Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection

Unlike Nintendo, who has went the route of overpricing there older retro games and selling them individually on the Virtual Console, Sega has decided to release yet another collection of old Sega-published games, and at a cheap price. The title, "Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection", is misleading, though. This isn't just Sonic games. There is a handful of Sonic games, though.

Here is the list of the games in this Sega collection:

Genesis
-Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
-Alien Storm
-Altered Beast
-Beyond Oasis
-Bonanza Bros.
-Columns
-Comix Zone
-Decap Attack
-Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
-Dynamite Headdy
-Ecco the Dolphin
-Ecco: The Tides of Time
-E-SWAT
-Fatal Labryinth
-Flicky
-Flicky
-Gain Ground
-Golden Axe
-Golden Axe II
-Golden Axe III
-Kid Chameleon
-Phantasy Star II
-Phantasy Star III: Generation of Doom
-Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium
-Ristar
-Shining Force
-Shining Force 2
-Shining in the Darkness
-Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
-Sonic 3
-Sonic 3D Blast
-Sonic & Knuckles
-Sonic Spinball
-Sonic the Hedgehog
-Sonic the Hedgehog 2
-Streets of Rage
-Streets of Rage 2
-Streets of Rage 3
-Super Thunder Blade
-Vectorman
-Vectorman 2


Master System/Arcade
-Golden Axe Warrior
-Phantasy Star
-Shinobi
-Alien Syndrome
-Zaxxon
-Altered Beast
-Congo Bongo
-Space Harrier
-Fantasy Zone

Now, that's a giant list of games, there. Forty Nine to be exact. It's kind of hard to think about. When you were a kid sitting on the floor playing your Genesis, would you ever've believed that games you spent $60-90 for back then would all be packed into one disk(if you knew what a disk was in the 80's) for $30? You wouldn't.

Soon as you start it up you'll get a nostalgic feeling. The games are virtually identical to there original version. All the cheats are still there, the old graphics, even SEGA claims to have redone the games in HD, which is completely false. If you wanna stretch the game you can play in 16:9. But, if you decide to play it in 4:3 it'll have a theme in the background related to the game your playing. You can manually change the controls to how you want to. You can also save the game whenever you want, similar to an emulator. This feature is very cool, since you can get all save happy in some of the games. Oh, I made it past this enemy... Save! Oh, I collected two more rings... Save! It would be cooler if you could just press a button and have it instantly save, but you when click select you have to go down to save game, select that and save it. There is a max of three save states per game. After having a few states for each game, they'll take up a chunk of your HD.

There are quite a bit of unlockables. You can unlock interviews from the developers of the old Sonic and Phantasy Star games. To unlock the arcade games you have to achieve some task the game gives you.

Final Decision
Thinking about buying some Gensis game on Virtual Console? Don't. $8 for one game or $30 for nearly 50 games. There's no contest here. From the epic RPG adventures like Phantasy Star, the tetris-like Columns and Dr. Robotnik's M.B.M., to the action platformers like Vectorman and Shinobi, to the fast paced gaming icon, Sonic, this game has all you could want. You may find a few games, here and there, that you loved as a kid that aren't in here. But, hey, you can only please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, never all the people all the time, right?