Welcome back, all you Sega crazies and CDs nuts, to another update to Mega Archive CD: a chronological look at the Sega CD/Mega-CD library as I work on sprucing up their Giant Bomb wiki pages. We've passed Halloween '93 in the standard Mega Archive series so now it's time to do the same for our reflective friends in Mega Archive CD. This group of nine has everything you've come to expect from the Sega CD: FMV abominations, RPGs with fancy anime cutscenes, slightly improved ports of Mega Drive originals, and several licensed games.

Now that the Mega Drive is almost all EA sports games these days, I'm finding myself anticipating working on new entries for Mega Archive CD that much more. Too bad it received less than a quarter as many games as the Genesis did. Speaking of which, we'll be back on the November holiday grind for Mega Drive next month: we've got some real doozies coming up.

Be sure to check in on and follow the Mega Archive Mega Spreadsheet for past (and future) MD and SCD games covered here, which I'm happy to report can now be viewed by other people. Boy, Google Docs sure can be fun sometimes.

Part IX: CD77-CD85 (October '93 - November '93)

CD77: Vay

• Developer: Hertz
• Publisher: SIMS (JP) / Working Designs (NA)
• JP Release: 1993-10-22
• NA Release: July 1994
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Turn-based RPG
• Theme: Fantasy (Plus Mecha)
• Premise: A prince of a fantasy kingdom is about to marry his betrothed when the wedding is suddenly raided by anachronistic power-suited foes, whom kill the prince's parents and kidnap his new wife, forcing him to recruit a ragtag group of warriors to get her back. Any RPG that starts the same way as Krull (1983) is already a winner.
• Availability: Coincidentally enough, a company named SoMoGa put this out on iOS a decade ago and just a few months back followed it up with an Android port. Seems pretty faithful.
• Preservation: The Mega CD's early library included a lot of RPGs, certainly in a greater concentration than the Mega Drive saw at any point, which suggested to me that the early third-party adopters for that system saw an opportunity in the CD format to focus on games that would benefit from more elaborate and dramatic presentations, especially as far as audio is concerned. This was of course something many devs had learned from working with the preceding TurboGrafx-CD and something I believe Squaresoft was very envious about, stuck as they were with whatever exclusivity deal they had with Nintendo and the SNES with its stubborn adherence to cartridges and sound chip music. Vay feels very much like a continuation of that early practice, presenting a pretty traditional RPG experience—less so the story, that posits a scenario where a high-powered, semi-autonomous, sci-fi mech suit crash-lands on a technologically primitive fantasy world and proves to be beyond anyone's abilities to cope with—that was enhanced by what was possible with the optical medium format. Vay then received a typically flippant Working Designs localization, adding levity to an otherwise serious revenge/rescue story: it was the second Sega CD game they worked on after Lunar: The Silver Star, and we'll be seeing them twice more when we hit 1994. Hertz, meanwhile, had worked on a few Mega Drive ports for other companies (usually subcontracted through SIMS, the JP publishers here) and I guess put everything they had into this Sega CD original project, as they sadly did not survive the year.
• Wiki Notes: Needed some text and a bit of sprucing up elsewhere. Also a header image.

CD78: Lethal Enforcers

• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• JP Release: 1993-10-29
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: 1993-11-19
• Franchise: Lethal Enforcers
• Genre: Light Gun/On-Rails Shooter
• Theme: Police Shootality
• Premise: Supercop Don Marshall takes to the streets to enforce the law, lethally.
• Availability: Unlike many less popular arcade FMV light gun games, there's been nothing in the way of a Lethal Enforcers remaster. That's Konami for you.
• Preservation: Hey, we're back here on the mean and apparently extremely sunny streets of Chicago where every criminal is indiscriminate with their shooting because they're all wearing shades and can't see shit. We covered Lethal Weapon back in Mega Archive #34 and with many of these MD-to-MCD ports there's a bunch of improvements, though in this case the improvements are more in the service of getting the game closer to arcade parity (though obviously the Sega CD FMV can only be so sharp). Like with the MD game, Lethal Enforcers was only ever sold with the Justifier light gun as a pack-in: you can't find it without the gun. Or at least, you can't get a regular-sized box of Lethal Enforcers as I'm sure many of the copies showing up on eBay et al "lost" the gun someplace. It always turns up where you least expect it, like in your luggage while lining up at TSA. One curious thing about this port: in Japan, the Mega CD release predates the Mega Drive one. I wonder if Konami worked on this first...?
• Wiki Notes: Triple-dip, between the SNES and the Mega Drive. Just needed the Sega CD box art and releases.

CD79: Bram Stoker's Dracula

• Developer: Psygnosis
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Dracula
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Fiendish Fisticuffs
• Premise: Jonathan Harker's fiancée Mina caught the worst STD of all—vampirism—so Harker goes to kill the NTR (Nocturnal Transylvanian Resident) who might have had something to do with it.
• Availability: Deceased for good this time, one hopes.
• Preservation: Our second MD port this entry is Bram Stoker's Dracula, a licensed video game to tie-in with the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola movie and not to be confused with Ham Stroker's Dracula, which was a very different enterprise altogether. Like Lethal Enforcers, we covered this game's MD version back in Mega Archive #34. Unlike the Lethal Enforcers Sega CD port however, which just made visual and audio improvements courtesy of the wonders of the CD platform, the SCD Dracula plays very differently from the MD version owing to its different development team and could be considered an entirely separate game. In fact, our wiki already makes a distinction between the differing versions, which does make me wonder whether or not we should be separating them out into individual wiki pages, but that seems like more work than I'm willing to do right now for a movie tie-in from Sony Imagesoft. For clarity's sake, the Mega Drive version from Traveler's Tales played vaguely like Castlevania (fitting the theme) with large levels to platform your way around, while the Sega CD version feels more like a FMV brawler where you walk to the right a lot while punching bats. The protagonist of this game is Jonathan Harker, who in the movie was played by Keanu Reeves with an accent he must've found somewhere behind a tent at a Ren Faire, but this game's hero is definitely not Keanu Reeves. He looks (and animates) more like Keanu Reeves's pool shark uncle after he got drunk enough to "assume" he knew kung fu. The game's also really, really bad: it feels ancient, like Irem's Kung-Fu Master with constant annoying enemy spawns and the occasional trap you can poorly attempt to avoid with the very limited jumping distance. Could make for a good seasonal Blight Club game, at least. Bite Club. Man, I'm just doing all of Giant Bomb's work for it.
• Wiki Notes: MD double-dip. Very few edits needed.

CD80: Cliffhanger

• Developer: Malibu Interactive
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Cliffhanger
• Genre: Brawler / Action
• Theme: Dropping Girlfriends Down Chasms
• Premise: Sly Stallone and Michael Rooker play former professional partners who had a falling out after one disappointed the other, but are forced to work together in the face of a grave threat. Wait, that's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
• Availability: Licensed game so nope.
• Preservation: Unlike the other Mega Drive to Sega CD ports in this entry, this was a simultaneous release with the cart version and yet you'll still find some extra content in addition to the usual presentational enhancements which I guess means they made this one first and took out anything a cart couldn't handle later? Is that how game development works? Man, I worked in game development and I have no idea. Said enhancements are of course your standard grainy FMV clips from the movie (including about five minutes of the first act to set everything up) and CD music closer to the original score, and the extra content appears to be a 3D avalanche-evading snowboarding level I doubt anyone asked for, but you can't argue that it didn't make the Sega CD version that much more of an attractive proposition. Of course, I'm speaking in relative terms here: this is still a terrible movie tie-in that feels vaguely like the Spider-Man brawlers of the era in that they tried to break up all the punching with some "climbing while things are constantly flying at you" action stages. Movie's fun enough though. It's Die Hard on a mountain. (I think I said that last time? I covered it in Mega Archive #39, i.e. the most recent one as of writing.) I always did think it was a little messed up that it doesn't actually end on a cliffhanger.
• Wiki Notes: Another triple-dip. I've spent more time than I'd like to believe writing about the Cliffhanger game.

CD81: Ground Zero: Texas

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1993
• EU Release: 1994-02-18
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: On-Rails Shooter
• Theme: Everything's Trigger in Texas
• Premise: Aliens have taken over a small town in the Lone Star State and replaced some of its population with their own shapeshifting agents. Are you a bad enough hombre to shoot first and check later if they were actually body snatchers or not?
• Availability: Remastered in 2021 for PS4 and Steam.
• Preservation: Oh hey, it's Ground Zero: Texas. One of the lesser celebrated of the big FMV shooting galleries on the platform, it must've been someone's favorite if it received a lavish Screaming Villains remaster. For those unaware, schlockmeisters Screaming Villains has rescued quite a few Sega CD FMV games from the dumpster of gaming history: they also worked on the 25th Anniversary Edition of Night Trap as well as remasters for Double Switch and Corpse Killer (both coming soon to Mega Archive CD). In Ground Zero: Texas, a group of shapeshifting aliens called the Reticulans (which I figured were so-named because you point reticles at them, but there actually is a Reticulum constellation out there; if that's an intentional pun then it's a good one) take over a southern rural town as a foothold for a planet-wide invasion, and it's up to some paranoid special forces operatives to flush them out. Mostly by switching between four camera feeds to shoot at random civilians who suddenly pull a raygun out of nowhere: it's that kind of fast-reflexes light gun game (albeit one that doesn't actually support light guns). Digital Pictures went all out on the budget for this one, even hiring enough Hollywood talent that they had to make good with the various unions involved in big movie productions, all just to see their hard-earned footage get reduced in visual quality to the point you can't make anything out half the time. Sometimes the tech just ain't there yet.
• Wiki Notes: Pretty detailed page already. Just needed some releases and a header image. I yoinked one of the remastered screenshots from its Steam page: a slightly rotund dude in a Stetson shooting at people in front of a taco stand, all of which scream "Texas" to me.

CD82: Puggsy

• Developer: Traveller's Tales
• Publisher: Psygnosis
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1994-01-06
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Pugg Life
• Premise: True alien chads fix up their own rides rather than phone home for a pick-up like some kind of finger-glowing wuss.
• Availability: Nope. I'm sure Puggsy's waiting to hear back from the ToeJam & Earl reboot devs.
• Preservation: Our fourth Mega Drive port for this entry is, again, one that received enough new content to be worth adding here. I guess you can just assume that's the case for every SCD port going forward too, but in Puggsy's case it includes FMV intro cutscenes, CD music, and new levels and boss fights. Puggsy, if you don't recall from when we covered it on Mega Archive #33, is about an alien that resembles a space hopper as he makes his way across levels through a combination of standard platforming and some before-its-time physics engine tomfoolery with carryable objects that each have their own physical properties (some roll, some bounce, etc.). Traveler's Tales would later make a mint just releasing the same Lego platformer over and over, so it's reassuring to see here that they made something pretty ambitious early on in their careers.
• Wiki Notes: Double-dip, just needed the Sega CD releases and box art.

CD83: WWF Rage in the Cage / WWF Mania Tour

• Developer: Sculptured Software
• Publisher: Arena Entertainment (NA + EU) / Acclaim (JP)
• JP Release: 1994-06-24 (as WWF Mania Tour)
• NA Release: November 1993 (as WWF Rage in the Cage)
• EU Release: January 1994 (as WWF Rage in the Cage)
• Franchise: WWE
• Genre: Pro Wrestling
• Theme: Shoots and Ladder Matches
• Premise: Despite all my rage, I am still working on a wrestling game's wiki page.
• Availability: Legally I don't think WWE can release anything with the WWF brand any more. Not without a bunch of panda goons stopping by and tossing furniture around as an intimidation tactic. When WWF's panda goons come calling, you're the one that's endangered.
• Preservation: The Sega CD got exactly one wrasslin' game and you're looking at it. Well, to be exact, you're looking at me being unkind to it and to some extent the entire WWE institution in text form as I explain that this game is actually just WWF Royal Rumble with a few (but not as many as you'd hope) bells and whistles owing to the new platform. One of those is of course the addition of cage matches, in which wrestling talent is put behind bars instead of, in a more perfect world, the erstwhile owner of the business. We get some introduction voiceover clips, and previews of wrestler specials in glorious monochrome FMV, but someone forgot to commission any musicians so it reuses the original tinny Mega Drive sound chip renditions of all the entrance themes. It's like when you play those old PC ports of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII and it's wall-to-wall MIDIs on the soundtrack; you guys realize you published these on CDs, right? Anyway, if the urge ever strikes to play as the Headshrinkers or the Nasty Boyz in a wrestling game that somehow doesn't offer a tag team mode (in 1993), by all means have at it.
• Wiki Notes: Screenshots and releases.

CD84: Dark Wizard

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-11-12
• NA Release: March 1994
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy RPG
• Theme: Tenebrous Thaumaturgy
• Premise: Four warlords challenge the titular dark wizard after he conquers the nation of Cheshire. Dude must really love cheese or something.
• Availability: Oddly, for a first-party RPG, it's never been rereleased. Didn't even make it on the Genesis Mini 2.
• Preservation: Here we are with Dark Wizard, Sega's own sorta answer to Fire Emblem—though it's structurally closer to Master of Monsters between its unit management and hexagonal battlefields—which combines a strategy RPG where you summon units both generic and unique to overwhelm enemy commanders with a lavish anime production with a whole lot of talky cutscenes. It has four campaigns, each of which renders the others non-canonical due to how they address the death of the ruling monarch: the crown prince who seeks to avenge his father, a feisty knight captain who decides the prince is too much of a wuss to win the kingdom back on his own, a sorceress tricked into assassinating the king, and a vampire lord hoping to use the confusion to take over himself. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, from their leadership potential to their economy income to their magical skills, as well as their own unit types and champions. It's apparently a real long game too: the promotional materials at the time suggested it would take 300 hours to see everything, which strikes me as unlikely. In Japan, the game is called Dark Wizard: Yomigaerishi Yami no Madoushi ("Resurrection of the Dark Wizard") but they dropped the mostly redundant subtitle for its North American release (and, like many RPGs, it passed over Europe entirely—ironic that the country that has the real Cheshire never got to see this fantasy version of it).
• Wiki Notes: This was one of the most detailed Sega CD pages I've encountered so far, so very little work was needed. Minor edits only.

CD85: Arslan Senki

• Developer: BEC
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-11-19
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Arslan
• Genre: Strategy RPG
• Theme: Not the One With the Talking Christ Lion
• Premise: Prince Arslan must recover his vaguely Arabian kingdom from invaders after his father, the King, is betrayed and assassinated.
• Availability: Licensed game, so... best bet is the more recent Arslan: The Warriors of Legend video game adaptation from Omega Force. Hope you like musou.
• Preservation: Our final game for this Mega Archive CD entry is Arslan Senki, another strategy RPG. However, this one's based on the novels/manga/anime of the same name created by Yoshiki Tanaka. It's meant to be a companion piece to some OVAs that were produced after a couple of animated movies and uses the same character art, as far as I can tell. While Dark Wizard was sort of Fire Emblem but also sort of not, this game is the same except for the "sort of not" part. I'm sure diehard FE fans can point to many areas where the two diverge, but the moment I walked up to some nobody enemy goon and attacked him and was shown an animated cutaway that took off so many little vertical beans of health from his HP gauge I was immediately like "oh, huh, so it's one of those." I dunno, aping that series probably felt like a safe bet given this property has a whole mess of warfare in it while also following a bunch of important named characters around. I kinda wonder if Arslan Senki would've played like Suikoden instead had it come out five years later: a lot of similarities between the two franchises, especially as being an effeminate white-haired prince with a handful of loyal retainers trying to raise an army to take back his throne is almost exactly the plot of Suikoden V too. Incidentally, this is our one and only encounter with BEC on any version of the Mega Archive: they were a Bandai outfit (the acronym stands for Bandai Entertainment Company) that they formed with Human Entertainment which mostly assisted other Bandai-affiliated developers like SRW's robo-wranglers Banpresto but would infrequently put out games of their own. Anyway, Arslan (both the game and the anime) seem kinda neat so maybe I'll consider making it a Game OVA subject when summer rolls around.
• Wiki Notes: Skeleton page, so needed a bit of everything.