Hey Bombarinos. You know what I miss? Caring about the Giant Bomb Wiki. Used to be around this time I'd be filling out or adding every page I could in preparation for AGDQ—no longer a concern of ours, as Twitch now uses a different game database—but it's been a while since I rolled up my sleeves and got to the prickly business of adding release data, snapping a few photogenic screenshots, and making up a couple paragraphs of synoptic bullshit about games old and new. Then I remembered I had this ongoing exploration of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis left incomplete. (I'll cop to being somewhat inspired by the tireless work of our own @borgmaster, who has been following a similarly Sega-friendly path with their coverage of the Sega Saturn.)

At any rate, I'm returning to my old system of presenting a list of informational bulletpoints followed by my own takes on how well these games have held up from my brief time figuring them out for the Wiki's sake. Feel free to check out their new and improved pages too by clicking the titles, though there's usually more work to be done. For the time being this will be a monthly rundown; I'm easing my way back into the swing of things as I work on other projects (which this month also includes more fashionably late GOTY business).

We left off last time at the cusp of February 1993, which this entry will cover in full. As expected of the Mega Drive at this point in history, almost all of the following games are focused on the North American and European markets as that was where the system excelled (in Japan it was still getting its ass beat by the Super Famicom, not that I'm playing favorites or anything) with the usual mix of sports games, Amiga/Atari ST migrants, and at least one licensed game based on a cartoon. Business as usual for the late-era Mega Drive; I can't say I miss all those early shoot 'em ups but on the whole I'd rather be covering those over endless annual EA Sports titles.

If you'd like to revisit any of the previous Mega Archive rundowns, here they are in this increasingly unwieldy table:

Part XXIX: 391-400 (February '93)

391: Jeopardy!

• Developer: Park Place Productions
• Publisher: GameTek
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Jeopardy!
• Genre: What is the Puzzle genre?
• Theme: What are Cheap Game Show Adaptations?
• Premise: Grab your closest potent potable and get ready for some Jeopardy! on the Sega Genesis. Can you slowly input the correct questions in time before digital Trebek's moustache mutates into its final form and shoots power rings at you? (This may or may not actually happen.)
• Availability: Newer versions of video game Jeopardy! abound. Might be easier without all the questions on forgotten '90s culture.
• Preservation: It's... Jeopardy!. GameTek notoriously milked these licenses for all they were worth, finding talented developers who had better things to do to quickly throw these games together between bigger projects. There's actually three Jeopardy! games available for Genesis: this one, a sports-focused one, and a "Deluxe Edition" which isn't all that much different except I guess it has extra question sets. One curious thing about this particular edition is that the CPU doesn't make intelligent wrong answers; instead, they'll just randomly type in "XXX" to torpedo themselves and keep their scores on par with a struggling player. I like to imagine they're all really big fans of the Vin Diesel movie (or maybe fans of, uh, something else). Notably, one of the questions I saw was about the river Thames that went something like "while Thatcher watches over Parliament, Parliament watches over this body of water": to clarify here, Margaret Thatcher was gone by 1990 which meant this question (or answer) was already three years out of date by the game's release. Given one of the other categories was "60s Trivia" you have to wonder how old these sets of questions are: my ongoing theory is that they're pulled from some old show archives and not looked at too closely before being digitalized. Probably would've asked questions about Yugoslavia and phrenology if I kept going.
• Wiki Notes: It's a SNES double-dip, so not much needed to be added to the body here as I did most of the work back when I covered that system. The release needed some punching up (it didn't even have the release date, which is kinda the most important field) and it was missing screenshots. While it played the same as the SNES version—how could it not? Game shows are already pretty codified—the visuals had significant distinctions owing to the different developers for the two systems. Surprised to see Park Place behind it: they're normally tied up with EA Sports games so I don't usually see them in a non-sporty context, but I guess this was put together during the off-season?

392: Tyrants: Fight Through Time / Mega-Lo-Mania

• Developer: Sensible Software
• Publisher: Virgin Games (NA/EU) / Ecseco Development & CRI (Japan)
• JP Release: 1993-04-23
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: 1993-04-05
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy Sim
• Theme: Cavemen vs. Biplanes
• Premise: The gods are having a proxy war and humanity throughout the ages is that proxy. Advance your tribe through research and resource management to have the greatest weaponry and subjugate all these divine pretenders.
• Availability: The PC version just got added to EA's new retro-focused Zoom digital distribution platform.
• Preservation: Our first European home computer port for today is Mega-Lo-Mania, released in the US with the slightly more on-the-nose title as Tyrants: Fight Through Time, which was an attempt by Sensible Software (the UK developer behind Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer; the little people sprites in this game are a trademark of sorts for them) to get in on the burgeoning god simulator genre spearheaded by Bullfrog's Populous. I actually prefer Mega-Lo-Mania to the many other contenders in that arena, due to its balance of real-time strategizing—do you pour time into researching stronger weapons, knowing the enemy might march over the hill with a bunch of sticks and still decimate you with all your manpower placed elsewhere?—with a dark, subversive sense of humor. For instance, every "era" has an offensive weapon for attacking enemies and a defensive weapon for protecting your base: when you evolve your base to the Cold War era the only defense for a nuclear attack is a retaliatory strike, which wipes out both players. As if to highlight the differences between the two consoles and how one was more beholden to European developers than the other, the Mega Drive version was based on the original game and shared the same developers while the SNES version was a port of the X68000 home computer version that was remade from scratch by the Japanese developers SPS. It's obvious enough when playing the two side-by-side due to the different portrait designs for the godly protagonists.
• Wiki Notes: Another SNES double-dip. Just needed a full set of releases, since it already had some Genesis screenshots. If only they could all be this quick.

393: NBA All-Star Challenge

• Developer: Beam Software
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Slamming and/or jamming
• Premise: In the vein of the classic Jordan vs. Bird: One on One (or One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, going further back), NBA All-Star Challenge has players compete in one-on-one matches with various major NBA players of the 1992 season via a rare vertically-oriented perspective of the court.
• Availability: Licensed, so nothing doing.
• Preservation: I'm not going to force myself to find anything interesting to say about thirty-year-old sports games, so these will be relatively brief. We still had sports games back then that fell outside the monolithic license-hoarders, so something like this one-on-one b-ball game from Australian developers Beam Software (later Krome) can have real team and player names without breaking the bank trying to outbid EA for the license. It's actually kind of odd how they go about this, since I guess the package deal meant they had to figure out some way to put the team names out there in a game all about one-on-ones with specific all-stars. So what you do is select a team name and you'll be given an all-star from that team, rather than just a list of the player names. Anyone could find Michael Jordan easily enough by picking the Bulls, but a little more knowledge of the 1992 season is required for locating anyone else. Or I guess you could just pick your favorite team and go with whomever is attached to it?
• Wiki Notes: We're three-for-three for SNES double-dips so far. By 1993 the two consoles were so thoroughly established as rivals that it didn't make sense to release for one and not the other, unless you had some kind of exclusivity deal or just couldn't afford to do the extra work. A one-on-one of their own, as it were. Just screenshots and releases again.

394: Paperboy 2

• Developer: Tengen
• Publisher: Tengen
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: June 1993
• Franchise: Paperboy
• Genre: Suburban Hellscape Simulator
• Theme: Less than minimum wage
• Premise: There's newspapers that need delivering (remember those?) and only one boy—or girl?!—is up to the challenge. If they finish quickly enough and with zero fatalities, they might take their bikes to the obstacle course for extra points.
• Availability: The original Paperboy was a co-production of Atari and Midway, so it shows up in compilations for both. Paperboy 2 does not.
• Preservation: Everyone's favorite child labor game is back with this less-regarded sequel that skipped the arcades and went straight to home computers, the ideal place to play any sort of action game. Tengen, being who they are, managed to squeeze out console adaptations for everything active back in 1992-93 excepting the poor old TurboGrafx-16. The big evolution to Paperboy 2 was the addition of a papergirl, which just reminds me how sad I was Amazon cancelled that intriguing sci-fi Paper Girls show after only one season. They need to stop learning the wrong lessons from Netflix. Anyway, the game more or less plays the same as its forebear with a few more hazards and the other side of the street to consider. You could also get into the newspaper itself by performing certain noteworthy actions within the stage, such as foiling a robbery or saving a runaway pram or getting murdered by a monster truck. Reviews of the time weren't kind, largely because a Paperboy sequel released at full price in 1993 was a little audacious to say the least.
• Wiki Notes: Hey, guess what? Well, it's not like Tengen wasn't going to release every Atari Games title they could find on every system they could. So, yes, another SNES double-dip. The only screenshot it needed was the title screen (I like to be thorough with those) along with some releases.

395: PGA Tour Golf II

• Developer: Polygames
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-04-16
• NA Release: March 1993
• EU Release: February 1993
• Franchise: PGA Tour Golf
• Genre: Golf
• Theme: Golf
• Premise: Golf
• Availability: "Golf uck yourself". That is to say, not available.
• Preservation: EA's PGA Tour franchise lasted a while there, picking up a Tiger Woods endorsement from 1998 onwards and then finishing with the first game in the series to carry Rory McIlroy's endorsement instead: 2015's Rory McIlroy PGA Tour. Before they went annualized though, we got a PGA Tour Golf II and a PGA Tour Golf III, both released only on Sega systems. EA was definitely molding the Genesis into the home for sports games around this time—might explain why my preference was for SNES—and having an exclusive golf series would certainly help. Or at least it would if golf wasn't the one sport EA had trouble cornering the way they did all the others. Like the rest in the series, PGA Tour Golf did its best to balance realism (bringing in many real-life courses and professional golfers) with an arcade sensibility that would be palatable to Genesis players, leaving the super serious PC sims like Links well enough alone by releasing only to console.
• Wiki Notes: Our first system exclusive for this Mega Archive entry. Regular wiki contributor Nes did a fine job summarizing the game in the page's main body, so all that was left was some screenshots, box art images, and releases. Also needed a header image, the first I've crafted in quite some time: I went for the main menu screen which is a CGA-ish colored shot of a bunch of dudes with dad bods standing around holding their clubs, as that seemed to capture the essence well enough. One thing I'll say to Mega Drive's credit is that its vertically-aligned boxes means having more room to work in a good header image: the SNES with its horizontal boxes gives you a much narrower sliver due to how the wiki page auto-formats itself.

396: Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball

• Developer: Sculptured Software
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Baseball
• Theme: Baseball
• Premise: Baseball
• Availability: Nope. There are almost certainly better, or at least more current, baseball games floating around out there.
• Preservation: Here's Roger Clemens, cluckin' all the while. Maybe I should've titled this edition as "ESPN Presents" as the sports quotient is out of control. Clemens is of course the talented Red Sox pitcher that I, as an ignorant foreigner, only really know about because of that one The Simpsons softball league episode. Like with a lot of these non-licensed but celebrity-endorsed games, he's the only actual player involved with the game though the rest have some pretty paper-thin aliases like "Raspberry" for Darryl Strawberry (someone else I only know from that Simpsons episode). Not much to add here, except the two companies involved might be a little bit of a smokescreen: both Sculptured and Flying Edge are associated with Acclaim—the former was a regular contract developer eventually purchased by Acclaim in 1995 and turned into Acclaim Studios Salt Lake City, while the latter is a publishing label Acclaim often used for their Genesis games—so this is really an Acclaim game in all but name. Even back then they were starting to realize their brand was poison.
• Wiki Notes: Another SNES double-dip, lucky me. I take personal exception to the typo in the title: since there is only one Roger Clemens that I'm aware of, it should be "S-apostrophe-S" rather than the plural form "S-apostrophe". Since it's right there on the box and title screen, though, we gotta abide by it. Just the usual mix of Genesis-specific additions here: releases, screenshots, and box art images. Only needed one release and box art, since the Genesis version was a region-exclusive for North America.

397: Captain Planet and the Planeteers

• Developer: NovaLogic
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: 1993-02-16
• Franchise: Captain Planet
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Corporate-Endorsed Environmentalism, the sincerest kind of environmentalism
• Premise: Thirty years of people saying "what kind of lame power is 'heart' anyway?"
• Availability: Nothing since the original release. Maybe if Digital Eclipse made another one of those cartoon-based Afternoon Collections and expanded on which studios they included?
• Preservation: We're preserving planet Earth this time because this is the Sega-produced Captain Planet game I guess everyone was asking for. Sega's overseas branches were pretty savvy about tapping into what the kids wanted, and there was a big push around the early '90s for environmentalism-themed stuff: Ecco the Dolphin and Awesome Possum were definitely designed with green messages in mind. Taking the license from Mindscape, who produced Captain Planet games for NES and home computers, Sega brought in NovaLogic to quickly make a Mega Man style action-platformer where you controlled the four Planeteers that matter in their own individual stages in any order before the big finish with the titular mulleted wonder himself. The game's trash, but it's trash that would put itself in the correctly-colored recycling bin if it could so I can't begrudge it too much. Speaking of NovaLogic, this would be their first game for the Mega Drive: they'll show up again just once more for a The Chessmaster port released only on the Sega Channel. I've gotta figure out how I'm going to cover that thing (probably the same way as all those Sega MegaNet Game Toshokan titles from earlier).
• Wiki Notes: After some consideration, I decided to create a whole new page for the Genesis Captain Planet game. Currently, the Captain Planet franchise is a quagmire on our wiki: we already have three pages that all point to what is essentially the same game published by Mindscape and distributed to a half-dozen platforms. The reason I'm separating this one is because the developer/publisher combo is different, but also because I don't want to clean up that mess right now. As a new page, it needed everything: data, text, screenshots, box art, header, and releases. Still, there's always something enticing about starting a fresh page.

398: Flashback: The Quest for Identity

• Developer: Delphine Software
• Publisher: US Gold (NA/EU), Sunsoft (JP)
• JP Release: 1993-12-29
• NA Release: 1993-02-20
• EU Release: June 1993
• Franchise: Flashback
• Genre: Action-Adventure
• Theme: Sci-fi / Cyberpunk
• Premise: Conrad B. Hart wakes up in a jungle with no memories and yet must single-handedly foil an invasion by shapeshifting aliens regardless. Mondays, right?
• Availability: There was a 2018 remaster that is available on PC, PS4, and Switch. It also has a 2013 remake.
• Preservation: Oh hey, it's Flashback. Originally an Amiga game, Delphine's rotoscoped sci-fi adventure was a more involved spiritual successor to Another World (a.k.a. Out of This World, which we'll also be seeing in a very short while) that follows an agent through a series of platforming and action sequences as he attempts to regain his memories and put an end to the Morphs' plan to take over the world. The game goes through various thematic shifts as you play while retaining throughout its Prince of Persia-style hyper-accurate platforming and some gunplay that involves quickly setting up energy shields and shooting through them to avoid damage to yourself. The opening jungle chapter is relatively straightforward but then it broadens a bit once you get to the city and end up doing odd jobs all over the place to raise some necessary capital. Between its newer remake/remasters and several contemporary Indie games like Dex and The Way aping its style, it's evidently a game that engenders a lot of affection even to this day.
• Wiki Notes: We have ourselves a triple-dip this time, because I've covered Flashback for both the SNES and the Atari Jaguar previously (man, was that Jaguar Wiki Project sort of a downer though). All it needed was some extra detail on its releases and some box art images. I'll get back to it again when I cover its Sega CD port, though I probably won't write a separate Mega Archive entry for that unless there's some really goofy FMV cutscenes or incongruous CD music to mock.

399: Mazin Saga: Mutant Fighter

• Developer: Almanic
• Publisher: Sega (EU/JP) / Vic Tokai (NA)
• JP Release: 1993-02-26 (as MazinSaga)
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: July 1993 (as Mazin Wars)
• Franchise: Mazinger Z
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Mecha Anime
• Premise: The invading Biobeasts have conquered the Earth's surface, pushing the human survivors deep underground. Koji Kabuto, the inheritor of the powerful Mazinger-Z powered suit, uses it to defeat these invaders.
• Availability: Another licensed game, so nope.
• Preservation: Our first—and only—Japanese developed game for this edition of the Mega Archive is an odd one, based on the MazinSaga mecha manga that is itself a more fantasy-themed spin-off from the larger Mazinger Z franchise by Devilman creator Go Nagai. It's a brawler where every stage culminates with a kaiju one-on-one fight and it has this neat idea where, because the Mazinger has yet to grow to colossal size to take on its next opponent during the brawler section, the stage boss appears on a much larger scale as a hazard prior to the showdown. The most you'll see of it before the stage finale is a big foot trying to stomp you or its face poking in to breathe some kind of malignant energy while you're trying to deal with small fry. I actually own a physical copy of this game and I've always been curious what inspired Sega to release a Mazinger Z game in a country that had no idea what a Mazinger was. The game kicks ass though, both conceptually and when playing, so maybe that's reason enough. Also worth noting that this is Almanic's first appearance on Mega Archive; it's also their last, unless we ever get around to covering the 32X or Saturn as part of this series. I might be all Sega'd out by then.
• Wiki Notes: Releases and screenshots were fine this time, but what it needed was some text for the main body and the European box art. I also added the different title screens from each region as well as the opening crawl (gotta love a good bit of pre-game exposition).

400: Bulls versus Blazers and the NBA Playoffs

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-07-30
• NA Release: 1993-02-28
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: NBA Playoffs
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Basketball
• Premise: Basketball
• Availability: Wouldn't it be wild if EA made all their old licensed sports games available somewhere? Just these huge compilations going back three decades? They've not done that yet, by the way.
• Preservation: We hit 400 games! I guess that means we're almost halfway done? Oh boy. To mark this auspicious occasion we have the inauspicious presence of our second NBA game this February and it is, of course, the EA one. This is the fourth game in the "NBA Playoffs" series EA made focusing on the end of the basketball season, following Lakers vs. Celtics and Bulls vs. Lakers. We'll be covering the fifth and final one of those when we eventually hit 1994.
• Wiki Notes: Our last game is another SNES double-dip, bringing that total to eight of the ten games we've covered today. Quite a bit of an overlap happening between those two. Subsequently, it just needed a few box art images. Impressively detailed page (not by me) which is always good to see; I'm just glad we have some wiki editors around who are way into sports games because my eyes just glaze over every time I'm faced with one.

Happy to see you back fighting the good fight of Sega documentation. As a question, how are you getting the release dates for these game? I've had a terrible time trying to figure out when anything came out in the early 90's.

@borgmaster: I've been going by Sega Retro's dates because they have citations, unlike GameFAQs and Wikipedia. Of course, those citations happen to be contemporaneous video game magazines which aren't always super accurate but I figure it's still better than nothing.

Actually, since there were a lot of Genesis/SNES cross-platform games this week, I've been noticing some discrepancies between when the two versions came out: the gap seems a little too wide, so one or the other is probably inaccurate. I think that's why I prefer working on Japanese releases since they're so well catalogued that they have those release dates down to the day.

@mento: Ah, damn. I was hoping there was some secret resource that I didn't know about. Gotta love dealing with a vibes-based chronology.