Welcome to the Mega Archive CD, Mega Archive's younger and more reflective brother, as he continues to keep pace with his cartridge sibling in the final months of 1992. That means this entry contains games for November and December which (sigh) also means that we have to contend with the North American Sega CD launch and the dumptruck of FMV madness that accompanied it.

I've been putting off this update because, well, I've been dreading doing it. Not just for the fact that I have to look at a bunch of terrible FMV games with grainy, postage stamp-sized videos, but that each of them are such well-known quantities at this point - covered by this very site several times, in some cases - that this is going to feel like the least essential update yet for fans of the obscure and forgotten. What can I say about Night Trap that isn't the usual spiel about how the US Senate wanted to ban all video games after someone showed them some footage of an embarrassed starlet in her underwear being dragged away with a leftover Child Catcher prop from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Or anything on the Make My Video series that isn't "why in God's name did they make three of these?"

All the same, I think the end of 1992 must have been a fun time to be a games journalist. I don't doubt fans were coming down hard on anyone daring to lambast Sega's bold new CD project given the amount of hype Sega of America must have built around it, but the novelty of seeing live actors in a console game can't have overcome just how limited they were in terms of interaction and longevity. Evidently, the CD format was one that would take game developers a little more time to figure out; at least as long as it took to have 32-bit hardware that could do right by its potential.

All that said, we do have a few games here that aren't live-action FMV, including another from Japan like Cobra Command that uses anime FMV instead. We'll get into these next nine Mega CD games in just a moment, but first a refresher:

• Mega Archive CD: Part I & Part II
• Mega Archive: Part XXV - From Ecco the Dolphin to Streets of Rage 2 (latest)

Part III: CD21-CD29 (November '92 - December '92)

CD21: Night Trap

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-11-19
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: June 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: FMV
• Theme: Sickening Filth Corrupting the Moral Fabric of America / Horror
• Premise: I'm Sir Galahad and I'm here to say, I've got a lance in my pants in a major wa- ohhh "Night Trap". OK, I misheard you there.
• Availability: A Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition is available on PC, PS4, and Switch.
• Preservation: Welcome aboard, Digital Pictures. The biggest western supporter of the Sega CD is perhaps its most notorious, at least in retrospect. Their first project, and easily their most famous, is the Dana Plato vehicle Night Trap about a seemingly wholesome family of cannibal (?) vampire (?) alien (?) mutants (?) that invite young women to their suburban home and capture them with elaborate traps, often at night. Your job, as a member of the special forces unit S.C.A.T. (short for Should've Changed that Acronym, Twits), is to monitor each room and activate the traps remotely to ensnare the very creeps that built them. Given there's a number of different camera feeds to watch, it's a process beholden to a lot of trial-and-error and it means missing anything of value to the story as well as the performances of the actors, since you'll be switching away every five seconds to make sure more goons aren't skulking through empty hallways and bedrooms. Integral also is a color-coded password system that changes intermittently, and you need to be looking at the right feed at the right time to hear these changes. Despite facing a lot of criticism, from contemporary game reviewers to Senators to even the Time Trotters, there's no denying the importance of the game's lasting effects on the future of the Sega CD.

CD22: Sega Classics Arcade Collection

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-04-23
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: 1993-04-02
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Compilation
• Theme: We Gotta Sell This $300 System With Something
• Premise: The good Sega CD games are coming we swear, but in the meanwhile can I offer you a nice Streets of Rage in this trying time?
• Availability: These four games are all individually available on Steam, and together as part of many recent Sega compilations.
• Preservation: Conventional wisdom for new system launches is to lean a little on the legacy of its forebears. The PlayStation 5 PS+ online service, for instance, launched with a gaggle of PlayStation 4 exclusives that could suffice as the foundation for the system's inchoate library. The Sega CD does something similar with this collection of Sega Genesis classics: Golden Axe (MA II), Streets of Rage (MA X), Columns (MA III), and The Revenge of Shinobi (MA I) (later versions, including the European debut, also included Super Monaco GP (MA IV)). This collection was a pack-in for Sega CD SKUs in North America and Europe. Despite the new possibilities presented by the CD format though, very little was changed to these games: some saw some improved digitized sound samples and a new audio CD track or two, but were mostly left alone. Golden Axe was downgraded to a single-player game, made all the more surprising by the fact Streets of Rage wasn't. The Revenge of Shinobi even lost its Batman and Godzilla bosses, since it was based on a later spoilsport post-lawsuit revision. I guess you could say it was the Super Mario 3D All-Stars of its day: a whole lot of not a whole lot.

CD23: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

• Developer: ICOM Simulations
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: April 1993
• Franchise: Sherlock Holmes
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Catching Criminals With the Help of Watson and "Lady Caine"
• Premise: Long before Sherlock could make word clouds appear with his mind, he relied on his own wits and a tribe of street urchins for all the clues he needed to crack London's most ingenious crimes.
• Availability: As a pack-in game only, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Vol. I is actually harder to find than its sequel. In 2012 the PC version was remastered for on Steam, iOS, and Android - each of the game's three cases were sold separately.
• Preservation: Pioneers of the adventure genre, ICOM first established itself with the first point-and-click adventure games (their MacVenture series) and then took the plunge into live-action FMV adventure games starting with this trilogy of mysteries based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1991 and beyond, Consulting Detective appeared on almost anything that had a CD-ROM drive: first the Japanese FM Towns, then DOS PCs, the doomed Commodore CDTV, the TurboGrafx-CD, and eventually the Sega-CD. A rite of passage for any new CD system, you could say (and a good case study for a "compare and contrast" experiment). Like the above Sega Classics Arcade Collection it was released as a pack-in for console SKUs, though unlike the above it was never released later as a standalone product. Gameplay essentially boils down to visiting the right locations and answering the right questions, most of which were accompanied with video clips of budget Holmes and Watson on the case. You were scored on efficiency and accuracy, with fewer visits to non-essential locations the better. We'll see its sequel in a little bit.

CD24: Time Gal

• Developer: Wolf Team
• Publisher: Wolf Team (JP) / Renovation (NA) / Sega (EU)
• JP Release: 1992-11-13
• NA Release: May 1993
• EU Release: September 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: FMV
• Theme: Time-Travel Anime, Or "Baka to the Future" If You Will
• Premise: Help Time Gal catch a criminal while surviving a series of misadventures through human history and beyond.
• Availability: It showed up on iOS and Android in 2017 but only in Japan. The Sega CD version is the only one that's ever been localized.
• Preservation: Time Gal's another like Cobra Command or Dragon's Lair in that it first showed up in the mid-80s as an arcade laserdisc game and had to wait more than half a decade before a home console could run it, and like those games requires you to input directions within certain time windows during an animation to keep it going. Failure to do so meant an unfortunate fate for the eponymous Time Gal Reika Kirishima, though deaths are played for comedy - this isn't exactly Akira or Genocyber we're talking about. The original Time Gal was a combined effort between CGI pioneers HighTech Lab Japan, anime studio Toei Animation, and arcade giants Taito; however it is our old friends Wolf Team that was handed the reins to this Sega CD port, with Telenet Japan's North American publishing label Renovation helping to localize it for that market (Sega, meanwhile, brought it to Europe). The quality of the animation had to take a hit on the Sega CD due to a number of limitations, with Wolf Team re-drawing the frames rather than let the original video go through the brutal compression process required, but at least it fares better than the live-action FMV we've been seeing so far. For one, the video takes up around half the screen rather than 30%.

CD25: Robo Aleste / Dennin Aleste

• Developer: Compile
• Publisher: Compile (JP) / Tengen (NA) / Sega (EU)
• JP Release: 1992-11-27 (as Dennin Aleste)
• NA Release: August 1993 (as Robo Aleste)
• EU Release: April 1993 (as Robo Aleste)
• Franchise: Aleste
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Vertical)
• Theme: Space
• Premise: Nobunaga needs a little help unifying Japan from his secret squad of eight-meter-tall ninja mecha. How's a thing that like supposed to be stealthy?
• Availability: Sadly, the recent Aleste compilation did not include this one.
• Preservation: Wow, so I had no idea what to expect here. Compile's Aleste franchise is one I've encountered a number of times on Sega's and other's platforms - M.U.S.H.A. (MA VI), Space Megaforce, and Power Strike are all from this series - but they tend to stick to futuristic scenarios where a spacefaring version of humanity must take to their mecha to face down aliens or each other, but Robo Aleste's plot (called "Dennin Aleste" in Japan, or "Dennin Aleste: Nobunaga and his Ninja Force" to give it its full title) has Portuguese sailors show up on the shores of Nippon during the Sengoku era of endless conflict, only instead of revealing the secret of cannons and matchlocks it's mech suits and airships. This naturally changes the face of warfare in 16th century Japan somewhat significantly, and none are more shrewd than Nobunaga when taking advantage of these new weapons of war. Best of all, the localized versions keep all this Sengoku business in, with a new voiceover explaining all the Sengoku leaders and their robots (and the VA does a great job with the Japanese pronunciations too), which is uncharacteristically detail-focused of Tengen. Gameplay-wise it's the same kind of power-up-centered vertical shoot 'em up action we've seen many times before (though rarely with Compile's level of polish) but I am here for any medieval Japanese mecha lunacy the 16-bit era has to offer.

CD26: The Adventures of Willy Beamish

• Developer: Dynamix
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Adventure
• Theme: Like a Weirdly Raunchy Dennis the Menace
• Premise: Toss out your technology and live off the land like the worshippers of old as you teach Willy to Be Amish.
• Availability: The PC version's on GOG. You'd probably want to play that over the Sega CD version.
• Preservation: We've covered Dynamix before with Rise of the Dragon (MACD II), but they were a major PC developer of adventure games and simulators who took a risk on the Sega CD and converted a few of their more popular games to the platform. The Adventures of Willy Beamish, a satirical adventure game about a regular kid living in an irregular town, has the feel of the sort of creative enterprise someone might put out after The Simpsons became huge: one that treats its oblivious adult figures with scorn and irreverence and grants its central kid hero a rich inner life full of schoolyard drama and adventures around the neighborhood. Its journey from PC CD-ROM to the Sega CD platform did not go smoothly: as well as the usual dip in graphical quality due to the system's lack of color depth, the game is burdened with abysmal load times. It's so bad that the game actually gives you a screensaver to play with as it loads the next scene or audio clip, which I don't think I've seen before or since. It's like the replacement bus service of video game features: "we're sorry we messed up, so here's a bunch of balls to look at." Dynamix appear to have developed the port themselves, but there's also a credit to a company named Infinite Laser Dog that may have helped with the conversion. A+ for the name, if for nothing else.

CD27: Make My Video: INXS

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: August 1993
• Franchise: Make My Video
• Genre: FMV
• Theme: Not Enough Time? More Like Not Enough Time To Explain Why These Games Suck
• Premise: Discover the wonders of royalty-free B-roll in these music video production simulators. This one's for INXS!
• Availability: Licensing issues and sheer apathy probably means no rereleases.
• Preservation: And so we have the infamous Make My Video series to contend with, as I knew we would once I started fording the fetid swamp waters of the North American Sega CD library. All three games in this series tasked the player, as a would-be video producer, to mix the best video for three songs of a famous band. It's been said that the developers figured there'd be oodles of leftover footage to consider whenever a music video is created and creating new remixes could make for a compelling video game, but it turns out that the music video industry is a lot more economical than they thought; to make up for the lack of bonus material to work with, they borrowed a lot of random public domain footage from what appears to be the Library of Congress because most of it is historical record or clips from long-out-of-copyright vaudeville motion pictures. That's why you end up with videos all slick and sexy like INXS's Not Enough Time interspersed with Buster Keaton getting hit by a train or a televised speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower. '90s kids like Ike, I guess. (It does work slightly better with Heaven Sent, though, since that video was also in black-and-white.) RIP Michael Hutchence.

CD28: Make My Video: Kris Kross

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: November 1993
• Franchise: Make My Video
• Genre: FMV
• Theme: Jump? More Like These Games Can Jump Off a Pier
• Premise: Discover the wonders of royalty-free B-roll in these music video production simulators. This one's for Kris Kross!
• Availability: Sheer apathy and licensing issues means no probable rereleases.
• Preservation: The second Make My Video, though only alphabetically - sites that track release data are extremely sketchy when it comes to when these Make My Video enterprises, though all three dropping in the holiday period of 1992 seems the most likely scenario. Kris Kross were of course the pubescent hip-hop stars of Jump and backwards clothes fame who were among the earliest of the long and prestigious history of Atlanta-based rappers, and perhaps the best act from that era for an experiment like this given A) their age proximity to the kids these games were aimed towards, and B) hip-hop's already significant use of sampling. RIP Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly.

CD29: Make My Video: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch

• Developer: Digital Pictures
• Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Make My Video
• Genre: FMV
• Theme: I Need Money? More Like I Need Money if You (Makey) Make Me Play Any More of These
• Premise: Discover the wonders of royalty-free B-roll in these music video production simulators. This one's for Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch!
• Availability: Sheer issues and licensing apathy means no rereleases, probably.
• Preservation: I'm not entirely sure why I put all these Make My Videos together instead of padding them out a bit, but I think I just wanted to get them out of the way. So yes, this is Digital Pictures's third attempt to make one of these music video builders; from what I can tell all three were released around the same time, because I'm not sure the reception the first received would've encouraged the development of any more. The Marky Mark Make My Video might be the most enduring of the three - the early rap career of Boston's favorite dopey son is an ever-amusing reminder of where he came from, and the interstitial clips of the kids trying to figure out the best video (even Seth Green's here, hey Seth Green) is perhaps one of the silliest ways to frame the "gameplay," especially as it's never quite clear what the game is looking for even with the actors' hints. RIP to the possibility of another Max Payne movie.