Following on from my article about it, I felt compelled to show the wonder that is G-LOC to all of you.
If you’ve never encountered this game, it’s one of the later Super Scaler games from Sega in the arcades, and until the recent Sega Ages release for Nintendo Switch, it has never had a particularly good conversion to home consoles.
Now though… whoo. You have to tear me away from this damn game. Enjoy the video below, and subscribe on YouTube for more.
Speak to pretty much anyone familiar with the Streets of Rage series, and chances are their favourite installment is probably the second.
While the first game may have set the template for the series to follow by being a beat ’em up designed for the home rather than the arcade, the second is where it well and truly hit its stride. Streets of Rage 2 demonstrates what the humble Mega Drive is truly capable of in the hands of real masters of their craft.
And it’s a game that is still relevant, enormously playable and impressive to look at, even to this day. So let’s take a closer look.
The Streets of Rage series is an all-time great in gaming, and you could practically hear the collective sigh of relief from the entire community when the brand new fourth installment, released at the tail end of April 2020, turned out to be good.
How do the older installments hold up today, though? Having not played them for a few years, I figured “while I wait for my Limited Run copy of Streets of Rage 4 to arrive” would be the perfect time to revisit them all. So that’s exactly what I’m doing.
We begin, of course, with the first game in the series, which first hit the streets in 1991 with releases for the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear. We’ll be concentrating on the 16-bit Mega Drive release for today, since that’s still the most readily available version for modern audiences. Let’s dive in.
Sega’s G-LOC Air Battle is my favourite arcade game of all time — not that I had that many opportunities to play it as a child, sadly.
We don’t really “do” arcades here in the UK anywhere other than the seaside, you see, and thus, growing up in a small village that was a considerable distance from the nearest seaside resort, I only ever got to play a lot of arcade games when we went on holiday. This, naturally, led to me judging a lot of domestic holiday destinations based on what arcade machines were readily accessible.
G-LOC is a game that immediately caught my attention on a family trip to Newquay in Cornwall. I dropped a quid in it for three credits, sat down and prepared for action. And from that moment on, I was in love.
Continue reading Sega Ages G-LOC Air Battle: Wish Fulfilment
Back in the early days of home computing, you couldn’t rely on arcade game companies to provide official ports of their own games.
Nope; they tended to be farmed out to other publishers and developers who had more experience with working on the 8- and 16-bit platforms of the era. One such example of this was the relationship between Sega and Activision; this resulted in a number of Sega arcade classics getting ported to systems like the Atari ST.
Here’s Enduro Racer, one of several products of this partnership. Can the humble ST stand up to the might of this Super Scaler classic?
With apologies to Senran Kagura Peach Ball for shamelessly stealing its Dad joke-tier ninja pun, it’s time to look at another in Sega’s excellent Sega Ages series for Nintendo Switch.
This time around, it’s 1987’s Shinobi, an important game from the relatively early days of Sega’s video gaming portfolio, and a title that doesn’t seem to get talked about all that often these days.
Hailing from the height of the “ninja boom” of the 1980s — a popular culture phenomenon that is regarded to have kicked off with Menahem Golan’s 1981 movie Enter the Ninja — Shinobi remains a solid, challenging game today, and well worth revisiting.
Continue reading Sega Ages Shinobi: Rescue Those Kids? Shuriken!
With this week marking the release of a new Hatsune Miku game on Nintendo Switch — and it apparently dominating the sales charts somewhat — I thought it was high time we celebrated the world’s most famous Vocaloid.
Miku is an impressive cultural icon in that she transcends context and medium; she’s a genuine superstar who crosses boundaries, brings people together and inspires a considerable amount of passion from creators and fans alike.
Where did she come from? How did this phenomenon come about? Let’s take a closer look.
An unstable economy might not sound like it would make the setup for a compelling video game, but Fantasy Zone is here to prove you wrong!
To be fair, the premise is little more than a justification for the fact that all the enemies in the game drop coins that you can use to upgrade your ship; Fantasy Zone is instead much better known for being one of the progenitors of what came to be known as the “cute ’em up” subgenre, alongside Konami’s Twinbee.
First released to arcades in 1986 and subsequently ported to a variety of different platforms, Fantasy Zone has been a beloved part of Sega’s back catalogue for many years now. And, at the time of writing, the recent Sega Ages version for Nintendo Switch promises to bring it to a whole new audience. So let’s take a closer look at that particular incarnation of this colourful blastathon!
We tend to think of the world of video game protagonists being a boys’ club until Lara Croft came along in 1996… but female protagonists have been around for quite a while longer than that.
1987, for example, gave the world Alis Landale, protagonist of Sega’s first Phantasy Star game. Alis wasn’t a damsel in distress, she wasn’t a secondary character, she wasn’t a love interest — she was the lead. She had a mission, and she was damn well going to make sure she carried it out, come hell, high water or Dark Falz.
Being the protagonist of a 1980s 8-bit role-playing game, we don’t really learn a lot about Alis the person within the game of Phantasy Star itself. We can, however, look at the context in which she appeared, and the various ways she was presented. So let’s do that!
Remember Columns? Remember how we talked about how chilled out it was, and how it didn’t want to stress you out? Yeah, you can forget all that with its direct follow-up.
Columns II is an example of an approach to sequels that was popular for a short while in the late ’80s and early ’90s: the provision of an experience clearly geared towards expert players, and a distinct case of “the same, but more so, and way harder“.
While Columns wanted everyone to relax and have a fun old time matching coloured gems, Columns II does everything in its power to stress you out at every opportunity. And I both love it and hate it for that!
Continue reading Columns II: The Most Passive-Aggressive Puzzle Game Ever
