Despite having recently received a Mega Everdrive, I am still impulsively grabbing whatever PAL Mega Drive-related thing I can find... 😕 Today's scores:

• Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
• Sonic the Hedgehog (the first one, only had the third)
• Eternal Champions
• Rise of the Robots

Still haven't done any mod on my console, might prepare to do the switchless regionfree/IGR one. Don't really feel like drilling holes and adding switches, it's fine as it is...

Also bought Mario Kart 64 and am waiting to get my hands on Ridge Racer 64 and Wipeout 64.

Yes there's something very tactile about the actual carts - I've considered the Everdrive too but I like owning / using the real thing too much.

What a great system the MD is - I modded mine a while back to do 60Hz and it was worth doing, particularly for SMS games. Incidentally SMS games look much sharper on the MD than they do on my SMS V1, so the MD has become my ultimate Sega machine.

Can MD do 100% SMS sound?

Grabbed some Amiga goodness

appiah4 wrote:

Can MD do 100% SMS sound?

Yep, the MD includes the Master System's SN76489 PSG sound generator in hardware (technically it's integrated into the video chip.) You can even use the PSG & YM2612 FM chip together, although I don't know if any original games did that (modern chip musicians do though. 😉 )

Nice Zool, cool to see it complete with code wheel! Great game.

I'm not sure why I picked this up - actually, because it was $5 is why I picked this up. Plus, I like rail shooters and cheesy FMV sci-fi games, and this is certainly both:

^^ yes, that is a gate-fold back of the box. Never seen that before.

It looks like a late '97 or '98 game by the box design and art, but it's actually a DOS game from 1994/1995. They were a little ahead of their time with the art style.

^^ whoever owned this before failed pretty hard at following instructions. The bottom of the box, which you're supposed to open, is still sealed. 😜 I have no idea why they designed it this way.

Here's what was inside:

This beauty comes on three whole CD-ROMs, which is pretty impressive for 1995. Even Cyberia II (the gold standard of this genre for me) only shipped on two. Lots of pack-in catalogs and promo materials too. This company only put out a few games AFAIK but they pulled out all the stops trying to make it huge.

I don't think the floppy of Commander Keen 4 originally shipped with this game, but it was in there when I unpacked it, so bonus. 😜

Now here's where things get a bit bizarre. I went to try it out, and:

Huh? Did they really not include a crucial required library on the disc? I stuck a copy of DOS4GW in my system path and tried it again (running "DOS4GW LOADSTAR.EXE" instead of the executable directly), and it launched, but then flopped back to DOS complaining of a missing sound driver. It was at that point I noticed the CD only had 1.8MB of files on it.

I stuck it into another machine running OS/X and sure enough, a complete game including DOS4GW and 600MB of FMV was on the disc. WTF?

It turns out, for some bizarre reason, they'd stuck 99% of the content on there as hidden files. All three discs are like that. Well, the game couldn't see them so it refused to run. I tried to copy all 3 CDs to a USB stick but they had overlapping (different, same-named) files, so that didn't work, and I have no way of "swapping" disc images on a multi-CD game while it's running in DOS. I ended up just burning three new CDs with all the files un-hidden, which worked fine (I "washed" the DOS file attributes by copying them onto my Mac's HDD first.)

Is this a FreeDOS incompatibility or something? Like, does MS-DOS allow programs to use hidden files without exposing them to the user through DIR or what? FWIW I was using MSCDEX from MS-DOS 7. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they pressed the discs this way. It's not copy protection, since the game doesn't care that I just re-burned it from a directory of files with all the attributes changed. Baffling.

Fun fact: Elon Musk - yes, that guy - was a programmer on this game. I hope he didn't write that part.

Anyway, I managed to get into the game, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. The FMV is pretty good/bad (bood? gad?) and I'd put its production values around those of a mid-budget sci-fi TV show from the time. Somewhere between Cleopatra 2525 and Babylon 5, maybe. The video codec is blocky and dated but still watchable, not too far off from a VCD.

Rather than taking a bunch of screenshots myself, I'll just link you to the intro footage & some of the first mission. The first ten minutes pretty much says it all. I do enjoy this kind of camp. 😉

BTW this is more literal rail shooter than some of the others that were out there, as you're piloting a vehicle on a rail at least for the first mission. There are a surprising amount of controls for one of these games, which gave me a bit of trouble as the defaults do NOT work with my Kinesis Advantage keyboard and there's no way to remap them. I had to go dig out a conventional keyboard. But still, the game works well for what it is & is fun in that way.

I'll just end the discussion by pointing out there's a space camel on the box:

Jeff Minter did not work on this game, but I suspect he'd approve.

I bought that game back when it was released. ^^^^

I don't remember it ever having those sort of install issues with hidden files, etc., but it has been almost 25 years since I played the thing. I do remember being more impressed with the packaging more so than the actual game. Even back in those days you knew the screenshots were not realtime 3D, but you hoped they may of somehow swung it anyway through creative use of voxels or bitmaps, etc. in the end this game disappointed me, but from a collector's point of view I see the attraction. It's fun to look at and certainly a neat curiosity. Thanks for all the photos. Most definitely a trip down nostalgia lane for me and it is fantastic you found such a pristine condition copy. Looking it up on Mobygames I never realized they released it for the Sega CD as well.

xjas wrote:

Jeff Minter did not work on this game, but I suspect he'd approve.

No but apparently Elon Musk did as a low-ranking game company employee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLywBJCOK6Q 🤣

Bought a few LucasArts Classics re-releases of some games I have no hope of obtaining in big box format anytime soon.

Stiletto wrote:

No but apparently Elon Musk did as a low-ranking game company employee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLywBJCOK6Q 🤣

I mentioned that above, but holy hell, it sounds like he may well have been responsible for the shonky CD-ROM file access routines I was complaining about. L0L.

Just for fun, I scanned the Loadstar manual & Rocket Science gear catalog. I find it hilarious they put this much effort into the presentation of a game that runs 90 minutes long, really only has one gameplay mode, & would have been on the bargain rack within 6 months of its release. These are both printed on REALLY high-quality cardstock, BTW. This was not a low-budget game.

Gear catalog
Game manual

I am now fascinated by this company; I didn't know much about them before but it seems like they were really trying to be the next Sierra or Interplay. The names they had on the roster were some pretty big ones, notably Brian Moriarty, Ron Cobb & Steve Meretzky (they published his adventure game, The Space Bar, which I also have) among others. By all rights they should have blown up & become huge, but for some reason they just... didn't.

I know Elon Musk didn't have anything to do with the story of this game, but tell me this isn't straight out of his futurism playbook:

^^ Heavy industry moved to space, Earth returned to a garden state, age of abundance, interstellar exploration in the 2090s... Even the idea of mag-lev cargo trains running in a vacuum at thousands of km/h should sound familiar. I love this stuff; this is a better backstory than most modern "triple-A" games. I want to play more stuff set in this universe. Hell, I want to live in this universe. Where the fuck has this kind of sci-fi utopianism gone?

Nice to see those ragged Broadway musical actors finally getting decent jobs in space with no dress code or other limitations to ones appearance.

Purchased Toy Story 2 Action Game (aka, Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the rescue) for the PC. Now I have a copy of the game for my PSP, Nintendo 64 (still had the cartridge all these years), and PC. Now I need to find a physical copy for my PS1.

Bought Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge for PC for $0.21.

US & UK versions of The 7th Guest

appiah4 wrote:

Bought a few LucasArts Classics re-releases of some games I have no hope of obtaining in big box format anytime soon. […]
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Bought a few LucasArts Classics re-releases of some games I have no hope of obtaining in big box format anytime soon.

I had two Jedi Knight boxes with Vader on the cover (because my dad bought me one and I accidentally broke the disc so I bought another one). Lost them both along with Dark Forces in a move. Still have Jedi Outcast small box, though, which I got later on.

I picked up a free box of floppies off the local classifieds site today. In it was, well, gold:

Sadly the 'seller' didn't have any boxes or manuals/includes (I asked), but really can't complain.

Also brought this home from a thrift shop last week. Two whole bucks:

^^ interesting that it lists XG support specifically on the back of the box. Gonna have to try that out.

The numbskulls in the shop had wrapped packing tape around it to "seal" it shut 😠 , but fortunately I was able to get it off with a hair dryer & some patience. Why would you even think to do that?? It turned out to be in great shape & seemingly complete contents inside.

There's a ton of pamphlets and ephemera in there. Should I do some scans?

Ah, TN:SFC is one of my all time favorites. Some great MIDI soundtrack is in there as well. Definitely scan the paperwork as Moby Games is missing a bit of it in their archives. Nice find.

Grabbed a copy of Prey for XBOX 360.

xjas wrote:

The numbskulls in the shop had wrapped packing tape around it to "seal" it shut 😠 , but fortunately I was able to get it off with a hair dryer & some patience. Why would you even think to do that?? It turned out to be in great shape & seemingly complete contents inside.

Yep I've had to deal with the tape thing too - I think it's because they look at anything like that as a "game", i.e. like a board game or a puzzle, so they don't want peeps opening them up and taking a piece out, rendering it worthless.

xjas wrote:

I picked up a free box of floppies off the local classifieds site today. In it was, well, gold:

nice, Looks like the rarer AGI version of Kings Quest IV! Nice find, most KQ4 was SCI version.