We're back with another early '00s CRPG banger from the archives. The banger archives. Also known as GOG. The game this time is Gothic II, the sequel to Gothic and the predecessor to Gothic III. Go ahead and check if you don't believe me.

OK, so, there's this German development studio called Piranha Bytes (later Pluto 13 GmbH). Piranha Bytes likes making RPGs, but only in a very specific way: there has to be a blank slate protagonist who can eventually learn any combination of talents and disciplines, from magic to weapons to lockpicking to skinning monsters for extra crap to sell; there has to be factions, and a majority of the game is spent working for one or more of them to reap the XP rewards before eventually settling on your preferred group of assholes for the late-game; if you go the wrong way at the wrong crossroads, the monsters there will kill you in one or two hits, so the player always has to poke at their surroundings like they're testing the temperature of a boiling kettle; and any and all voice acting is performed by German nationals who learned all their English intonation from watching over-dramatic Hollywood trailers. It's served them well for three Gothic games, three Risen games, and the sci-fi epic ELEX so far.

Gothic II has the always-neat sequel hook where it resumes almost immediately after the previous game, albeit with a long enough gap for your hero to forget all their old skills, lose their old gear, and de-level back to the rank of "feckless chump". After the first game ends with the protagonist dropping the magical barrier trapping everyone inside the King's prison colony, which may or may have involved the sealing of an inter-dimensional demon in an underground temple but you didn't hear that from me, that same protagonist emerges from their little staycation under some big temple rocks to find that all the old factions of the prison camp have dissolved; the survivors of Gothic 1 have instead fled to every corner of the island looking for a way off, in much the same situation as they were in before. The island's city of Khorinis, which is confusingly also the name of the island itself, is facing no end of problems with orcs, the King's needy paladins, and a brewing civil war with the wealthy owners of the island's outlying farms. However, the protagonist is cognizant of an even bigger issue: the reappearance of the mythical and fearsome dragons, who might decide to fly in and chomp down on everyone at a moment's notice.

They dump a lot on you right from the word go in this game, especially since all you have is a stick and no armor, but I'm liking how I can already make out a vague shape of how I have to proceed: I have to visit the paladins in Khorinis to recover an amulet that will restore much of my power from the previous game (I'll believe it when I see it) but to do that, I must first convince the paladins I'm someone worth paying attention to, and before I can do that I must figure out a way for the local militia to let me into the "upper quarter" where the rich citizens live and the paladins are stationed, and to do that I must become a citizen of the town, and to do that I have to become an apprentice to one of the master craftsmen in the lower quarters by completing tasks for them or otherwise showing them my worth. There are hints to other, more subterfuge-like paths, as well as the opportunity to throw my lot in with the mercenaries working for the greedy landowners outside the city, so I'm in that early phase of the game where I'm exploring all my options and completing every quest that doesn't set me onto a specific path to the next chapter of the story. Specifically, I'm going around talking to every named NPC inside the city and seeing what I can do without much fighting so I can save up for some decent armor and a few levels' worth of stat distribution (like the last May Millennials game, Arcanum, levelling gives you building points which can be spent to upgrade stats and skills alike) before I head back out into the wilds.

I'm enjoying the game about as much as I anticipated I would after playing the first Gothic last year, which is to say quite a bit. It has its janky charms, though it's been patched enough times over the years that I've not noticed anything too glitchy so far, and it offers an impressive level of freedom to pursue its goals that is perhaps less permissive than it appears to be: many locations are blocked off either due to lacking enough faction points with the local authorities or because a big monster is sitting on the path ready to eat my fledgling ass if I come at it with the weak dagger and farm worker clothing I've found so far. It feels like the user interface is much improved since the first game, with a quest log and character sheet that tells me everything I need to know at a glance, and it's still the type of amenable RPG where I don't have to worry about item durability, encumbrance limits, or stamina meters. Combat's still a bit of a real-time mashy free-for-all that vaguely stabs at a combo timing system, evasive back dodges, and weapon parries, but as long as I don't bite off any more than I can chew (I learned those lessons the hard way in the previous game) I'm confident I can master it sufficiently with enough practice. I'm even surprised by how accessible parts of the game can be: while I've yet to find a map or any sort of fast travel system, you can ask anyone in town where a location is (within the town) and they'll go step by step, noting every waypoint on the route between here and there. I mean, yeah, a map would be more convenient, but I'll find one eventually I'm sure (there's even a key binding for it).

So that's where I'm at currently: running around the lower areas of the city filling my quest log with as many tasks as possible that don't involve pissing someone else off, and scraping together enough cash for the local grocer's special armor set and noting where all the relevant trainers are, while also bumping into the occasional familiar face from the prison colony and trying to remember what their deal was. Nothing too notable in the way of surprises just yet, but Gothic II's brand of methodical old-school (but not too old-school) RPGing is why I signed up for another month of low-poly shenanigans for the second year running. (And hey, if you like reading about old CRPGs you'll probably never want to play, be sure to check in with @arbitrarywater and his Wheel of Dubious RPGs blog series. Dude's leaping on the bad game grenade for all your sakes, people.)

< Back to May Millennials

One of the threads I keep returning to with the Indie Game of the Week feature, mostly incidentally, is how Indie adventure games are always experimenting with storytelling techniques. In particular those that are better served with the interactivity that video games bring, if not necessarily with the same reflex-intensive focus that an action game might have. A popular route, as it were, is the "choose your own adventure" hook of having multiple paths to select between: the player is given agency when a branch in the road is presented, with their choices affecting the rest of the playthrough by a significant (entire new destination) or subtle ("so-and-so will remember what you did") degree.

Burly Men at Sea follows a vaguely The Odyssey-esque nautical shaggy dog tale of three mostly identical bearded fishermen brothers who fish up a sea chart in a bottle one day. The chart itself is empty, but as a local elderly barista tells the trio the idea is that the chart itself invites adventure and fills itself out at the end of the journey. The confused fishermen set out onto the open sea, only for their boat to be consumed by a monstrous whale. So begins their latest story, the opening vignette of figuring out how to escape the whale triggering a series of events determined by the player's previous responses.

The game is designed as such so that the whale can be escaped in one of three ways, and each of those three ways then leads to a binary choice, followed by another, after which the trio converse with an enigmatic sea dragon who drops them back off on their home island just as the new day dawns. To save you some mental math, that's a total of twelve possible endings (1-1-1, 1-1-2, 1-2-1, 1-2-2, 2-1-1, and so on). A different set of responses the following day results in a new adventure with new events, though the sequential nature of the game means the brothers and the NPCs they meet are always cognizant of what has already transpired in an earlier loop. The game uses this foreknowledge to, in effect, remind players of the paths already travelled (through new dialogue) so they might try something different on the next attempt. If the game has anything close to puzzles, it's in the decisions themselves and identifying where the branch may lie: did you try scrolling to the left or the right last time? If you're being antagonised by a monstrous sea creature, what happens if you let it win? The end "results screen," which simply involves the brothers reading their now completed sea chart before adding it to the coffee shop's bookcase and grabbing a fresh one, gives you some idea of where you had a choice to make.

This format does have its drawbacks, of course. For one, you have to repeat a lot of the early content to get back to a later split. If we class the whale as the first act, the binary choice that follows as the second act, and the final binary choice as the third act, then you'll need to see the whale scenario's three results a total of four times each. Each of the second act's results must be seen twice, to see both results of the binary choice that follows. If you also consider the prologue of getting onto the ship and meeting the whale and the epilogue of being dropped off on the initial island, you'll see them both a total of twelve times before you've seen everything else the game has to offer (unless something significantly changes during the twelfth and final route). Each of these micro-adventures is about five to ten minutes each though, so at least the repetitiveness isn't also a massive drain on your time. Burly Men at Sea is also specifically built for touchscreens, ideally suited for iOS, Android, and the Switch. It still operates fine with a mouse, but the mechanics of holding and dragging the left or right sides of the screen to move in those directions can be unusually awkward at times, often snapping back to center at random intervals. This eventually lead to a game-breaking bug, as I indicated a door for the trio to move through at the end of my sixth or seventh adventure, only for the game to hang before they could reach it as the screen had already snapped back in the opposite direction. A weird bug that I'm not sure is applicable to every version of the game, but it served here to eliminate five minutes of progress and I'd no interest in repeating the same events again to "log" them for the sake of the game's final completion state.

The first impression of Burly Men at Sea is of a specific brand of artistic minimalism: a style of design school I'm sure I'm unqualified to identify, but one that uses a lot of geometric shapes for its details. An example would be how two vertically-oriented semi-circles, one larger and darker than the other, are used to represent flames at multiple points in the game. Many of the characters, locations, and background elements you find have a similar simplicity to their appearances. There's music but it's subdued; Burly Men at Sea refers to itself as a "quiet adventure game" and this is reflected in its light visuals, calm audio design, and unhurried animations, even when the current situation is ostensibly perilous. There's something distinctly Wes Anderson-y about the whole enterprise, though it's equally possible the two creators have some shared influences.

Overall, I think I like this game but at the same time it's not quite as inspired as it thinks it is. Branching narratives have been present for so long in Japanese visual novels, for example, that newer examples of that genre have been innovating on ways to deliver alternate story content that are far more mechanically and narratively compelling. To take 428: Shibuya Scramble from a few years back, which had every choice not only change the fate of the current character but any number of the game's other protagonists, so that the player would often change their earlier decisions to avoid inadvertent stalemates or premature game overs. Zero Time Dilemma had an enormous flowchart of decision moments that the player could revisit in any order they wished, to see what might've shaken out after taking a different route. Burly Men at Sea lacks the budget and ambition those games had, of course, and is generally content with a more gentle approach to decision-based storytelling, but it feels behind the curve regardless. All the same, it's charming and undemanding and well-written and probably perfect for those who don't play a lot of narrative video games and might want to, so I find it hard to criticize it too harshly and harder still to dislike.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I'll be frank with you all: this was an inauspicious start to May Millennials this year, even putting aside the quarantine troubles. It felt like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura fought me every step of the way as I attempted to at first enjoy its more subtle strengths of an unusual setting and unique mechanics before tolerating everything else long enough to see what the later game was like, and I've instead spent much of the past week finishing up Picross S, Ms. Splosion Man (which, while also feeling like pulling teeth at its nadir, did at least remain compelling throughout), and watching the occasional Giant Bomb stream and episode of Fringe (that is not a show you want to watch while eating something, lemme tell ya).

Arcanum's early game, and possibly its entire game, is excruciatingly slow. I don't just mean in terms of its glacial movement and map traversal, though they are certainly very applicable, but in how leisurely it takes the game to get anywhere interesting. I'm meant to head to the largest city of the region, Tarant, to investigate a ring that was left to me by an important-looking gnome passenger on the airship in which he and I crashed. Having no other immediate goals or agency for my character's fate, this has become the de facto primary quest of the game, and my investigations in the sleepy opening village of Shrouded Hills revealed the location of the makers of the ring as well as hints that a major cult of some kind is tracking it down, and tracking me down in turn for several reasons beyond wanting to hold onto the jewelry in question. I know this because every other tavern NPC reveals themselves to be an incognito high-level cultist assassin who cuts me down mercilessly because the game has once again set itself to "real-time mode" and I'm dead before the dialogue UI has disappeared and I'm aware we've switched to combat. The guards do not help during these fracas, and I can only surmise they're part of the same occultist plot. What's great about this also is that the game doesn't auto-save at any point.

Anyway, this dumb ring is incidental to what I want/need to do, which is to explore the more immediate zones for the experience and equipment I'll require to take on the big city's many perils. A few guides here and there - this game is obtuse enough to need them, believe me - strongly suggest that I first check out the nearby (though by "nearby" I actual mean "several weeks' travel each", since that's the lethargic speed the game's world map traversal operates at) towns of Dernholm and Blackroot. The former leads to the latter, as I need to learn the whereabouts of these places before I can visit: the map works much like the ones in Fallout and Fallout 2, where it's a blank canvas that has locations added to it as you receive directions. Dernholm was as interesting as its name: a worn-down former capital full of destitute sadsacks and a powerless king, with a handful of quests that are concluded elsewhere (hence, I suppose, the guide's insistence that I come here to pick them up first). Blackroot was marginally more interesting, with a dock area and quests that involved local issues like a nearby thief gang stealing the mayor's symbolic item of office (a dagger) and a reclusive inventor out in the woods who ran afoul of a magic portal spitting out demons. However, in both cases, any combat immediately led to a deft demise: the thieves were around level 20, and the weakest portal demons were level 15.

For comparison's sake, I had just reached level 7 and had upgraded my melee skill in the vain hope of nudging my to-hit above 25%, which was what I was getting against these overpowered enemies in this ostensibly early region of the game. I'd wanted to pour a few points into lockpicking and persuasion, to attend to this roguish gunslinger adventurer archetype that was quickly becoming a fantasy in a world devoid of the nuance to pull it off, but the level up system had instead regressed to one building point per level, which offers very little in the way of character development potential. I've read that the game's level cap is 50: I've yet to figure out if that means it's interminably long or if I need to complete the game's objectives in a very specific order befitting of my character's competence, bouncing from town to town and completing only those quests without a heavy martial or skill-based aspect (i.e. only the most banal of fetch quests) until I'd had a few dozen more levels under my belt and a character build worth an olde Victorian ha'penny capable of handling the more challenging fare. Probably both.

The final straw came when I was beating a fast exit from the aforementioned inventor's shack to take the Blackroot train to Tarant, the place I was meant to go before I was led astray by some dubious walkthroughs, when I was met with a pack of level 12 venomous swamp rats as a random encounter on the world map. These rats proceeded to hit me with a poison value - that is, the amount of health it will drain before it vanishes - of about three times my current HP total in quick order (the game had switched to real-time again, of course). The poison was moot, though, as the rats killed me quickly thereafter. I then chose to exit the game rather than reload for more punishment, only for it to bug out and hang on the main menu indefinitely. Sometimes you abandon a game because it wasn't what you hoped for and other demands on your time take priority, and you leave in a sort of ambivalent mood that does not necessarily preclude another attempt in the future. Then you have situations like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, where it feels like any bridges have been set on fire, pissed on to extinguish the flames, burned again, and their ashes magically disintegrated for good measure.

Still, though, I remain optimistic that the rest of the May Millennials itinerary will prove more palatable. Next is Gothic II, the sequel to a game I played for this feature last year. While rough around the edges, I appreciated Gothic's odd structure - even if it also demands a very particular critical path that the player is forced to deduce on their own before they're strong enough to open up the game a little - and its ludicrous fantasy fiction take on Escape from New York. I'm hoping the sequel is stacked with some necessary improvements, though I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

< Back to May Millennials

May Millennials is back with a few more of the biggest CRPGs from the 2000s that I missed out on, starting with the last of the three major Troika releases I've yet to write about*: their fantasy steampunk-themed Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Like the other two Troika games, this was almost entirely resurrected by an accommodating community who saw what these overly ambitious developers were trying to do, albeit without the necessary amount of budget and time to polish it to a sheen (or even to the point where it was functional enough to be sold to people), and helped them over the finish line with a series of fan patches, the last of which released only last year.

Honestly, after playing the game for a few hours, I'm not sure they needed to bother. Maybe that's just early CRPG doldrums talking - the first "town" of any CRPG is invariably dull and full of simple fetch quests intended to get new players acclimated to the new game and its mechanics - but even with most of the rough edges sanded away by frequent patching, there's a distinct clunkiness at the core these community mods were never fully able to overcome. It moves like molasses, important options frequently untoggle themselves mysteriously, random items can vanish from inventories equally mysteriously, and the map travel system is just bizarre in how it switches from the local to world maps depending on your distance from the center of the region but theoretically lets you keep walking past that border for possibly forever. Then there's the hilarious "critical miss" system that can cause your weapons and armor to lose a significant amount of their item endurance and become permanently unusable, or scar yourself for a semi-permanent stat penalty to attractiveness, or knock you on your ass to make it easier for enemies to finish you off, or you'll simply drop your weapon and have an NPC ally decide on their own to pick it up for you for safe-keeping, preventing you from using it for the rest of the conflict. Any aspirations I had to play this game all rootin' and tootin' with a flintlock was quickly dashed when the game makes clear that gunfighting is purely a late-game build extravagance, and the only firearms you can find early on can't hit the broadside of a barn and will bankrupt you in ammunition costs besides.

I have to say, though, like Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, the game is slowly growing on me despite its flaws and iffy gameplay. Part of that is just how underpowered you are to start with; upon hitting level 5 I received double the usual amount of building points (might just be a thing for levels divisible for 5, but I'm hoping it's the new standard from here on out) and am starting to feel a little bit more secure with my skills. Arcanum has an odd system where everything - stats, health, skills - use the same pool of building points, and higher skill levels often require boosting the attached stats sufficiently first. It means that you can't exactly master a whole lot right away - the best being a handful of the most useful skills and a preferred stat or two - but the game does accommodate this somewhat by letting you sweet-talk or outwit certain critical foes instead of fighting them. Sometimes. You do still have to fight your way out of the wreckage site the game starts in, surrounded by wild beasts who aren't so taken by your charisma stat, and that alone can be quite a challenge for the physically impaired. Reminds me of that intense first dungeon in Daggerfall and how it makes fools out of those wishing to take a more silver-tongued approach to the rest of the game.

Anyway, that's all I've got for Arcanum at this stage. There's a certain Giant Bomb Monopoly stream going on right now that ate my whole evening, so I'll have more to say when I pen an "Outro" sometime later next week, but I'm hoping getting a few more levels and adjusting to the game's very particular personality and maybe seeing some more interesting locations will turn me around a little more definitively. For now, I'm in that Deadly Premonition/Final Fantasy X-2 zone of suffering some bad gameplay now for some potential good narrative later. This May's going to be a rough one, I can tell.

(* I've written about VtM: Bloodlines via a semi-scathing review here, and about Temple of Elemental Evil with this "illustrated" series here.)

< Back to May Millennials

Talk about your blasts from the past. Ms. 'Splosion Man was Twisted Pixel's second 'Splosion Man game, which instead followed the equally insane distaff version in a riff on Ms. Pac-Man (and, like Ms. Pac-Man, plays more or less identically to her male counterpart). It will be celebrating its tenth anniversary sometime next year, so what better time to finally start playing it? Ms. 'Splosion Man is a very challenging, reflexes-intensive game that fell right into that period of time where almost every Indie game was a "puzzle-platformer": those that are half skill-based jumping, and half figuring out how to progress with the puzzle components provided.

Ms. 'Splosion Man gets around by "'sploding" herself, which not only damages nearby objects and enemies but also propels her upward: she can then 'splode twice more in the air before she needs to hit terra firma to recharge (though there's a few mid-air ways to recharge also). That is the extent of actually controlling the protagonist; every other factor is determined by what is found the environment. Ms. 'Splosion Man can gain height by 'sploding barrels, can wall jump, can hit switches, can possess certain enemy types, can ride down rails, bounce off trampolines, etc. The game has a huge variety of directions to develop its platforming challenges, frequently introducing new elements to build puzzles around (throughout the first world, at least; I'm expecting later stages to use the same elements in more pernicious combinations).

Late-era Twisted Pixel became primarily known for their wild forays into FMV silliness, sometimes but not always featuring Lloyd Kaufman and his fellow Troma weirdos, but any real-life footage is used sparingly here. Most cutscenes instead use the in-game characters, and while the game has dialogue the vast majority of it is Ms. 'Splosion Man randomly spouting off song lyrics from Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and Beyoncé as well as traditional valley girl speak and the occasional movie quote: every bit the madcap string of sound bites that her other half babbled, just with a more feminine twist. While this stream of pop culture consciousness is only fitfully funny, it wholly fits the sci-fi Looney Tunes aesthetic and hyperactive energy of the game. Speed's not only conducive to the game's personality, it's also integral to the fun: like Super Meat Boy and other "masocore" platformers worth their salt, steps have been taken to alleviate frustration whenever possible with quick checkpoint turnaround, concise enough air control and the three-'splode system to help course-correct jumps and halt any violently fast momentum, and reasonably short levels that tend to have par times of around 3-5 minutes. Even the boss fights have checkpoints, which I always appreciate but don't always anticipate.

That said, the game is definitely not one to pull any of its punches. Whatever difficulty already exists in the particular chain of jumps and 'splodes you need to accomplish for any given scenario is exacerbated slightly further still by how the game keeps rolling out new mechanics and the speed with which certain sequences move or are introduced suddenly, both of which can make for some wildly unpredictable scenarios that take a little bit of trial and error before you can reliably conquer them; that can and will mean dying a few times to something you had almost no time to react to, which is irksome to say the least, and there can be issues in correctly predicting Ms. 'Splosion Man's 'splode radius when in a mad dash. However, for the most part, everything is intuitive enough and deaths rarely feel like they're anything's fault but your own.

The game is also replete with fun extras, including some bonus FMV shot by the Twisted Pixel staff (they had an odd fascination with beards back then for whatever reason), a "2 Girls, 1 Controller" mode (yikes) for those intending to try the multiplayer mode solo, and all the usual concept art and trailers you could want (though probably a lot more than you could want). The cash needed to earn these extras is contingent on your performance: completing a level nets you 20 coins; completing it with the requisite hidden pair of shoes (which are both challenging to find and hold onto) is another five; and you get an extra five for beating the par time. Enough reason to want to revisit stages, and you'll have your own ghost to race against or one grabbed from the online leaderboards if you're that serious. It's a little odd to feel nostalgic for a platformer that A) wasn't released all that long ago, and B) brand new to my eyes, but it reminded me that this particular flavor of stage-based, time-trial 2D platformer were once everywhere but have mostly fallen out of favor more recently in lieu of explormers and 2D Soulslikes. Nice to remember this type of game exists, even if I'm fully prepared to crash and burn on Ms. 'Splosion Man's later worlds and vindictively decide that, actually, I'm glad they all died out.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (Though I'm sorely tempted to drop it to 3/5 after that last world.)

Ah, the dregs of summer. That's what we're looking at with Part XVIII: an uninspired gaggle of sports games and licensed games. I wish I could say there were some highlights, but... not so much. Well, not for me at least, but then I knew what I was getting myself into when I started this g-d project. Seriously, we have three basketball games in this entry alone. What gives? And golf, tennis, baseball, pool, F1, the Olympics, and two grody early The Simpsons tie-ins. Makes you long for the days when it was all shoot 'em ups.

Since this week's entry will bring us to the end of June '92, and thus complete the first half of the year, this will be the last of the Mega Archive blogs for a while. At least, the last of the "conventional" entries: you'll see what I mean in due time, I hope. My thanks for anyone who takes the time to check out my impressions of these venerable Sega games; I'm slowly building a more lucid vision of what owning a Genesis was like at the time, and the types of games I might've looked forward to for the holidays and those I would've rented a dozen times had my life taken a different path back then.

If you need to catch up with the past four years of the Sega Genesis, have at it:

• Part I: 001-020 can be found here.
• Part II: 021-035 can be found here.
• Part III: 036-050 can be found here.
• Part IV: 051-065 can be found here.
• Part V: 066-080 can be found here.
• Part VI: 081-098 can be found here.
• Part VII: 099-115 can be found here.
• Part VIII: 116-130 can be found here.
• Part IX: 131-145 can be found here.
• Part X: 146-160 can be found here.
• Part XI: 161-175 can be found here.
• Part XII: 176-190 can be found here.
• Part XIII: 191-205 can be found here.
• Part XIV: 206-220 can be found here.
• Part XV: 221-240 can be found here.
• Part XVI: 241-255 can be found here.
• Part XVII: 256-270 can be found here.

Part XVIII: (April '92 - June '92)

271: Todd's Adventures in Slime World

• Developer: Micro World
• Publisher: Micro World (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-04-30
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action / Platformer
• Theme: Gooey
• Premise: Todd descends through a series of slimy planets with a supersoaker full of bleach for... fun, I guess? Is this what spelunking is in the future?
• Availability: Nope. There was a brief revival of Epyx properties a few decades back, but nothing slime-related.
• Preservation: This is what Todd's Adventures in Slime World is? I always assumed it was some long-forgotten Russ Meyer movie about an obscure fetish. It's instead an Atari Lynx platformer from Epyx that a Japanese port developer decided to recreate with caveats for the Mega Drive. It's a little more than your average action-platformer though, with an emphasis on mapping and exploration that puts it not quite but closely adjacent to the explormer genre. There's all these different modes - effectively different maps - that prioritize different playstyles, for instance one that requires you to be fast, another that has you exploring larger maps, one that makes combat more difficult, and so on. For a doofy platformer that is trading in on a very specific '90s fad of kids buying Nickelodeon Gak by the gallon, it's remarkably innovative. Well, beyond "Metroid but gooier".

272: Arch Rivals

• Developer: Arc Developments
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: May 1992
• EU Release: 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Sports
• Premise: The game for those who thought Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball was too polished and slick. If someone records video of this game for posterity, does that make it Archrival footage?
• Availability: The arcade version appeared on Midway Arcade Treasures 2, for PS2/Xbox/GameCube.
• Preservation: Midway's Arch Rivals was in many respects a dry run for their later NBA Jam - a semi-irrelevant and "arcade-friendly" take on America's third favorite sport that reduced teams to two a side, simplified the rules, moved like the players' shoes were on fire, and maybe let you swing a punch at the opposing team (or pants them) when the ref wasn't looking. Acclaim brought the game to home consoles, using their Sega-focused subsidiary Flying Edge in this case, and sadly it doesn't sound like the port fared particularly well. At least it's better than the NES version?

273: Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge / Nakajima Satoru Kanshuu F1 Hero MD

• Developer: Aisystem Tokyo
• Publisher: Varie (JP) / Flying Edge (NA/EU)
• JP Release: 1992-05-15 (as Nakajima Satoru Kanshuu F1 Hero MD)
• NA Release: June 1992 (as Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge)
• EU Release: September 1992
• Franchise: Nakajima Satoru
• Genre: F1 Racing
• Theme: Drew-bait
• Premise: Welcome to Team Ferrari in this licensed F1 game from Aisystem Tokyo, presented courtesy of Acclaim.
• Availability: Nope. Modern licensed F1 games are a dime a dozen though.
• Preservation: So yeah, this is a game from a semi-popular first-person F1 series in Japan that Acclaim randomly plucked out of international obscurity and released overseas with a new endorsement. We've already covered its Japan-only predecessor (MA #234), and we'll eventually see its Japan-only successor by the end of 1992. F1 games have always had to struggle with that dichotomy of replicating the exciting fast speeds and timing-intensive maneuvering of the motorsport and the heavy technical elements that also make it compelling to the more engineering-inclined (will the driver take a pit stop to switch out tires, or can they manage for one more lap?). No F1 game feels too arcade-y or too simulation-y as a result, but instead dwells somewhere in the grey zone between. It'd be a fascinating game design dilemma to look into, if I cared about F1 a single iota.

274: Warrior of Rome II

• Developer: Micronet
• Publisher: Micronet
• JP Release: 1992-05-28
• NA Release: May 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Warrior of Rome
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Ancient Rome
• Premise: Caesar's made a complete salad of his latest military campaign and needs your help telling a bunch of little soldier units what to do. Again.
• Availability: Nope. Try the Total War series, maybe?
• Preservation: I'm not sure these games were ever popular - I certainly hadn't heard of them before doing this feature - so I'm not sure how they gleaned enough goodwill for a sequel. Maybe it's a "Big in Japan" thing. Either way, these games aren't quite the obtuse headaches that the Koei war sims are, instead playing a bit more like a regular RTS where it's all about building shit and sending over oodles of units to overwhelm the enemy encampments. Units level up through heavy usage, so it also has something like an XCOM or Cannon Fodder element where you become ironically protective of the long-surviving heavy hitters despite them being the most capable of defending themselves.

275: Bulls vs. Lakers and the NBA Playoffs

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-04-02
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: September 1992
• Franchise: NBA Playoffs
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Sports
• Premise: EA tackles the '90-'91 NBA season, somehow correctly guessing the two final teams only mere months after the playoffs had already happened.
• Availability: Nope. I'd say get this year's EA NBA Live game instead, except they cancelled it.
• Preservation: Unlike most of EA's sports franchises, which launched out of the gate with the same brands they'd continue to use for another three decades, it took a while for EA to settle on what to call their annual basketball enterprise. Initially, we had the various "[Sport Team] vs. [Sport Team] and the NBA Playoffs": that is, word vomit that's not nearly as concise and marketable as "NHL [Year]" for example. Still, the one positive of the name is that it proved EA were determined to stay current: the Bulls had a hell of a season in 1991, to put it mildly, and having their name in the resulting summer of 1992 NBA game probably drew even more attention than it might've enjoyed otherwise.

276: Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball

• Developer: Acme Interactive
• Publisher: Mindscape
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Baseball
• Theme: Pro Sports
• Premise: Baseball's own "The Iron Man" is here to present a sub-par sim that's perhaps more rip-off than Ripken.
• Availability: Nope. Mindscape's gone and Cal Ripken Jr.'s long retired, so off this game goes to the obsolescence graveyard. Toot toot. (It's taking the train to get there.)
• Preservation: It's not clear when the Genesis version of Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball was released - it could've been closer to December, when the SNES version came out - but I figure you can't have enough summer ball games on this particular entry of the Mega Archive. Mega Archive XVIII is representing almost every other sport, so why not baseball also? Not much to say about this one: like many cheapo sports games, the developers acquired the endorsement of a single athlete - the former Orioles shortstop in this case - but not the official MLB or MLBPA licenses, so Ripken's the only name you'll recognize on the field. At least I can appreciate how many 16-bit games from 1992 onwards released on both the SNES and Mega Drive: having already completed all the game pages for the former, there's only so much I need to add.

277: David Robinson's Supreme Court

• Developer: Acme Interactive
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-07-10
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: August 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Sports (also the theme of June 1992 in general, apparently)
• Premise: Remember when the Supreme Court was an institution to be admired? San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson does, and uses this educational game to guide politically-curious youths through the USA's Judicial Branch of government.
• Availability: Nope. Probably gonna have to go through some hoops to track this down one.
• Preservation: The third of three basketball games released that summer, David Robinson's Supreme Court is the most interesting to look at with its axonometric slant, but like Acme's other game in this Mega Archive there's a certain feeling of economy involved. It again has just the one sportsperson associated with it, as opposed to a team or the whole league, and it feels scrappy in the way sports games used to be until EA's dominance made any budget competitors less viable. There's also a certain weakness to the isometric look that makes itself known every time a player passes the midcourt with the ball in tow and the game has to fade to black for a moment to switch the camera around, which isn't really conducive to such a fast-paced sport like basketball.

278: Krusty's Super Fun House

• Developer: Audiogenic Software
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: December 1992
• Franchise: The Simpsons
• Genre: Puzzle
• Theme: Mass Extermination
• Premise: Krusty's fun house has a vermin infestation problem, and only elaborate murder machines can quell it. Bart immediately volunteered to man said machines, apropos for the character.
• Availability: Nope. Go see if Disney's amenable to bringing these Acclaim Simpsons games back. I'll wait.
• Preservation: It's probably no surprise to anyone that the only half-decent Simpsons game Acclaim ever put out was a modification of an existing puzzle game that they bolted the license onto. Left to their own devices, most Simpsons games instead turned out like Bart vs. the Space Mutants, i.e. trash (and trash we'll be visiting real soon - keep reading). I'm not exactly sure why Krusty's the star here; maybe the Simpsons household is too well-known by the audience, and they figured a TV clown was the most likely citizen in Springfield to have a bizarre, giant mansion that fit the level design?

279: Olympic Gold: Barcelona '92

• Developer: Tiertex
• Publisher: US Gold (NA/EU) / Sega (JP)
• JP Release: 1992-07-24
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: July 1992
• Franchise: Olympics
• Genre: Sports
• Theme: Sports
• Premise: Oh right, 1992 was an Olympics year. Well, here's your customary Olympics game, covering all seven events (look, they could only do so much back then).
• Availability: Nope. I'd say wait for this year's Olympic Games instead, except they cancelled those too.
• Preservation: Considering what a big deal the Olympics are (the Summer Games, at least), I was always underwhelmed by the "Official Game of the Games" that came out alongside them. I feel like the Mario and Sonic ones are probably the best case scenario because they embody the spirit of friendly international competition without taking itself too seriously. Official games like Olympic Gold are so austere and require such elaborate control schemes for each individual sport - because anything less would be an insult to all the top-tier athleticism involved - that you don't get a whole lot out of them, especially when you can only fit seven events on a cart.

280: Side Pocket

• Developer: Data East
• Publisher: Data East
• JP Release: 1992-12-11
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: 1993-02-22
• Franchise: Side Pocket
• Genre: Billiards
• Theme: Rearranging Balls Via Pockets
• Premise: Swim with the pool sharks in Data East's bar game simulator, delighting onlookers with your mispronunciations of "snooker".
• Availability: Looks like it's still available on the 3DS Virtual Console.
• Preservation: Unlike most sports games (maybe sports should be in brackets here) I'm quite fond of pool sims. Maybe because the simple physics involved make game versions feel very close to the real thing, even if in 1992 they weren't yet at a place to perfectly encapsulate the smoky atmosphere of seedy bars and pool halls. Data East's Side Pocket was as close to the platonic pool (pooltonic? Nope) ideal as you could get back then though, except I don't think attractive women hanging off saggy middle-aged dudes around a pool table was a thing outside of The Color of Money.

281: The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants

• Developer: Arc Developments
• Publisher: Flying Edge
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: June 1992
• EU Release: July 1992
• Franchise: The Simpsons
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: "They Live Was A Good Movie"
• Premise: Before Kang and Kodos there were the space mutants, and before good Simpsons games there was this.
• Availability: Nope. Probably destroyed by the same holy ritual that sent Acclaim to the Stygian abyss.
• Preservation: I'll admit to having something of a soft spot for Bart vs. the Space Mutants. As a platformer it was plain garbage, and unfortunately most of the later stages exacerbated the issue by making the platforming even harder, but early on it had some almost clever adventure game ideas that required lateral thinking. For instance, the first stage's unusual goal of removing any and all purple-colored objects required spraypainting a lot of things orange but also concealing or removing them in some way that might involve using inventory items or waiting for the in-game clock to hit a certain time. You even prank call Moe to get him outside so you can spray his purple bartending apron. My god, that jumping though. Diabolical.

282: Jennifer Capriati Tennis / GrandSlam: The Tennis Tournament

• Developer: System Sacom
• Publisher: Telenet Japan (JP) / Renovation (NA) / Sega (EU)
• JP Release: 1992-06-12 (as GrandSlam)
• NA Release: September 1992 (as Jennifer Capriati Tennis)
• EU Release: 1993-02-22 (as GrandSlam: The Tennis Tournament)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Tennis
• Theme: Sports
• Premise: Welcome to the world of professional tennis - a brutal and uncompromising place where love means nothing.
• Availability: Nope. Also Capriati retired in 2004 so I'm guessing the endorsement won't have the clout it once did.
• Preservation: I haven't done the necessary research, but this is either the first or one of the first sports games to have a female athlete on the cover and in the name. Capriati made headlines in 1992 for winning the gold medal at the Summer Olympics at the age of 16, defeating Germany's Steffi Graf, and even though it makes sense why Telenet would seek out her endorsement for the North American localization it feels a bit weird to court someone that young for a namesake business arrangement like this. I guess if you can win gold medals at that age, you can have your name attached to commercial goods. At any rate, the scuttlebutt has this game being perhaps the best "arcade-style" tennis game the Genesis had to offer, especially this early into its lifespan. I kind of like the cute little exaggerated animations of all the players; sports games can always use that extra touch of personality.

283: Top Pro Golf

• Developer: Soft Machine
• Publisher: Soft Vision
• JP Release: 1992-06-19
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Golf
• Theme: Ball Chess
• Premise: Being a pro golfer is like being Ganon - you won't get anywhere without hitting the Links often enough.
• Availability: Nope. Consigned to the bunker trap of history.
• Preservation: I'm really out of my element with most of the sports games featured in this entry, though I can at least recognize when a golf game is trying to be serious by the number of customization options and permutations the player is given control over. The more scientifically you approach golf, the less it starts to feel like a fun game where you just whack a tiny ball with a stick as hard as you can. Top Pro Golf, which has no player endorsements nor a featured real-life golf course, feels as rudimentary as they come, and even for a golf game is kinda dull to think about for more than a second. It did well enough for a sequel though: Top Pro Golf 2, which even saw a localization as the awesomely named Chi Chi's Pro Challenge Golf. I'm guessing it's not Dragon Ball themed, but finding out for sure will be something to look forward to with the 1993 season of the Mega Archive.

284: Gemfire / Royal Blood

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1992-06-25 (as Royal Blood)
• NA Release: November 1992 (as Gemfire)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: Ishmeria recently deposed its tyrant of a king, but he might regain his power if some other wizard doesn't grab a bunch of gemstones first. Look, it's Koei Fire Emblem, what more do you need?
• Availability: Koei remade the game for PC in 2003, but only in Japan. The series would not persevere with annual entries the way Nobunaga's Ambition did.
• Preservation: Koei were all-in on the Mega Drive by 1992, which sees them in the process of porting over almost all their existing properties including a few that didn't really take off. Gemfire is one such anomaly: a one-and-done attempt at a fantasy strategy RPG in the vein of Nintendo's Fire Emblem or Sega's own Shining Force. In fact, I'm guessing it was the hype around the latter that might've precipitated Gemfire's Mega Drive port, though the two releases are too close together to say that for sure. Gemfire's a bit more accessible than Koei's other strategy sims, but still considerably more details-oriented than most other strategy games for the system: expect to futz around with a lot of menus to keep all your soldiers trained and fed and to deploy diplomacy and trading routes whenever and wherever applicable.

285: Tougi-Ou: King Colossus

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-06-26
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action RPG
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: A burly amnesiac moves across the world beating up all manner of monsters in this Ys-ish RPG.
• Availability: Nope. Mostly forgotten now, despite its first-party pedigree.
• Preservation: Now this was a pleasant surprise. I'm usually in two minds about games that are deliberately lifting whole blueprints from other series, especially those that belong to a specific company/console. For a while Genesis experimented with finding its own Zelda, for example, with Crusader of Centy and Beyond Oasis being close - but distinct enough - pretenders. Tougi-Ou, conversely, is very much in the vein of Falcom's Ys franchise: the top-down ones in particular, where you fight monsters in real-time to gain levels and make a very small HP bar get progressively larger. It was graciously fan translated in 2006, this patch not only translating the script but also offering a few necessary gameplay patches, so it's been oddly compelling to work through its familiar charms even though I'm supposed to be focusing on... well, this blog, for one. But it looks like we're done here, so I'm hopping back into it. Thanks for reading, and the Mega Archive will return soon... (Probably.)

I hadn't encountered Faravid Interactive before starting Whispers of a Machine, a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi detective story released in 2019, but I am familiar with the game's other co-developers Clifftop Games: they created Kathy Rain, which I very much enjoyed when I reviewed it in 2018 for this feature. For that reason, I'd been keeping an eye on Whispers of a Machine - a spiritual follow-up - and quickly grabbed it when it was discounted in the December Steam sale. Of course, if I planned this feature out with any more vision than hitting a random number generator every time, I could've been playing it a lot sooner.

Like Kathy Rain, Whispers of the Machine follows the Wadjet Eye philosophy of there being a "sweet spot" for adventure gaming, around the early '90s when CD-ROM support meant full voice acting but before the genre embraced big expensive 3D CGI and/or FMV productions, and has its roots in that most permissive of point-and-click engines: AGS. Additionally, it is also a detective whodunnit first and foremost, with the protagonist Vera Englund - a cybernetically-enhanced agent of the Central Bureau - interrogating witnesses and investigating crime scenes as she tracks down the culprit of a string of grisly murders in an otherwise quiet town. Because of her enhancements, she can rely on a few tools that assist in her duty: a method of scanning the environment for traces of DNA or specific shapes like a boot print, a biometric scanner to determine whether someone is lying, and a burst of strength whenever some extra force is required. However, she'll also develop new abilities as the game progresses, and these are determined by her attitude and demeanor: at frequent points, she can choose to respond to people with empathy, assertiveness, or a dispassionate analytical mindset. Through this system, the game presents alternate routes depending on the "path" you've set Vera on, with puzzle solutions changing depending on the abilities Vera has received. For example, as a generally more empathetic type, my Vera acquired the ability to give short-term memory loss to those blocking her investigation, disorienting them long enough to get what she needs. It's a vaguely Deus Ex twist to how the player approaches the game's scenarios.

So far the game's been very accommodating with its puzzles and directives. It straddles the line between making things too easy for you and stymieing your adventure with one too many obtuse head-scratchers, which is always a tough balancing act. Generally, you always have some idea what you need to be doing and where you should investigate next, if not always the full picture of how to get there or accomplish what you need to do. Vera often announces when she's done scouring a location for clues, handily sparing the player from vacillating in case they missed anything, and she'll regularly toss out the inventory items she no longer needs as the story progresses. There are fatal fail states in the game, but they always return you to the moment before the life or death decision must be made.

The voice acting is uniformly excellent, as is the writing, and I've half a mind to replay the game once I'm done to see what certain puzzles are like with an alternative set of skills (and perhaps to chase down the very conditional achievements, which include major missables like finding the murder weapon to minor acts of decorum like remembering to turn off a giant machine before exiting its location). I really enjoy the setting and the particular path this world's apocalypse took, and I almost hesitate to explain too much of it here due to how it factors into the game's story and how the game does a great job drip-feeding that information to you, first via hints and allusions and then via a puzzle-related exposition dump. It reminds me of the way Technobabylon throws you into its world to let you soak up the cyberpunk atmosphere for a chapter or two of its story before bothering with the hows and whys of the world being the way it is through some incidental reading of the last few intervening decades of human history between now and this forlorn future. It's a form of confident world-building I never get tired of in games like these.

It's treading some very familiar waters as Ms. Rain's first (and hopefully not only) outing, which in turn borrows significantly from the first Gabriel Knight: your investigation can only go so far in a single day, as per J. Michael Straczynski's rule of "the speed of plot," and the game uses this story-determinant day/night cycle to separate the story into discrete "chapters" - it's only after waking up the next day that Vera acquires her new abilities and has her little inventory spring-cleaning sessions. It's a structure that lends itself well to an overt sense of narrative progression, even if you don't feel like you've done much or solved a lot in the preceding twenty-four hours. Needless to say, if you appreciated the sharp adventure gaming acumen of Kathy Rain, this is every bit a worthy follow-up and an equally compelling narrative with a neat abilities-based means of adding some "new game plus" longevity to what is normally a one-and-done narrative genre (after all, once you know whodunnit, why ever come back?). I hope these studios have many more stories left in them.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Hey there, we're back with the Mega Archive again this week. I was planning to write this whole thing on Deck13's The Surge instead, but once you start digging into Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games it's hard to stop, you know? As was the case with the Genesis in 1991 (and pretty much every year for any console), the release schedule of the first half of 1992 was a relatively barren place. In fact, it will only take three of these entries total before we catch up with the year's midpoint, each covering approximately two months apiece. I'll probably take a break after the next one, since working on fifteen wiki pages in one week is a lot, even during The Lockdown.

We actually have a star-studded line-up this entry. Two of the most instantly recognizable Genesis franchises made their debut in this time frame, and I guarantee you'll have heard of at least five more. The rest are your semi-obscurities and Japan-only types, but as always it's an eclectic bunch now that the Genesis has finally shaken off its awkward "arcade shoot 'em ups and nothing but arcade shoot 'em ups" phase. We still do have several shoot 'em ups though, so don't think old habits die easy.

Speaking of old habits, be sure to check up on previous entries here:

• Part I: 001-020 can be found here.
• Part II: 021-035 can be found here.
• Part III: 036-050 can be found here.
• Part IV: 051-065 can be found here.
• Part V: 066-080 can be found here.
• Part VI: 081-098 can be found here.
• Part VII: 099-115 can be found here.
• Part VIII: 116-130 can be found here.
• Part IX: 131-145 can be found here.
• Part X: 146-160 can be found here.
• Part XI: 161-175 can be found here.
• Part XII: 176-190 can be found here.
• Part XIII: 191-205 can be found here.
• Part XIV: 206-220 can be found here.
• Part XV: 221-240 can be found here.
• Part XVI: 241-255 can be found here.

Part XVII: (March '92 - April '92)

256: Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-04-23
• NA Release: March 1992
• EU Release: March 1992
• Franchise: Strike
• Genre: Shooter/Sim
• Theme: Modern Military
• Premise: In this fictional sequel to the Gulf War, as opposed to the real one from 2003, the player is tasked with completing missions across the Middle-East in a Super Apache chopper. Watch out for Scuds!
• Availability: Nothing more recent than the 2006 PSP compilation EA Replay, which also has the sequel Jungle Strike. You'd think they'd stick the whole series on Origin.
• Preservation: Long before EA's favorite pastime became eating up companies and spitting out their bones like a Mortal Kombat fatality, they proved themselves indispensable to Sega of America and its North American/European market chokehold during the 16-bit era with a procession of unmissable hits. The Strike series was one of many franchises that EA debuted on the Genesis to great acclaim, each packed with a versatility behind its mission design and a non-linear structure that had players exploring their options and determining the best order to complete their objectives. My favorite part is when you blow up an entire building to rescue the POW trapped inside; I sometimes suspect the actual US military took the wrong lessons from these games.

257: Kid Chameleon

• Developer: Sega Technical Institute
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-05-28
• NA Release: March 1992
• EU Release: May 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: If You Die In The Game, You Die For Real!
• Premise: Meet Kid Chameleon, the coolest dude around! Or so he believes. His middle-school peers have a secret Discord channel where they talk about how lame his shades are and how he dresses like an extra from Grease. A current meme on the channel involves everyone calling him "Danny Suck-o". Kids can be so cruel.
• Availability: Available on the Genesis Mini (NA only) and in the Sega Genesis Classics collection (and standalone on Steam).
• Preservation: The second game from Sega Technical Institute, who at this time were still focusing on original first-party properties. Kid Chameleon feels like Comix Zone (also an STI game) or NiGHTS, in that it feels like half the Sega playing world has dedicated a lot of their energy trying to convince the other half that this game was ever any good. A platformer with a shapeshifting protagonist gimmick, I found the platforming is frequently too swimmy and the game overall not particularly challenging. Most of the reviews online are effusive though, so who am I to cast aspersions on this little dork. It's no Chameleon Twist, I can tell you that much.

258: The Duel: Test Drive II

• Developer: Distinctive Software
• Publisher: Ballistic
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: March 1992
• EU Release: 1992-05-06
• Franchise: Test Drive
• Genre: Driving
• Theme: Car Go Fast
• Premise: The sequel to one of the earliest "realistic" driving sims to really take off, Test Drive II adds more features to tinker around with including an CPU opponent to race against.
• Availability: Nope. The Test Drive franchise is still alive and kicking though, or at least it was as recently as 2012.
• Preservation: I played a considerable amount of Test Drive 1 on the Atari ST back in the day, and my enduring impression is how relatively sedate it was compared to other racing/driving games of the era (especially Super Mario Kart, which might as well be its diametrical opposite). The Duel tries to gin it up with some additional conflict but I think people appreciated this series at the time because it was the closest you were going to get to driving a Ferrari or Lambo for real. Hence, "Test Drive". The Mega Drive version lacked the expansion discs of the Amiga original, which meant its starting three cars were all you were going to get, but at least it had a faster frame rate and in-game music to listen to.

259: Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?

• Developer: Brøderbund Software
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: March 1992
• EU Release: March 1992
• Franchise: Carmen Sandiego
• Genre: Educational
• Theme: Temporal Larceny
• Premise: Combining two things every teenage gamer loves, cops and learning, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? challenges the player's sense of history rather than geography. If you've ever wondered why there's a lady in a red trenchcoat in Da Vinci's The Last Supper, here's your answer.
• Availability: There are new Carmen Sandiego games coming out all the time on all manner of scholarly subjects. She also has that Netflix cartoon. I hear it's OK.
• Preservation: I have to admit that the whole Carmen Sandiego phenomena slipped me by. I would've been the right age for it, but for some reason the schools over here didn't prioritize the idea of catching criminals through geographical/historical information-gathering as much as they might've done elsewhere. I did play my fair share of Mario is Missing and Mario's Time Machine though, so take that as you will. Where In Time was actually both geography- and history-dependent, so it was kind of intense. Also, if you're wondering why this saw a Genesis port and not Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, that'll be showing up later in 1992. I guess Where In Time used its Chronoskimmer to jump ahead a few months and release first.

260: Steel Empire / Empire of Steel / Koutetsu Teikoku

• Developer: Hot-B
• Publisher: Hot-B (JP) / Flying Edge (NA/EU)
• JP Release: 1992-03-13 (as Koutetsu Teikoku)
• NA Release: June 1992 (as Steel Empire)
• EU Release: July 1992 (as Empire of Steel)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
• Theme: Steampunk
• Premise: Take to the skies in your gyroplane to stop the evil military dictatorship Motorhead. How could Lemmy do us like this?
• Availability: Remastered for 3DS (in 2015) and Steam (in 2018).
• Preservation: It's a shoot 'em up, but at least it has an unusual setting. It's all gliders, gyros, and zeppelins and some old-fashioned filmreels to introduce the game. Feels kinda like The Rocketeer. Hot-B are mostly known for their fishing games, but this foray into shoot 'em ups seems to have served them well because they keep bringing it out on newer systems (via their current incarnation Starfish).

261: Shining Force

• Developer: Climax Entertainment
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-03-20
• NA Release: July 1993
• EU Release: September 1993
• Franchise: Shining
• Genre: SRPG
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: The evil Kane and his army are plotting to revive the Dark Dragon, and they can only be stopped by a ragtag group of knights, mages, archers, ninjas, dragons, centaurs, birdmen, werewolves, armadillos, robots, and a hamster wearing a football helmet. Usual generic fantasy stuff.
• Availability: Available on the Genesis Mini (all regions) and in the Sega Genesis Classics collection (and standalone on Steam). There's also a GBA remake, Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon.
• Preservation: Now, Warsong was Genesis's first claim on the SRPG territory - a specific sub-genre of RPG not well-represented on the SNES, at least not yet - but Shining Force is what defined the genre to many and still does. Born from the same universe as Shining in the Darkness, thematically and artistically if not narratively or mechanically, Shining Force gave you a huge amount of characters to tinker around with to find ideal team dynamics and also incorporated class promotions and equipment: both of which might turn a weak joke character into something formidable (except for Jogurt, he'll always suck). Kudos to Sega for localizing this and its sequels; all the best SNES SRPGs (Fire Emblem, Bahamut Lagoon, Let Us Cling Together) remained Japan-only for a long time.

262: Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden

• Developer: Human
• Publisher: Human
• JP Release: 1992-03-27
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Fire Pro Wrestling
• Genre: Pro Wrestling
• Theme: Pro Wrestling
• Premise: Don't work your kayfabe into a shoot with this, the first of Human's Fire Pro games to make it to a Sega console.
• Availability: Nope, but there are better modern Fire Pro options.
• Preservation: Hey, that's cute. They renamed it Thunder Pro because it's Sega instead of Nintendo (for the record, they didn't extend this naming scheme to the Saturn/Dreamcast Fire Pro games). Usual business here: get into the ring (or, as we Fire Pro types call it, the Bouncy Diamond), pin some familiar-but-legally-distinct-from-actual-wrestlers wrestlers, and choose from any number of match types and special conditions for the next bout. Thunder Pro, like Human's previous Mega Drive game F1 Circus MD, felt like an experiment for the developer: they would ultimately stick with SNES and PC Engine for subsequent games in those series for the remainder of the 16-bit era.

263: Turbo OutRun

• Developer: Tiertex
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-03-27
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: June 1992
• Franchise: OutRun
• Genre: Racing
• Theme: "Rush a Difficulty"
• Premise: The little red convertible is back to burn rubber across the US, plowing into every landmark along the way. Sorry for crashing into Roosevelt's giant head, you guys. Guess I should "Rush less" huh.
• Availability: Nope. Sega's never put Turbo OutRun on any compilations, not even the arcade original.
• Preservation: Hilariously, despite being set in the USA and having the star-spangled banner right on the title screen and box art, the Mega Drive version of the game was not released in that country. You weren't missing much; the home versions couldn't handle the super-scaling so they didn't quite capture the original's spirit. Sega seems to have completely forgotten about this sequel - it doesn't quite have the nostalgic throwback appeal of the original, I guess - but in many ways it's the superior game. The new turbo boost can really make or break your chances of making it to the next checkpoint in time, and I can always appreciate a racing game with an "easy mode" automatic transmission option. Too bad it didn't keep the original's branching paths; that really helped keep the original fresh through multiple playthroughs (which, full disclaimer, I did to earn a Yakuza 0 achievement).

264: Cadash

• Developer: Cyclone System
• Publisher: Taito
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action RPG
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: The friendly citizens of Cadash are big into footraces and they challenge you, the player, to keep up with the Cadashians. Actually, it's just knock-off LOTR.
• Availability: Nope for the Genesis version. The last time the arcade original appeared anywhere was on Taito Legends 2, for Xbox and PC (Cadash wasn't on the PS2 Taito Legends 2 for whatever reason).
• Preservation: To make up for the above, here's a game that only North America got. Taito's arcade game Cadash is like a side-scrolling Gauntlet almost, or those Capcom Mystara games, with multiple players assuming various D&D classes and making their way through action stages while leveling up and finding new gear. The Mega Drive version might be the worst of its ports, which is impressive given its competition was the TurboGrafx-16: it cuts half the playable classes, messes with the brightness, and removes at least one boss.

265: Jordan vs. Bird: One on One

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-09-24
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: May 1992
• Franchise: One on One
• Genre: Basketball
• Theme: Slamming and/or jamming
• Premise: Jordan takes on Bird and the winner... gets to play the same match again with the same opponent. And no, the "Bird" is not Tweety. Get outta here with that Space Jam shit.
• Availability: Nope. The Mega Drive version is as new as you're going to get.
• Preservation: One of the grandfathers of modern basketball games is a little two-player contest called Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One, and this is its sequel. It's seen a few improvements in the time since its 1988 release on the C64 and NES, but still consists of Michael Jordan and Larry Bird playing one-on-one hoops. Just those two guys. Locked in some kind of b-ball purgatory from which there is no escape. Forever. (I might just interrupt this "Dunking for Godot" skit here to mention, by the by, that Midway's NBA Jam was only a year off.)

266: Sol-Deace

• Developer: Wolf Team
• Publisher: Renovation
• JP Release: 1991-12-12*
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: 1993-04-02*
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
• Theme: Sci-fi
• Premise: Flip a coin, it's either a rogue AI or aliens that have taken everything over (it's an AI this time). Do Sol-Deace fans call themselves "Sol-Deace Nuts"?
• Availability: Nope. Sunsoft owns it though - it was published through Telenet Japan, and Sunsoft acquired all their IPs in 2009 - so they might find their way to rereleasing it.
• Preservation: Sol-Deace is our third game on the Mega Archive to have launched first on the Mega-CD (though it was originally an X68000 game) but received a later cartridge release because the Sega CD still hadn't launched in the US yet. Kind of makes you appreciate how much of a gimmick CD-based gaming was at this time that a new release can have its CD audio and cutscenes removed and still be perceived as marketable. For all the fuss, it's another run-of-the-mill shmup from our friends at Wolf Team, albeit one that was widely liked at the time.

267: A Ressha de Ikou MD

• Developer: MNM Software
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-04-10
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: A-Train
• Genre: Business Simulation
• Theme: Trains
• Premise: A game where you not only create a network of trains to carry passengers and cargo but also indirectly create all the destinations for the trains to go to.
• Availability: There's a few A-Train games on Steam, including a "Classic" one.
• Preservation: A Ressha de Ikou, or A-Train as its known to the west, is a SimCity-like train simulator. Its popularity has also partially inspired the SimCity franchise itself: the fact that SimCity 2000 has an isometric perspective is largely due to A-Train taking that route. A Ressha de Ikou MD is a version made specially for the Mega Drive by a former developer at Artdink (the original A-Train developers), not unlike the special SimCity that appeared on SNES. I'm not familiar with the series, but it sounds like it takes after both A Ressha de Ikou 2 and 3 (3, meanwhile, would debut in the west this same year on PC as simply A-Train).

268: Devilish: The Next Possession / Bad Omen

• Developer: Aisystem Tokyo
• Publisher: Hot-B (JP) / Sage's Creation (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-04-24
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Devilish
• Genre: Breakout
• Theme: The Occult
• Premise: What if I were to make a sequel to a Game Gear Breakout clone, but changed its Japanese name so no-one would know? Delightfully Devilish, Aisystem Tokyo.
• Availability: Nope. It has a Nintendo DS sequel, but it's not so hot.
• Preservation: Devilish is a type of game I've only seen a handful of times before - the vertical scrolling bat-and-ball game. Most games of that genre are strictly single-screen affairs: you break every block in sight, and then move onto the next level. Devilish instead has you moving up the screen towards the boss, not necessarily destroying everything along the way. It also gives you two paddles to play with: one locked at the bottom as per usual, and the other with an adjustable height if you wanted to get stuck in and trap the ball higher up the screen somewhere. It's not the most elaborate game and the playing field feels a bit claustrophobic - possibly due to it being the sequel to a Game Gear game - but I'm always into some novel game design. Especially if there's demons and shit, and an early Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy Tactics/Vagrant Story/Valkyria Chronicles) soundtrack.

269: Magical Taluluto-kun

• Developer: Game Freak
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-04-24
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Magical Taluluto-kun
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Cute Magic Anime
• Premise: Help the titular wizard through a series of action stages using his magic and jumping skills.
• Availability: Nope. So-so licensed game, so no reason anyone would want to spend the capital needed to bring it back.
• Preservation: Naughty Dog and Game Freak releases a few months apart? A lot of surprising cameos in 1992. Game Freak's propensity for cute goobers would serve them well when they finally get around to making their little monster-raising RPGs, but in 1992 they were content to work with licenses like Magical Taluluto-kun, which in short was a manga/anime about a normal kid getting constantly abused by this fucked-up tiny wizard baby who insists he's "helping" with all his crappy spells. Like the other Taluluto-kun games, it's a World of Illusion-style platformer with an item grabbing/tossing mechanic and big colorful sprites.

270: Uncharted Waters / Daikoukai Jidai

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• JP Release: 1992-04-29 (as Daikoukai Jidai)
• NA Release: November 1992 (as Uncharted Waters)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Uncharted Waters
• Genre: Simulation
• Theme: I'm On A Boat
• Premise: Conquer the oceans of the 16th century as an explorer, trader, treasure hunter, smuggler, or pirate in Koei's broad naval sim.
• Availability: Oddly enough you can buy both Uncharted Waters games on Steam, but neither of them have English localization. Surely there's a translation patch out there...?
• Preservation: Uncharted Waters was Koei's spin on Sid Meier's Pirates!, offering you a number of money-making choices on the high seas once you'd gathered a ship and crew together (and, eventually, a whole fleet). As is typical of Koei's simulation franchises, there's a deep learning curve to the game and a whole lot of menus to navigate. The Age of Discovery theme is a lot more relatable to us than Three Kingdoms China or Sengoku era Japan though, and Uncharted Waters along with Aerobiz became one of Koei's more globally accessible franchises. I forgot to put a joke here. Unfarted Waters? Not when I'm taking a dip! Wa-pow! Badum-tish!

I've talked at great length about my love of explormers on this feature and elsewhere, but a very specific subgenre I don't get to address nearly as often are what I've nebulously dubbed in the past as "hybrid RPGs". A hybrid RPG is in essence any game that has a major RPG component, usually the focus, and then any number of additional modes that ideally feed back into that main RPG progression in some way or else serve as distractions from the grind. Fishing that rewards healing items or extra cash for equipment, for example, or a puzzle mode that lets you build new weaponry from blueprints. My usual examples are games like Dark Cloud 1 & 2 (RPG + town-builder), Persona (RPG + socializing/dating sim), Rogue Galaxy (RPG + Factorio-style factory assembly puzzles), and - most pertinent to this week's Indie Game of the Week - Recettear (RPG + shop management).

Moonlighter is very much operating in a similar space to Recettear (which, in turn, expanded on a concept introduced in Dragon Quest IV with the Torneko Taloon chapter) in that the player is both an explorer of roguelike dungeons as well as the proprietor of a hub town storefront that serves said explorers. By finding materials and artifacts while dungeoneering, the player can sell those to the local adventurers and use the more useful components and the money from trading to fund the construction of their own equipment at the blacksmith's, or put that money towards making their store bigger and more feature-rich, or invest in new vendors that serve you and the town alike with their services. The progression is such that you're always struggling with each new dungeon - there are four total, each of which has three floors that must be quickly traversed - until you've picked up some of the materials found there, used those to make new equipment and curatives, and then take another whack at the boss with your now-competitive loadout.

However, putting the RPG aspect front and center like that slightly undermines how engrossing the shopkeeping aspect can be. There are no hard and fast rules about item values, for instance: part of the process is figuring out the sweet spot cost for every one of the game's items, selling it at a profit without alienating your customers with flagrant overpricing or letting them off too easy with severely underpriced goods that you take a loss on. Each store "session" has you running around restocking shelves with whatever you have to spare (a single dungeon trip will easily fill your backpack's twenty slots), keeping a close eye on customer reactions to your prices and adjusting accordingly, sorting out the occasional shoplifter, and - as your store grows - covering additional challenges like prioritizing priceless items by putting them in glass cases to increase their value further, or taking item requests from clients at a significant mark-up provided you can meet the demand.

The storekeep routine is just compelling enough that it serves as a welcome distraction from the roguelike RPG half, which is fun enough (it follows a very Zelda-esque dungeon format, not unlike The Binding of Isaac) but can occasionally cause some irritation with your limited weapon reach and how certain enemies seem to clip your hitbox despite being some distance away. There's also an omnipresent time-limit whenever you enter dungeons: dawdle too long exploring every dead end for chests and you'll get something akin to Spelunky's invincible ghost breathing down your neck, and he'll even show up during each floor's customary mini-boss fight to make it that much more "enjoyable." In addition, using the teleporter to go back to town carries a hefty fee; this price is higher still if you wanted to come back to the same dungeon seed right where you left it. The game's default difficulty is "Hard" for a reason, and you have to learn to live by its rules if you hope to get anywhere - earn money by selling your spoils, get better gear, and don't expect to waltz through each dungeon on your first visit because the second- and third-floor foes in each will simply overwhelm you without upgraded gear.

While my time with Moonlighter hasn't been wholly ideal - there's a bug in the PS4 version at least where taking along one of the newly added "pet" creatures (who fight foes and occasionally perform other duties) will cause the game to hang indefinitely when you warp back from a dungeon - but as an Indie successor to Recettear with a vaguely Hyper Light Drifter-esque art style it's been gratifying enough and I'd be the first to admit that I'm hooked on the game's cycle and am planning my next resource-gathering excursion as I write. I'm not that far from completing the second dungeon, so I'm probably going to see the whole thing through soon enough unless the difficulty curve goes totally Everest on me. Not without its flaws, but otherwise a worthy contender in an unfortunately uncompetitive genre.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, Sega... heads! Segaheads! That's a term we all use to describe each other and have for years!

We've now entered the interesting but not fascinating console battlefield that is 1992: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is making a spirited counterattack on the market share that the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was able to wrest away from the weaker NES in western territories, though Sega's hedgehog-shaped secret weapon has allowed them to keep a thin lead (which they'll maintain, in the US and Europe at least, for the rest of the generation). It's a totally different story in Japan, however, with the Super Famicom vastly outpacing the Mega Drive in sales, releases, and in third-party support. The Genesis/Mega Drive saw 142 new (discrete, so that doesn't include localizations from last year's batch) releases across all regions in 1992, which would be impressive if not for the SFC/SNES's 220. (Of course, that's no indication of overall quality; a fair amount of cheaply-produced shovelware made its way to the SFC. Believe me.)

It's safe to say that the Genesis had the attention of almost every major western developer at this time and many of those 142 new releases will be North American or European-derived, several hopping over from the popular home computer platforms of the era. As for the year's biggest games, most are going to be arcade ports and superior sequels, though there's a few new faces this year that will carve out their own legacies on the Genesis platform and the ones to follow.

There's also the matter of the Sega CD. Released in Japan late in 1991, it would have its first full year of support in 1992 (as well as its American debut) with something in the region of 35 new games, including gimmicky FMV titles like Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and the "Make My Video" series as well as fledgling CD-ROM stars like Lunar: The Silver Star, Robo Aleste, and a chunky The Secret of Monkey Island port. I'd like to eventually get around to exploring those releases too, as the Sega CD played a major role in the success of the Genesis as a state-of-the-art rival to Nintendo's complacency.

OH! I forgot to mention, I'm sprucing up all the pages of the below Genesis games on our wiki and this is kind of a rundown of what they're all about, where you can get them, and whether they've held up at all. That's this feature. It's been a while, figured I should reiterate. Be sure to catch up with previous entries here:

• Part I: 001-020 can be found here.
• Part II: 021-035 can be found here.
• Part III: 036-050 can be found here.
• Part IV: 051-065 can be found here.
• Part V: 066-080 can be found here.
• Part VI: 081-098 can be found here.
• Part VII: 099-115 can be found here.
• Part VIII: 116-130 can be found here.
• Part IX: 131-145 can be found here.
• Part X: 146-160 can be found here.
• Part XI: 161-175 can be found here.
• Part XII: 176-190 can be found here.
• Part XIII: 191-205 can be found here.
• Part XIV: 206-220 can be found here.
• Part XV: 221-240 can be found here.

Part XVI: 241-255 (January '92 - February '92)

241: Earnest Evans

• Developer: Wolf Team
• Publisher: Wolf Team (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1991-12-20*
• NA Release: 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Earnest Evans
• Genre: Action
• Theme: Archeological Study
• Premise: Earnest Evans, the third of his name, seeks to complete his grandfather's mission to keep three mystical idols out of the hands of evil, in his case a bounty hunter by the totally normal occidental name of Brady Tresidder. (In the Japanese version, their Earnest Evans is the original.)
• Availability: Nope. I assume Bandai Namco picked up the El Viento IP along with Wolf Team itself, and it's not like they're short of better retro games to re-release ad nauseam.
• Preservation: I wanted to start on an auspicious note, and the sheer weirdness and ambition of Earnest Evans is how it's managed to endure even if its awkward controls and zero chill leave much to be desired. The sequel to El Viento (#183), it was released in late December 1991 in Japan but only as a Mega CD game (hence the asterisk) with its cartridge-format NA localization showing up on some unknown date in 1992. Like its predecessor, the game plays vaguely like Valis with its speedy brawler-like energy, though the choice of animation style - where each of Evans's limbs is its own sprite - creates an especially uncanny effect whenever he moves or attacks. It also does that annoying thing where enemy damage is applied per frame of contact, so your health can be drained in an instant. The Mega CD version has CD audio and a smattering of anime cutscenes, which the cartridge version sadly (but understandably) lacks.

242: Rings of Power

• Developer: Naughty Dog
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: January 1992
• EU Release: February 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Tolkienism
• Premise: Aid a little dude in a cloak and his fellowship in recovering the one ring, as well as a bunch of others, from... zombie Slash from GNR?
• Availability: Nope. I half-suspect Naughty Dog would prefer us all to believe that Crash Bandicoot was the first game they ever put out.
• Preservation: Oh hey there, Naughty Dog. Your first (and only) Sega console game is an isometric LOTR knock-off that skipped the PC platform? With a nude code? You scamps. Hearing about the development of this game, it sounds like the fledgling Naughty Dog - though they'd been around earlier as JAM Software, this was only their second game with the new label - kept butting heads with the publishers, EA, and the latter's decision first to bump the game from home computers (Amiga and PC) to the Genesis because EA saw those platforms as "weak," and their refusal to reprint the game after it sold out in several stores (which I'm in no hurry to believe actually happened) because non-sports games were also "weak." They make EA sound a totally inept, Trump-ian, divorced-from-reality, divorced-from-the-zeitgeist conglomerate of artless, oblivious moneymen, which honestly tracks with everything we know about them. II'd bet an almost identical back-and-forth happened with BioWare and Anthem in 2019. RoP is a bit meander-y and tough, but respect to Naughty Dog for putting out a huge, non-linear, open-world isometric RPG when that was far from the norm, even if they didn't try very hard to come up with an original story and setting.

243: Chibi Maruko-Chan: Waku Waku Shopping

• Developer: Namco
• Publisher: Namco
• JP Release: 1992-01-14
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Chibi Maruko-Chan
• Genre: Board Game
• Theme: Slice of Life Anime
• Premise: Maruko-chan decides to do some shopping, but it all gets a little too waku waku if you catch my meaning.
• Availability: Nope. Quickie licensed game so forget about it.
• Preservation: Chibi Maruko-chan must've been a big deal in her time, because the grade-schooler manga and anime has no less than fifteen game adaptations from multiple developers. This is her only Mega Drive appearance (though she'll pop up again in a Konami Saturn game) and like many of her tie-ins it's a board/party game intended for a younger audience. Like almost every other Japanese board video game, it's based on the Game of Life and is therefore an arbitrary mess of big numbers going up and down. What grade-schooler anime fan doesn't like math, though?

244: Super Fantasy Zone

• Developer: Sunsoft
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• JP Release: 1992-01-14
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: Fantasy Zone
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up
• Theme: ...Fantasy?
• Premise: Opa-Opa needs your helpa-helpa murdering the cute monsters that killed his father, (no kidding) O-papa.
• Availability: It's on the Genesis Mini (all regions).
• Preservation: Sunsoft was given custodianship over Sega's day-glo shoot 'em up for its NES ports, since Sega employees turned to ash whenever they got close to Nintendo's Osaka headquarters back then. That led to Sunsoft taking charge on this semi-sequel/reboot for the Mega Drive. Curiously, the game skipped over North America: they could only get it digitally for the longest time, first via the Sega Channel and then eventually through the Wii Virtual Console. Like many other Mega Drive-exclusive "sequels" to classic Sega arcade games, it's not really a progression but an adaptation. Sunsoft knew better than to mess with perfection.

245: Tecmo World Cup '92

• Developer: SIMS
• Publisher: SIMS (JP) / Atlus (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-01-31 (as Tecmo World Cup '92)
• NA Release: December 1992 (as Tecmo World Cup)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Tecmo World Cup
• Genre: Soccer
• Theme: Pro Sports
• Premise: Put the round thing past the rectangle thing more times than the other guys.
• Availability: Nope. Sports games age like fine milk.
• Preservation: So here's the thing - there is no World Cup '92. There was a Euro '92, but the World Cup is every other two years (same as the Summer Olympics). Reason for the name is that this is a port of a two-year-old arcade soccer game, and it still couldn't get the list of qualifying teams right after all that time. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not impressed so far, and that's even before factoring in my apathy for sports games and soccer in particular.

246: Toki: Going Ape Spit

• Developer: Santos / Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-01-31
• NA Release: Spring of 1992
• EU Release: March 1992
• Franchise: Toki
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Simianulator
• Premise: Rescue your kidnapped girlfriend and undo your monkey curse as the "expector-Ape" himself, Toki.
• Availability: This enhanced Mega Drive port is lost to time, but the game itself was graphically remastered just recently for Steam, Switch, Xbox One, and PS4 by Microids (the Syberia people?!).
• Preservation: Toki's a real weird game to research. It originated in arcades in 1989, developed by the Japanese developers TAD Corp, and the appeal of an apathetic ape who spits at animals must've caught on because it showed up on everything after that. Even got itself a shiny new graphical remaster.. It's not a remarkable game or anything, so I guess there must be some kind of atavistic appeal to an ape that spits fireballs. After all, were we all not ourselves fireball-spitting apes at one point in the distant past?

247: Wani Wani World

• Developer: Kaneko
• Publisher: Kaneko
• JP Release: 1992-01-31
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer / Puzzle
• Theme: Alligators
• Premise: Cutesy hammer murder
• Availability: Nope. More like Kan't-eko.
• Preservation: I mean, this is just Lode Runner with a cartoon gator. You can't fool me. What's perplexing is where this came from; Kaneko adapted it from an earlier arcade game of theirs called Berlin no Kabe (or Berlin Wall, which was something else people were hitting with hammers around this time) but switched out the protagonist from some clown-looking kid. Alligators with hammers were something established elsewhere in the arcades: Namco's ubiquitous Wani Wani Panic, an animatronic "whack-a-croc" game which had you smack the alligators yourself. Seems a bit cheeky to riff on another developer's intellectual property, but it's far from the worst thing Kaneko's done where the Mega Drive's concerned (DJ Boy, for instance).

248: Alisia Dragoon

• Developer: Game Arts
• Publisher: Game Arts
• JP Release: 1992-04-24
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: April 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Action
• Theme: A Frank Frazetta Painting Come to Life
• Premise: A warrior maiden, Alisia, sets out to avenge her father (a lot of patricide this entry...) by defeating evil forces from beyond the stars.
• Availability: It's on the Genesis Mini (all regions).
• Preservation: Game Arts appeared before (they'd previously commissioned Yellow Horn for a mahjong manga tie-in (#84)) but this is the first Mega Drive game they developed on their own. They would become much more prominent on the Sega CD and Saturn, where they'll create two of the best-loved JRPG series of the CD-ROM era: Lunar and Grandia. Alisia Dragoon resembles yet another barbarian action game like Rastan Saga II or Dahna, but the actual mechanics have a completely different dynamic to them: Alisia relies on her powerful enemy-seeking lightning magic and companions, but you can't keep the fire button pressed too long or you'll hit an "overheat" stage and be quickly overwhelmed by enemy forces. You'll also need to turn around to hit those chasing you. It feels like a tense multi-directional crowd-control shooter with platforming, and a bit of an exploration emphasis as you hunt around for upgrades and power-ups to help weather the storm (and the impressive bosses). Despite not being a huge seller in its day, it's one of a handful of games to appear on the Mega Drive Mini purely due to its reputation. (Another odd characteristic is that Game Arts, who can usually handle story stuff just fine given their famous games are all RPGs, actually brought in Gainax to work on the art and story of Alisia Dragoon.)

249: Paperboy

• Developer: MotiveTime
• Publisher: Tengen
• JP Release: 1992-06-26
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: April 1992
• Franchise: Paperboy
• Genre: Action
• Theme: Part-time Drudgery
• Premise: Deliver them papers, son.
• Availability: I dunno, try iOS? Paperboy ports are like rats; you're never more than five feet away from one.
• Preservation: I wasn't aware of who MotiveTime was, but apparently it was the name Elite went by for a while. Elite's another UK games company like Ocean that reprogrammed and published a huge number of era-contemporary arcade games for home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST. They'd already worked on a home computer version of Paperboy, and were natural choices for the Genesis port. Otherwise, this is your run of the mill Paperboy game: deliver papers, watch out for dogs and mowers, try to cycle on that mythical sweet spot near the curb where nothing can reach you that a kid at school once told you about.

250: The Terminator

• Developer: Probe Entertainment
• Publisher: Virgin Games
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: June 1992
• Franchise: The Terminator
• Genre: Side-scrolling Shooter
• Theme: "Technology Bad"
• Premise: Dun-dun dun dun-dun. Hear that? That's a metal man on his way to steal yo' girl.
• Availability: Nope. Last copy must've got dipped in molten steel or something.
• Preservation: There are so many Terminator games, and it runs into that odd issue - more prevalent in this era of pre-ESRB - where a premise is so cool that you can sell it to kids, even though they should not be allowed anywhere near the original source material until they can at least grow themselves some face fuzz. Termie didn't get an incongruous Saturday morning cartoon like RoboCop or the Toxic Avenger did, but this colorful bloopy shooter featuring everyone's favoite pre-ordained motherfucker Kyle Reese is clearly meant for a younger audience.

251: Winter Challenge

• Developer: MindSpan
• Publisher: Ballistic
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: February 1992
• EU Release: 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Sports
• Theme: Sports
• Premise: Sports
• Availability: Nope. But if you're jonesing for some Olympiad action, you could always wait until this summer for the... oh, right.
• Preservation: Talking of sports games that don't have anything to do with any major global sporting events, wink wink, Winter Challenge is a winter sports compilation released the same year as a Winter Olympics (1992, Albertville) but based on a different, also unaffiliated, DOS game from the late 80s that was more likely released to coincide with a different Winter Olympics (1988, Calgary). This economic recycling could only come from Accolade, who are once again up to their old tricks by manufacturing unlicensed Mega Drive carts on the cheap through their Ballistic label. Winter Challenge did eventually get a "legit" rerelease a little while later, post-lawsuits.

252: Sorcerer's Kingdom / Sorcer Kingdom

• Developer: Masaya
• Publisher: Masaya (JP) / Treco (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-02-07 (as Sorcer Kingdom)
• NA Release: August 1993 (as Sorcerer's Kingdom)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: Make a name for yourself as a hero as you run around solving everyone's problems in this vague and directionless game.
• Availability: Nope. Maybe Dracue Software, the ones behind the Assault Suits Leynos remake, could try remaking a few other Masaya games? ...They're out of business you say? Well this turned into a bummer fast.
• Preservation: Our old friends Masaya with another tactical RPG. The last game of theirs we encountered was Warsong/Langrisser, and Sorcerer's Kingdom has a similar combat system if not progression structure, with combat turning into a grid-based strategy affair only once roaming enemies get close enough. However, it decided to follow Final Fantasy II (a bad idea in general) by having specific stats improve after using them repeatedly. Beyond that it's a little on the plain side, but at least Masaya never sticks to one idea for too long.

253: Syd of Valis / Valis SD

• Developer: Telenet Japan
• Publisher: Laser Soft (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-02-14 (as Valis SD)
• NA Release: April 1992 (as Syd of Valis)
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Valis
• Genre: Action
• Theme: Fantasy Leering
• Premise: It's Valis, so it's probably something to do with half-dressed chosen warrior maidens and creepy masked anime dudes, only now they're all chibi and shit.
• Availability: Nope. The Valis franchise was... handled somewhat irresponsibly, let's say, and I doubt anyone wants to wade through the muck to save it.
• Preservation: I can't get over the fact that Renovation chose to localize "Valis SD" as "Syd of Valis", even changing the name of series-wide heroine Yuko to Syd in cutscenes (but not in the manual?), because that was easier than trying to explain to a western audience what "SD" meant. Anime fans are familiar with "super deformation" - turning normally proportioned characters into tiny, crudely drawn babies for comedic effect - and that's pretty much what's going on with this game, which is a goofier retelling of Valis II with a lot more levity. If Renovation's localization uh-ohs weren't enough, they chose an unrelated PC Engine game's box art for the NA release. The mind truly boggles. There has to be a fun story out there somewhere about how little time and resources they had.

254: Traysia

• Developer: Telenet Japan
• Publisher: Riot (JP) / Renovation (NA)
• JP Release: 1992-02-14
• NA Release: April 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Fantasy
• Premise: Courageous hero Roy is itching for adventure, and finds it when he accompanies his travelling merchant of an uncle across the world.
• Availability: Nope.
• Preservation: I get that every other fantasy RPG has a woman's name that has since fallen out of common use, but "Traysia" might be stretching a little (apologies to all the Traysias out there). This RPG is much like Masaya's Sorcerer's Kingdom, above, in that its combat predominantly uses a SRPG-type grid. Other than that it's as generic as they come, and Telenet Japan probably figured it'd be easier to sell something so mediocre to an RPG desert like the Mega Drive than try to break into the well-represented SNES JRPG market, which at the time was building up hype for Dragon Quest V and Final Fantasy V. At least Renovation picked out some germane box art for the game this time, rather than finding a random piece of manga art and calling it a day.

255: Two Crude Dudes

• Developer: ISCO
• Publisher: Data East
• JP Release: 1992-02-28 (as Crude Buster)
• NA Release: 1992 (as Two Crude Dudes)
• EU Release: May 1993 (as Two Crude Dudes)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Brawler
• Theme: Post-Apocalyptic
• Premise: New York has been nuked, gangs have taken over (I guess the fallout doesn't bother them), and the US government - like the current administration - cares so little for its biggest city that it sends in two jocks with bad haircuts to save the day.
• Availability: No rereleases for the Mega Drive port, but the original arcade version is in the Data East Arcade Classics compilation for Wii.
• Preservation: Our last game for this entry is Two Crude Dudes, or Crude Buster, a mildly popular Data East brawler that found more success with its Mega Drive port. Possibly related to the Bad Dudes, the Crude Dudes are post-apocalyptic New York City's best shot at clearing out the Big Valley gang of hoodlums and mutants that have moved into the burned out buildings and molten streets after the nukes. I'm honestly not sure why anyone wants this version of New York back; it's not exactly in the best condition for re-habitation. I guess it's the principle of the thing? No-one wants to see a three-armed goon spraypaint obscenities on the side of the Empire State Building, in theory at least.