16t

Genre: Platform Developer: Sega of Japan Publisher: Sega of Japan Players: 1 Released: 1991 (download)

16t may be quite possibly one of the most obscure games available for the Japanese Mega Drive as a whole. It was released on Sega’s Toshokan modem service as a download-only game. It was later released the Sega CD Game Can series of compilations featuring many of Sega’s downloadable titles.

In 16t, you take the role of a programmer who enters his bugged program to kill off all of the baddies by throwing 16-ton weights on them hence the game’s namesake. The game is really too overly simple to really recommend though. Even as a download-only game, it’s still really too thin to enjoy for very long. If you’re a fan of games such as Flicky, Teddy Boy or Ghost House you may find something to like here as it plays really similar to those games. You run through endlessly scrolling stages trying to squash a set number of enemies in order to advance to the next stage. There is a small grid at the top of the screen that tells you where the enemies will spawn at and where they are on the screen, giving you a chance to avoid being squashed by them when they fall. There are three enemy types: a mummy who flies, a zombie like guy who ducks under your thrown weights and some other type of undecipherable enemy that jumps over your weights. The same three enemies keep repeating for every stage taking much of the variety of the game away.

Your character can simple jump around and throw weights. If you’re moving your throw weights further and harder. Weights can also bounce off already thrown ones to kill enemies or you if you’re not careful, and they slowly disintegrate over time. Also, you can only throw a certain amount of weights at a time.

The stages have a few different kinds of platforms, from ice to slide on, stones that break with thrown weights, and bounce platforms. The stages and backgrounds repeat pretty quickly and never show much detail to begin with. Thankfully, the game is not without some charm. The enemies explode in a mess of gore when killed, which is worth a laugh or two, and the single musical track is almost catchy though repetitive.

I played a handful of games to see how far I could get and made it all the way to round 14 before the big game over hit, and I had some fun while it lasted but don’t really want to play it again. 16t is a game that’s fun to play for around fifteen to twenty minutes but is far too shallow to have been released on the Genesis and it’s a game that would’ve felt way more at home on a system like the ColecoVision or another system from that time so as it stands it’s not really worth tracking down in any incarnation.