Up’n Down is not an arcade game I’m especially familiar with — and I’ve also learned it’s one that people often get confused with Data East’s Bump ‘n Jump, for reasons that are probably obvious.
The Atari 8-bit version here is not a bad port at all — though it does suffer from a few glaring technical issues that make it a little tricky to truly enjoy at times.
Check it out in the video below, and donβt forget toΒ subscribe on YouTube for more!
After we covered the Atari ST version of After Burner a little while back, a few people reached out to me and told me to take a look at the PC Engine version. So I did.
Good Lord, that version leaves the ST version in the absoluteΒ dust. And on a platform with an 8-bit processor to boot. Turns out thereΒ wasΒ at least one platform out there of producing a thoroughly respectable version ofΒ After BurnerΒ that was almost as good as the arcade version… apart from the “canyon” level, but we can probably forgive that.
Check it out in the video below, and donβt forget toΒ subscribe on YouTube for more!
Back in the day, we all knew that home ports of the most impressive arcade games were never going to match up to playing on original hardware. But we took what we could get.
Such was the case with Argonaut Software’s port of Sega’sΒ After BurnerΒ to Atari ST. It, of course, pales in comparison to the arcade version — but when you didn’t have ready access to that arcade version, I can attest that you would absolutely find a way to be happy with this!
Check it out in the video below, and donβt forget toΒ subscribe on YouTube for more!
It’s the Olympics! Given that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics are… somewhat lacking in atmosphere due to understandable circumstances, let’s take a look back at an Olympic games where there were actually people watching.
Eurocom’sΒ Beijing 2008,Β published by Sega,Β is an excellent multisports game with a surprisingly substantial offering for the solo player. There’s a ton of variety, there’s character progression and there’s some solid TV-style presentation. If you’re after a fun Olympics game for an older platform, this is well worth your time.
Check it out in the video below, and donβt forget toΒ subscribe on YouTube for more!
Tokyo Highway Challenge for Dreamcast is an interesting game, as we’ve previously talked about. On paper, it sounds like it should be really boring — all you do is race around the same stretch of Tokyo highway night after night after night — but in practice, it’s a really enjoyable and interesting twist on the racer genre.
At least part of this is due to its unusual race structure, which takes some cues from fighting games, of all things. Rather than simply beating your opponent to a set destination, you need to defeat them by emptying their “Speed Points” bar. You achieve this by staying in front of them and, essentially, proving your superiority at this whole racing thing.
Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
Pardon me, boy, is that Sega’s Super Locomotive? Why no, good sir, it’s Alligata Software’s Loco, a gratuitous “homage” to Super Locomotive which creator Antony Crowther got away with thanks to Super Locomotive’s relatively unknown status!
LocoΒ is an interesting concept for a game; you’re driving a steam locomotive down never-ending tracks, fending off attacks from small aeroplanes and inconveniently placed handcars that have been carelessly discarded around the railway network. You’ll never get where you’re supposedly going — this is an arcade-style game through and through — but in games like this it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
As part of Sega’s 60th anniversary celebrations, the company has been putting out a number of limited-time-only free minigames on Steam, including a Streets of Rage-inspired brawler based on the Yakuza series, a tank blaster based on Company of Heroes and a Fantasy Zone/Endless crossover.
By far the most controversial of these freebie releases is an unfinished prototype that has become known as Golden Axed. It was originally intended to be part of an ambitious series known as Sega Reborn,Β which would not only feature reimaginings of Sega classics such asΒ Shinobi, Altered Beast andΒ Streets of Rage,Β but also tie them all together with some sort of coherent plot and a “hub world” to explore.
The project as a whole never happened, but the team from Sega’s Australian studio behind the pitch did manage to put together a short prototype for the Golden AxeΒ part of the whole package. But there’s an interesting — and somewhat depressing — story behind it that is well worth sharing. So let’s explore further.
I’ve always loved a good multi-sport athletics game, right back to the good old days of Epyx’s “Games” series on 8- and 16-bit platforms.
With the 2020 Olympics being cancelled (sorry, “postponed”) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there I was thinking there wasn’t an official video game out there. But there was! It came out in 2019 and is a Japan-only release, but has full English support. You can read more about it here.
Or you can watch me show off all 18 events to varying degrees of success in the video below, of course. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.
The dearly departed Bizarre Creations were best known for their racing games — Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast, the Project Gotham series on Xbox platforms and the wonderful game that would, sadly, turn out to be their death-knell: Blur.
But throughout the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, they actually fiddled around with quite a few different styles of game. They made aΒ James BondΒ game, for one — you better believe that will show up at some point in the near future — as well as the delightful “techno-classical” rhythm game Boom Boom Rocket.
Today we’re taking a look atΒ The Club,Β a Sega-published game that combines gritty third-person shooter action with arcadey scoring and racing mechanics; a modern-day (well, late 2000s) Outtrigger, in many ways. Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
With a few exceptions, officially licensed video game adaptations of the Olympics tend to be little more than footnotes in video gaming history.
Often regarded by critics as collections of minigames rather than anything of real substance, they tend to enjoy a brief period of popularity around the time of the real-life Games they find themselves based on, then afterwards fall into complete obscurity, never to be seen again. Which puts Sega’s Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – The Official Video GameΒ (Tokyo 2020Β hereafter) in a rather interesting position.
First releasing in Japan in July of 2019, a full year before the actual Tokyo 2020 games were set to begin, it now finds itself in the peculiar position of being an official adaptation of an event that never happened — and that, at the time of writing, we’re not 100% sure willΒ happen as the global COVID-19 pandemic continues. Which makes it an interesting historical curiosity at the very least — but thankfully it’s also an entertaining game, too. Let’s take a closer look.
Continue reading Olympic Games Tokyo 2020: The Game of the Games That Never Were
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