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The Mega Drive Mini 2 - Sega Minis What Nintendon't

Sprite

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
It's always said "NA" on Amazon, despite Canadians not being able to order it. A very bizarre oversight.

I'm at peace with the games list, there's enough there I genuinely want to justify the purchase, and I just know if I don't get it now I'll obsess about it in a couple years and impulse buy it on eBay.

Honestly the bigger disappointment is confirmation that Working Designs's ouevre is likely to remain legally inaccessible on anything past the PS3.
 
muteKi

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I mean this was the one reason I figured that the M2 guys would be talking about Rydeen on twitter, but that's not so much a pull out of wide left field as one from the football stadium across the street
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
The Genesis Mini 2's full game list was revealed. It's not good news. Lunar and Lunar 2 were, as was feared, replaced by Sewer Shark and Night Trap.

EDIT: Oh man, is that Yellow Magic Orchestra's Rydeen!?
(clicks link)
Holy crap! It IS! And it's a great cover! This would have been INCREDIBLE to hear in an arcade game from the end of 1982!!
 
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Phantoon

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Kazin said:
No Lunar, no Snatcher. Looking forward to hacking it and taking out fucking Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and Mansion of Hidden Souls.
Click to expand...
I don't know how much work is going into hacking Minis nowadays. Just be warned this might not be an option
 
Kazin

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Meh, I still want it, Shining Force 2 and CD are enough for me, and I'm a sucker for these things anyway. I bet it gets hacked though.
 
muteKi

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
Since I don't expect to see, say, LRG or some similar group reprinting SFCD there is definitely some of this I find quite tempting, but I think if I had to decide, I'd rather just have this hypothetical SFCD reprint
 
MetManMas

MetManMas

Me and My Bestie
(He, him)
I'm not a big fan of the Working Designs localization changes but all that Sega had to do to convince me to give half a shit about the localized version of the Mini 2 was have the Lunars and Popful Mail in there and they didn't do it. A disappointment in limited quantities, this.

Night Trap? Sewer Shark? I could just watch 'em on YouTube! Hell, the former has modern console ports with higher quality video if you insist on paying for cheesy video footage thrown into a UI.

If I could ever be arsed to seriously learn how to read and understand Japanese I would import an MDM2.
 
Sarge

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Kazin said:
No Lunar, no Snatcher. Looking forward to hacking it and taking out fucking Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and Mansion of Hidden Souls.
Click to expand...
I think there's enough there that I will keep the preorder, but man, this is super disappointing. By all accounts, they didn't offer Vic Ireland enough to put Lunar and Popful Mail on there. We may never know the terms, but it's hard to know if I should be mad at Vic for holding out for too much or Sega of Japan for lowballing him.

Still, nice to see Crusader of Centy on there. I (shockingly) have the cart of that, but others being able to play it will be a treat. I'm also pretty amused at how many of these games I hacked onto the original Genesis Mini. :LOL:
 
Kazin

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Haha yeah, I put Shining Force II and Shining in the Darkness on the original Genesis mini like, a month ago when I first got it lol. But I'm a big dumb baby and will definitely be getting one of these, because Shining Force CD wouldn't fit on the original!
 
Sarge

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
That's one of my hopes, that they have a good amount of leftover storage on it. And who knows, they may still have the Japanese games on the system - I know they were present on the first iteration, interestingly enough, and I swapped out for the Japanese version of Dynamite Headdy.
 
muteKi

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
For the record the footage of Super Locomotive has ever so slightly messed with the music to not actually be Rydeen (I believe that M2 are calling the track 'Ryzeen') but nobody here has mentioned yet that they've made a port to Genesis of Fantasy Zone and that they have given Space Harrier II a rebuilt version akin to Fantazy Zone IIDX.


I presume that there are at least some licensing issues involved but I still think it needed to be Wirehead over Sewer Shark
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
Sarge said:
I think there's enough there that I will keep the preorder, but man, this is super disappointing. By all accounts, they didn't offer Vic Ireland enough to put Lunar and Popful Mail on there. We may never know the terms, but it's hard to know if I should be mad at Vic for holding out for too much or Sega of Japan for lowballing him.

Still, nice to see Crusader of Centy on there. I (shockingly) have the cart of that, but others being able to play it will be a treat. I'm also pretty amused at how many of these games I hacked onto the original Genesis Mini. :LOL:
Click to expand...

Yeah, same deal over here. The Genesis Mini 2 actually has a pretty good selection of Genesis games, but most of 'em have been on my system for at least a year now thanks to Project Lunar. Well, not The Ooze, because I have standards!
 
Yimothy

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
Very interested to see Crusader of Centy, my sentimental favourite Mega Drive game, on there. I wonder if the European version will have the superior* PAL version, Soleil? Hopefully this is a sign that it’ll be released separately on other platforms in future, too. It’s a game I thought was lost to time, at least in terms of official releases.

I get the disappointment in no working designs stuff, but there is still some pretty good stuff on this thing. If it’s actually possible to buy where I live I might be tempted, even if I already have almost everything I’m interested in on either physical cart or previous collections.


*in the sense that I owned it as a child
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
By the way, I just played the arcade version of Super Locomotive, and its dual perspectives will cause much stress for players. This isn't like Sega's other game Star Trek, where the bottom window is just window dressing and you can play it entirely from the overhead view. Everything attacks from behind you, and you have to navigate the tracks on the top, overhead screen while firing missiles on the bottom, side view screen. The big problem is that the altitude of the missiles can be adjusted by holding the button, and you have to shoot not only trains with Popeye arms, but airplanes overhead and their missiles. There's a real "pat your head while rubbing your stomach" duality to the gameplay, and if you can't monitor both screens at once, you'll never get to the next depot. There's also a turbo button that speeds up your train and makes it invincible, but it comes at a heavy cost to your fuel supply.

I don't know if American players will enjoy Super Locomotive, but there's no question it will provide ample challenge. Replay Burners makes the game look easy, but it is quite far from easy.
 
LBD_Nytetrayn

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
Sprite said:
The lack of Canada is just that much more befuddling.
Click to expand...
It gets even better:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1560626063104827392

So not only does Japan get their own version, but they get ours, too!

Well, I say "ours," except as noted, Canada gets nothing.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1560771788019204096

This isn't even the only thing. They've just recently started noting on their PSO2 YouTube channel that the anime episodes are there for one week only (would have been nice to know). But don't worry, North America! You can still watch past episodes on Hulu!

...except you can't watch Hulu in Canada unless you have a VPN.
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
Might as well put my analysis on the table while we're at it.

kiblitzing.blogspot.com

A Mix of Mega and Meager

Another Sega Genesis Mini 2 update? Why, don't mind if I do! All the games for both the American and Japanese versions of this micro conso...
kiblitzing.blogspot.com kiblitzing.blogspot.com

What's kind of aggravating is that while the system's Sega CD library is kind of crap, the Genesis library is surprisingly good. There are some genuinely entertaining titles in the mix, the kind of games that didn't get the attention they deserved in the 1990s. Maybe not good enough to justify the $130 price tag, but an impressive selection all the same. They could have done so much worse.
 
Phantoon

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
I'm not a fan of Night Trap or Sewer Shark but there's no denying the effect they had playing in Rumbelow's window, or the importance of Night Trap to history. I wish they'd got some Core Design stuff on there, and it's sad that they couldn't make a deal with Victor Ireland

More importantly, where the hell is Quackshot?
 
Sprite

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
Oof, assuming CJ Iwakura's summation of the lack of Lunar is accurate (seems perfectly plausible to me), those games just seem to be a casualty of the nature of the project. I can't blame Vic for holding out if Sega of Japan was offering peanuts, and I can't blame Sega of Japan for offering peanuts when those games weren't going to mean the difference between selling out or not. Vic's not exactly holding the games hostage if the only thing he has is the audio, but also the work involved in adding subtitles to old Sega CD videos of an RPG - on top of the already laborious work of getting those cutscenes properly synced in the first place - would pull resources on a project already strapped for time.

So honestly the real culprit is that games companies didn't give a flying flip about accessibility in the 90s. Nothing pisses off my crappy ears more than lacking subtitles.
 
fanboymaster

fanboymaster

(He/Him)
It wouldn't even just be a case of adding subtitles to videos, like a lot of early CD games, I believe Lunar has segments of gameplay where the game just drops voiced audio over sprites essentially just standing there doing idle animations. You'd have to drill pretty deep into the game to actually get it to display text boxes there.

I'd have more sympathy for Vic's position if I figured he was trying to make sure the voice actors in that dub were getting paid something, but pretty sure he just wants cash. He's got a bit of a history of trying to use what few pieces of Lunar he has as a bludgeon (see the period leading up to the U.S. release of the PSP version where he tried to throw his weight around to be pulled into the room on that version's translation/voice acting but seemingly mostly just tried to keep the WD slate of voices from auditioning and got pissed when one of them agreed to sing the intro song)
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
arstechnica.com

Sega packs unreleased games, new arcade ports into Genesis Mini 2

Full 60+ game list also includes some Genesis classics with new gameplay features.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Ars Technica, as they are wont to do, digs deep into the Sega Genesis Mini 2, and discovers a handful of new features added to some of its games. Of particular interest is Hellfire, which has "new features and options for the Genesis." That's pretty vague, but what I'm hoping M2 has done is add on the fly directional firing, similar to Vanguard or Robotron: 2084. The game originally forced you to cycle through forward, backward, sideways, and diagonal firing with the touch of a button, as the Genesis controller only had three action buttons at the time. What I'm hoping is that since the system will include a six button controller, M2 will use the same control scheme as Smash TV on the Super NES, with X, Y, A, and B each firing in a different direction. C could be assigned to the powerful "Hellfire" shot.

Most of the other additions are either QoL improvements, bug fixes, or largely inconsequential bonuses. OutRun has extra music, Truxton has its own music adjusted to play at the proper speed, Phantasy Star II has an easy mode and faster character movement in the overworld, etc.
 
Phantoon

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Having M2 do this guarantees an extra level of care. I wonder what they'd do with a SNES mini to beat what Nintendo did?
 
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