The marketing, box art, and even screenshots are quite misleading for the type of game this is. Even the fantastic artwork doesn’t accurately convey the tone of the game. The first game was a chaotic combination of trial and error, resulting in its incredibly short duration. The second game follows more linear and traditional point-and-click adventure gameplay with digitized scenes and full voice acting. While the voice acting isn’t half bad, the sprites could have used a few more animations and don’t mash well with the H.R. Giger art style of the Darkworld.
Dark Seed II focuses mostly on a murder mystery. You play as Mike Dawson, who is recovering from the events of the first game. The local sheriff has charged you as the prime suspect after the murder of your high school sweetheart, Rita. You then wander around various locations in town, talking to people trying to move the story along, and this is where the game really falls apart. Like most point-and-click adventures of the time, the game is very obtuse; there aren’t any puzzles, but knowing what items to pick up and where is a real chore. The first game had issues with objects blending into the background, but in this game, you just wouldn’t know where to start. I had to play this game with a full guide, or I would have spent hours wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. The lack of a button or other mechanism to access the map makes the significant amount of backtracking even worse. To get to the map, you must walk back to the edge of the area, slow walking speed and all.
Once you get to the Darkworld, things get a little more interesting. The artwork is fantastic, and it’s a shame the low-resolution visuals don’t do it justice. The voice acting didn’t mesh well with the characters in this world, which put me off. They are meant to represent people in the real world, but come on. Why is there a strange statue of a gargoyle that Giger created speaking with a silly New York accent? It just doesn’t sit right tonally. I still loved the bizarre architecture and surreal atmosphere that the Darkworld gave, but the repetitive music, sound effects, and half-assed animations just don’t do any of this justice.
There isn’t much gameplay. You can change your action icon with the right mouse button and have a pop-up inventory, but you won’t be using it much. Most of the game involves walking back and forth and talking to people. While the overarching murder mystery is rather interesting and the ending was a surprise, I wanted more of the in-between stuff. There was a significant opportunity to bring the Darkworld to life, and even in the mid-90s, this could have been feasible. There was a hint of this happening when you converse with certain creatures; they mention the Darkworld briefly, but the worldbuilding simply lacks depth. The adventure titles of that era, like The 11th Hour, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Full Throttle, and others, didn’t follow the same pattern. Many other games did this just fine, without the macabre legacy of Giger himself lending a hand to the art department.
Without the artwork, this would be a ho-hum adventure title. While there have been many improvements over the original title, I would still like to see more Darkworld architecture. I wanted more time spent here. Yes, there is more of the dark world. There are more screens, buildings, and creatures in the Darkworld than in other adventure titles of the time. There is a layer of cheese that you just can’t look past when it comes to certain events or scenes in the game, and it made me roll my eyes or frown. H.R. Giger’s art is my favorite of all time. There’s so much that could be explored here, but instead we get an obtuse, backtrack-heavy game with an interesting murder mystery and the best parts taking the backseat.
A murder mystery. A supernatural thrill ride. A past that haunts you. These are many things, Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac have to deal with. Carnby’s best friend, Charles Fiske, is found dead off the coast of an island. You are sent to investigate, but your parachute is damaged on impact, and you must fight off strange creatures from another dimension while trying to find out the fate of your friend. The story here is surprisingly deep and involved, but not very interesting. It’s akin to a sleepy mystery novel that keeps you hooked just enough to keep reading but then quickly forget about it shortly afterwards. The New Nightmare is kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place due to the timing of its release. It came out just before the beginning of a new generation of consoles and kind of feels like it has a foot in each generation.
I do have to state that the visuals are very impressive right off the bat. For a Dreamcast game, the pre-rendered backgrounds would be mistaken for a PS2 title, especially when using VGA. They are bright, crisp, and well detailed without that 32-bit sheen that older “tank-style” horror titles had that used pre-rendered backgrounds. The lighting effects are well done, especially when using your flashlight, and the monster designs are surprisingly not very scary or interesting. They feel like generic sci-fi creatures from a B-grade midnight premiere on the Sci-Fi (yes, not SyFy; get that out of here) Channel. The atmosphere is really tense, and there are a few jump scares scattered throughout the game, but overall it does a great job of giving you a haunting, impending doom feeling.
Back to the whole one foot in each generation business it still has pre-rendered backgrounds, tank controls, and a tiresome inventory system. Thankfully, there aren’t a lot of items to pick up, as there are few puzzles in this game. Most of your pick-ups are weapons, ammo, saves, and first aid. You can combine and split objects, but I only had to do this once as Edward. I got tired of having to do a quick reload by going into my inventory screen and manually reloading there, as there is no reload button. You must wait until you are out of ammo first. This would be nice to have, as you eventually learn how many shots each creature type takes and can count them that way. I also hated how much the views and angles flipped around. I appreciate the more modern take on cinematic angles and camera views, but this game could have easily been 100% done in real-time on the Dreamcast with no issues. When fighting some creatures, you get knocked into another angle, and the screen pauses to load for a split second, making you disoriented. This especially proves troublesome during the final boss fight.
I did like how the game doesn’t skimp on ammo, but you must preserve it in the beginning and be smart. I easily missed the shotgun the first time around and had to restart, as you don’t get much revolver ammo in the game at all. The majority are shells. I wound up in a hallway with zombies, zero ammo, and 200 shells. Thankfully, it was only 30 minutes of gameplay before I could get to the shotgun again, but this is another foot in the previous generation. I like the better map with an actual dot on screen showing you where you are, but certain angles and lighting make things hard to see. Some items sparkle, but I would see sparkles through walls that were objects in another room. It doesn’t help at all.
If you conserve well during the first disc, you get many more weapons later on and tons of ammo, and you can just blast away. However, the game tries to guide you a bit better, similar to how modern games do. Puzzles will sometimes be two-way communication over the radio with hints or instructions you need to follow or clearly needing symbols for a code lock, but you can use an item to follow clues and trails to the symbols you need. It’s a great step in a new direction, as I love these games’ atmosphere, story, creature design, or anything else but navigating their frustrating, labyrinthine, and obtuse maps. Backtracking is also not super horrible here. There were only a few times I needed to go from one end of a level to another, and it was the final time before moving on to the next major area. I do detest the limited saving system. You need to find Charms of Saving, and there are only around 20 in the whole game. Thankfully, the game is done in less than 5 hours, and if you are careful, you won’t die and can spread them out. I only used about 10 during my whole playthrough.
Overall, The New Nightmare isn’t a reboot of the game (we were graced with that horrible beauty just a few years later), but a step into making the traditional point-and-click adventures console-friendly and trying to make them more modern. The story and characters are interesting enough to push you through the game, but mostly they are forgettable. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the visuals are awesome. There is so much pushing and pulling in two different generations that the game falls into typical 32-bit supernatural horror trappings but also tries to break free of some. There are plenty of weapons and ammo; the auto-aim system works well; the puzzles are not obnoxiously obtuse; and backtracking is minimal. Overall, The New Nightmarehas aged better than many games of its era thanks to trying to push in more modern directions. This is a great way to spend a Halloween or dreary evening.
I remember MK3 very fondly as a kid. I remember seeing ads for it everywhere. Specifically, a cardboard standee in a Walmart with the giant logo My parents had a friend bring the Saturn version over once during a really bad storm. I remember seeing the arcades as well. I wound up renting it for the Super Nintendo and had a blast. I mostly loved the much darker and more mature tone the series took. MKII felt more cartoony and stylish, while MK3 felt like it pushed the first game’s realism even further.
Sadly, it does not transfer over to the Game Boy version. I don’t know why they bothered at this point. Probe dropped the ball after the pretty decent MKII and made MK3 just about as bad as the port of the first game. Back are the smaller sprites, sluggish animations, unresponsive controls, and weird speed issues with jumping animations. Animations seem to speed up and slow down, making the game just slightly better than a Tiger Electronics version. The control scheme is mostly intact, which isn’t that bad, but we also get the running mode, which is useless on such a tiny screen with a low frame rate. A new developer took the helm here and went with a 512K cart this time, which could still be bigger. Sure, we get four stages, but they’re ugly, and the music stinks too.
Once again, we get quite a few cut characters. Liu-Kang, Stryker, Nightwolf, Kung-Lao, Jax, and Shang Tsung are all missing. That’s nearly half the roster. Every character has their babality intact, but only a single fatality and mercies were kept in. It honestly doesn’t matter how insanely slow the game plays. It feels like everyone is wading through mud. It’s just so unacceptable at this point, as many Game Boy games look and play so much better.
There is nearly no redeeming value in playing this atrocity. It’s the worst version of the game, and at this point, 8-bit versions should have already stopped. We’re almost into 1996. 32-bit systems have been here for a couple of years now. The Game Boy is already almost 7 years old. I can only say this is for people who are curious about or are collectors of Mortal Kombat games. Otherwise, stay away.
Mortal Kombat II is considered the best of the 2D games and, according to another group, the best in the entire series. It’s sad how some think the series peaked so early on when it had so much more to offer. Next-generation consoles were here, and the series needed to adapt. This game was strung across three different generations. 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit systems That’s a lot of systems to make a game work. This would be the last in the series for the original Game Boy. Already 6 years old at this point in time. Sadly, Probe didn’t use a larger cart, so we do have some cut content again here.
Thankfully, the gameplay part was fixed. This is by far the best MK game on the Game Boy. It’s fast-paced, fluid, and responsive, and it plays similarly to the console versions. The control scheme is the same as in the first game, which works. Holding down away from and towards a punch or kick can do sweeps and roundhouses. The visuals have also improved, with larger sprites on screen. Fatalities are intact, as are babies; however, Friendships were stripped. We still get a stage fatality on Kombat Tomb, but many stages are still stripped. We get The Pitt II, but there is no stage fatality there, which makes no sense. We also get Goro’s Lair again, but it’s just a solid wall of gray bricks. Horray? Yeah, the stages stink here.
Also gone is Kintaro, but we do get Smoke and Jade as hidden characters, which is kind of cool. Sadly, Johnny Cage is also missing from this game, along with Raiden, Kung Lao, and Baraka. Why did Probe cut Johnny Cage every time? While the gameplay was a serious issue in the first game, the lack of content is the worst offender here. They were acceptable in the first game, but with a larger cart, they could have fit all of them. There is also still no gore or blood, unless you count Candy Bonez bouncing on screen as gore.
Overall, this isn’t the best fighting game on the Game Boy, but it’s the best game in the series on the system. Fighting games just weren’t great in the 8-bit era, and it shows here. I’m glad Probe improved the gameplay and made animations feel much faster, but we are only getting a part of a whole game.
This is my favorite video game of all time. Hands down. While later games in the series are better and have more depth, the first game is just so raw and visceral. It had a weight to the fighting that other games didn’t have while still feeling fluid and well-balanced. This translated well to home consoles on the Genesis, SNES, and even MS-DOS, despite their own flaws. Even the Game Gear version did well. However, I don’t know what I’m seeing on the Game Boy. I don’t think it’s the lack of power in the system, as the Master System and Game Gear versions are 8-bit and still play really well. The Game Boy version is just so bad. I can look past the visuals. They look pretty okay despite being a monochrome color. What isn’t excusable is the cut character. Johnny Cage isn’t present at all. Why bother if you can’t include the already small roster?
That’s not the worst part. The controls are also forgivable, as the Game Gear and Master System also only have two buttons to work with, which they manage. Holding away or towards the punch or kick button will do things like roundhouse kicks or sweeps. The special moves are also intact, including the fatalities. There are also many cut-scene stages. We only get The Pit, The Courtyard, and Goro’s Lair. All of the stages could have been included, I’m sure. This is only a 256-kb game, which is unacceptable when 8-MB cartridges were available. They could have put all of the content here. But, again, that’s not the worst part about the game.
It’s just downright unplayable. The characters feel like they’re fighting in molasses; animations take 2-3 seconds to complete; and there’s just a serious delay in everything. The health bars are terribly done; there’s no blood, no gore, and no Test-Your-Might either. The game is severely butchered and cut back for no reason. The manual is more interesting than the game itself. It’s written in the form of a comic book with great illustrations. That’s pretty sad.
There’s almost no redeeming value in this game other than for collectors. There are much better versions, let alone 8-bit versions, out there. This is by far the worst version of the game ever made, and I feel bad for anyone who paid full price for this game back in the day. Maybe a Game Boy Color version could have come around and done better, but it never happened. While the game looks the part and the character sprites are decent, the sluggish and unresponsive gameplay just doesn’t work. It’s too bad because the control layout works fine and is used on other 8-bit systems as well. I can only recommend this out of pure curiosity and nothing more.
The Game Gear was a system that was revolutionary at the time and really tried to do some brave stuff compared to the Game Boy. First off, it was competing with the Game Boy. Sega really thought they could deliver a different system to appeal to their already hardcore audience, and they kind of did. Sega succeeded in making a good handheld system, but with many flaws, some of which the Game Boy didn’t have to deal with.
First off, the handheld’s orientation is what handhelds will eventually end up becoming. The horizontal length that Atari set as standard with the Lynx, Sega took off with, and it just became the standard. Sega’s ‘tude branding leaked out onto the Game Gear, and their leading IPs pushed the system. Sonic the Hedgehog was great on the handheld, as were other Sega DNA-style games. Sonic Pinball,Streets of Rage, Ax Battler, The Lion King, and many others This felt like a Sega handheld. Sadly, it was 8-bit and not 16-bit like its older brother. Despite coming out two years after the Game Boy, the only leading technology they had was a backlit screen, and barely at that.
The Game Gear screen is notoriously bad. While it is backlit, it’s also blurry and just doesn’t look that great. You still need to be in a dimly lit room, but you can at least see the screen. Props to Sega for beating out Nintendo on that front. Because of this, the system chewed through six AA batteries. Yeah, I’m not joking. The battery life was maybe 4 hours, all because of this screen. The internal hardware was the same as the Sega Master System, so it was competing for that 8-bit handheld crown. It’s nothing technically impressive outside of that screen, and those with bigger hands will appreciate the chonkiness of this beast.
In today’s world, the Game Gear is a much harder system to use and play as it has leaky capacitors, which usually destroy the sound. You will find many Game Gears with low volume issues, and many people will just chuck these. You can also install a McWill LCD mod, but these aren’t drop-ins and are much more expensive than Game Boy drop-in LCDs. There is a new mod by Retrosix that uses a new screen PCB with a drop-in LCD, but it still isn’t a drop solution. However, just like any older handheld, this is a must-have mod at minimum for playing a Game Gear today.
We judge older systems based on their libraries, and the Game Gear has a surprisingly robust library for those who like the Sega DNA from the 90s. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, Paperboy, The Simpsons, Ax Battler, Gunstar Heroes, Puyo Puyo, Streets of Rage, Wonder Boy, Castle of Illusion, Ristar, and many more may sound familiar to you. If you love the Master System or Genesis, then this handheld is a must-have for you. If you don’t care for those systems, you aren’t going to find much difference here in handheld form. Sega really marketed the Game Gear as a portable console experience rather than a separate handheld experience like Nintendo did. The games sound and play really well, and any fan of Sega couldn’t ask for anything better in portable form.
With that said, the system has a lot of faults, including full-on hardware faults that we suffer from today. Unlike the Game Boys, you can still enjoy those today without any mods, but the Game Gear really needs a screen upgrade. That CFL tube in the system drains batteries, and you actually improve battery life with a modern upgrade. There were various accessories, such as battery packs and TV tuners, for the system, but most of those are obsolete these days and won’t work. There are also two different models of the Game Gear. The original model from Sega and then a budget release from Majesco. These models have rounder front shells and make modding the system more difficult.
The Sega Saturn has always been a system that felt like unobtanium to me. It’s expensive, fiddly, has a very obscure and small library, most of the good games are Japanese imports, there are very few accessories, and they are big and expensive, and on top of all that, the games are insanely priced. Saturn games are some of the highest-priced games on any system. These days, there are things like optical disc emulators, RAM cart hacks, and things like the Satiator that allow you to run games through the video CD port. A lot of people are defensive and go to bat for their favorite way to emulate games on native hardware. I get it. There is no correct way to do it, with each having strengths and weaknesses. I went with the TerraOnion MODE due to its high build quality and support, as well as its multiple storage options.
I will run through an install of TerraOnion MODE, but unlike most install videos or articles, I want to talk about snags and problems I ran into that other people might discover. I want this to be a comprehensive resource for beginners to just buy a Saturn second-hand and know what to get and how to set things up correctly. I will also talk about proper video setup, and again, like various disc emulators, there are numerous ways to get good-quality video out of the Saturn.
“When you have Sega Saturn, nothing else matters”
Do I want a Japanese, European, or US console? For disc-based gaming, this matters as the Saturn is region-locked. There are also Saturns with a power supply mounted to the lid (VA0 model), but they are not that common. Most disc emulators work on any console since they unlock region locking, but thankfully most hacks for the Saturn have every version in mind. Usually, you can rest easy without seeking out a specific model, unlike the Dreamcast.
So, even if your Saturn doesn’t read discs, this is a great option for you. There are also other mods, like ReSaturn, that replace the power supply completely if yours is failing. It’s a good idea to open up your Saturn and check the capacitors on the PSU for leakage.
There are also new shell mods you can swap your guts into if your Saturn is in bad shape cosmetically. Overall, these are some mods to consider and systems to look out for when shopping for a Saturn.
It Needs to Look Good
The first thing you probably want to invest in after getting a Saturn system is the video output. There are two main things you need to consider. Good S-Video or component cables and a good upscaler I went with the Retrotink 2X Pro and HD Retrovision component cables. Yes, these are expensive but worth their weight in gold. I have never seen a retro console look so crisp and nice as this setup. While that’s the high end of things, there are also cheaper ways to hook up your Saturn, and that also includes the TV you’re playing on.
Of course, this is mostly true if you’re gaming on a newer HD TV. Buying cheap composite or S-video upscalers on eBay isn’t going to get you good results. Even plugging the console into the back of your TV would be better than those awful upscalers. However, there are cheaper routes, and that might be to just buy a CRT TV. They are going up in price due to retro collectors, but you can get many locally for free. While the tube itself might be old, it’s the most authentic experience.
With that said, there are other upscalers that do a good job, like an OSSC, but these can be a little much for just casual players who want a good picture. Cables are a huge thing as well. Don’t get cheap S-video cables off of eBay. Most S-video cables actually don’t have the chroma or luma in the actual S-video part and are empty. Most are fakes that just feed in composite. If you have a Retrotink, you can find fake cables by plugging them into the S-video, and they will be in black and white or won’t display correctly under the S-video input. A correctly wired cable won’t do this. There are some better-known brands out there, like KMD. I own one for my N64, and it displays S-video correctly. If you can find them, proper S-video cables won’t have a yellow plug.
Optical Disc Emulators – Pros and Woes
These range from carts to full-on boards, and while there are plenty of good choices, I’m going to cover the TerraOnion Mode. It’s a very well-made board with both positives and negatives to it, but overall, I am very pleased with it. I’ve had it for two weeks now and figured out some kinks and bugs using various hardware and software that I thought people might run into. A lot of these issues I had to figure out myself, as there just isn’t enough information out there.
Installing the MODE is pretty straightforward, but new casual users may be a bit scared to dive into this. If you already did some other mods listed before, like the ReSaturn, or checked the PSU for leaking caps, then you clearly shouldn’t have had an issue up until this point. The Saturn is a very single device in the end. just a disc drive, motherboard, and power supply. There are literally only three components in this thing. One thing I do recommend when installing the MODE is StoneAge Gamer’s 3D-printed bracket mount. I personally also don’t see the need to use an actual hard drive in this thing, and I will get to that later, but they also make an adapter to allow easy access to the drive.
The Optional Power Cable
Now one snag I ran into when installing was for the “optional” power cable. It’s needed for running mechanical drives as the Saturn doesn’t have enough juice to power them, but I recommend installing the cable regardless just to relieve strain on it. The installation shows pushing the leads into the power supply clip but doesn’t explain how. I watched a few videos, and no one has covered this. When you push the power supply down into the motherboard, the pins will push a metal “pincher” to the left of the pins. If you press the PSU down slowly, you will see this in action. The leads need to get “pinched” by this. I tried sticking them in while the PSU was installed, and it just wouldn’t work. You need to fully lift the front side of the PSU and stick the leads into the correct spots. Hold them firmly down and then press the PSU down onto the pins, and the “pincher” will firmly hold those wires in place. The other alternative is to just solder the wires directly to the pincher area.
Firmware Updates and Freezing on Boot
Other than that snag, the installation went smoothly, and I had no issues. Now comes the majority of issues with the software. When I opened up the MODE, there wasn’t any explanation of how it actually works. My Saturn booted straight into CD player mode, and I didn’t understand why. Without changing settings, you need to put the lid on! I then got into the mode, and it froze up and wouldn’t do anything. After several reboots, the mode would just read games and freeze. I then updated the firmware, and this worked. Remember, the MODE will only auto-detect firmware on SD cards and USB drives. I couldn’t get into the menu to access the update on my 2.5″ laptop drive, so that was a major issue. I don’t know what caused the freezing, but this fixed it.
Action Replay Flash Carts Not Working
This was one of the biggest headaches I had. The Action Replay 4M carts you can get everywhere are supposed to work with the MODE, but mine didn’t. I didn’t have one with the physical switch, but with the auto-switching one. When you plug one of these into their menu, it takes priority over an ODE because it’s technically just a disc. While this is fine and it works, it’s irritating to have to quit the menu of the flash cart to get into the ODE menu. You have to erase the boot menu from the flash cart and make it a standard “dummy” cart. With MODE, this is fine, as there are manual backups. You can now easily just fill up your saved RAM and then back it all up on the MODE for more games. I will walk you through the process of making an Action Replay an annoying free dummy cart.
The first thing you need to do is download a boot loader called Pseudo Saturn Kai. This is a “game” you can put on an SD card and launch from the main menu of the MODE. It’s important to download and install the tools cue/iso so you can actually erase the entire menu. This is found in the full version of the download. The lite version for “other” ODEs just erases the firmware but still boots to PSK every time. We also don’t want to boot into another menu. Remember, you can always restore the flash cart back to the way it was through this utility as well. Just remember what firmware version your flash cart had.
Load up the utilities, go to the save manager, press the R button, and go to the erase boot menu. This will now turn your cart into a standard RAM cart. Mine works flawlessly for 1MB and 4MB games. I tested nearly every game that uses one and didn’t have any issues.
My Flash Cart Isn’t Being Recognized
This is common, and it probably isn’t the cart itself. When you insert the cart to erase the menu, you might notice that the detection of the cart in yellow text flashes, or it seems the cart is wiggly. This is usually a dirty RAM slot or one that’s too loose or too tight. There are two screws in the RAM slot, and you can try tightening them first to see if that works, but if not, you need to loosen them. Sega didn’t solder the RAM slot to the board, so 6 to 7 turns with a screwdriver on each screw should help until they’re really loose. Mine had this issue, as I would load up games and it would only see the cart sometimes, despite the cart working fine. Loosening the screws fixed this, and I no longer had to set the cart in softly, head-on, and not at an angle, or pull it out a couple of millimeters. It’s not the best fix, but it’s better than sticking paper between the cart and the slot.
Resident Evil has been more about tense action, inventory management, and puzzles than horror. RE3 polishes up the already not-so-smooth gameplay of Resident Evil and ports it over to the Dreamcast to make another buck off of it. RE3 doesn’t really have much of a story, but the tense action, puzzle-solving, and always-looming Nemesis boss make this one of the tensest games of the era.
You play as Jill Valentine (the star of the first game) and are back in Racoon City this time to try and find out what happened during the outbreak. Being a direct sequel to the second game, you visit a few familiar areas, and some Easter eggs are tossed in. Outside of running around collecting ammo, healing items, documents, and various things of that nature, you solve puzzles and mow down armies of the undead and genetically modified. New enemies crop up that are freaky and challenging, and the only boss in the game is Nemesis, who is a tough monster, and choices are thrown into the game depending on where the story goes. These choices impact where you start in locations and how you approach fighting the Nemesis. One choice kept the Nemesis from chasing me around town, but I was going to have to fight him early on. You can totally avoid fighting him in most cases, but he becomes stronger the less you fight him.
I honestly recommend playing this game in easy mode the first time, as you get tons of healing items and weapons at the start, as well as infinite save ribbons. This mode should be used first for another reason, and that’s to learn the layout of the game. Resident Evil is a game where enemy location, map layout, and puzzle-solving are a must before attempting harder modes. Now with all that said, I do find earlier Resident Evil games tough outside of just combat, as without a guide you can get lost and frustrated quickly as puzzles are obtuse, and there might be objects you saw hours ago that you have to go back and get, such as the Downtown/Uptown maps in this game. It’s imperative to write things down if you don’t have a guide, as you will run around for hours trying to find that one item that you can’t remember.
The story and characters are nothing special, but the voice acting is surprisingly decent for its time. We don’t learn much about Umbrella outside of someone going in and trying to pop off the supervisors throughout the city and cover up the T-virus outbreak. There’s no character development or anything like that, so you’re mostly paying for the action. The visuals are rather nice, but at this point, the pre-rendered backgrounds were getting tiring. The Dreamcast version is a slightly smoother PlayStation version, but there’s not much of a difference. I would have liked to have seen more modes, better visuals, and new content for a new $50 release, but what we get is mainly for newcomers.
I highly recommend RE3 on the Dreamcast. At this point, this is the definitive version of the game and the best the series has to offer up until this point. Don’t expect a deep story; have a guide ready, and you’ll be in for a good 8–10 hours of intense action and fun.
Mortal Kombat 4 was a rough start in the realm of 3D gaming for Mortal Kombat. Midway Chicago were experts at 2D fighters, and somehow MK4 seemed a little rough around the edges. It looked decent and better than most 3D fighters back in the day, but Gold was an opportunity to release the arcade port of MK4, which looked the best and ran the best over the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions.
Gold is pretty much an unchanged version of MK4, with just added content. We get added characters such as Mileena, Baraka, Kung Lao, Cyrax, and Kitana, and hidden characters such as Noob Saibot, Sektor, and Meat. That large roster change and just these added characters make the game worthwhile, but there are no added modes or anything like that. Despite this being an arcade-perfect port, it still looks dated compared to current Dreamcast games like D-2, Soul Calibur, and Sonic Adventure. On top of all this, Mortal Kombat has never been known to be a very deep fighter, and that’s extremely clear in this title.
Another added feature was weapons that could be brought out instead of just picked up off the ground, but they don’t add any depth to the game and are actually quite useless. Once you get hit, the weapon flies out of your hand, and you are left defenseless. There are also no real combos in the game, there’s an over-reliance on cheap fighting with character special moves that are hard to break from and there’s a lack of grappling. Even the fatalities, which are iconic staples of the series, are lacking in this game with only two-stage fatality levels, and most of the new characters have repeated fatalities from MK3 or both of their fatalities are similar, such as Mileena, who throws sais and then nails. I have to say the Fatalities in Gold are some of the weakest in the series, but there are some great ones at least.
Because of the lack of depth in the game after you see all the fatalities and endings, there’s really no reason to go back to the game, especially when there are better fighters on the Dreamcast. It’s great to have an MK game on this system, but why not port MK Trilogy over? Even UMK3 would have been nice at this point.
Overall, this is the definitive version of MK4, so take that as you will. If you never liked MK4, you will like Gold even less, but with the arcade version of the game intact, it’s a nice fighter on a system that has few of them. If you can ignore the weapon system and enjoy the added roster of characters and the fatalities, then this is a decent fighter at best.
D was a strange FMV-based game for PlayStation that didn’t get much attention or very good reviews. D-2 is a spiritual successor to that game with more gameplay and stunning visuals, but it still has its fair share of issues. This is by far one of the strangest games I have ever played, and being my first Dreamcast game, it helped put the system into perspective.
You play as a woman named Laura Parton, who is a flight attendant and is on a plane that crashes in northern Canada in a remote area. She wakes up in a cabin to discover strange creatures that “blossom” and use humans as hosts. The game’s intro is well done, with combat and navigation being introduced as a tutorial, which was kind of rare back in the day (we had manuals back then). The game is a first-person light gun shooter mixed with a first-person adventure game and a third-person tank game like Resident Evil. I wouldn’t really call his survival horror as it didn’t feel like it. When you’re inside buildings, you can only turn to objects you can interact with, like adventure games back in the late ’80s and early ’90s on PC. When you’re shooting enemies, you can turn in a square pattern using the face buttons and aim with the analog stick. It’s really strange, but I have to commend WARP for trying to use the Dreamcast’s weaknesses in its favor and making this game work control-wise.
The third-person adventure part is the weakest part of the game, as it’s literally just a mode of transportation between random JRPG-style battles and buildings. There’s a lot of boring walking along just white, endless tundra. You can use a rifle to hunt animals and use them for health so you don’t use up your first aid sprays, but hunting is a real pain, and only the hares are worth shooting as they give you two meats. The scope is incredibly shaky, and most of the time I always miss it. Outside of the hunting, I just ran back and forth between cut scenes, as that’s really all you’re doing. There are probably a good 2–3 hours of cut scenes in this game, so it’s only for the most patient gamers.
Combat consists of shooting a gun at these creatures that can attack you as many as three at a time. They start out easy, but towards the end of the game, I died a lot. Part of this was the strange design of the combat system. Face buttons flash on-screen when an enemy is nearby, and pressing that button makes Laura turn towards the enemy, and the analog stick is used to aim. The aiming is really sensitive, and there’s no way to dodge or block, so you take damage no matter how fast you are swinging around trying to kill everything. I had to strategize filling up my health by leveling up versus wasting health items. You gain experience from combat, but it only increases your health, and that’s literally it. You also have unlimited ammo for your machine guns, but your handgun and shotgun are limited. The handgun is literally limited to six bullets in the entire game, as far as I could see. I used the gun once, and it was done. The shotgun ammo is hard to find, and I saved it for bosses, but bosses are usually only beatable with machine guns, as you need rapid-fire to shoot everything they throw at you. The same goes for grenades, which are useless against bosses because they move around so much.
Outside of combat, the story just makes zero sense. Each disc feels like its own story, with one of the weirdest endings to a game I’ve ever seen. So, there’s an apocalypse coming as the game is playing off the Y2K scare, and it’s supposed to be the same one that wiped out the dinosaurs. There are so many plot holes that you can literally separate each part of the story and just ask yourself, “What?” There’s a man named David that is never explained, and he whispers to Laura at the end of each disc. There’s this plant parasite thing that is explained in disc 3 and makes a little sense, but then there’s a weird priest that randomly has the power of the apocalypse. Then there’s Jannie, who is a little girl, and we have no idea what her connection to anyone is, and she is a pointless character. You then can be resurrected every time you die, as you’re some sort of “chosen one,” and that is also never explained. Then, at the end of the game, time rewinds back to 1999 and you meet David, and then there are 10 minutes of white text on a black screen of statistics about various issues the planet is facing from the late ’90s, and before that was footage of wars and various world events. What does that have to do with the rest of the game?! It made no sense, and thankfully, the game was only about 6–8 hours long.
Various elements of the game just slow everything down, such as a cutscene for picking up items, a cutscene for opening and closing a door, laying down in bed, and examining simple objects; all of this adds up to maybe 30 minutes of time just being burned, and the constant backtracking to pick up a key at this house, walk all the way across the map to this house to talk to this person, walk all the way back across the map to then trigger another event, and in between all of this, there are dozens of random battles that also slow down the game. After the first hour, combat just isn’t enjoyable and becomes a nuisance. I have to give WARP credit for the amazing monster designs and some incredibly disturbing images that weren’t really common on the Dreamcast or anywhere back then outside of Silent Hill. The animations are well done, and the bosses are the best part of the game combat-wise, as they make the most sense with this combat system in place.
The game itself looks amazing with great lighting effects, and everything is rendered in real-time instead of pre-rendered backgrounds like Resident Evil. The voice acting is even passable without being really cringy and laughable. Overall, the game has a lot of good elements that are just not tied very well together. It’s playable and aged fairly well, but it’s incredibly slow and cut-scene-heavy with flawed combat and a story that makes zero sense. It’s an obscure title that shows how unique the Dreamcast was, and it is one of the rarest games to find for the system, but if you have the patience, give it a chance.
Great post tthankyou