Sega CD Gems?

[DR TEAMCAST]

I've had a sega cd laying around here for a few years and only played snatcher sonic cd and some of a dracula point and click mystery game. Snatcher was one of the greatest games i've ever played. But i was wondering are there any other gems on the sega cd other than snatcher or all they all B games that are only good if you're really into retro gaming? I have some cables coming in for it and want to try some of its best games

[FinedrivE]

Listen man, here is the thing about the Sega CD, if you have a lot of loot you'll be good. The really good games are full STACKS of cash. Pop full mail, Koei Flying Squadron, and the Lunar games are EPIC. No Doubts about the quality there.

The reason those games are so much though is because the majority of the library is shit or repackaged Genesis games or even worse......... SHOVELWARE.

There are still some good ones though if you're willing to wade through all that shit. Here are my faves for the budget conscience.

Soul Feace
Eternal Champions
Mortal Kombat (if you don't already own it on the Genesis)
Space Ace
Mason of Hidden Souls
Spiderman Vs The Kingpin
Batman Returns
Demolition Man
The Terminator
Silpheed
Wing Commander
Ecco The Tides of Time
oh wow I'm stuck already.

OK well if you don't mind playing shitty FMV games the Digital Pictures ones are OK I guess.

Sewer Shark is by all accounts awful but I absolutely love it. The "acting" is over the top but the dialogue is pretty funny. You and your good pal Ghost cruise through the sewer in a pimped out apache-gunship-hovercraft-jet-thing and blast the piss out of mutant rats (called ratigators). You get directions from a robot, who sounds like a moon-shiner, named Catfish. He gives you all your orders in clock face directs so 12 is up 6 is down 3 is right and 9 is left. Between the intersections where you hit a direction you kill the rats and shit. Later on there are larger monsters. It's pretty predictable. Any who you'll do that for awhile and then watch some super grainy video footage of your shitty boss eating pizza and being inappropriate with his secretary. Your goal is to kill enough of the rats to retire on a nice sun-shiny island. Naturally there are forks in the road and the story throws in a few monkey wrenches.

I have played the hell out of this game. I LOVE IT. I was trying to sell my Sega CD and I played this game for 10 minutes to test the console before a sell and immediately changed my mind. I can't give it up. I don't know what it is. It really is not that good. Its a rail shooter like Panzer Dragoon but not good. I can't stress how not good it is.

Take a chance buy, this turd, if you go in with a child like fascination and aren't taking yourself to seriously you'll have a grand ol time.

On the other hand there is Corpse Killer which is truly unplayable. Think Area 51 on a stupid island with a Jamaican guy and a horrible reporter chick. This game has ZERO redeemable qualities. It makes Night Trap look like Sonic the Hedgehog 3. I've owned multiple copies. They all skip and jump, the frame rate drops for no explainable reason. I had the Saturn version dubbed "Grave Yard Edition" and even it wasn't playable.

Thats the best and the worst of the FMV games.

Go forth and achieve great things!

[Aleron Ives]

Sonic CD is probably the most famous Sega CD game that isn't shovelware.

[FinedrivE]

Yeah I missed that one. Wow that should have been the first one on the list.

Sonic CD is perhaps the best of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games. However 2 is still my personal favorite. Can't believe I missed that one. Its next on my list to purchase for my Sega CD collection.

[Aleron Ives]

Sonic CD is also probably the most polarising of the 2D Sonic games (unless you count Chaotix). Some people love it, and others think it's beneath its siblings. The time travel aspect and level design are somewhat controversial, and CD plays quite differently from 1/2/3/K as a result.

Also note that if you're going to get it, there are two different soundtracks depending upon whether you get the US or JP/EU version.

[krssn]

Final Fight CD co-op mode...

How could you forget that one!?...

[DR TEAMCAST]

I was hoping there were other 10/10's like snatcher and sonic CD. I was looking at the RPG's but i'm not a fan of the turn based combat. I may give them a try though

[FinedrivE]

Final Fight CD co-op mode...

How could you forget that one!?...

Never played it. :sad face:

As for tens I would describe sewer shark as a 10 depending on if the games you were used to playing were of the board variety.

Also Batman Returns is a SOLID 7 if you are into the punch and jump variety. Plus the driving bits were challenging and broke up the punch + kick gameplay.

Eternal Champions was exceedingly deep for a fighter of that era. There was a veritable smorgasbord of new moves, a thorough rebalancing of the initial characters, new fatality style kill moves 13 new characters, rendered cut scenes, a combo system with good juggles and God knows what else. It was a completely new experience over it's Genesis counter part. This one was well worth the asking price.

You won't be disappointed with the Lunar games. Standard JRPG or not, this was the pinnacle of RPGs at the time. I failed to mention Vay as well which was one of my personal favorite that I never got to finish.

10s are hard to come by on the Sega CD simply because it seems in most case nobody tried on this console. I think a lot of the published games we got in the US were quick cash outs on fancy new tech. For every Snatcher or sonic CD there were 20 Corpse Killers. Let's not even get into Slam City or that one Kris Kross game.

I guess that's kinda why it's loathed by most and seen as a joke by the rest. There are great games in there but like I said originally, you will wade waste deep in shit to find them.

[Aleron Ives]

Sadly the focus of CD technology at the time was to find ways to use all the extra space that a CD had as compared to a cartridge (over 150x more space of the maximum size of a Genesis cartridge, and over 300x more space than the size of most cart games). This led to the creation of FMV games, which were basically just movies with fixed paths that forced you to press certain buttons at certain times in order to keep the movie playing. If you failed to press the right button, the movie would immediately branch to an alternate clip where the main character would fail/die, and then you'd have to re-watch that portion of the movie for another chance to press the right button.

Most gamers saw this as the pathetic money grab that it was, as in theory it would have been a lot cheaper for "game" developers to shoot some footage and place button prompts on top of it than to actually pay programmers to develop a real game. The Sega CD became known for this type of software and consequently gained a bad reputation.

It's a pity, as Sega released the CD to enable the Genesis to better compete with the SNES, as the CD's scaling and rotation capabilities are even more powerful than what the SNES could do with its mode 7. Unfortunately, the fact that Sonic CD and the driving stages in Batman Returns actually use this functionality makes them outliers in the Sega CD library. The FMV games are almost all terrible, and many of the passable CD games are just regular Genesis games with cutscenes and new BGM (e.g. Ecco and PItfall). The Sega CD sadly has few titles that truly take advantage of its capabilities.

[DR TEAMCAST]

Well thats a shame. I'll probably check out batman and one of the lunar games. Though Landstalker is getting a playthrough on the genesis as well. I've had that for a little longer than the Sega CD and never played more than a few minutes. I hear that's one of the top 10 on the Genesis