Sam's video game collection essentials

Here we have the best-selling and perhaps the most famous Sega CD game, starring everyone’s favorite blue hedgehog. It’s also one of the earliest Sonic games, starting development not long after the first game was released. Sonic CD hit shelves between when Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 did for the Sega Genesis. Like most Sonic games, Sonic CD pits Sonic the Hedgehog against the evil Dr. Robotnik. This time, Robotnik has decided to try and convert this small magical planet into his own fortress to take advantage of its power. The power of the planet is held in seven special “time stones” which can control the flow of time and even make time travel possible. This game sees the introduction of a popular recurring character in the series, Amy Rose, a fellow hedgehog who has a big crush on Sonic. Robotinik kidnaps her to try and lure Sonic, which does work even though Amy is the one obsessed with Sonic and not the other way around. Time is not just a story element here, as the developers chose to ad...

Konami delivers another excellent offering yet again. This one was the brainchild of Hideo Kojima specifically, a very famous creator of a certain stealth game series that I haven’t gotten to yet. Snatcher is what you’d call a “graphic adventure game” (and maybe fits the more modern term “visual novel”), a type of game that was more commonly seen on PCs at the time. And indeed, Snatcher was originally developed and released for a couple types of Japanese PCs before getting console ports. This Sega CD version is interesting because it was developed specifically for Western markets as the game’s only release outside Japan, and yet the developers put a lot of work into it and made improvements from the game’s previous iterations so it’s arguable that it’s the best version of the game. The name “Snatcher” refers to the game’s antagonist, a mysterious group of evil robots who have recently been secretly murdering humans, taking their skin and covertly replacing them in society. At the start...

I’ll take a second here to talk about the Sega Game Gear. As I’ve already covered in this series, the handheld system Game Boy from Nintendo was an enormous success which made portable gaming as we know it mainstream. It’s no surprise that Nintendo’s biggest competitor at the time, Sega, would challenge it. The Game Gear launched in 1990 in Japan and Western countries the following year. It saw modest success and surpassed Game Boy’s other competitors…but it still finished a VERY distant second to the Game Boy. The console had a colored screen and backlight which set it apart from the Game Boy, but the unit itself was huge and it dried up batteries much too quickly. I owned a Game Gear for quite a while as an adult, but it just didn’t have enough games of interest for me to keep it. Anyways, the reason why I bring it up here is because there were a few Shining Force games on the Game Gear. This release, Shining Force CD, is a remake that contains two of those games greatly spruced up w...

And now we have the other most famous Working Designs-localized game on the Sega CD. First, you might ask, what does that title mean?? Well, Mail is the name of the main character. Nobody seems to know what “popful” means exactly, but it’s probably something that a Japanese person with a rudimentary level of English came up with when trying to think of a word like “peppy” or “spunky”, I’m guessing. But I don’t really know! Although the box calls this game an action RPG, it isn’t really. There’s no leveling up in this game, and there’s some gameplay elements you might find in a regular RPG but not really enough to call this a part of the genre. This is more of a side-scrolling action adventure title. It originated as a game for certain Japanese PCs that I know nothing about and received a few ports on other platforms…or maybe I should say remakes, because some versions of this game are extremely different from one another. As I said before, you play as Mail, who is, despite the name, is...

Here’s another iconic sports game you may have expected that I put off due to there being a Sega CD version. NHL ‘94 is still considered one of the best hockey games (even best sports games in general) of all time. Like Tecmo Super Bowl, it is known for having a dedicated fanbase that still makes fan-made updates with updated teams and rosters to this day.  I can’t say a ton about NHL ‘94, I’ve always stunk at any hockey game that’s remotely realistic so that’s kinda prevented me from spending too much time with it. I could pick the best team against the worst team and still struggle to score any goals! But I’ve always been aware of this game and its quality since I was a kid. I’ve played the previous hockey game from the same development team, NHLPA Hockey ‘93, and the jump in quality from that game to this one is staggering. They just nailed what a mid-’90s hockey game was supposed to be, ranging from controls to presentation.  NHL ‘94 is most popular as a Sega Genesis game,...

If you’ve been following this series then you might have been surprised at the absence of NBA Jam up until now, as it didn’t appear among my SNES or Genesis games. That’s because my preferred version is this one, on the Sega CD! This is a game from the highly successful American arcade game developer Midway, who had been around a while by the time they released this game in arcades in 1993. They had developed non-traditional arcade sports games before, and in fact this wasn’t even their first such basketball game, as they had previously made Arch Rivals. But NBA Jam skyrocketed way past them to new heights of popularity. In fact, this is one of the absolutely top most successful arcade games of all time. If you spent much time at all in arcades in the ‘90s, you are almost certainly familiar with NBA Jam. I’ve explained before how “arcade-style” sports games often don’t try to go for a realistic design, and instead focus on fast-paced action that’s easy to pick up and play. NBA Jam is t...

After the success of the first Lunar game, it should be no surprise that a sequel was made. Eternal Blue takes place in the same world as the first game, but 1,000 years in the future. It is actually a direct sequel, though, as there are tie-ins with the first game that obviously I’m not going to spoil in a post like this. Lunar: Eternal Blue places the player in control of Hiro, a young explorer who you first meet treasure hunting in a cave with his friend Ruby who is a baby dragon. He soon meets a mysterious and powerful young woman named Lucia who appears in a nearby tower and has mysterious incredible powers…until they are taken away by a big bad evil being known as Zophar. Lucia informs that she must meet with the Goddess Althena and is determined to travel by herself if necessary to do so. Hiro decides to follow and aid her, and the group meets a variety of friends on the journey.  It seems to me like the first Lunar game is the one that is most remembered (maybe because the...

Before I talk about the game itself, first I want to talk about Working Designs since this is the first published game of theirs that I’m covering. Working Designs was strictly a publisher and not a developer, meaning they did not develop any games from the ground up. They instead looked at games only released in Japan and would work out a deal with the game’s developer so that they could put in the work to make an English version for an American release. They brought over a good number of games that otherwise would have been stuck in Japan, and that was really wonderful. They also had some practices that really set them apart from any other company at the time. They really put in extra effort to make the packaging for their games really nice, often adding some additional shininess to their box art (though not in this particular copy shown above)). In the instruction manuals for their games, they would have words directly for the fans and asked to hear feedback, for example, about what...

By the early ‘90s, it was clear that CDs were destined to replace cartridges as the standard for how video games were sold. Technology was improving rapidly, but when this truth became evident, it was years before things had progressed enough for CDs to properly replace cartridges as the standard. Nevertheless, companies were eager to stay ahead of the curve with technology. At first, rather than release consoles that played games stored on CDs, companies instead developed add-ons for their cartridge-playing consoles that were sold separately and could play games specifically developed for them. One competitor to Nintendo and Sega back then was the Turbografx-16 (also known as the PC Engine in Japan) developed by NEC, who collaborated with developer Hudson Soft. They were the first company to release an add-on for playing CD games, which came out in the late ‘80s. (I have in the past owned Turbografx consoles but have chosen not to keep them in my collection so I won’t be covering them...