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The Battle Mania games featured beautiful visuals, rock-solid gameplay, and some really great humor. The first game made it across the pond under the Trouble Shooter moniker, but its much-improved sequel was left behind. Is it worth the $150 asking price?
Renovation was quite a prolific publisher during the Genesis era, and it almost single-handedly kept the space shooter (shmup) genre alive for a long time. Among its selection of quality releases was a port of the Sega CD shmup Sol-Feace, itself a conversion of the Sharp X68000 original. Despite the name change to Sol-Deace and not having the bells and whistles of the CD version, the cart rendition is more than capable of standing on its own. Read the full review for more details.
If there’s a bright side to having to review all these full-motion video games for the Sega CD, it’s that we’ve gone through the majority of them. A few still linger around the fringes of our consoles, like hungry puppies trying to force their way close to thier mother’s belly to nurse. One particularly determined puppy is Rocket Science’s space rail shooter Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine. Typical for the genre, the gameplay falls far short of the cut scene production values, and gamers have yet another means to cure their insomnia.
Within the vast library of Genesis shooters are a select few that follow a “cute” theme. These games are often portrayed as being simpler and more kid-friendly than their more serious counterparts, but looks can be deceiving. Gametek’s Gadget Twins is one title that’s adorable to look at, but its frustrating gameplay is not something to make your little siblings suffer with.
Lots of arcade shooters made the jump to the Genesis, but some suffered great changes. Insector-X is an example of a game that went through massive graphical and audio alterations on the trip home. The cartoony visuals were traded for some seriously robotic bugs, and the soundtrack was completely swapped out. Some argue that it’s all for the better, while some say the game is worse off for it.