty of scanline options as well and they look pretty good there's also a few extra features first is the buffer mode fully buffered mode duplicates the timing of the original sega genesis but it will cause about one frame of lag and no screen tearing the zero delay mode actually speeds up the genesis a tiny bit so that it runs at the standard speed of 59.94 frames per second instead of the 59.92275 frames per second that the real console runs at but that means for every 10 minutes that you play you'll be ahead by one second compared to if you played on a real console i don't know can you handle that extra blast processing single buffered mode runs at the same speed of the original genesis but with less lag and you'll get some minor screen tearing here and there personally i say just leave it on zero lag mode nobody's gonna notice the difference and i don't believe anyone who says that they do one nice thing is that you can turn off the stupid colored borders around the screen that plague a lot of genesis games usually these weren't seen back in the day on a crt not sure why they even existed i guess just maybe they're a byproduct of the way the system was originally designed anyway turn them off and keep them off unless you're a weirdo you can't turn off the colored borders and master system games though unless you use the cropping function then there's the dither blending feature if you turn this on and adjust it you can affect what the console does when it detects dithering here's how castle of illusion normally is look at the jello that actually is created with dithering so you can kind of see through it but it actually has like a checkerboard pattern which is i know some people don't like it but if you turn onto dither blending you can see right through it as if it was a real transparency i don't know it kind of works okay but it depends on the game it is kind of fun to play with and it's cool here and there but over the years i've just learned to appreciate the dithering for what it is and sometimes i kind of like it there's even some audio settings you can probably get away with leaving most of this stuff alone but there are a few things here worth noting first is swap left and right who wants backwards stereo well maybe if you put on your headphones backwards and you're just too lazy to flip them around you can adjust the latter effect depth which should help the system sound more like a good model 1 genesis instead of a model 2 which used a yamaha 3438 instead of a yamaha 2612. a setting of 4 is most like the ym2612 and the model one and that's what you want [Music] then there's the ym2612 high quality mode which supposedly helps the audio sound a touch better by keeping it at 14 bits instead of truncating it to nine so no need to turn that off the psg sounds are too loud compared to a real genesis so be sure to go into the channel levels and set the three squares and the noise to about 32 i also recommend enabling the low pass filter and setting the cutoff to about 6900 with a roll-off of about 12. it's not perfect but it sounds pretty good then there's the ym 3438 busy behavior toggle when it's unchecked it behaves like a model 1 genesis and the music in hellfire plays back at the proper speed [Music] but if you check it then it behaves like the newer chipsets in many model 2 genesis and hellfire plays the music too slow which is the wrong speed [Music] reversely if it's checked then the original earthworm gem sounds like it should so decide if earthworm gem or hellfire is more important to you and leave it that way or just change it depending on whichever of those two games you happen to be playing it really doesn't matter in any other game as far as i've ever noticed there's also plenty of options like the look of the menu and what happens when you first turn the system on and things like that lastly there's a bunch of settings for the led and i guess people really love this i don't know why but they do but hey more power to you oh and don't forget to save your settings after you change them unfortunately analog provides no method of writing your settings to an sd card so each time you upgrade the firmware everything will be reset so instead of writing the settings to an sd card you'll need to write them to a piece of paper and then put everything back in one by one which is almost as fun as testing your controller in the tools menu analog says that they will fix this in a future update though so that's good and of course you can enter game genie codes as mentioned before or you can use a real game genie if you want save states are not supported on consoles made by analog but you could get around that by using one of the top end ever drives oh and there's a whole new menu for the master system stuff that you can only get to while playing a master system game and calling up the in-game menu you'll have to set everything up one by one all over again here as the other settings don't carry over and be sure to save these too [Music] okay those minis can be pretty overwhelming there's a lot of different things that you can adjust to your liking and honestly i love it i mean the more options the better but how does it play the games how compatible is it and the big question does it work with altered beast this console comes with a built-in game called ultracore made by dyson psygnosis that never got a release back in the day but was finally finished up recently analog describes it as a holy grail it is pretty good actually from the very brief time i've spent with it so far it's a cool single player running gun and you can tell right away that it's european which means there's likely to be some deadly drops of water in here somewhere it's not as linear as contra and whatnot and so far it seems like it would be well worth a play through it's too bad that this didn't get released back in the day who knows maybe i'll have a full review of this one in the future [Music] [Music] we were instructed to clean our cartridges well before we reviewed the mega sg but i'm not gonna do that reason being is that if it works in a real 30 year old sega genesis it should work just fine in the mega sg granted if you come across a cartridge that doesn't work of course we're going to recommend cleaning it check out my video to learn the best ways to clean your stupid games but so far every cartridge that i've tried has worked perfectly fine us and european games and japanese mega drive games all fit into the cartridge slot even sunsoft games fit no problem and they even survived the wiggle test which the analog nt mini did not the games all look sound and play great once you get the settings dialed in even the two-player mode of sonic 2 works but it looks pretty nasty thanks to all the interlaced coning same goes with the dumb int mode in ease 3. i don't even understand why this mode is in the game if you choose to get the 8-bit do doe m30 wireless gamepad you'll be getting a pretty damn good controller it feels fantastic and it's very responsive in fact the d-pad feels exactly like the one sega used in the official genesis 6-button controllers and also the saturn model 2 controllers and there's no additional lag here that my slow-ass brain can detect and since it comes with a dongle you can even use it on a real sega genesis or an atari 2600 pretty much everything that works with a real genesis is gonna work here even virtua racing which uses the svp chip in the cartridge this is one of the few games that actually kind of benefits from the dither blending homebrew carts like pure solar work great and games that save and load work great too you can't back up or load save files to an sd card or anything though also things like the everdrive work fine however if you have master system games on your genesis everdrive they're not going to run here shadow and highlight mode seem to be working fine as seen here in a japanese version of batman the shadows seem to be maybe a touch brighter here than they are in a real genesis but that's barely even worth pointing out and honestly i could be mistaken on this slowdown is here and there are no options for overclocking the speed of the game nor are there any for increasing the sprites per scan line the genesis audio is always the biggest flaw with any kind of emulator or fpga and the mega sg here gets it mostly right it's generally close enough that i don't think that 99 of people will notice or care there is some light squealing noise that you can hear when the game isn't generating any audio and when i was playing sonic 2 something definitely didn't sound right sonic's jumping sound was coming more from the left when it should be absolutely centered [Music] you can fix this by going into the audio panning setting the square one and square two to zero as they should be then be sure to save your settings and who knows they may fix this in an update i sure hope they do and yes it works with my copy of altered beast which came with my genesis when the console was launched of course the ultimate test for accuracy may be the titan overdrive 2 demo and it runs mostly very well i made sure to force my region to pal and also change the mega sg's output to 1080p 50hz since the demo is designed to take advantage of the pal hardware i also made sure to uncheck the masking of the top bottom left and right borders with that said it messes up in this scene here where the borders get actual graphics on them the top and bottom borders are mostly there but the left border is extremely clipped and the right border is completely gone so the accuracy with this aspect isn't quite there yet still when it comes to playing actual genesis games the mega sg isn't gonna let you down [Music] all right so the compatibility is absolutely fantastic so is the accuracy in fact it's played everything that i've thrown at it so far however playing genesis games isn't the only thing that the mega sg can do [Music] you can also play master system games with the included adapter if you're playing using a genesis controller then buttons a and c act as button two and b as button one and start as pause this is great especially for those pesky games that have the jump and action button backwards like zillion here and having the pause on the actual controller is really nice as well you can use a regular master system controller but you lose the pause button unless you modify the adapter light phaser games don't work of course and neither do 3d games analog says that they'll offer a dac later this year to allow people to play on a crt which will enable these features the games default to fm sound if the title supports it unless you change it to psg in the core settings the fm sound is mostly accurate but i noticed a difference in raz stand in real life rastan sounds like this in fm [Music] but on the mega sg the fm sounds like this [Music] otherwise i had no issues playing master system games in fact it's all quite pleasant the master system everdrive also works you can even load up sg1000 roms from your master everdrive and play them though they're supposed to be coming out with the cartridge converter so you can use your real sg-1000 carts oh and if you want to play master system card games well screw you because you can't unless you use the hyperkin master system adapter then it'll work and if you do that you can even play f16 fighting falcon which won't even run on a real genesis since it uses a video mode from the sg-1000 which just happens to be supported on the mega sg [Music] if you have a sega cd the mega sg works with that too it comes with a little rubber spacer mat that's kind of cool also be sure to enable external audio in the settings and just leave it that way this ends up being a weird hybrid of real hardware working with faked hardware but mostly it's just fine it works just like it would connecting to a real genesis the backup ram cartridge is recognized you can move files to and from it as well as load and save games directly to the cartridge both audio and video is output over hdmi and you won't need any weird mixing cable setups the audio level mix between the genesis sounds and the sega cd sound seems to be about right like a model one connected with a mixing cable and volume slider set to nine or ten this can all be adjusted in the menu of course even the homebrew pure solar works in tandem with its own weird sega cd disk you'd think that the fmv games would benefit a little bit from the dither blending option but on or off they're still really grainy sadly the mega sg can't bypass the region setting that's in the sega cd hardware itself so you'll need to find another solution to play import cd games and there are games that have issues like willy beamish as the opening cut scene finishes up the graphics go to crap and then as it begins to load the actual game it completely crashes not like anyone wants to or should play this game anyway and unfortunately if you have the sega cd hooked up it breaks compatibility with a lot of master system games some still work but most that i'm trying don't they definitely need to fix this and it goes without saying that the 32x doesn't work though i just said it anyway interesting though the sega cd game fahrenheit sees the 32x if it's attached and asks you to put in the 32x disc nothing happens after that of course the mega sg is also supposedly compatible with game gear games but a cartridge adapter has not been offered on their store so we can't report on the quality or compatibility in that regard [Music] well there you have it the analog mega sg so is it worth it for 189.99 well honestly that depends do you have a genesis that's set up for rgb with an upscaler like the framemeister or the ossc if so probably not unless you're just really enthusiastic about video game hardware like i am if you don't have any of that stuff and you just want to play your genesis games on an hd tv without any lag then hell yeah this is worth it this is the best fake genesis there is that's only going to get better with future firmware updates it's not perfect but it's going to get really really close especially soon so let me know what you guys think about your analog mega sgs it's out today and i'll be interested in reading your comments about it and in the meantime thank you for watching game sag [Music] gamesack commercial for the analog mega sg take one introducing the magus g from ana lagoo with the magus g you can fight mega s g joe analog mega s g introducing the mega sg from analog with the migos analog not anal never anal introducing the mega sg from analog with the mega sg joe that's the super nt not the mega sg that's the super nintendo version idiot introducing the mega mt from analog with the mega and t mega sg not vnt what does sg stand for sega genesis you sure it's not sega [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game sack this time we're talking about the atari lynx i always wanted one of these systems back in the day i actually even bought one of them i don't know why i picked it over the game gear but i did i just wanted a system with a backlit screen that was better than the game boy and let's just say i was not overjoyed with what i bought so anyways i'll left with that uh joe's got an overview of the system so let's take a look at that the [Music] no atari in september of 1989 for 180 us dollars not long after the genesis and the game boy the atari lynx was the world's first color handheld gaming system it was also the world's first 16-bit handheld originally designed by epics as the handy atari eventually came along and funded the project and renamed it the lynx because what would you rather get for christmas a lynx or a handy epix was to handle the software development while atari manufactured the hardware but it wasn't long before epics filed for bankruptcy leaving full responsibility to atari the system was designed to be played right-handed or left-handed and the screen image could be flipped to accommodate either configuration some games could even be played vertically powering the lynx were two custom 16-bit cmoses running at 16 megahertz each an 8-bit c5s co2 running at 4 megahertz 64 kilobytes of ram and 4 channels of sound the 3.5 inch screen had a resolution of 160 by 102 and could display up to 16 colors per scan line out of a total of 4 096. ultimately atari just couldn't attract many third-party developers to write high-profile games for the system and sales were sluggish the lynx ended up selling nearly 3 million units with a library of 74 games all right as usual very interesting video i think you missed a few things there but like the scaling blitter that i didn't know what the word was for it but yeah you missed that part of it anyways we've got a bunch of games to look at so here we go california games is the title that was included with the links when it launched unfortunately i've never really been good at any of the versions of this game as i can never figure out the weird controls but still for some strange reason i like to try you can choose from four different games roller skating and frisbee didn't make it into this version the bmx game is interesting as it now takes place with an isometric view in other versions this one's usually played as a side scrolling event but this new view doesn't do anything to hinder the gameplay and i know this for a fact because i'm exactly as inept here as i am in other versions in the lynx california games surfing makes you go to the left instead of to the right this is the only event that i can do somewhat decently in the wave has some cool graphical effects as well i absolutely suck balls at half pipe and i'm never able to do anything at all except for fall off the board but i really like the full screen zooming effect which was absolutely mind-blowing when this came out at least it was to me and footbag aka hacky sack is just dumb why did they even bother making a game out of this oh well this probably wasn't the best choice for a pack in but if you actually know how to play the game well maybe you'll enjoy it all right let's check out batman returns one of the few movie license properties for the lynx it's a side scrolling beat em up in a similar vein to konami's batman returns game on the super nintendo you can attack and jump with the two main buttons one of the option buttons allows you to switch your attacks between punches batarangs and eventually some sort of vials that you can toss the other option turns the music on and off it's easy to get beaten up and lose life but fortunately you can collect bat symbols to restore some of it and also get more batarangs to toss sadly this game just isn't well designed at all bombs and dynamite will be constantly tossed at you from behind doors and from sewers i mean look at all the dynamite coming from down there how are you supposed to get past this without taking damage and then there's this building that explodes and as far as i know there's no way to avoid having to take nearly your entire life bar away i quickly discovered that the best way to get through a level is just to keep rushing to the right and jumping you'll still take a bit of damage especially from the exploding building but is seriously the best way to make it to the end of the stage then you fight the penguin and it's very hard to avoid his shots because you move very slowly not only that but you have next to no invincibility after you get hit so i make it past him and on to stage two i missed the first jump in i'm ted that's right you only get one life and no continues whoever designed this one just didn't understand how video games work [Music] blue lightning was a launch game and possibly is one of the best games on the handheld in this one you get to fly an airplane and embark on various missions like shooting down enemies and also shooting down enemies it plays kind of like afterburner except without the speed the screen rotation and the pumping music you have a vulcan gun which has unlimited ammo as well as a limited supply of heat seeking missiles just like an afterburner once you line a distant enemy up in your sights a crosshair appears meaning you can launch a missile and they will die pressing option one will fire your afterburners and make you go really really fast for a short bit holding option two and fidgeting the d-pad will let you do a barrel roll sorry sorry i mean aileron roll you can stop typing that comment now if you get hit by enemy fire you explode and restart right there however if you crash your plane into something the game forces you to restart your mission all over again which kind of sucks and these missions aren't very short either so the best advice is just not to crash the length of the levels can also depend on you sometimes you have a certain number of enemies that you need to destroy and then the style of the landscape will change and you move on to that segment and you'll fly over lots of different stuff from barren grasslands canyons with tons of mesas everywhere mountains with enemies hidden in between and even out at sea where you need to blow up tons of enemy ships in at least one level you're forced to fly through a canyon blowing up enemies you can't fly over it like you can in other levels and sometimes you hear the beeping of an enemy missile locking onto you so you've got to be fast to avoid it and also try to shoot down a missile or two if you can you don't always get time to enjoy the scenery speaking of which the graphics are really good for their time remember this came out at around the same time as the game boy and the genesis there's tons of scaling here and i was completely blown away it even has mode 7 style scaling on the ground long before mode 7 existed in fact i used to play this game a lot on my friend's links i never got very far and it's more of a tech demo than an actual game but hell i still had fun with it and yeah i'm even having fun with it today playing it again after all these years if you have a links you have to have this game gauntlet the third encounter is one of maybe five links games where you play it by holding the system vertically and yes this is gauntlet 3 and of course you get to pick from your favorite gauntlet characters like a wizard an android a punk rocker a nerd and what have you the game plays like gauntlet except that the enemies are just there there are no enemy regenerators to find and destroy you run around collecting items and keys but you can only carry so much stuff for example in the second level don't pick up any pots of gold because you'll need all of the keys that you can carry to unlock the 1 000 doors that block the exit it probably works better when you link up multiple systems so you can effectively carry more the levels can be pretty big but that's not really an issue what is an issue though is the music is pretty bad it's very repetitive and it doesn't ever seem to change well i mean it might but if it does i can't get far enough to find out still it's not a horrible game or anything but it's not one that i'd really go out of my way to recommend to anyone chips challenge is a cool puzzle style game we showed the commodore 64 version back in our episode about the classic mini systems which included the c64 mini the lynx version is the same well actually maybe a bit better the visuals sure look nicer and the music here isn't bad or anything anyway the premise of this game is that you need to collect all of the computer chips that are strewn throughout each level and of course there are hazards and obstacles that you'll need to avoid or manipulate for example you may need to find a key to open that same colored door or you may need to find a shield to protect you from elements in level three you need to get the shield to walk on water to grab the chip that's there and then get the crampons so you can walk on the ice without sliding get that chip and then the orange shield to protect you from fire wander over there and get that chip and then the magnet which will let you walk on the moving belts without being pushed in whatever direction they're moving the first few levels are fairly linear and easy but they're still fun but of course the levels do get much more clever and difficult before long if you need a slight hint just touch the question mark box and you'll be told what the items in the level do or be given a general hint thank goodness there's a password feature here and you also have unlimited tries this is definitely a standout title for the links even though it can be had on several other old computers [Music] here's xenophobe which originally appeared in the arcade you absolutely hate aliens and it's your job to kill every last one of them just because they're not human and for no other reason they in turn are trying to kill you or maybe just defend themselves i don't know in the beginning you can select from a bunch of different characters i'll start with dr pink just because you wander through the base killing aliens and collecting items you've got to keep your health up and kill all of the aliens before the time runs out there's many different aliens but the only alien that you can appreciate is a dead alien but in order to kill them you need to find them and the bases can be pretty big sometimes there are multiple floors the good news is that they don't all wait for you to come to find them some will actually chase you down if you die you can choose another character to continue your quest you can get bombs to toss and more powerful guns as well sometimes the aliens can knock your weapon away and you'll have to rely on your fists until you can find another one the game plays very well i enjoy the 3d like transitions from room to room which weren't in any other version of the game and the stereo sound is cool if you're playing on a lynx too all in all this is an excellent port of the arcade and kept me entertained [Music] electrocop was another launch game for the lynx from epics in this one you play as a cop who must navigate the innards of a building punching codes to open doors and find his way around all while not dying i liked playing this one on my friend's links at the time because of the cool scaling effects that let us basically explore the world in 3d which was a really new experience i was never good at this game though and i'm still not and to be honest the gameplay really isn't very good at all it's hard to position yourself properly to kill the enemies without being damaged all the hell yourself and your weapons run out of power way too quickly not to mention that the audio is horrible all around but i still like what they did with the graphics and sadly that's the only leg that this game has to stand on hey at least there are a few little mini games built in to pretend to have fun [Music] with [Music] all right well we've gotten started per se um that electro cop that's an interesting idea i mean good concept but you know just not executed very well yeah definitely so it's too bad too because i think it could have been a great game it would have been awesome like maybe one of the first playstation games or something who knows but we've got more to cover so let's get into it ninja gaiden is even on the links alas it's a port of the original arcade version which is a beat-em-up but at least it's a good port for the most part you run around punching thugs like you would in any beat-em-up there's some power-ups and items hidden in crates and phone booths and things like that but i can't figure out how to break them open without being tossed into them by an enemy this game was made in a time before beat em up gameplay was refined so it's pretty clunky as a result but otherwise both the graphics and the music are pretty good the scrolling is also smooth which seems to be rare on the links [Music] but fret not because ninja gaiden 3 is also here and is a part of the nes game this seems very out of place on the system but here it is it mostly plays quite well it played better though if the jump in action buttons weren't backwards the level design is mostly the same as the nes game even the cutscenes are in here unfortunately i feel that there's a little bit of an issue hitting enemies with your sword sometimes and it's often not only hard to make out some of the enemies against the background but it's also hard to see what the power ups are you'd think with its massive array of colors they would have perhaps improved the graphics some to make the enemies stand out more or just make it nicer but it actually looks considerably worse than the nes original they even got rid of the parallax scrolling still at least the scrolling is smooth and the music is good overall i like the nes version better but it's still cool that this is on the links [Music] up the gates of zendikon is an exciting horizontal shooter from epics i lied it's not actually very exciting but it is a horizontal shooter you take off in your poorly drawn ship button b fires your lasers if you hold the button down you get a continuous laser beam however if you tap it again and again you can also drop little bombs if you hold down the a button you generate a shield around you which destroys anything it touches you can use this to get through pretty much anything you'll rarely ever need it though because there's not much that really presents any danger to you and if you do get hit your ship takes damage and loses parts so usually you're still good to go your goal is to make it to the gate at the end of each stage inside the gate you'll land your pilot will get out go down and take off from another ship for whatever deranged reason but if you had damaged your ship in the previous stage well you've got a new one now sometimes rarely the landing pads are electrified and can blow up your ship in fact these are the only things that ever killed me in the game you play through level after level and it's all very slow and you can feel the hardware chugging sometimes though it does speed up when there's not much on screen and there are 51 levels to go through the biggest challenge in saving this universe is not becoming bored and quitting before you make it through all 51 stages however if you do get bored at least there's a password feature so you can finish it later [Music] [Music] hmm the port of double dragon from telegames is decent all things considered the first thing you'll notice is that the screen is way zoomed in because they didn't bother resizing the sprites for the lynx's low resolution screen this can cause issues because the screen sometimes gets crowded and is tough to tell what's going on otherwise most everything is here it's just abridged you have your punches and kicks but in order to jump you need to hold up in one of the attack buttons which is weird as a result i sometimes found myself jumping when i didn't want to but it's a minor issue i suppose you just need to get used to it some of the moves are missing for example there's no backwards elbow smash unless i just can't figure it out the game is way too easy with that move anyway the levels are a bit smaller than the original arcade but mostly faithful you even get to jump across the bridge in stage 3. [Music] sweet besides being zoomed in the graphics are great and mostly look just like the arcade it would have been better if they sacrificed this to make everything smaller to fit the screen though each stage has music you're used to and it sounds decent for the lynx which isn't exactly a powerhouse when it comes to sound overall it's interesting but i feel it could have been better [Music] gordo 106 is about a lab monkey could this be diddy kong's origin story maybe anyway you escape from your cage and your goal is to free all of the other caged animals and defeat the scientists by throwing apples at them you can collect apples to refill your ammo and of course bananas refill your life diddy i mean gordo controls ok he can hang from lights on the ceiling as well as the typical walk run and jump and attack moves the problem is that if you fall into a hole you go way down into a dungeon full of flames and gargoyles and whatnot what kind of laboratory is this and below that there are even more animals to be freed and the holes in the floor are all over the place in the game unfortunately the level design combined with the controls isn't very good and you'll spend most of the time falling down holes to its credit though it does have some nice parallax scrolling though it's not the smoothest in the world the music however is kind of abrasive and grading this game is a nice attempt but it needs more polish [Music] good desert strike return to the golf got ported to the lynx and i've got to say it's pretty good actually it's much better than i expected well there's one thing that's not very good here and that's my skill playing this game i still enjoy it though i just need more practice anyway you play a helicopter who needs to accomplish several objectives in each mission sometimes there's a butt load of objectives for your poor lonesome helicopter to complete and often your objectives require you to blow things up in certain order so you're less likely to be detected by a ton of resistance so in mission one and two you need to take out the two radar dishes first you can always pause the game and bring up the map that shows where you are as well as your objectives and you can cycle through them there's a bit of slowdown when there's more than just a few things on screen and it can make turning around tough sometimes but overall the graphics are great for the little system and the scrolling is pretty smooth the sound is fine as well but there's no music that's okay because the original game didn't have music as you played either all in all is a pretty good port road blasters is a port of the atari arcade game and it's really good believe it or not this is a rally racing game at least that's what the game calls each segment that you drive in basically your goal is to make it to the end without running out of fuel and there are a total of 50 segments you have to shoot other cars on the road that are just minding their own business but they're in your way some cars can't be destroyed though your fuel is always depleting and it goes down even further if you blow up which trust me is easy to do i mean there are even guns on the side of the road shooting at you you can increase your fuel by collecting the green and red orbs on the road but be careful because there are even mines on the road in some places a futuristic plane will sometimes come in and drop parts for you to catch these are usually super guns which obliterate your enemy my favorite is the nuke that you fire off into the distance and vaporizes oncoming enemies for a very short time and as you'd expect these enhancements don't last forever and go away immediately if you die this is a great conversion of the arcade the acceleration takes a short time to get used to as you control it by pressing up and down to increase your speed fortunately you don't have to keep holding up to go the scaling is well done and everything is extremely fast and not choppy at all and while there's no music the sound is done well and even includes voices with that classic atari arcade quality [Music] this is a great game for the lynx rygar is another tecmo game that made it to the lynx and like the original ninja gaiden is a part of the arcade game that means it's much more simple than what we saw in the nes just run to the right defeat enemies and keep running to the right there's items you can get and even power ups for your attack but they really don't matter much because almost everything in this game dies with a single hit you don't have all the moves you can do with your slingy disc thing that you could in the arcade version and i was sad to see that cut but again it doesn't matter much because it's still hyper easy there's some platforming to do here and there to break up the monotony just a bit there's even some climbing but what really brings it down is the same droning music track that plays over and over on each stage and it feels like it's only four seconds long it's actually longer there's just not much more to the music than the repetitive bass line [Music] what all right dave i always felt that the arcade version of rygar wasn't quite up to par with the nes version it's like one of those games where the nes version is actually better true and you know same with ninja gaiden it's like a lot of those tecmo games they way improved them when they brought them home i totally agree with that but hey it's i guess better than nothing considering the systems library right maybe so maybe so anyway let's finish this up even pacland made it to the lynx you don't see this one on very many systems and it's a cool if weird game the goal is to make pac-man run to the right getting the fairies that you keep under your hat to fairy land after you've delivered enough of them you need to run back home to your family but watch out for the ghosts because they are diabolical you have never seen pure evil like this they drive in their little cars and sometimes fly in their planes and flying saucers dropping their children on you of course if you touch them you die but there are power pellets scattered around and if you get one you can eat them alive if you die you seem to be restarted in a random place sometimes you get sent all the way back to the beginning of the town but if you die there suddenly you're in the woods [Music] this version has the parallax scrolling that was completely missing from the turbo graphic 16 port so that's cool the control is very floaty i feel that there's also some issues with the collision detection as a result this is the hardest version of paclan that i've personally played so far finally the music is kind of grating and rough it has a good melody it's just that the sound quality isn't so hot [Music] dirty larry renegade cop is another side scroller and it kind of reminds me of batman returns it also reminds me of technocop on the genesis you start out in the chief's office getting yelled at for destroying another police car so now you need to do all of your work while walking around or on the subway you take to the streets with your gun and your fists pressing up jumps and is a good thing you don't need to jump much in this one button a attacks and b will let you switch between your fists and your gun you don't want to use your fists if you don't have to as they're practically useless you have limited ammo unfortunately you can get a lot more sometimes it just isn't enough though your life bar drains quick and although it can be replenished you really need to be careful out there of course you only have one life and when you die there are no continues just like in batman returns i do like how the baseball furies from the movie the warriors are in here and i like the gritty areas you wander through but the scrolling is really choppy and there's no music at all the game is pretty rough and honestly it feels about average for the links [Music] i used to play stun runner a lot back in the arcade it was a cool untextured polygonal tube racer shooting game i remember seeing pictures of the lynx version here in magazines and i always thought it looked terrible because of the dithering on the tube i felt that instead it should have been a solid color now that i'm finally playing it i've got to say it doesn't really bother me as much as i thought it would and this version is really fun there's not much to this game and honestly that's perfectly fine basically you blast down a road trying to hit boosts and green stars certain obstacles and cars can be destroyed with your laser and of course other obstacles cannot if you collect enough green stars you get a shock wave weapon which can destroy indestructible enemies but of course you need to collect a ton of green stars for each one of these that you use the frame rate is kind of low but it really doesn't bother me or make the game less playable and it's always fun to finish a track and play just one more again and again and again and there's even a ton of voice here that was brought over from the arcade you have completed level 4. they did a really good job with this conversion and you should own it if you have a lynx seriously checkered flag is a racing game that's similar to pole position you control your f1 car from behind in a third person view around the track it controls fairly well actually and look at that i get a trophy and a kiss from a hot woman after finishing a single practice lap all by myself okay maybe i'll switch from practice to single heat same thing it's super easy okay i'll try the tournament mode maybe now i'll be able to move up in the ranks and win the world championship i like that there are rear view mirrors on my car so i can see my opponents i mean if there were actually any opponents to see in fact every track i race on is a single lap all by myself i sure am racking up the trophies and kisses at a record amount though oh drones i have to turn on the drone cars and the default setting is zero which means you can't lose okay now there's finally opponents to race against boy this game sure runs slow with all the other cars some people really like this one but i'm not sure why overall it's not a horrible racing game but it's super easy unless you change the settings and even then it's just kind of mediocre hydra is based on the atari arcade game and this is the only home port that it ever received basically it's kind of like road blasters in a boat you're giving items to the liver and i guess your shady ass is the best courier that they could find you set off in your boat and you shoot down pretty much everything that you see along your way except most things are shooting right back at you be sure you grab all of the money bags that you see which are attached to balloons you can collect green balls for fuel and also orange balls which give you a boost jump this sends you into the sky which helps you avoid enemies and you can also collect things like more money while you're up there if you crash you'll lose the item that you're transporting but you'll be able to pick it up again along the way the problem is discerning it among the other hazards in the water everything is a pixelated mess and you may end up crashing again trying to retrieve it if you make it to the end of the stage with the item you win a kiss from one of the bikini girls if you fail to deliver the item the girls will have absolutely nothing to do with your incompetent ass between stages you'll play a bonus round trying to collect as much extra money as you can then you'll be able to buy extra weapons and abilities at the shop one weird thing about this game is that you press down to accelerate fortunately like road blasters you don't need to hold it you just press down until you're happy with your speed which is what's represented by the white bar on the left i like all of the scaling here and it definitely has that atari arcade feel which i also like i recommend it for sure [Music] foreign when joe mentioned we were doing a lynx episode i was like i get to do clacks i was being sarcastic but joe made me play it anyway i've never been a fan of klax you hold the links vertically to play this one you need to match three tiles of the same color vertically horizontally or diagonally sometimes you need to do only what the game tells you to do in order to clear around what else can i say it's clacks on the links in my opinion of the game remains unchanged with this version [Music] ok let's move on to todd's adventures in slime world the game also appeared on the genesis and the pc engine but believe it or not the lynx version is the best and that mainly has to do with the graphics the lynx's scaling abilities are put to good use here to make slime world pulsate and undulate otherwise the games are pretty much the same you wander around amazed collecting items trying to find the exit you pick up many different types of items from the ground like slime shields gun power ups jet packs and more todd has a slime gun that he can shoot to dispatch enemies but be careful because when they explode they can get slime on you in fact you'll die if you get covered in too much slime fortunately there are pools of fresh water everywhere that you can simply wash yourself off in or you can be fully restored by collecting a red gem oh and be careful of red slime that's instant death you wander from room to room and you have a map to help you figure out where you're at and trust me you're going to get lost quite easily the game is very slow and honestly it gets kind of boring the mazes are super huge and it sometimes feels like i'll never get out each mission has you doing different things like delaying an explosion or what not add to the fact that you're constantly falling through floors into places where you don't want to be it just ends up being kind of frustrating to make it even worse there's many traps that are next to impossible to avoid even when you know exactly where they are you have unlimited lives to keep trying though and you're going to need them like i said the graphics are pretty good but the sound is annoying and you'll probably want to turn the volume way down this was a game that was highly spoken of for the links back in the time most likely due to its multiplayer aspect when linking several systems together but as a single player game i don't feel the game has aged very well i really wanted to include warbirds because i think a lot of people in the lynx community think highly of it i tried it a bunch of times and i just really couldn't get into it but i think that i can at least appreciate it for what it is and that's a world war one biplane dogfight simulator and that's all it is you have a bunch of options you can change which affects your game then you can choose your scenario you can be fighting anywhere from one to three different planes at a time basically you just want to shoot them down before they shoot you down the problem is is that once you've played a round or two there's really nothing left you've seen everything each scenario of the game takes place over the same boring grassland with the same boring clouds there's not really any variety there is a bit of strategy in the game like cutting your engines to dive or whatever but it didn't really add anything for me there's also an arcade and a simulation mode and for the life of me i couldn't tell the difference the arcade mode might respond to hair faster to your controls maybe again i couldn't really tell i don't know i'd just rather play blue lightning and i bet you would too [Music] finally here's scrapyard dog from creative software designs in the beginning you're hanging out with your dog and neither of you are bothering anybody then a mafia dog shoots you in the back and steals your mutt mr big leaves you a note that tells you he has your dog and goads you into trying to find him who the hell just steals someone's mutt anyway of course you're gonna go after them and you begin in a junkyard you're armed with a very strange grenade for a weapon from what i can tell it does one of two things when it hits an enemy either it crushes them to the size of a single atom or sucks them into a different dimension entirely and of course you die instantly if you touch anything even related to the enemy and that can be anything from birds cats cranes and dogs with clothes on they're all trying to kill you man your dog must be really special it's best to take your time and move slowly due to the one-hit deaths there's some simple platforming here and generally it's pretty easy to control there's a few power-ups here and there that can make you invisible briefly or even allow you to take one or two more hits before you die the graphics are simple but they work the same can be said about the music and sound effects this is a good game that's tougher than it looks check it out [Music] all right and that's pretty much the atari lengths for you i think it's a system that was way ahead of its time it's very interesting but i wish the library could have been a lot better yeah that would have actually made the system much more enjoyable is just some games that were kind of heavy hitters but it just was just mediocre indeed and dave has an announcement for everyone i do you do um yeah guys it's time for me to say that i am actually gonna leave game sack um it's come to a point where i'm just kind of getting burned out with a full-time job at fedex in a family and game sack i just don't feel like i have a lot of quality time with my family and blah blah blah but um you know it is what it is i've had a great run of eight years on the show and happily joe's gonna keep going on i mean because it's still gonna be quality show without me so indeed but we've got one more playing with sax left with dave and then uh the next game sack episode after this will be the last one with dave and for that episode i'll let you pick the topic idea oh i wonder what it's going to be and again we're going to keep going oh i'm going to keep going uh but in the meantime let us know your thoughts on the atari links and thank you for watching [Music] what are you doing joe i'm playing the atari lynx portable video game system dave and you're enjoying it damn right i am well i brought my handheld system too what the hell is that it's shinobi joe is that gigi shinobi no it's electronic shinobi dude i want to play electronic shinobi here you play the links that's my shinobi give it back i don't know your stupid leak i rescued a hostage [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamesack in this episode i'm checking out the mister what the hell is the mister basically it's this and inside this is an fpga using a very fast arm chip and several members of the community contribute cores to it to mimic hardware of arcades consoles computers you name it now fpga stands for field programmable gate array and it mimics at the hardware level instead of software like emulation is it better than emulation it's not up to me to say but a lot of people say that it is and anyway let's check out a little bit about the mister itself the base hardware of the mister is the terrasic de10 nano which uses the altera se fpga however this can and should be expanded upon greatly by the user which means you that's right you're going to want to purchase the ram expansion like this one at mr addons.com which is required for many of the cores in addition there are several daughter boards that can be installed to give you exciting functions like a real-time clock or a bevy of output options like vga rgb digital and analog audio and even a usb hub to hook up all of your peripherals should that tickle your fancy lastly you can get a variety of 3d printed or even acrylic cases to mount your mister in to make it easier to handle and overall better looking you can get an rgb start cable which hooks into the analog video out and it displays in glorious 240p on your crt monitor you can also get a component video cable there is even another daughter board that offers s video and composite video out which will also give you 240p or whatever the original resolution of the game that you're playing is hdmi output is standard and the default is 720p though you can change it to other resolutions if you want i changed mine to 1080p i mean come on 720p is so mid-2000s but it does divide evenly if you're using a 4k display so there's that the mister can and will have things plugged into it from all sides especially if you have the usb hub the more wires the better i recommend having a usb keyboard always attached though you certainly don't need to i'm using a spare apple keyboard i had laying around and also my usb saturn controller for this episode the mister runs off of a micro sd card and you'll have to use a utility to set it up which is only available on windows this is mandatory because even if you copy all of the files from a working sd card to another the mr won't see it unless it's blessed by this application after that though you can just add your rom files via drag and drop on any modern os if you're a mac user be prepared to see a lot of files that begin with a dot as you peruse your menu on the mister normally files like these would be ignored but as of the making of this video the mister sees them so what you want to do is download this dot clean app from gamesac.net and just put it in the root of your sd card from there launch it and have it remove all of the dot files run this app each and every time you add stuff to the card and you'll be good to go to power the mister you've got to plug it in or unplug it as there are no power switches on the unit itself kind of crazy but hey that's how it works there are a few different sites online that offer startup guides to help you out on the mister itself there are three buttons at the top this one will call up the menu which is the same as pressing f12 on your usb keyboard this one resets the game you're playing currently and this one resets the mister to its home menu the mister can be updated after plugging in an ethernet cable and running the update script these updates happen all the time and cores are updated on an individual basis to run a game you need to navigate the menu with a keyboard to the console arcade or computer you want to play the core loads up and most of the time you get a black screen from here press f12 to get some options like enabling your region or whatnot all depending on the individual core scroll through the list of games that you put on the sd card hit enter and now you're in the game that is assuming that it works games that save to a battery backup on the cartridge are supported here and work fine but you need to remember to press f12 to go to the menu and write the save to the sd card before you load another core or power off the mister also there are some video modes that you can play with if you like such as enabling scan lines and adjusting the strength of them you can even have a blurry lcd screen like effect if that's what tickles your horn whatever the hell that means i think i just made it up these video filters are only available on the hdmi output and sometimes they're updated when you update the rest of the [Music] system [Music] all right so you can see that the mister is capable of a bunch of different things and you have a ton of different options on this thing but is an fpga fundamentally better than emulation i will say this and that they're both susceptible to the same kind of inaccuracies and flaws and with that said let's look at some of the console cores there are a ton of different cores on here for a ton of different platforms but the first console i tried was the genesis since i'm very familiar with it at first i was like what the hell the games were squished and kind of running slow but stupid me i accidentally had it set to the european region so make sure not to do that man i feel really bad for what you pal gamers had to go through back in the day anyway i adjusted that and i've got to say right off the bat that the genesis core here is near perfect everything runs at the correct speed and looks as it should again i'm using my saturn usb pad that i've had for ages and after mapping the buttons it works perfectly and i don't need to remap them every time i want to come back and play a genesis game though i can remap them if i want the mr guys tell me that there's a tiny bit of input lag but i honestly can't feel it when i play on a crt so it's pretty damn short in fact i sometimes had to remind myself that i was playing the mister instead of a real genesis the sound reproduction is pretty damn good as well not quite perfect but very very close so close that i think that 99.9 percent of people wouldn't notice the little nitpicks that i do and even i'd have a hard time describing them they seem to be mimicking a genesis model too so that means the music in hellfire plays slow and there's no toggle for the ym3438 busy behavior on the plus side that means earthworm gym sounds correct but the difference in that one isn't quite as noticeable the games still flicker like a real genesis for the most part and so far there are no options in this core to increase the sprite count slow down is still here as well and there's no kind of overclock function at least not yet but who knows what the future holds games like sonic 2 which feature interlacing work on a crt but the framemeister doesn't like it at all just like trying it with a real system actually and it goes without saying that virtua racing which has an enhancement chip doesn't work at all and of course neither do 32x or sega cd games the games look absolutely outstanding running an analog rgb on a crt but what about hdmi well they still look really good it's scaled up to fit the screen and there is some shimmering during the scrolling but it's nowhere near as bad as i thought it would be you can view hdmi and analog video at the same time and the hdmi is maybe a frame or two behind the analog video oh and the two player mode in sonic 2 works here but it looks pretty bad with lots of combing artifacts due to the interlacing but at least it works in my opinion this is currently one of the best cores on the mister [Music] so if the genesis core is so good the master system one should be perfect right well not quite the games do look good and play well you can even increase the sprites to 64 per scan line instead of the standard eight it was really interesting playing r-type like this which is normally a flicker fest but unfortunately the sound is not done as well here especially the white noise channel [Music] ah never mind they fixed the sound right after i said that the mister does indeed get updated often [Music] you can also enable fm sound for games that support it if you want but it's still pretty messed up at the time i'm making this video the game called f-16 fighting falcon doesn't work because this one relies on the sg-1000 functionality built into the master system this game doesn't work on a real genesis with a powerbase converter either i was able to hook up a sega light phaser via an adapter which i'll cover in the near future the mister and the game recognize it and the screen flashes when i pull the trigger but the game couldn't see that i was pointing at the tv even using a crt this is because the input lag of the system is off just enough but the good news is is that they're aware of it and they're working on it they say that light gun should be supported within the year hopefully currently there's no way to plug in your sega 3d glasses so if you want to play a 3d game you can go straight to hell and sadly game gear games don't seem to work yet of course the nes core is the one that you'd expect to be spot on and it mostly is once again the games look and play just like you'd expect from a real nes especially on a crt you can select from various different color palettes if you're into that but as of the making of this video there's no way to increase the sprites per scan line count i did notice a couple of very small oddities with sounds playing or not playing in blaster master but that was the only game in which i heard any issues and it wasn't really very noticeable [Music] also i tried to get akumaji dinsetsu to run many times but it refused ran fine for me the other day but of course now that i'm recording it refuses to work no problem just play a bunch of other nes games first okay it finally loads up and yes expansion sound is supported it also supports other expansion sound chips like the fm stuff that you'll hear in konami's lagrange point i mean lagrange why did i say lagrange lastly if you have a proper bios then the famicom disk system games run as well yeah there's still some loading here and there but as expected it loads much faster than the actual magnetic disks do and although i have an adapter for the zapper the nes core unfortunately doesn't let me configure inputs for controller port 2 so there's no way to try it in fact i'm noticing the two-player functionality is missing in a lot of the cores on the mister so far this is a pretty good core that undoubtedly has received a lot of attention and i'm sure it will continue to do so [Music] [Music] a game boy core is here but it's pretty basic at the moment i'm recording this the games themselves play fine and you can choose between a four by three aspect ratio or a ten by nine mode which is the game boy's proper shape that's the mode i prefer to play them in and everything as smooth as you remember on a real system just without the blur you can play with different palettes but you have to load them externally and personally i just wasn't interested enough to try it out but you can do it unfortunately super game boy games like donkey kong here don't have the super nintendo enhanced borders or sounds i couldn't seem to get any game boy color games to run no matter what i did i'm sure they're gonna work fine in the future though oh and this core only works via hdmi it's all messed up if you try to play it on a crt however by the time you see this video they'll probably have the tv out feature working and maybe even the two players side by side link feature you'll have to update your mister to find out but other than that this core is promising [Music] this the super nintendo core had damn well better be impressive and it is of course it plays the system's games very well and they look and sound almost perfect i say almost because there's very minor things in the sound that you'll notice if you played certain games billions of times like i have there's also a little noise sometimes when sounds fade out or whatnot [Music] but that's not going to ruin the experience for you and you most likely won't even notice the normal slowdown is all here and there's no options to eliminate it or increase the sprite count or whatnot and you know that's fine by me i mean the extra options are certainly really cool and all but they're just not absolutely necessary and i've got to say it feels very very wrong playing f zero with a sega saturn pad it's just not right but you don't have to use a saturn pad you can use pretty much any usb controller you want but i will say that super castlevania 4 felt awesome using the saturn controller in fact i just kept playing and playing until i died for the first time which was right here more good news is that this core works with all of the games that use helper chips that i personally tried so far like mega man x2 here star fox also works well as does yoshi's island which uses the super fx 2 chip even street fighter alpha 2 works great i mean as good as it does for the super nintendo anyway i'm glad that they were able to get the games that use an extra chip working as a lot of the console's library wouldn't be playable otherwise it's not 100 percent there yet but it's still a fantastic chord that you're going to spend a lot of time with [Music] [Music] okay yeah so i guess some of the sound effects do come a little early [Music] we can't neglect the turbo graphic 16 and thankfully there's a core for that as well it's pretty good but it needs a little bit more work especially in the white noise sound area also some of the graphics seem stuttery like these sprites and dragon's curse they don't scroll at the same frame rate as the background check out the game being played on real hardware here and notice how everything scrolls perfectly smooth but not so on the mister at least not currently be sure to watch this video at 60 frames per second to notice the difference there's a little bit more shimmering in the scrolling than i'd prefer in the hdmi output of this core but of course the crt output is perfectly fine also like the master system core there's an option to increase the sprites per scan line to 64 to help get rid of most of the flicker which is pretty cool and even super graphics games work but you've got to append them with the dot sgx suffix and not dot pce otherwise they won't even be recognized and as of this recording cd games aren't supported at all which is too bad maybe in the future still there's a lot of fun to be had here even if you are currently limited to hugh carts [Music] even the atari 2600 has a core here what's interesting is that some games work better on hdmi like this one which when played on a crt parks itself too low on the screen and is slightly cut off and some others like beta and edom only work on a crt and output garbage over the hdmi connection still the core is entirely playable on a crt for the most part one of my favorite games on the system is dragon fire here which i probably haven't played since i was a kid you dodge a few fireballs on the bridge make it inside the dragon's chamber collect all of his treasures and then gtfo as they say and i didn't even know that there was a 2600 port of one of my favorite arcade games back in the day it was called kangaroo the atari 5200 is even here some games like star wars here aren't very playable without analog controls but most of the other games are playable if you can get them to start of course since 5200 is double the number of 2600 that means the graphics are twice as good and yes twice as much fun well actually maybe half it's interesting to see some of the games on the system as it was largely ignored the colecovision is on here as well though the emulation seems a bit off in some games like choplifter here if you look at the helicopter's shots i don't think that's right there's even a version of dragonfire for this system it was really interesting to see this far better looking but unfortunately far worse playing version of the game i'll have to get more into this core someday as i'm not really well versed in the colecovision not yet [Music] then there's the magnavox odyssey 2 from 1979 the games run but i can't seem to control them even after i signed the buttons oh well not really a big loss in my opinion another core that's on here that i really like is the one for the vectrex this was a vector graphics based home system from the early 80s and i've only ever gotten to play one in real life a couple of times and since vector graphics are basically just lines drawn between two plotted points there's really no limit to how far they can be upscaled and they look pretty good with the 1080p hdmi output here but don't try to play this on a crt with the analog output as you'll only get this mess still this one is a fun one to mess around with and there's some surprisingly good games for the vectrex [Music] okay so the console cores on here have varying levels of accuracy and it's always fun to watch them improve and i know they're making new cores like a neo geo one which will be really fun to see but let's check out some of the other cores that aren't consoles the computer that i was most looking forward to trying out here is the amiga but where is it i don't see an amiga folder oh on the mister it's called the mini mig i mean duh why would i look for amiga under amiga anyway the amiga core uses a virtual hard disk and this is one of them that i feel still needs a little bit of work the virtual hard disk that i have has all amiga games on it and there are a ton of them if you want to play a game that starts with the letter s or later in the alphabet well it's going to be quite a wait before you get there but at least while you're slowly traveling to your favorite letter in the alphabet you get to hear some nice camera shutter sound effects fortunately it looks like you can set up some sort of favorites list some games will load and some will even actually play though it's kind of a crapshoot if they play correctly for example in altered beast level 1 has no music and only sound effects but level two has both music and sound effects either this core still needs some work or they forgot to put the music in level one you know honestly i wouldn't put it past the game's developers a lot of games will like to blink things on and off for a while when they load and only when they load space here your two wants me to press a fire button to start it unfortunately i don't seem to be in possession of such a button nothing on the controller or the keyboard works still it was fun to try out the amiga version of space harrier 1 and witness just how awful it is i've always been wondering about this one since like 1990 it is truly horrible get ready get ready oh and check out the amiga version of outrun it has hilarious super dramatic voices and music at the title screen that's more suitable for an intense super scary game or something sega computer software presents [Music] out run i don't know if i want to play some outrun or go hide underneath the table speaking of outrun outrun europa is sure a lot better on the amiga than it is on the master system in fact the difference is staggering it's still not an amazing game but i could definitely see myself spending some more time with this one a lot of games on the amiga are designed to be used with a one button controller and that really brings the platform down as a whole they have all this hardware horsepower but only one button for the games for example in shadow dancer pressing up jumps but to get to the platform above i'd normally need to press up and jump at the same time how can i press up and up simultaneously here i tried holding it and it doesn't work i try to up an attack i mean nothing works oh well i didn't want to get up there anyway despite the weirdness that this course sometimes exhibits it's still really fun to play some of these games and i'm sure they'll improve it if they haven't already by the time you see this [Music] you even have some old computers like the mac plus if you ever wanted to play dark castle in its original black and white glory well now you can [Music] you really want to have a mouse hooked up for this one but i kind of like that actually i love old macs and i love point-and-click adventures like shadowgate one great computer here is the msx however using it can be kind of a chore like most computer cores it requires a virtual hard drive and the one i have is a pain in my bum after you select your computer revision and the game it needs to unstore itself which takes a very long time even if it's a tiny game and be careful because you stand the chance of getting an unsupported rom after all that so once it's unstored you can play your game and it's mostly pretty accurate psg and fm sound are supported as is konami's scc sound chip there are tons of great msx games to play and if you want to know more about it then check out our episode on the thing sadly though the whole unstoring thing here makes this core kind of feel like a waste of time i don't want to be a negative nancy but that's just how it is you'd think that once it was unstored it'd stay that way for example i tried playing super rambo special here after i got done playing which doesn't take long because the game is hard as hell i shut off the mister and eventually came back to it later i tried to load up super rambo again but it won't start it just keeps resetting the core unfortunately this one still needs a lot of work right now i have high hopes for this core in the future though because msx games are awesome and they should be enjoyed by everyone and yes the commodore 64 is here as well it's certainly easier to manage stuff here than it is on the c64 mini i can say that much it can mount discs and cartridges and from what i can see everything seems to be spot on granted i'm certainly not a commodore 64 expert as i've admitted before but so far everything i've loaded up has run fine actually that's not true i couldn't get my helicopter to take off in shoplifter and some other games i couldn't even figure out how to start the gameplay but otherwise this core seems pretty good the sound seems to be in stereo which is interesting the original computer featured mono sound unless of course you mod it however there are options here to have it playback in mono if you want to be a purist this is mostly a good core aside from the few input control issues i mentioned which could just be my own boneheadedness i would have loved to jump there by the way but couldn't find the button lastly there are a bunch of arcade cores and each game exists as its very own core these are mostly old and simple games like miss pac-man and the such it's really fun playing these on a crt the experience is exactly the same as it was playing these in the arcade back in the early 80s of course if you play these using hdmi you can rotate the image to be right side up but if you're playing via analog out you don't have that option at all understandably of course the cores here have varying levels of accuracy and once again it's usually in the area of sound where you'll notice the most flaws some cores will let you adjust certain aspects of the game if you like and there are even some hacks available for certain games like miss pac-man for example you can play it with atari 2600 style graphics or maybe even with a neon look my favorite though is the speed hack which is super fast i've played this version in an actual arcade and i love it i can't wait to see what arcade games they add in the future [Music] [Music] all right there's the mr for you in a nutshell anyway i mean there's a lot more to this thing than i talked about i guarantee you that this thing is intense so now we come to the part where we talk about if it's worth it to you well if you want something that you just plug in and play not gonna happen with this it requires a lot of setup however if you want to be part of an ongoing project with a large community that's contributing to this then hell yeah it's actually pretty fun so what do you guys think of the mister let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] sega computer software [Music] presents computer software sega computer software presents [Music] [Applause] outrun [Applause] [Music] wow it's officially been 30 years now 30 years since sega launched the genesis in north america this is my original genesis console that i got 30 years ago i am pretty old but so is the genesis hello and welcome to game sack and for the 30th anniversary of the genesis sega has released the genesis mini it's coming out in september 19th and well it has 42 built-in games and i'm here to give you some impressions so let's get to it [Music] the sega genesis mini is based on the model one genesis which was launched in north america on august 14 1989. as with all of the other mini consoles that have been released by everybody else so far they did a really good job with the aesthetics actually they seem to have gone above and beyond here you have a working power switch which of course turns the unit on and off you have a working reset button which calls up the in-game menu and yes even the volume slider moves though it doesn't actually adjust the in-game volume of course it belongs in the up position it even has working cartridge flaps which is really cool oh and the cover for the sega cd expansion slot can even come off hmm will sega introduce a sega cd mini someday that could possibly be attached well there are no electrical connections in either the cartridge or the cd ports the unit itself costs 80 us dollars and comes with two three button controllers an hdmi cable a usb cable and an ac adapter for the usb cable if you need it one of the controllers that came with my genesis mini doesn't work at all straight out of the box it's dead next i feel like it wasn't the best decision to include the three button version when there are games that use six buttons that are included with this system but this is likely because of some deal that sega has with retro bit as they want to sell those six button controllers which are compatible i tried my saturn usb six button controller and it doesn't work at all inside the genesis mini are chips that i don't recognize from zuwiki or c and unil [Music] turning the unit on you're greeted with a menu you can sort the games by release date genre number of players or alphabetically as i prefer the mini looks good and it's easy to navigate the 42 included games and if you press the b button you can change the view so you see the box spines as if they're on a shelf if you set the system language to japanese you not only get the japanese boxes for each game but the japanese versions of the games themselves [Music] the menu music was done by yuzo koshiro and basically it's just bits and pieces of each game's soundtrack strewn together [Music] as far as the display options you have a few choices here you can stretch the games to fit your entire screen or you can have them in the correct 4x3 aspect ratio if you're a normal person there are a couple of different borders that you can choose as well as solid black thankfully if you press the c button in the screen you engage the crt filter it looks kind of dim and generally i don't know they didn't seem to increase the gamma or brightness while applying the scan lines which makes everything super dark this definitely isn't for me as far as playing the games go it's fairly straightforward the project was handled by m2 who are renowned for their conversions and ports of old stuff like this during a game pressing the reset button on the console or holding down the start button on the controller for a while will bring up the in-game menu each game has 4 slots for save states and you can also reset the game or exit back to the main menu games like fantasy star 4 which have an in-game save option can also be saved that way as normal and it doesn't take up any slots the visuals are all presented in 720p generally it all seems to look pretty good if you choose the 4x3 aspect ratio it uses an integer scale vertically so that means there's a border around the entire game and that's fine unlike the nes and snes classic there's no choosing between pixel perfect and 4x3 here and there really doesn't need to be only the games that are 256 pixels wide on here will exhibit any shimmering during the scrolling however most genesis games are 320 pixels wide so it's rarely an issue another thing that's nice is that it gets rid of the dumb colored border that surrounds the genesis games it also runs faster than real genesis hardware it runs at 60.24 hertz whereas a real genesis runs ever so slightly slower than ntsc spec at 59.92 hertz granted literally nobody will be able to notice this with their eyeballs audio is one of the hardest things to get right when it comes to emulation of the genesis how is it here well it's mostly pretty good if you use your ears to judge it's nowhere near as bad as it could be if this were say made by at games that said it isn't perfect it has slightly less bass than a real model 1 genesis and a more aggressive low-pass filter this probably won't matter to most people some of the sound quality is also slightly different here's how space hair your scream sounds on a real genesis and here's how it sounds on the genesis mini it doesn't end there as other games are affected here's stage four's music from thunder force 3 on a real genesis and here's that same music on the genesis mini on top of that there's lag and literally all of the audio meaning sound effects will play slightly later than they're supposed to again here's a real genesis listen closely and here's the genesis mini i wonder if this is just a common issue caused by the hardware that these mini consoles seem to be using okay so now you know about the device itself let's take a look at the games yep every single one of them and now for the games there's 42 of them on here which is twice as many as the snes classic has no matter what there's just no way to satisfy everyone with the titles that they chose but let's go through them alphabetically first up is alex kidd in the enchanted castle i'm not sure why this one is on here as it doesn't have many fans alicia dragoon is a good choice and i don't think very many people played it back in the day [Music] some might be questioning why altered beast is on here keep in mind this one came with the console up until sonic came out so it's kind of a no-brainer plus it's two-player assuming both of your controllers that came with your genesis mini actually work beyond oasis is another great choice and this one will satisfy those looking for an action quest that might remind you of zelda-style gameplay i'm totally blown away that castle of illusion made the cut this is a licensed property after all it's short but it's definitely one of the better games on the system castlevania bloodlines is a very solid choice and more people absolutely need to play this one columns is an underrated puzzle game i always like the music and sound in this one [Music] comic zone is good for its style and i like the ideas that they had but the gameplay never really impressed me contra hardcore is great even though a lot of people seem to have a very hard time with it that's because it's tough darius is an unreleased game seen for the first time on the console here it's pretty brutal from what i've played i think i might like the pc engine versions better even though i didn't think they were that great to begin with robotnik's mean b machine aka puyo puyo is one of the few puzzle games that i enjoy playing from time to time so good choice dynamite heady is another good game but the us version here is tough once you get used to it though you'll be able to make it pretty far the genesis version of earthworm gem 1 is the second best version only behind the sega cd can't go wrong here echo the dolphin is okay i just can't get into the cartridge version though i'm just too used to the amazing music from the sega cd version eternal champions is eternally boring especially without a six button controller ghouls and ghosts is awesome this is the easiest version of the game even if you set it to professional which you should anyone can beat this golden axe is awesome and it's another great two-player game here the genesis version even has an extra stage and last boss gun star heroes is awesome and i'm glad it's on here even though contra already is kid chameleon is a game that's probably made better by being on the genesis mini because now you can have save states trust me you want them lance stalker is a fun isometric adventure game and it's a good addition [Music] like crusader might even be a better isometric game i don't feel that many people have played this one so hopefully gamers give it a chance mega man the wily wars has mega man 1 2 and 3 all in one package the controls are laggy and it's not the best conversion mega man 2 is stuck on hard mode i'd rather play these on the nes monster world 4 is here in english and everyone should play this it's a fantastic action platformer and i even had a great time plowing through it in japanese back when i got it fantasy star 4 is an insanely great rpg and a wonderful choice i love the battles here road rash 2 is really fun and it's also the only racing game you're going to get on here glad it's a good one shining force is a spectacular strategy rpg that's easy to learn and fun to play shinobi 3 is an awesome ninja game but if i had to choose i'd rather have revenge of shinobi honestly i'd preferred if both of them were on here and alex kidd got the boot sonic the hedgehog is sonic the hedgehog however if you switch your system language to japanese you can play the finished version with extra scrolling and other effects sonic 2 is more of the same and i know why it's here but i'm just personally all sonic'd out the good news though is that the two two-player mode looks fantastic and it's rendered in progressive scan so no interlacing artifacts at all sonic spinball is another one i just can't get into but sega loves to go overboard with all things sonic i'm not sure why space harrier 2 is on here especially considering that the game struggles to run at 15 frames per second street fighter 2 special champion edition is a good game if you have a six button controller i do not streets of rage 2 is a fantastic beat-em-up and it only feels natural that it's here and it's a great two-player game as well strider is another good one it's short but sweet [Music] super fantasy zone was never released in the us for the real genesis to me this is the true fantasy zone 2. tetris is a game which is extremely rare and was pulled by sega shortly after its release due to all of the legal stuff going on with the game back in the day what can i say it's tetris and there doesn't seem to be anything special about this version thunder force 3 is an amazing shooter that anyone can beat after a few tries i'm surprised that thunder force 4 isn't here as well probably because it was released on the switch not that long ago as a standalone game toejam and earl is a one or two player walking simulator if you like walking around you'll love this i guess i could never really get into vector man but lots of other people seem to like it for whatever reason so here it is virtua fighter 2 is such an odd choice i mean why wonder boy in monster world is the prequel to monster world 4 but the stories don't really tie into each other this is a great game that starts out kind of slow so give it a chance finally we have world of illusion which is another great disney game but this one can be played with two players definitely a great addition well there you go that's the sega genesis mini for you and what do you think are you planning on getting one of these things on september 19th and if you happen to be watching this video after september 19 2019 did you get one and what do you think let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game zach [Music] all right so i have this genesis-shaped usb hub hooked up to the sega genesis mini through the usb connection and coming from that i have the usb power going through the retro pad 32 connected to a real 16-bit sega genesis from 1989 now i only have power connected to the real 16-bit sega genesis from 1989 and we're gonna see if i throw the power switch on the genesis if it powers the genesis mini which in turn powers the genesis usb hub no time like the present to find out let's see if it works [Music] it totally works oh my god i can't believe that oh man that's awesome i love science okay i guess there can be too much blast processing learn something new every day [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game tag talking about the game boy advance this time around and this is actually the first portable system i ever bought it's right i never had a game boy game gear nomad nothing like that this was the first must-have portable system at least for me anyway so let's take a quick look at the system itself the game boy [Applause] the nintendo game boy advance was released in japan in march of 2001 and europe and north america in june of that same year the original unit features a horizontal layout with a non-backlit screen in the middle powered by two double-a batteries which lasts around 15 hours revisions were made which are rechargeable and include a backlight the game gameboy advance sp being the most popular model the games come on small cartridges that range anywhere from 4 to 32 megabytes officially part of the game boy line it's backwards compatible with both game boy and game boy color cartridges the game boy advance is powered by a 32-bit arm processor running at 16.8 megahertz screen resolution is 240x160 pixels with up to 32 768 simultaneous colors four independent background layers and 128 sprites on screen of varying sizes the sound is a dac powered by the cpu itself and it's the weakest point of the system with many games using a sampling rate of 11 kilohertz or even lower giving it a very fuzzy or scratchy quality overall the game boy advance was a huge success selling over 81 million units worldwide with over 1500 released games all right so it has some interesting specs but of course what people always care about the most are the games and the game boy advance will not let you down on that front so let's take a look at some games that i find interesting for one reason or another [Music] let's start off with mario kart super circuit this was the fourth best-selling title on the game boy advance right behind the pokemon stuff and no sorry i won't be covering any of the pokemon games in this episode because i'm just not really into pokemon suffice it to say people really love their mario kart i can see why it's a very simple concept try to win the race while using items to cheat your way ahead but it's not really cheating since every other participant in the race can use the same items that you can this version was developed by intelligent systems who were responsible for the fire emblem series and even the original duck hunt you can certainly feel the duck hunting roots while playing this one actually that's stupid no you can't it mainly looks and plays like the super nintendo original only with much better graphics you've still got the coins on the floor the hopping power slide and completely flat tracks without any hills but there's more detail on these flat tracks and now the sprites are also scaled properly as well even the distant scrolling backgrounds have a lot more going on the music is good and well it's what you'd expect from a mario kart game there's also a link up feature for you and up to three of your friends to battle which sadly i can't show you because i have no friends overall it's a good entry into the series and it proved that mario kart could even succeed on a portable system [Music] [Music] this is ninja 5-0 from konami and developed by hudson i've rarely heard anyone mention this one they should though because it's pretty darn good in fact it's on the cusp of being amazing you're a crime-fighting ninja cop out to take down thugs and rescue hostages this game reminds me of a mix between elevator action returns shinobi and rolling thunder and that's all definitely a good thing as you make your way through each area you can toss weapons to defeat enemies you can even slash them with your sword your sword is also used to open red crates which can contain power ups or keys to open the same colored doors enemies also sometimes drop power ups and life ups as well your shots get cooler and cooler the more power ups you get but if you get hit too many times your power level will decrease if you press jump again while in midair you'll extend a grappling hook which you can use to get to higher ledges you also have full screen ninja magic that you can use if your green bar is full you need to be careful not to hit hostages hit even one accidentally and you'll have to start the entire stage over and these stages can be pretty big there are three stages to complete in each area and the fourth one is a boss encounter it'll only take you a few seconds to get used to the controls and they work extremely well for the most part the exception is the grappling hook most of the time it's perfectly fine but there are points where you need to keep swinging your way higher and higher and it's just not done very well at all my enjoyment of the game is brought down just a teeny little bit because of this instead you can try to go up the sides of the walls in some areas but be careful and while i like the music the problem is that each area has the same music so it gets old quickly and it's too bad because this game is so close to being truly amazing and they just fell a bit short it's still definitely worth having though probably not worth what they're asking for it these days it's fairly well sought after since it originally didn't sell well at all [Music] there are three sonic advanced games on the system each released a year apart i thought i'd mention these briefly but there's really not a whole lot for me personally to say about them i love sega i really do but i simply don't care for sonic i just don't see the appeal anymore but hey at least these games are built from the ground up for the system so that's a plus i actually bought the first one when it was released for some reason probably the same reason i keep buying mario games but never finish them i get caught up in the hype during the release and give in anyway three sonic games are here for you if you like them and more power to you if you do just because i don't like them doesn't mean i'll think less of you if you do sorry if i make any of you sad but hey we all have our own likes and dislikes [Music] and speaking of mario games how about mario and luigi's superstar saga this is the first game in the rather large mario and luigi series and it's the only one on the gameboy advance this isn't your typical mario game actually it's like a slightly more complicated super mario rpg yes this is an rpg and once again you've teamed up with bowser however as you'd guess from the title you only play as mario and luigi both at the same time someone has stolen princess peach's voice and for some reason they left her alive since she still lives this prompts mario luigi and bowser to go on a quest to get her voice back the battles are kind of similar to super mario rpg with the enemy hopping and pressing the button at the right time for a more powerful attack and whatnot though to me this feels like nintendo had just realized that they have not just one but two different buttons don't want them going to waste gotta use them both all the time one button controls mario and the other one controls luigi it's not necessarily a bad thing it just feels like maybe they're pushing this concept a little hard as you walk around you can do special jumps for example if mario is leading luigi can jump on him and you both will jump higher as a result if luigi is leading mario can jump on him and you'll do a twirly thing to float across the air for a bit and sometimes you'll have to switch back and forth again and again a lot just to get to a box that has a coin or a mushroom the battles also have some combo attacks that i just couldn't pull off well at all so why stop trying it doesn't matter much though because the enemy attacks are usually easy to dodge it just takes a lot longer to finish the battle with single attacks overall i like the game the characters are all really fun the pacing is perfect the battles are mostly fun and the music sounds good definitely give this one a try [Music] um obviously there's a lot of variety in the game library but some of my favorite games have always been action and adventure turns out the game boy advance doesn't let down in those genres either treasure gave us some games on the platform including advanced guardian heroes they took their rule about not making sequels and just threw it out the window i'm very surprised that treasure did this since they broke away from konami because they got sick of making sequels and the such sega owns the license to guardian heroes and they weren't interested in the sequel so treasure actually had to license it from sega and have ubisoft publish it wow they really changed their minds about sequels anyway this one is a beat em up similar to the original saturn game it's pretty good but it's not great the action is fun and so is using all of your powers my main issue is that there's a lot of slowdown especially in stage two and it feels like stage two goes on about three or four times longer than it should the entire thing is played like this on this little platform not very exciting it also feels like it takes too long to get back up after being knocked down aside from these two gripes the game is well made and definitely enjoyable once again you can power up your abilities between stages you can also invest crystals into some slow moving research in the laboratory most of the stages seem to have their own gimmick like this one which auto scrolls with you standing on a glowing circle the music is pretty good with lots of tunes from the saturn game making a return it's not horribly expensive these days and you could certainly do worse with your money [Music] in 2005 treasure blessed us with gun star super heroes yeah not only did treasure start making sequels but now even remakes still this is an awesome game though it really shows off the scaling and rotation abilities of the game boy advance more than most other games a lot of the stages from the genesis original are here in fact i think that the genesis version of this stage looks a lot better but at least i still get to enjoy these tiny guys freaking out as i destroy their homes for no good reason yeah look at you you're now homeless and yes of course it still has a dice maze it's not a straight up remake there are lots of new stages and additions and this game loves to pay tribute to sega like this stage which is basically flicky only it's rotating around as you play in fact a lot of stages left to rotate in this game or how about this stage which is a nod to the arcade version of thunderblade there's even more in here but i'll let you discover that for yourself the music is also great though i do think the genesis version sounds better check this out if you want some fast paced explosive action on your game boy advance treasure and sega also brought us astro boy the omega factor i'm not sure who asked for this i've never been a fan of astro boy and i doubt he's popular enough to sell a game at least in north america and that might be why people rarely mention this one but what is treasure gonna do with the license make a bad game of course not this is an action platformer where you play as a nearly naked robot boy that has a ton of firepower you can punch kick shoot your finger laser blast through the air do a super laser and you even have your trusty butt bullets usually you need to defeat a certain number of enemies before the screen will let you advance after you meet certain characters you can power yourself up one point at a time kind of similar to advanced guardian heroes the control is very good and you'll get the hang of astro boys moves in no time there are even a lot of cut scenes for you to skip the visuals are once again done very well with lots of parallax scaling and rotation though not as much as gun star superheroes however this one loves blocky sprites why draw the enemies bigger when you can just scale up the small ones to save memory and time be sure to check this one out if you want to play as a proto mega man before mega man existed which plays nothing like mega man no seriously this one's good [Music] another series of games i need to briefly mention are the castlevanias i talked about these in great detail in my metroidvania episode so i'll keep it short here but please definitely check that episode out it started with circle of the moon which was a launch game in north america it's kind of stiff but it's super fun with great music harmony of dissonance was next the music wasn't so hot in this one but the gameplay and graphics took a fairly big leap forward well except for those dumb outlines around the characters and they saved the best for last with arya of sorrow this one is just outstanding and every game boy advance owner should try to play through this one if they can these are all in the metroidvania style of course these games alone made owning a gameboy advance totally worth it for me [Music] metroid 4 showed up on the game boy advance as metroid fusion samus has been infected with something called x and cells from a metroid saved her and now she's all messed up in yada yada all you need to know is is that it's metroid i would say that this is a metroidvania but it's not it's just metroid novania here except for that part where you have to kill dracula it's a really fun game full of exploration i will say that i did have a bit of trouble trying to get samus to jump off of the hanging ledges but only in a few particular spots still the stages are mostly well designed beyond that and of course you still need to rediscover all of your powers at least this game gives you a reason as to why you no longer have them but what good would a metroid game be if you started fully powered up anyway expanding your abilities is half the fun at least i'm not a huge fan of collecting the glitchy globs that float around but that's only a very minor complaint the graphics are pretty good but sparse in a lot of areas there doesn't seem to be as much variety here as there was in super metroid and i'm not fond of the blue and yellow look of samus samus samus whatever but what's that i think there's something going on here guys got a little mystery on our hands the music is ambient but honestly it doesn't have the chops to pull off the mood as well as super metroid did still don't let that deter you this is an awesome game two years later came metroid zero mission which is a remake of the original from the nes i really really love this game it doesn't bog you down with much text at all in fact there's barely any narrative to the game and it doesn't suffer as a result i've always had a fascination with the original metroid but playing it was problematic without a map and you also had to write down passwords now it's been given a very super metroid-like makeover with all of the things we've come to expect from that game as a result this game can finally shine the way it was meant to lots of stuff is familiar here and of course they took some liberties which is totally fine by me they added save rooms map rooms new areas and more and now some chozos will show you where you need to go next via the map screen the graphics are all extremely well done and i love them i really can't find anything to gripe about here and i love to gripe the music is also exceptional most of that is based on the nes original which itself was amazing so no surprise here yes it's still a little grainy sounding but it's not bad it really does a fantastic job setting the ambient mood or ambiance if you're fancy the game boy advance is definitely a phenomenal platform for metroid style adventures with these two plus the three castlevania games [Music] the super nintendo is well known for its rpgs many of which were ported over to the system but how about the original rpgs or even strategy rpgs are they worth your time or mine but first there's a game that i had to buy right when it came out because i was curious if it could live up to its namesake i'm a huge fan of super monkey ball so i just had to purchase super monkey ball junior keep in mind that i am not a very smart man obviously it scaled way down from the gamecube game and i'm surprised that they even attempted it it almost feels like a broken 32x game i kid it's not that bad but it is extremely slow and of course the frame rate isn't that great either also you don't have the benefit of analog controls and it feels like there's a touch of control lag as well the courses have been designed for this in mind somewhat but it still can be kind of frustrating there are four mini-games here all of them multiplayer some of them requiring multiple systems being linked together monkey fight is really fun but man that sound is pretty bad i really don't know what i was expecting from this game but like i said i had to try it and now i am sharing my pain want an rpg well how about golden sun from camelot these are the same developers behind shining force and shining the holy ark in all of those games if you've played any of those you'll notice the similarity in styles here the characters all have weird ticks look at that they really do that a lot too i'm not sure why they do that but i'm not a fan of it because it does slow down the pacing since it happens so often but whatever this game revolves around a psychic power called synergy basically this is just super fancy telekinesis but it can be used for a lot more than just moving stuff it can do stuff like revitalize your health and of course it can be used in battle speaking of battles the ones here are random and they happen all the time as far as the story goes it's typical and nothing really out of the ordinary for an rpg i did find it hard to get used to moving stuff with my synergy at first though still the game is put together very well and aside from the extremely verbose characters and their weird tics it's quite enjoyable the graphics are nicely done and i really like the colors in art the music is immediately recognizable to me as being from a toy soccer rabba who always does the music for camelot and of course it's very good [Applause] [Music] golden sun 2 the lost age is also on the system this one is set up just like the first game and uses a lot of the same characters it seems to have slightly better pacing you get into the meat of the game sooner or then you'll l enjoy both of these games [Music] [Applause] [Music] the legend of zelda the minish cap is the only original zelda game for the system at least for a single player and therefore the only one i can really show you this one was made by capcom oddly but they did a great job it has all of your familiar zelda trappings such as weapons and items that you can assign to different buttons dungeons you need to find keys to solve as well as light puzzles i appreciate that the game doesn't waste a lot of time with preamble you're into it fairly quickly zelda's been kidnapped and a new evil sorcerer threatens the land but he broke the only sword that the humans can use to defend themselves from said evil so your job is to speak to the menace who can repair the sword these are small creatures who only speak to young people like yourself along the way you get a green dude who affixes himself to your head he helps you out throughout your adventure with advice and whatnot he also shows you how to shrink down to the size of the minish when you're small you need to be extremely careful of water you can grow and shrink anytime you see a portal and there are plenty of them around anyway that's the game's main gimmick and thankfully it's not horribly annoying the visuals are very well done especially when you're playing a small link capcom brought their own style to the game and i like it i mean don't get me wrong it still looks very zelda-ish the sound is also very good with most of the familiar tunes you're used to in the series and some nice original ones pretty much a must-have for the system unless you hate zelda for some weird reason [Music] how about a strategy rpg okay so advanced wars doesn't really have much in the way of rpg but it's a great tactical game it's also pretty easy to learn if you've played any other similar game before however in this one you'll need to resupply your units if you can keep your supply trucks alive you can also capture enemy buildings that'll show them each side gets one turn per day yeah each turn takes an entire day there are also options you can set like fog so you can't see all of the enemy units at a given time and they can't see all of yours i don't like this option at all at least when playing by myself but if you're playing with another human it might add some surprise to the mix the game is very snappy and the battle animations look great however i did find this one pretty difficult for such a game it's probably best played multiplayer i think [Music] that of course was followed up by advance wars 2. naturally it's more of the same but with some welcome improvements for one your maps are usually bigger secondly and most importantly you need to purchase and deploy your own battle force from your base during the battle and you can buy anything you want as much as you want just as long as you can keep the cash flowing i like that they didn't fix what wasn't broken and you can't go wrong here [Music] [Music] fire emblem was made by the same developer and it's definitely a real strategy rpg this is actually the seventh game in the series but the first to be released in north america this one plays more like the shining force games and that's a very good thing you have the same type of units those who can attack the nearest base like swordsmen archers who attack a space further away and even flying units in this game you can visit homes that are on the map and potentially gain information money or even new members that fight with you like shining force you'll gain some experience for each battle no matter the outcome unlike advanced wars you don't have to manually end your turn after you're done moving all your people around and have told them to wait or attack however if one of your characters dies in battle they stay dead forever just like real life but if you don't like it just reload your save and try that battle again also just like real life all in all this is a great strategy game [Music] two years later fire emblem the sacred stones was released this is mostly more of the same and it's every bit as good maybe even a little better maybe that's because you can turn off hints right from the beginning this allows you to get into the nitty-gritty that much quicker you can't go wrong with either of these games unless you absolutely hate strategy rpgs still everyone should try it just to see if they like it [Music] okay for this last segment i'm just gonna throw some games in there that i thought were interesting a couple of them are decently popular the others definitely some hidden gems i'm too hidden for these gems to hidden for these gems many hidden gems let's just get on with it next up is warioware incorporated or warioware inc this game is basically just a set of super short minigames i love the idea at the time i like things that are absurd and this game is definitely that basically you're given a single word instruction like grab or defend then you literally only have a few seconds to figure out what you're doing how to do it and then complete the task for example you need to catch this rod when it drops by pressing the button or move back and forth on a unicycle to balance your load you'll fail often because you just won't have time to figure it out once you fail four times it's game over if you win it keeps going and going but of course it gets harder and faster yeah but believe me you'll have to fail some of these a few times before you can figure them out only then will you know what to expect and how to beat it each character generally has their own mini-games that they throw at you but you'll often see ones repeated the presentation of the game is amazing with extremely well done and often silly graphics it also has some of the best use of the game boy advanced sound hardware [Music] while this game is a blast the one thing it doesn't have is staying power you'll get tired of it after a day or two but then you can ignore it for years and years like i did and then try it again and have more fun this was followed up by warioware twisted which used a gyroscopic sensor in the cartridge for motion controls yeah no thanks but this first entry here is still a hoot and a hauler for a couple of days at least [Music] speaking of wario there's wario land 4 or wario does anyone say wario instead of wario this one is more of a traditional 2d platformer a pyramid has been discovered somewhere so wario drives down to find all of the riches hidden inside wario so greedy you need to find four pieces of a gem in each stage once you find all the gems in that world you unlock the door to the boss fight there are a lot of things that wario can do that mario can't and it can be kind of tough to get used to a few of the moves you have to remember to engage the smash power before you jump not vice versa like i keep trying to do decades of other platforming games taught me to jump before i attack so it's just a little weird it's not a knock against it though sometimes you have to pick something up and carry it somewhere or even throw something there are lots of things that can happen to you like getting smashed flat getting blown up into a balloon or even turned into a nasty zombie yo that's gross this isn't your typical mario clone that's for sure but once you get used to everything it's pretty fun there are also some mini games you can play since i guess wario is all about the minigames wait could this baseball game be in mode is so amazing the graphics are extremely colorful and detailed and they don't disappoint at all there's lots of scaling and rotation effects everywhere as well the music is what you'd expect which is kind of bouncy maybe slightly evil check this one out you might like it metal slug even got a little love in the form of metal slug advance though i've got to say this is probably my least favorite metal slug game but it's still not bad you choose between two brand new characters as you start your mission then you choose your mission on the world map as they open up from there it's mostly standard metal slug action except that most of the animation has been drastically cut back there's also no blood here not even grey sweat the game is still brutal though and it only gives you one life the good news is that there are checkpoints and you do have unlimited continues after you get back to your camp you can save your game so you don't have to go through the entire thing at once during gameplay whenever you collect a random item it'll stop everything just so it can tell you that you got a card like why do i care back in camp you can view the cars that you got but again i see no reason to care about this still other than the lacking animation the graphics are done very well and so is the sound it sounds just like a neo geo metal slug game right down to how very mono it is so definitely not horrible but there are many better metal slug games out there that you could play instead car battler joe is an interesting little car rpg of sorts from ancient the people behind streets of rage 2. it's like they took the rpg mode from final lap twin on the turbo graphic 16 took out the random battles and added guns ustar is joe who wants to be a car battler and of course soon sets on his way it begins in an overhead rpg world with shops and all of that familiar stuff soon you begin doing courier jobs to earn experience and money you have a car that gets equipped with a gun to help battle off bandits and whatnot the car scenes take place on mode 7 style tracks you're shown which way to go via the blue route arrow that moves around the screen but it can be kind of crazy at times usually it won't let you down though early on you're just delivering goods that are essential for survival like medicine or burgers you can buy and equip better parts for your car with the money that you earn eventually you'll be tasked with specific missions that move the game's plot along like trying to recover some stolen goods for a family i've got to admit the game can be kind of addictive i kept wanting to get to the next area despite the overall lack of variety i mean i didn't care i just wanted to see what was next it's easy and fun to play and they certainly didn't overdo the rpg elements the music by yuzo koshiro gives the game a unique feel but it's not necessarily something you'd want to listen to outside of the game overall it's a good time if you want a little racing adventure on your game boy [Music] advance [Music] iridium 2 is a really nice vertical shooter for this system well okay it's not really vertical it's one of those where it's angled a bit but it plays just like a vertical shooter basically you fly a ship around and shoot things before each stage you can choose what type of weapon you'd like to bring as well as if you'd like it to power up automatically i always choose auto and i've never had an issue with it or felt like it needed to be anything more over on the right side of the screen you have all of your weapons and can eventually collect some more there's a tutorial i went through once that explained all of this but i found it boring i didn't go through the tutorial this time and i had no issues whatsoever not that i know of anyway if you hold down the fire button you have a rapid fire shot if you double tap the fire button and hold you can charge up a powerful shot this works fine but i just wish it could have been assigned to the other button since that one doesn't seem to do anything at least in auto mode it doesn't a lot of the stage designs remind me of viewpoint for the neo geo the game is pretty easy and you should be able to complete the first five or six stages without dying once and there are a total of 15 stages just keep collecting the power-ups and they'll help restore your life meter once you're fully powered up on that weapon because of this your weapon level resets to its weakest point at the beginning of each stage still it's really fun and i never get bored though i think mainly that's because of the outstanding music from manfred linzner who is also one of the programmers it's very euro and it's in the style of chris huelsbeck [Music] each and every stage without exception has great music that's not only well composed but really pushes the sound quality limits of the system my only gripe is that it isn't in stereo the graphics are also amazing even though they're mostly pre-rendered some stages definitely don't look as nice as the others but it's still really cool to see this on a portable system if you like shooters check this one out [Music] well there's the game boy advance i know i didn't cover every single game i left out maybe three or four but it should give you a taste of what the game boy advance is all about and i love this system it has so much going for it anyway what do you think of the game boy advance let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] introducing the new game boy advance from nintendo the hot new portable system that's so advanced you'll have to evolve to play it the nintendo game boy advance now you're playing with power

Channel: Game Sack

Views: 462,517

Rating: 4.8067575 out of 5

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, gameplay, videogames, retro, genesis, snes, nes, msx, sega genesis, sega mega drive, game boy advance, gba, mister, MiSTer, atari lynx, analogue, mega sg, analogue mega sg, sega genesis mini, genesis mini, mega drive mini, mega drive, megadrive, nes classic, snes classic, neo geo mini, neogeo mini, playstation classic, c64 mini, c64, commodore 64, commodore 64 mini, playstation mini, mini consoles, review, megadrive mini, sega megadrive

Id: xSoZiup1oD0

Length: 216min 15sec (12975 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021