March 20, 2006 1:20 pm - PS2, article
Compilation Catalog: Sega Classics Collection
This is the first part in a weekly series that will critique and offer background information on various retro remakes and compilations.
When Sega first announced 3D AGES, their now-defunct partnership with D3 Publisher to remake classic Sega games for Playstation 2, many balked at the thought. D3 Publisher have never been known for their high standards of design, polish, or gameplay, and the idea of making them responsible a project like this was just ridiculous. When the first ugly screenshots showed up on the web, showing the remakes looking as if the worst-case scenario was in effect, all the negativity seemed to have been vindicated. When nasty impressions of the remake of Golden Axe, one of the first remakes released, trickled out, the series seemed pretty much doomed. Nobody had anything good to say about the remakes, except that two or three of them were simply adequate.
A year and a half after the initial 3D AGES releases, Sega of America gathered up nine of the releases and released them as Sega Classics Collection. This is the best possible approach SoA could have taken with the series, because not only did it satisfy Sony Computer Entertainment America's policies on ports of older games to PS2, but it also made an honest cross-section of the series as a whole much more readily available. And now, after all the dust has settled, it's become apparent that 3D AGES didn't turn out quite as badly as expected.
There are a couple of technical issues present across many of the games in this collection. It's worth noting that the collection's main menu does not support digital-only controllers, so if you've got an old PS1 pad, Saturn PS2 pad, or arcade stick plugged in, the menu will scroll downward endlessly without any input. Digital support throughout the remakes is inconsistent and will be noted as appropriate. Nearly all the games run in that ugly half-frame-height video mode that was responsible for so many early PS2 games being described as full of "jaggies," and it doesn't look any better here.
Monaco GP
I'll cover these in the order of their original release under 3D Ages. The second title released, after Phantasy Star Generation 1, was Monaco GP. Next to Golden Axe, I was expecting the least out of this release. The original Monaco GP was released in arcades in 1979, and was one of the last games built entirely of discrete circuitry (instead of using a CPU). It was pretty deadly simple in design: steer your car left or right as it drives directly up the screen, try not to crash into any other cars, and don't run out of time. The remake's Classic mode replicates this design exactly, and it's not particularly interesting, especially with the way opponents' cars tend to crash into each other randomly without giving the player much time to react. The remade 3D graphics are functional, if slightly better than expected, as the player's car really looks pretty nice up close (as does the shimmer caused by the heat from its exhaust).
The remake includes an arranged "Original" mode, though, and it's much more interesting, but not just for its jump button, its powerups, or the bends in the track it adds. The most important element it brings to the game is the layer of gameplay that centers around the stars that are scattered throughout each track. The stars are generally laid out in straight lines or diagonals lengthwise on the track, and their formations are well-integrated into the tracks' designs. Collecting several stars in a row allows the player's car to speed up more quickly. When the player's car is at maximum speed, scoring further star combos allows the player to accelerate further and causes a white (and later gold) aura to shine around the car. This allows the player to ram sidelong into enemy cars and cause them to crash. There's a combo meter for enemy crashes, too, and both star and crash combos contribute to scoring. This mode is fast, frantic, and fun: keeping the car's speed up with stars and sending opponents flying while keeping an eye on the turn warning and keeping out of the way of opponents' crashes and that damned ambulance make for a very solid and pretty exhilarating arcade-style experience.
In addition to the arcade-style modes, there's a Grand Prix mode that moves the focus from scoring to beating the clock and progressing through a series of tracks. The final track of a tour has a rival car that races against the player (instead of simply needing to be dodged), and beating that rival is the key to unlocking Grand Prix tours past Beginner, as well as making the rival's car playable. Unfortunately, while Monaco GP is particularly suited to D-pad play (analog won't get you anywhere, really), there is no support for digital-only pads. I don't know if the original arcade game had any music at all, but the music here is classic Sega butt-rock that's perfectly suited to the game.
Fantasy Zone
Fantasy Zone, one of the original cute-em-ups and one of the best-known descendants of Defender, is nearly 100% intact in this incarnation. Its backgrounds still have a hand-drawn, 2D appearance, but are now in high resolution, with each parallax layer set apart from the other in 3D space. Foreground objects are now cel-shaded. Everything looks as colorful and sharp as it did in the original arcade game, and sound effects and music are very nearly identical to those in the original. In addition to the original arcade mode, there's a new Challenge mode that allows one level at a time to be played and new levels and items to be purchased, and an arranged Normal mode that integrates these purchases. Normal mode also has new, 3D, forward-scrolling bonus stages between levels that might remind some of Space Fantasy Zone. There's also a Gallery mode that lets players view an enemy up-close if that enemy's red coin drop has been collected in Challenge mode.
Digital-only controllers are supported, and control is just as good as it needs to be, however my main problem with the original game is still present here. I don't like how close the player has to be to the edges of the screen to cause it to scroll, as it tends to make the player more vulnerable than necessary, and reduces the flow of most levels to a start-stop ritual that I don't find much fun. Anyone who loved the original, though, will find a lot to love with this remake.
Space Harrier
D3 could have done a lot worse than they did with this one. The entire game's been remade with 3D graphics, and enemies have been redesigned and reimagined as well. Those dragons that appear as end-level bosses that were made of multiple scaling segments are now fully-realized and contiguous models. Instead of the checkerboard ground stretching into the horizon, there's now randomly-generated, height-mapped, textured terrain. The new 3D models don't always look or animate very nicely, but this remake plays very well, and aside from some level design changes, it's really very close to the original. Each level segues smoothly into the next after the boss is defeated, just as in the original, and the original themes have received some very well-executed trancey arrangements. A nice little treat that was thrown in is a switch in the options menu (the "Fractal" option) that trades the new 3D terrain for flat floors that simulate the original's checkerboards (enter Right, Left, Down, Up on the title screen to add shadows to this mode).
The only overt ways in which the gameplay was changed for this version were in the addition of a Panzer Dragoon-style lock-on charge shot and an area-effect bomb, and in the addition of a few powerups. The new shield powerup can be useful, but the rest, which mostly involve the bomb or lock-on shot, can be safely ignored if the player prefers. There are some delightfully awful new voice clips added, but these are traded for voices closer to the original's when you activate the checkerboard floors. The remake's main failing in comparison with the original is that it simply doesn't move as quickly or feel quite as nicely-tuned as the arcade game. And unfortunately, the game doesn't take advantage of the analog stick as well as it could have (the original arcade game used a full-sized flight joystick), and there's no digital-only pad support, either.
Golden Axe
Time to get this out of the way. Yes, Golden Axe is dreadful. It's received the cheapest 3D remake imaginable, and it doesn't look much better than Dragon Valor on the Playstation. Hit detection is loose and forgiving, and the game's easy as sin now. The original Golden Axe was never what I'd consider a fantastic beat 'em up, but it has a certain well-developed rhythm and hook to its combo strings. That's completely gone here. It's so far gone, in fact, that sometimes the player's character will go through the motion of a combo-finishing throw while the enemy meant to be thrown has fallen to the ground elsewhere. Each of the original game's levels have been split into two, for some reason, yet each of the new levels seems to be as long as one of the original levels. All of the incidental animations, like villagers running by or being menaced by enemy soldiers, are gone, with ridiculously bad realtime cutscenes in their place. These scenes look like they were meant to be voiced, but as there is no voice, they're simply pantomime with bad 3D. The gnome-whacking bonus stages are completely gone, and the first one has been replaced with a cutscene in which one of the gnomes runs through the party's campsite and collides with a sleeping Ax-Battler, pushing his still-static model across the ground. At this point it's hard to even look at the game with a straight face, and really, there's not much point. There is digital-only pad support, for anyone who cares.
Bonanza Bros.
Tant-R
Bonanza Bros. is a puzzle-ish platformer that was one of the first games to introduce an element of stealth. Tant-R is one of the very first games to consist of a collection of minigames. Both were included in a single 3D AGES release, and both have received high-resolution graphical upgrades (Bonanza Bros. originally ran at 496x394, and Tant-R ran at 320x240). Both had their FM-synth music replaced with fairly bland General MIDI-like synthesis, and I find myself preferring the more lively music in the originals quite a bit. Both have support for digital-only controllers. Both are identical to their originals as far as gameplay goes, right down to Tant-R (which includes minigames from both the original Tant-R and its sequel Ichidant-R) functioning as a credits-based arcade game. This isn't the best setup for a multiplayer minigame collection, as proved by later takes on the concept, but thankfully Tant-R has added multiplayer modes that allow any of the games to be chosen without the threat of a Game Over, as well as an option for unlimited credits in arcade mode. Tant-R's puzzles mostly include brain teasers of various types that run on a timer, and while there are some gems here and there, they're generally harder to pick up on and enjoy immediately than those later seen in the Point Blank or Mario Party series.
While Tant-R is interesting for historical reasons, Bonanza Bros. holds up better than its sibling, I think. The setup goes like this: you control a 1930s-era burglar intent on robbing a building of all of its treasures, while avoiding or disabling the policemen that patrol its hallways. The floors have some depth, like a scrolling beat 'em up, so it's possible to walk by a dozing constable (provided that you don't slip on that banana peel and wake him up), and the player can press up against walls to hide, a la Bonanza Bros.' System 24 contemporary Crack Down or the much later Metal Gear Solid. It's a very tightly-designed platformer with a nice tactical layer and lots of personality, and it's still fun to learn its level layouts and learn how to best foil those coppers.
Columns
So, is it safe to say at this point that Columns really always was this dull? I was entranced with the game at one time, after playing it on a Game Gear (my first experience with that system), because, you know, it was on a color portable!! Sega created it as their answer to the Tetris craze that Nintendo had the reigns of in 1990, but it never exactly shined quite as brightly as its Russian predecessor. And to play this remake of the original arcade now, with its staid backgrounds, prim and proper music, and perfunctory gameplay, is to see that this emperor was always naked. It doesn't change matters much, but this remake is now in high resolution, with gems that are prerendered and a new mode with arranged music and nicer gem-shattering animations. Of course, the music is just as plodding and sleep-inducing in its new arrangement. There's a new Vs. CPU mode that adds a few poorly-drawn characters and chirpy voice samples to the game, along with bits of story for each stage. The whole affair feels a little sad, because it's rough and unfinished-looking, as if the developers gave up on the idea of trying to breathe new life into this game that deserves to be buried. But the developers left in a way to work out their frustrations on the player: there is no pause menu, no way to quit out to the main menu from any of the gameplay modes, so the player is stuck until a reset or a game-over.
Virtua Racing
This is the title I most looked forward to playing in this series. Virtua Racing in the arcade was sort of a religious experience, with how clean the polygonal world looked and how foreign the synthetic whine of the F-1 race cars sounded - and let's not forget how cool the dedicated sit-down unit was. Every previous port of the game has rested somewhere between "impressive, for the hardware" and "a travesty," until now. The 3D AGES port of V.R. takes the original and upgrades its resolution to 640x480 (from 496x384), bumps its framerate up to 60fps (from 30), increases polygon counts here and there, adds a few reflection and lighting effects, and leaves everything else very much alone - just as it should. This makes for the best port the game has ever seen, and the silky smooth new framerate means the game looks just as clean and crisp today as it did in the arcades. Multitexturing, normal mapping, and various shader effects may comprise the standard for graphical splendor these days, but there's still something impressive about all those flat-shaded polygons flying by as fast as they please.
The game plays just as it did in the arcade, which is to say that there's still no drifting or other fancy driving tricks - just accelerate, brake, steer, shift, and don't hit other drivers (or you'll spin out in that same ridiculous way). Analog control is very well-utilized and responsive here, and the Logitech GT Force steering wheel is supported. A few new modes have been included along with the original arcade version, including a Grand Prix mode that takes the player through five or so tracks in a row. Points are awarded after each track depending on each contestant's final standing, and the contestant with the highest score at the end of the series wins. Several different cars can be unlocked by accumulating points in this mode, and there are three or four new tracks not found in the arcade game that are playable in Grand Prix. Also included are the usual time attack, free-race, and split-screen multiplayer modes.
Outrun
This received a treatment very similar to Space Harrier's remake, though with Outrun the developers went for a more literalist interpretation. The original's scaling-bitmap graphics have been converted very faithfully into rather rough-looking 3D, and all of the original's FM-synth radio tunes are selectable in-game, as well as some rather nice new arrangements. New to this release is an Arrange mode with new tracks and scenery that pits the player against rival drivers. One driver appears for each stage of the course the player reaches, and while the rivals don't have to be defeated to complete the Arrange course, each driver bested will contribute to a score bonus. To make this competition possible, Arrange mode's course layout diverges from the starting point and then converges after the halfway point to end in a single segment of track.
There's no wheel support here, but Outrun's analog control is very well-implemented and precise. I've had no problems getting familiar enough with it to pass semi trucks on narrow, curving sections of freeway (though doing this consistently is a matter of skill that I still need to work on). This port of the game plays so well that it's done more than any other version of the game to kindle my interest in it. I can confess to never having much interest in Outrun previously, with its 80s, day-glo, Miami Vice styling and relaxed approach to racing, but I've come to appreciate what it has to offer. The remake may not be pretty, but the soul and feeling of the original are alive and well here.
Alien Syndrome
The most recent remake in this collection is also one of the most divergent from its original material. The original Alien Syndrome was a Gauntlet-like overhead shooter that tasked the player with rescuing hostages on several different levels of a space station (or spacecraft?) from the very Alien-like xenomorphs that have infested the areas. It included several weapons and option bits for the player to pick up, and aliens exploded in a delightfully gory manner when shot.
The remake has received a much darker color scheme and art style to go with its relatively modern 3D graphics. As much as the original ripped off the Alien franchise, the remake goes even further. All of the weapons from the original game are present here, but the ones that were most "inspired" by Alien/Aliens now look even more like their movie counterparts. The male and female player characters are now outfitted in military gear and armor that looks like it was cribbed from modern sci-fi movies and anime.
Where this remake differs most from the original is in how much more intense and playable it is. The original had standard 8-way directional control and a single fire button, with a few enemies here and there. Enemies in the remake now come in swarms and from every direction, and while the old control scheme is still available, there's a new Robotron-style dual-stick scheme that makes the hordes of aliens much more manageable. Also alleviating this are the addition of a lifebar and a bomb attack. Also new is the fact that there are always a few more comrades on a level than those the number required to be rescued, allowing for a bit of fun in playing chicken with the timer for extra scoring. Of course, the gore is back in this version of the game, and the slowdown caused by dozens of enemies popping into piles of guts at once is more cathartic than frustrating.
So, while few - if any - of the games in this set received graphical upgrades that brought them in line with modern expectations, and while many have flaws in gameplay or presentation, nearly all of them effectively convey the spirit of their original versions. While for the most part I'd still recommend tracking down and playing the originals over the versions in this collection, for the $10 to $15 the disc sells for nowadays, it's a respectable value and a worthy purchase, especially for anybody curious to find out how 3D AGES really turned out.
i think the saddest thing about 3D AGES is that we'll never see the phantasy star remakes in the US, and that it looks like the PSIV remake is dead as well. they were totally decent, from what i played of them. oh well.