With over 40 titles from the SEGA Genesis era, including all the Sonic The Hedgehog favorites, fans will experience these classics now in sleek HD for only $29.95. With plenty of single-player and multiplayer action, gamers will take down a huge variety of enemies, including Sonics nemesis Dr. Eggman, shuriken-flinging ninjas, hordes of altered beasts and the worlds greatest fighting champions.
Features:
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The Largest Collection of Classic SEGA Titles. Players will trip back in time with favorites including Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Columns, Ecco the Dolphin and four titles from the Phantasy Star series, to name a few.
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Several Unlockable Titles. Included in the collection are arcade favorites such as Congo Bongo, Altered Beast, Zaxxon and more.
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All Titles Upgraded to Hi-Def. The classic 2D style never looked so good! Each title has been converted to hi-def (720p) and will be a blast to play using the intuitive controls of the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 systems.
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Massive Multiplayer Options. Friends can play the 2-Player classics together in select games from the same console at home.
Average Customer Review:
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42 of 43 found the following review helpful:
Superb collection for retro gamers and new gamers alikeFeb 14, 2009
By Eric San Juan Right to the point: There is nothing not to like about this collection. I've played it for the last few days and have loved every moment.
This disc brings together a huge collection of almost all of Sega's best games from the Genesis era. All the expected titles are here -- the Sonic the Hedgehog games, the Golden Axe series, Space Harrier, Shinobi and much more -- plus some awesome stuff you might not expect. (Presumably we'll see games like Afterburner and the lock-on version of Sonic 3 + S&Knuckles in a second installment.)
Two of the biggest reasons to be wowed by this set are:
Phantasy Star series -- With the four games included here (1-4), you get some of the best RPGs of the era and dozens upon dozens of hours of gameplay. The ahead-of-its-time Phantasy Star, the stunning Phantasy Star II (which influenced the direction of Final Fantasy in a big way), the amazing epic Phantasy Star IV. Just these four games alone are worth the $30. Heck, DOUBLE that. No fan of JRPG's should go without playing these.
Shining series -- Two predecessors of the popular Final Fantasy Tactics series (Shining paved the way for this sort of game) as well as a first-person dungeon crawler, these are fan favorites for a reason. They're great. Ahead of their time and they hold up great.
And SO many more. Shinobi. The difficult roguelike Fatal Labyrinth. Fun platformer Alex Kidd. Tetris clone Columns. Even coin-op classic Zaxxon! A HUGE collection!
All games allow you to save at any time, in any game, anywhere. This is a GREAT feature. Plus it saves high scores, has full 16:9 support for widescreen TVs, and you can toggle on graphics smoothing to make the games look even better than they did upon release. It's a dynamite feature. (The "museum" and interview extras are a nice bonus, too.)
All in all this is one of the best retro gaming bargains of the year. Got my copy a few days ago and already have loads of hours under my belt. The inclusion of not one but TWO fan favorite RPG series gives this disc an enormous amount of play value.
If you have any interest at all in retro gaming, ESPECIALLY if you were a fan of the Genesis era or if you missed out on the Genesis because you had a SNES, you owe it to yourself to grab this collection.
16 of 18 found the following review helpful:
Lots of gaming for your bucksMar 25, 2009
By Cloud
"..."
Late last year, Sonic Team over at Sega released "Sonic Unleashed" which did have its problems, mind you, but didn't really do anything stellar the entire way through. Reviewers pointed out that Sonic's previous games were miles ahead better and I find nostalgia can help make a game's success. After all, that one game that critics hated at the time might've been one of your favorites but looking at it now you go "wow did that game have issues". Therein lies the major issue/fun with the Ultimate Genesis Collection: does the bulk of these games stand the test of time? Some definately do while others will probably get barely a few minutes before you decide it's awful but there's a lot of work to be done here if you get this.
One of the most important and influential game series that kickstarted the Sega Genesis was Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario and included is a truckload of Sonic games: 1, 2, 3, Sonic and Knuckles, 3D Blast, Pinball and to a degree, Dr. Beatnik's Mean Bean Machine, a puzzle game akin to Dr. Wario, Yoshi's Cookie and Super Puzzle Fighter II. The first 4 are great and well worth the purchase while 3D Blast controls awkwardly, Pinball is decent but not stellar and Mean Bean Machine is good though later stages work a bit too damn fast for my tastes.
Another group featured is the side scroller platformer which run the gamut from Ristar to Kid Chameleon (woo!) to Decap Attack to E-Swat (big eh) to 2 Vectorman games. Beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage and Golden Axe are included and for RPG fans: all 4 Phantasy Stars. It's safe to say that nearly every kind of game is available on here from long drawn-out games to quicker arcade-y stuff but be warned: some of these games are...kind of hard. Not in that underpowered "everyone's better than you" way like a Ninja Gaiden but rather many times in the games you won't even get continues so if you die, boom, Game Over and you're sent back to the title screen which is really disheartening and I'm surprised I don't remember getting more furious when I was younger.
Now of course any collection from greatest hits to game collections is bound to have some stuff missing or curious additions. Fatal Labyrinth well...sucks, the Ecco games are familiar but playing through them, they're surprisingly boring and Super Thunder Blade is too easy to die in. But then, most likely because of dual releases on the Super Nintendo we're missing some other favorites: Battletoads, Toe Jam and Earl, the awesome WWF games, Maximum Carnage, any of the Road Rashes and to be honest, I quite liked the Aero the Acro-Bat games. Most of these games you probably wouldn't give the time of day too while other ones like Ristar and Comix Zone actually surprised me.
Naturally like all Xbox 360 games, there's achievements and these aren't just simply beat game, beat game kind but rather objective based so for example one of Golden Axe's achievements is to use magic a certain amount of times. Easy right? Every time you get a magic ability, use it and eventually, there we go. And thanks to the ability to save games anywhere you want but pressing the Back button, some achievements like the ones for Mean Bean Machine, Columns or Sonic Pinball can be done just by saving states after a certain time and loading save if you die. There's a couple like "Yatta!" that can potentially drive you crazy since it's more luck than anything while others are just simply "Turn to easy, max lives, play".
Another disappointing factor is that the games don't have online play, whether co-op for Golden Axe or Streets of Rage or leaderboards. Imagine competing against somebody to see who can get the highest score in Columns or taking on enemies with other buddies but sadly none of it are implemented and it's strictly offline co-op. But there's quite a few unlockables from videos of the games' developers to additional games (while unlocking Shinobi is cool, Congo Bongo flat out sucks) but it's the games that are important and for completionists, having so much games to beat will surely keep you busy.
The Ultimate Genesis Collection is tough to judge as a game because for every Sonic the Hedgehog or surprising gem like Ristar there's godawfulness from Fatal Labyrinth to Flicky to Bonanza Bros. However getting all Sonics, Phantasy Stars, Streets of Rage, and Golden Axes on one disc is reason enough to get it.
10 of 12 found the following review helpful:
A great option for old-school loversDec 13, 2009
By Jonathan This is just what it looks like - a collection of Sega Genesis titles for the 360, complete with updated graphics, achievements and save capability.
The collection is a decent cross-section of the platform's offerings, with the noticable exception of sports games, which are totally absent. Most of the classics are here though, like Sonic, Streets of Rage and Ecco. There are also a few deep cuts and the occasional "why did this one make the cut?" choice, but as a whole the collection is solid, especially when counting the nine unlockable games.
The achievements (33 total) are a curious lot. Not all the games have them, and the ones that do have only one as far as I've seen. Sometimes they're involved (like unlocking Roo as a playable character in Streets of Rage 3) and other times they're almost ridiculously easy (like "Get a Chaos Emerald" in Sonic). Most are worth 30G. I would have liked to see more achievements worth less. That way each of the 40 primary games could get 25G and have multiple achievements. Instead of having only one achievement for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ("Get 100 Rings with Tails in the first level" for 30G), we could get four or five ("Beat the game in any mode" (5G), "Get 100 Rings with Tails in the first level" (5G), "Get a perfect on a Special Stage" (10G), "Collect all the Chaos Emeralds" (5G)).
The "Save" feature is very nice, meaning you don't have to have a five-hour session to beat a particular game. The listing of the games is also a nice touch: you can do it alphabetially, by genre, by release date. Players can also rate the games on a scale of 1 to 5 and sort the games by their ratings.
The graphics have also improved, though not so much so they don't still feel like the originals (think what the memory add-on for the N64 did to that console's standard games and you get the idea). This is accomplished via a widescreen option and a smoothing option (like the Genesis titles you can get on the Xbox Live Arcade).
All in all, this is a good collection of classic titles at a decent price (if you downloaded them all from the Xbox Live Arcade - most are available there - you would be paying a lot more) with some other titles thrown in for good measure.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Bought for ClosureSep 30, 2010
By Robert Davidson I initially bought this for a sense of closure. I owned a handful of the titles in the collection with my Genesis growing up, and never got around to beating some of them. After about 15-20 hours, I had wrapped up my personal vendettas, and got around to looking at the rest of the collection, and was amazed at the wealth of gaming here. To anyone who can appreciate older games, and especially those who didn't have the money to get all of these when they were younger, this is a wonderful way to spend (upwards of) $20.
To gaming historians, this is an invaluable resource, showing just how far we've come, but also what we've come dangerously close to losing with the new generations of hardware. There is a simplicity here that, even amid the fracas of the action titles, and particularly in the RPGs, can be sort of calming. What's more, the online communities for these games have had more than a decade to develop, so it's very easy to find help for those hitting a snag.
Fans of puzzle games will be disappointed, but that's one of the few areas where the games truly have only been getting better. Columns is fun, and so is Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, but they are more or less the same game. Also, while games like Flicky and Alex Kidd are a nice look at where gaming was at that point, they aren't particularly fun, and there are a handful of others that probably won't hold you attention. Snob that I am, I still have nearly 30 games here that I gladly played.
For people interested in easy gamer points, getting a full 1,000 shouldn't take you too much time, especially if you're willing to cheat. Only one game (Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine) requires that you beat it; all others have fairly easy achievements, many attainable within the first 30 minutes of gaming. But seriously, if you're playing just for points, there are prettier places to go.
If you need to scratch that "vintage gaming" itch, or if you want to see the genesis (ahem) of a few big franchises and gaming standards, this is a great place to go. There are literally well over 100 hours of gaming here... And did I mention you can save any game at any time?
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Great ValueNov 05, 2009
By B. Deans
"Shadow"
I bought this game when it first came out. Most would wonder why i havnt written a review till almost a year later? The answer is simple.... i just finished playing! This game collection is proof of what genesis did and what it had to offer when it was in its prime. You get a ton of old classics for literally no money and have the replay value and gamer points you didnt have when you were playing on the original systems. Even if you werent able to play these games in their prime they are still solid games with decent story and loads of play time.
Pro -Cheap -Loads of old classics from genesis. -Ability to save wherever you are and continue later at the exact same spot -Unlock new games with more play time. -Franchise games have 1/2/3 not just one of the trilogy -Achievement points are easy to unlock -Updated graphics -Easy Controls -rating system that allows you to go right to your favorites without scrolling through all the games
Con -No Sonic 3 with knuckles..... So no Hyper sonic -Rating the games between 1-5 bars sometimes changes when you dont want it to
All and all this game is A+ and i would suggest anyone that is a genesis fan or someone that just wants to try some old games, gets it.
based on 77 reviews
( 77 customer reviews )
