Mega Archive: Part XXXV: From Davis Cup Tennis to Jurassic Park

The Mega Archive is now entering the dog days of summer just as we in the present are mercifully leaving same (though it certainly doesn't feel that way right now), with this entry jumping into what I've pejoratively dubbed "Electronic Artsgust". EA was never a wallflower when it came to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, but being responsible for four of the ten games featured in part XXXV (or 35, but I guess I'm stuck with the Roman numerals now) seems excessive.

Since the Mega Drive never saw the hosepipe of horseshit that the SNES/SFC received, every one of these entries tends to have an even balance of bad, mediocre, good, and sports games (I'm not in a position to judge the last qualitatively) and this time is no exception. There's three games in particular this entry I think are all-timers, and a few others that I know have their fans, yet there's at least one I still have nightmares about. Big difference from how some months with the SFC it was wall-to-wall pachinko and shogi.

As always, past and future Mega Archive (and Mega Archive CD) entries can be found in this informative spreadsheet I've probably put way too much work into (or not enough). I might not have the accurate numbers, but I believe this entry puts us firmly over the halfway point for the total Mega Drive library. Oh boy, that's... a lot of games left to go.

Part XXXV: 451-460 (July '93 - August '93)

451: Davis Cup Tennis

Developer: Loriciel
Publisher: Tengen
JP Release: 1994-02-25 (as Davis Cup Tennis)
NA Release: July 1993 (as Davis Cup Tennis)
EU Release: October 1993 (as Davis Cup World Tour)
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Tennis
Theme: Tennis
Premise: Tennis
Availability: Officially licensed, so no.
Preservation: I guess we still have a few weeks of summer left, so here's another tennis game. This is actually only the fourth tennis game on Genesis so far: it was one of the few sports to not be completely dominated by EA Sports and their relentless output. Davis Cup Tennis is based on an older home computer game simply called Tennis Cup, but the new endorsement and tweaks were sufficient reason to consider it a separate game for the sake of our wiki. Regarding that endorsement: Davis Cup Tennis is one of the few tennis games to be officially endorsed by the sport's main organizing body, the International Tennis Federation, hence the nominal use of the ITF's branded competition the Davis Cup. The competition pits international teams together, rather than individuals as in Wimbledon or the various Opens, and the US usually wins it (though Canada just clinched their first victory last year). This year's Davis Cup is due to start in a week or so as of writing, so that's serendipitous timing. We last saw Loriciel with Best of the Best: Championship Karate [MA XXVIII]; the French developer, far more prominent in the European home computer game market, would soon go defunct by 1994 but we will have one more game from their successor company Virtual Studio, which rehired most of the same staff, when we get to 1996. No spoilers, but it's about as Francophone a game as you can get. Oddly, if I ever decide to start covering the aftermarket stuff once we hit the end of the Mega Drive's tenure, they'll show up again as the original developers of a MD game that was finally released in 2021 (no guarantees I'll be covering those, though; I've still not decided whether or not I'll go beyond 1993).
Wiki Notes: A rare double-dip that wasn't a result of my work on SNES pages, but instead my work on TurboGrafx-16 pages. Can't be too many games that hit Genesis and the TG16 but not SNES (Altered Beast is one other example I can think of). Just required some MD screenshots.

452: Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master / The Super Shinobi II

Developer: Megasoft
Publisher: Sega
JP Release: 1993-07-23 (as The Super Shinobi II)
NA Release: September 1993 (as Shinobi III)
EU Release: 1993 (as Shinobi III)
Franchise: Shinobi
Genre: Ninja Action
Theme: Ninja Action
Premise: Joe Musashi, the Super Shinobi, is called back into service to deal with Neo Zeed one last time. Gettin' too old for this shi...nobi.
Availability: You can get your ninjitsu on in all sorts of places. Easiest route would be to buy it directly from Steam but it was also on the 3DS eShop as part of their "3D" series of remasters (sadly no longer available) and the first Sega Genesis Mini, but only the US/EU version.
Preservation: Usually regarded as the best Shinobi game, the third Shinobi (though actually something like the seventh) hews a little closer to its rival franchise, Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden, replacing the usual need for a cautious approach against well-defended foes with a bit more speed and platforming finesse behind its gameplay flow. As a result, it's a smidge more accessible than the other Shinobis and an ideal place to start for anyone intrigued by the series (as long as you don't mind being lost by what small amount of ongoing narrative it has). A Sega franchise through and through, this MD-exclusive entry was actually developed by a new first-party subsidiary of Sega's: Megasoft was an internal development studio formed by the remnants of Santos, which we last met with Toki: Going Ape Spit [MA XVI] (and is not the same Santos behind The Flintstones [MA XXXI]; that was a successor started by the staff that didn't get absorbed into Sega). Megasoft did not last long, its members eventually scattered across other internal Sega R&D divisions after some reshuffling, but we will see one more game with its branding very soon.
Wiki Notes: This is one of those mysterious occasions where I'd already polished this page to a satisfactory level but have completely forgotten the context behind why. It was either for the sake of a GDQ event or when I was working on games that had appeared on the GameCenter CX TV show. Given my edits were from the start of 2015, just before AGDQ was in full swing, I suspect it was the former. Memory problems are a hell of a thing.

453: Kishi Densetsu

Developer: Kodansha Research Institute
Publisher: Kodansha Research Institute
JP Release: 1993-07-30
NA Release: N/A
EU Release: N/A
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Real-time Strategy Simulation
Theme: World War II. The Deuce, as veterans called it.
Premise: See WW2 from the side of the Axis as you participate in the invasion of Poland and a number of other scenarios across the European front.
Availability: Nada. Given you control a Nazi tank platoon, that could be the reason why.
Preservation: Most WW2 games coming out of Japan tended to support the bad guys for obvious historical reasons, so here we have a game based on Japan's allies Germany and in particular a SS panzer division as it's deployed in various famous European WW2 battles. The title translates to "Knight Legend", equating the panzers to medieval knights riding into battle in their steel armor. It could be considered the Mega Drive's answer to Asmik's Koutetsu no Kishi ("Knights of Steel") games for SFC, which had a similar name, genre, and theme. No attempt was made to localize this for the US and UK, but I'd have been amused to see them try. This game comes to us courtesy of Kodansha Research Institute, the short-lived video game publishing wing of major book and manga distributors Kodansha, which we last met (as publishers) a while ago for Blue Almanac [MA IX]. Kodansha has many MD credits but almost always as a licenser of anime properties: it was only directly involved in three games. We'll be seeing the third and last of those before 1993 is over.
Wiki Notes: Brand new page! Always an event. So, yeah, here's me dropping Nazi propaganda all over the site. Just another day as a wiki editor.

454: The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare

Developer: Sculptured Software
Publisher: Flying Edge
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: August 1993
EU Release: October 1993
Franchise: The Simpsons
Genre: Lil' of Everything
Theme: Disposable Licensed Dreck
Premise: Bart's busy doing his homework (what?) but falls asleep midway through, entering him into a vivid dream world where his very homework—the thing Bart cares about the most in the whole wide world—is in peril. He's going to have to navigate his own twisted dreams to recover it.
Availability: I think the world would prefer to forget the Acclaim Simpsons games.
Preservation: It's our third The Simpsons game from Acclaim and by no means or measure are these things improving, though at least here you can get thoroughly irked by a bunch of different game types instead of just the one. The Simpsons TV show has had its wild moments but at its heart it's a just a slice-of-life comedy about a dysfunctional family living in a dysfunctional town in a dysfunctional country. That's why these tie-in games always had to stretch until their joints popped to come up with a video game premise that would fly, finally landing on the peak of narrative innovation that is "it was all a dream, yo". The idea is to eventually master every one of these mini-games, which vary in quality from bad to worse, and earn Bart an entirely incongruous A+ grade on his homework assignment; a good approach would be to play through the hardest mini-games first to ensure a promising run, except you have very little choice in which order you do them because the game refuses to accommodate the suckers that bought this, such is its scorn towards the easily hoodwinked. This is our sixth game from Acclaim's Utah-based workhorse Sculptured Software and we'll see many more yet, including one last The Simpsons tie-in.
Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip, though I won't take any credit for how shockingly detailed this page is. All it needed was a EU MD release and some box art images.

455: Bill Walsh College Football

Developer: High Score Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: August 1993
EU Release: September 1993
Franchise: NCAA Football
Genre: Football
Theme: Football
Premise: Football, but the kind where you don't have to pay anyone
Availability: Nope. EA's never rereleasing an annualized sports title. Be nutty if they did though.
Preservation: Time for our one mandated EA Sports title for this Mega Archive entry. I think the plan here was to create a distinction between EA's Madden NFL series, which covered the pros, and the College Football circuit by using a different manager-turned-commentator as its namesake, in this case former 49ers coach Bill Walsh. If you're asking me to do any more research or even think about American Football any more than that, forrrrrget it. The game did well enough to spawn a sequel (I've got a year's reprieve before that shows up) and then EA eventually dropped the Bill Walsh endorsement and just stuck with the NCAA Football brand from then on, which continued annually with that name until its last entry in 2013. EA's been looking to bring College Football back to gaming again after new rules were put in place about reimbursing the athletes for their likeness rights, which hadn't been the case previously, but have been running into all sorts of problems which looks to have tied the production up. Lemme just break out my tiny violin over here, I know I put it somewhere...
Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. Needed some Genesis-specific box art images, releases, and screenshots. I also did some of the groundwork for when I cover this again very soon for its Sega CD port. Even cleaned up a company page dupe and added a new franchise page for this and its sequel. A productive day all round.

456: B.O.B. / Space Funky B.O.B.

Developer: Foley Hi-Tech Systems / Gray Matter
Publisher: Electronic Arts
JP Release: 1993-11-19 (as Space Funky B.O.B.)
NA Release: September 1993 (as B.O.B.)
EU Release: August 1993 (as B.O.B.)
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Shooter
Theme: Sassy Robots
Premise: B.O.B., one day in his life as a teenage robot, crashes his dad's priceless space Cadillac on a planetoid of hostile weirdos. You do have a gun arm for protection, but don't pull the thang out unless you plan to bang.
Availability: It appeared in the EA Replay compilation for PSP in 2006. Granted, that's 17 years ago, but it's still more recent than the original.
Preservation: A busy EA also brought to Genesis this Contra-style run-and-gun with a colorful comic book style and a spacefaring protagonist with a sarcastic, laid-back attitude, perhaps hoping to cash in on the cachet of the similarly fresh and funky extraterrestrials ToeJam & Earl. Like many platformers of the era the level design is a circuitous (robot joke) fever dream that takes ages to navigate, rather than the straightforward "just go straight forward" format of its Contra peers. There's also something of a Mega Man aspect as you'll acquire finite items that can aid in traversing levels, like a helicopter that lets you fly over the more annoying hazards. The game actually hit SNES first where its development was credited to Gray Matter (or Chris Gray Enterprises, as it was still known at the time) and was then modified to some extent by Foley Hi-Tech for its Genesis port. I went with crediting both here since the versions are almost identical, though as the SNES version had some pretty bad slowdown this was one of those cases where the Mega Drive owners had the better luck (mileage may vary with the respective soundtracks though). We'll be seeing both these developers again in due time, so I'll go deeper into their backgrounds then.
Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip. The double-dippathon continues. Just some MD-related releases and box art.

457: Double Clutch

Developer: BGS Development / ASCII Entertainment Software
Publisher: Sega
JP Release: N/A
NA Release: N/A
EU Release: August 1993
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Racing
Theme: Clutch Wins, Doubly
Premise: Ever wondered what Micro Machines would be like without all that personality getting in the way? Look no further.
Availability: Nope. Consigned to obscurity.
Preservation: Now, this isn't something I see every day on the Mega Archive. A PAL-exclusive racing game from two mysterious new developers. Top-down racers like this, borne I guess from the likes of R.C. Pro-Am (can you tell I'm an expert?), were very popular in Europe and while the two releases are too close together to draw any conspiratorial conclusions I can't help but think Micro Machines and its immediate popularity might've precipitated this game's being. Probably more the case that every other European driving game did the top-down thing because not every studio had the budget for a more-involved simulation racer like a Lotus Turbo Challenge or a Test Drive. Double Clutch seems fine if dull; not sure why you'd choose it over Micro Machines but I guess you'd run out of stuff to do in that game eventually. ASCII's a developer I've bumped into a few times in other projects: they were a Japanese company that focused on home computers but occasionally ported computer games to consoles like the NES and SNES, including a lot of Wizardry games. Curiously, they're responsible for more Mega Drive peripherals than they are MD games, such as the arcade fighter-focused Fighter Stick SG-6 and Power Clutch SG. BGS Development I'd never encountered before; from what little I've been able to find out, it was a small Danish contract developer. Sadly nothing to do with Bethesda Game Studios; this game's more about car wheels than cheese wheels. This unusual team-up is behind another MD game we'll cover when we hit November '93.
Wiki Notes: A skeleton, so needed a bit of everything. Thanks to wiki user doejonathan for getting the ball rolling with that gameplay section.

458: General Chaos

Developer: Game Refuge
Publisher: Electronic Arts
JP Release: 1994-01-14
NA Release: August 1993
EU Release: September 1993
Franchise: N/A
Genre: Strategy
Theme: Military Hijinks
Premise: What if war was really dumb, actually?
Availability: No rereleases. There was almost a remake but it didn't reach its Kickstarter target.
Preservation: General Chaos is what happens when you let the creators of Arch Rivals, which was plenty violent enough, make their own war game. As if spiritually beholden to Arch Rivals, your "armies" are only ever five-person teams and are comprised of different class archetypes with their own strengths and weaknesses. Given the humor, wanton destruction, and emphasis on class-dependent team dynamics, you might even consider this game a precursor to Valve's Team Fortress, though that could be giving it too much credit. It certainly seems to have its proponents though: the page was pretty beefy when I first encountered it and Gerstmann's played it on the site before. Developers Game Refuge is new but also familiar: building on what I said earlier, the creators of Rampage and Arch Rivals founded the company after leaving Bally/Midway and then went on to develop a bunch of stuff. They're still around making mobile games as far as I'm aware. However, this was the first game they ever made and their only Sega Genesis credit so I guess I'll just politely wave at them as they pass this feature by.
Wiki Notes: Just a little bit of clean-up and a few releases. It already had a very in-depth page.

459: Jungle Strike

Developer: Granite Bay Software / High Score Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
JP Release: 1993-12-17
NA Release: August 1993
EU Release: August 1993
Franchise: Strike
Genre: Shooter/Sim
Theme: Modern Military
Premise: After the actions of Desert Strike, Uncle Sam's made more enemies than ever. What's a few extra by blowing up even more military targets on foreign soil?
Availability: Curiously, this is our second game this entry that can be found on the EA Replay collection for PSP. Nothing more recent than that; EA's really been lax in letting new generations try out this series. Too busy gutting BioWare like a fish, I suppose. Only so many hours in the day to enact pure evil.
Preservation: The Strikes were always these tough but rewarding games, developing a non-linear open-world mission structure that would later become more commonplace once the tech for 3D gaming caught up. There's a selection of tasks for each map, from rescuing POWs to taking down well-defended targets piece by piece to just scouring the landscape with the helpful map tools hunting for fuel or health pick-ups before you ran out of either. I remember Jungle Strike being more of the same but overall better and sharper than its predecessor Desert Strike, and it's the one I've spent the most time with (though I don't think I ever had the patience to beat it). We'll see the third Strike game when we hit 1994, Urban Strike, which was also the last of the series to hit the Mega Drive. This is our second High Score Productions game this entry, but Granite Bay Software is new. Their only MD credits are for the second and third Strike games though; there's not a whole lot out there about them, though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say they were probably based in Granite Bay, California. According to their website they now focus on videography software.
Wiki Notes: SNES double-dip and an already stacked page. Not a thing needed doing.

460: Jurassic Park

Developer: BlueSky Software
Publisher: Sega
JP Release: 1993-08-27
NA Release: 1993-08-10
EU Release: August 1993
Franchise: Jurassic Park
Genre: Platformasaurus
Theme: ¿Donde esta los Thunder Lizards?
Premise: Sure, science can bring dinosaurs back from extinction yet it can't seem to cure all my embarrassing medical conditions? Starting from the bottom and working our way up, we've got[DECORUM EDIT]
Availability: Licensed game. Said license holders might one day stick all the Jurassic Park games into one compilation but then they'd have to include that 3DO game (interactive museum?) and no-one wants that.
Preservation: All this furor around Starfield and its high-but-not-high-enough review scores reminded me that war never changes, and that's doubly true for console wars. I distinctly recall Jurassic Park being one of those hot topics in the school playground of "which did it better? SNES or Mega Drive?". Both games approached the subject matter—which is to say that one Spielberg movie with all the dinosaur clones a.k.a. Billy and the Cloneasaurus—from very different tangents. The SNES was this odd juxtaposition of an axonometric and a first-person shooter while the Genesis received a 2D platformer in which you split your time between the heroic Dr. Alan Grant and a less heroic but still somewhat sympathetic velociraptor looking to escape the island and maybe chow down on a few people in the process (an "eat-man-cipation", if you will). I always thought the Genesis version looked a lot better, especially when the T-rex suddenly bursts through a wall to deliver one of her classic catchphrases ("Graaaoar!"), but that awkward platforming could get real annoying at times. Like the fight over the two Aladdins, this was one argument that never really saw a definitive resolution. Jurassic Park was apparently the game that ascended BlueSky to one of the Genesis's most reliable "second-party" developers, and they'll be behind several more system-exclusive bangers to come (and a whole lot of sports games also, but pobody's nerfect). We're not done with Jurassic Park by a long shot yet: there's this game's sequel, but also the very different Sega CD version to cover in Mega Archive CD.
Wiki Notes: Some very minor clean-up. My main man Marino had already been through here, though that often means a page had to be split in half or combined. It's why we other wiki mods call him "The Vivisectionist" (we don't).