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Frogger has been making the rounds for almost two decades, and the little amphibian star has appeared on every console known to man. Majesco inexplicably decided on the classic title as the final official domestic release for the American Genesis, and we have a full review of that port, which no doubt taxes the Genesis hardware more than any game before it! Reeebit… I mean, read it for all the details.
I can imagine the executives at Namco back in ’93, as they brainstormed about how else to use their yellow mascot Pac-Man. As they ran through the gamut of genres, one young suit shot his arm into the air. ” I’ve got it!” He exclaimed, “what about a puzzle game?” All the other executives nodded in agreement, their faces slowly growing wide with a grin of satisfaction. It was time to collect another cash crop, and as he had always done before, Pac-Man was about to ensure a bountiful harvest. Thus, Pac-Attack was born, and the Genesis received another quality puzzler.
Take a snake and make him find his tail! That’s the basic premise behind Snake Rattle ‘n Roll, a NES game that got a major facelift for the Mega Drive. It never came stateside, but finding a copy should be easy enough, and the simple, arcade action is worth looking into.
Normally, you’d think that rolling a shiny metal ball around a stage without letting it fall would make for a great game. The original Marble Madness was wonderful, with its excellent trackball controller and more recently, Marble Blast Ultra on Xbox Live Arcade showed that such a game could work with a controller. But that was long after analog sticks became the norm, and poor Genesis gamers had to suffer with playing on a totally unsatisfactory D-pad. The Genesis port of Marble Madness suffered because of it, among other things, and the resulting effort was poor enough for even creator Mark Cerny to disown it!
The term “arcade classic” isn’t the first thing to come to mind when the game in question features a penguin pushing ice blocks at his foes, but it quickly makes sense when you consider what types of machines populated ’80s arcades. Sega’s Pengo was a fun (and hard) maze chase game that racked up its fair share of quarters before changing gaming tastes sent it off to franchise storage, but the plucky penguin did return for a Game Gear port in 1992. However, it wasn’t until Sega remade the game completely for the Mega Drive three years later that its true brilliance finally emerged. Unfortunately, Pepen Ga Pengo was left behind in Japan, and it now commands a hefty price on eBay.