Sega Classic Arcade Collection

Description

Sega Classic Arcade Collection was a bundle of four of Sega’s most prominent early system-sellers onto a single disc. The Japanese version was a stand alone retail product, in contrast a hardware pack-in for Western Sega CD adopters. The title captures a rushed era of early CD-ROM development that reflects product design driven by corporate necessity rather than artistic ambition. Sega simply dumped existing cartridge ROMs onto optical media to artificially inflate the launch library of their expensive new add-ons. The compilation features:

• Golden Axe
• Streets of Rage (Bare Knuckle)
• The Revenge of Shinobi (The Super Shinobi)
• Columns

This Japanese release retains the Western titles Streets of Rage and The Revenge of Shinobi on the packaging and menus instead of their original Japanese names (Bare Knuckle and The Super Shinobi), even though the in-game text remains in Japanese.

The gameplay experience is notoriously uninspired. Rather than taking the opportunity to refine the code, the ports are incredibly lazy inclusions of their existing versions. Streets of Rage suffers from the exact same severe sprite flicker and engine slowdown as the original release the moment multiple enemies flood the screen. Even more bizarrely, the port of Golden Axe is an active downgrade, inexplicably stripping out the original two-player cooperative mode entirely. The title almost completely fails to utilise the Mega CD’s enhanced processing power. There are no expanded colour palettes, no new scaling or rotation effects, and no added levels. The sole technical upgrade lies in the audio. Besides some minor improved digitised samples, Golden Axe features CD audio originally the arcade game.

Contemporary reviews were decidedly mediocre, heavily criticising Sega for charging retail prices for a massive missed opportunity. The Japanese stand alone release serves as an interesting curiosity filling gaps in the library but retrospectively a forgettable release.