Aerobiz Supersonic

Grade: A-

Ranking in Sega Genesis Top 50: 18th

Publisher: Koei

Year: 1994

Genre: Biz Simulation

Koei has published some pretty unusual games in their day, but Aerobiz Supersonic is one of those ones that absolutely should not have worked. In Aerobiz Supersonic, you’re the CEO of an airline. You spend your time crunching numbers, taking in meetings with your advisors, and negotiating deals. That’s it. You don’t get to fly the planes, or beat up coach passengers who try to sneak into first class, or come up with creative ways to sneak in hidden fares. At least with Koei’s hyper-detailed strategy games, you still get to fight a war, assuming your pre-battle mismanagement doesn’t cause all your troops to desert first. And while a lot of the Uncharted Waters series is about shipping and trading, at the end of the day, you still get to explore the world and can commit piracy. There’s nothing “adventure-like” in Aerobiz; it’s just you trying to do the one thing that nobody in America seems capable of – keep an airline from declaring bankruptcy.

I’m the CEO of Australia? Thanks, Ron Jeremy!

On paper, this sounds pretty dreadful, but somehow it manages to be fun. Hey, you know the old cliché: that’s why they don’t play these games on paper. Well, except for D&D, I suppose – that’s a game that you do play on paper. Also, paper football. But not video games. You don’t play those on paper… although in the case Aerobiz Supersonic you’ll probably need to play it WITH some paper, you know, to write all your budget spreadsheets and airfare rates on.

At heart, all business simulations are strategy games, so if you’re not big on the genre, you’re probably not going to find much to enjoy here. And even if you are, you still might not like it. There’s big a difference between launching a well-timed invasion into enemy territory and hitting them with, say, a fleet of tanks they didn’t see coming, versus doing the same thing except your weapons are a steep price cut and aggressive marketing campaign.

In fact, it’s hard to say exactly WHO the target audience for this game was. I’d say it was meant for Genesis-playing adults who enjoyed strategy games, but would be like saying the game was designed the game for the iPhone – neither of those things existed back then. I first found out about the Aerobiz games from my friend Jay, back when Aerobiz Supersonic had just been released. Now Jay was an extremely brilliant kid who grew up to be a doctor, and he was a little bit eccentric, too, so you might think this kind of game would be right in his strike zone. But he was also 15 years old at the time. His favorite part of the entire game was renaming all the airlines. It was all downhill from there.

Though he also enjoyed playing in the 1970s time period so he could pretend he was watching Starsky and Hutch after he got home from running the airline.

I’m still tempted to chalk this up as more evidence that Koei’s business plan back in the Genesis days was to make a bunch of games that wouldn’t sell, then hold them in warehouses and auction them on eBay twenty years later when people finally came around to appreciating them. Talk about visionary – instead of making games for the average gamer, they made them for the adults those gamers would eventually grow into. Oh, and they apparently predicted the existence of eBay. Either that, or they just had no idea what they were doing at all.

Aerobiz Supersonic is definitely not a game for everyone, but it does have a certain geeky appeal to it. Part of it is that it’s not too hard to get into. I’ve never run any kind of business before (unless an unpopular blog about Genesis games that generates negative revenue is considered a business), let alone an airline, but I managed to figure out what I was doing before very long. Compare this to many of Koei’s wargames, which can get to be pretty demanding, and generally result in me executing the brilliant strategy of having my navy dump my entire food supply into the ocean, while I spend all my money researching more efficient ways to dump food into the ocean. This plan generally leads me to step two of my grand strategy – surrender to whichever rival seems the least genocidal. So I give Aerobiz a lot of credit for the fact that I’ve never had to contemplate which competing airline would be the most likely to murder all my customers by the second turn.

For the record, though, it’s Air LA. They’re monsters.

But while it’s easy to understand, it’s still very challenging. It’s not quite that old “easy to learn, impossible to master” thing, because AS isn’t impossible to master – you just have to be very attentive. There’s a lot here that you’ll need to keep track of – money, your inventory of planes, rights to use certain airports, and perhaps most importantly, timing. Keeping everything on the proper schedule is perhaps the most challenging and most critical part of the game, because it affects everything you do. You don’t want to spend three turns negotiating the rights to have a flight between London and Paris, and then have to wait an additional turn before you have a plane available to actually make the flight. The game is a race to accumulate wealth and market share, and every wasted turn brings your enemies that much closer to defeating you.

That’s another thing about Aerobiz Supersonic – it gives you a real appreciation for the cutthroat nature of business. Everyone is trying to maximize their profits, and the easiest way to do that is to wipe out the competition. There’s no silver medals here. First place is control of the skies. Second place is you and everyone who works for you loses their job, and whatever city had been unlucky enough to house your corporate headquarters receives irreversible damage to their local economy and goes into a slow death spiral (ok, that last part isn’t actually in the game, just some speculation I have from growing up in the rust belt).

Sometimes on the news you’ll hear about corporations screwing their workers just to save seemingly inconsequential amounts of money, and you’ll think “Why wouldn’t they treat their employees better? They made $1.4 billion last year, would have been so awful if they made $1.3 and paid their employees better instead?” Well, a nice thing about a game like this is you can follow your morals and do the right thing. Go ahead, give everyone raises. And guess what? That insignificant $.1 billion (which is $100 million, by the way) that your competition didn’t spend on wages they didn’t have to, they used that money to undercut you in your most lucrative market. Now spending that extra $100 million just cost you $200 million in sales that went to your rival. Next quarter it’ll be a billion. Quarter after that, instead of raises, you’ll be giving out pink slips, which in turns floods the labor market and gives your amoral competitor the leverage to drive employee wages even lower. Isn’t capitalism awesome?

It is when you’re the one winning.

Availability: Aerobiz Supersonic is a hard one to come by. For reasons that should be all too easy to understand by now, this wasn’t exactly a huge seller when it first came out. And unfortunately, it’s also not available as part of any retro compilations, or for download on any of the current gaming systems. That means the only way to play this one is to track down a copy for the Genesis (or SNES, the two versions are pretty similar).

Now we’ve tried to take a somewhat neutral tone while discussing the prices of the games on our Top 50. After all, what we’d be willing to pay for an old game might be a lot less than what you would. In fact, we’re pretty cheap, so it’s actually pretty likely that many of you would be willing to spend more for a rare game than we would. Having said that, the prices being asked for copies of Aerobiz Supersonic are completely outrageous. The cheapest price we were able to find online was $35 (before shipping), and most copies were going for far more than that. On the off chance you actually see one in a store (which we haven’t), don’t be surprised if they demand you pay them in diamonds or precious metals.

Or trips to Saipan.

Still, if you ever do find one for a better price (maybe at a garage sale or something) or can borrow a copy from a friend, don’t hesitate to do so. Alternately, you could try to track down a copy of its predecessor, Aerobiz. The differences between both games are pretty minimal, so it wouldn’t be much of a downgrade. Unfortunately, it’s also not much cheaper, so you’re still paying a king’s ransom to obtain a copy. Don’t do that.

Sorry to say, but right now your best bet is probably just to keep your fingers crossed and hope that Koei decides to bring it out for the Wii’s Virtual Console, as they did with New Horizons.

Revoking the Dreamcast Seal of Quality?

So, Stryker and I have been tossing around the idea of doing a “Revoking” project for the entire Dreamcast library, similar to what we did for the Sega Genesis. I know, I know, we still haven’t finished the Top 50 Genesis games yet, and we’re already in the middle of a similar project for the Super Nintendo. Still, the Dreamcast idea makes some sense, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s only 270 games, which would go a lot quicker. By starting off this blog with our Genesis project, we already have some –uh,  I don’t know what you’d call it exactly – “Sega credibility”. Which is to say that our fans tend to be a little more fond of that company’s products and seem to think we have some sort of expertise in the area. We’re a teensy bit established in the Sega community, is what I’m saying. And finally, the Dreamcast is considered absolutely sacred to most the hardcore and elitist gamers, and you know how much we enjoy messing with those guys.

Still, there are a few problems. What we’re hoping to get is some feedback from you, our loyal readers, on how to handle the following challenges:

1. We don’t know where to stopping cutting. Because the system was short lived, the library is much smaller than that of the Genesis (270 vs. 707). So do we do another Top 50, or a Top 25? I’m inclined to say Top 25, as that would mean a little less than 10% of the games for the system would receive our approval, which is kind of the high standard you’ve come to expect from two non-professional “writers” making sarcastic remarks about old video games. On the other hand, you could make an argument that we should stick with tradition, or that the Dreamcast was such a great system it has at least 50 games worthy of our approval despite the smaller library.
2. We don’t have most of the games. Stryker used to run a used game store. That’s how we came into possession of most of the Genesis and SNES games that we’ve reviewed. Unfortunately, he ran his store during the early 2000s, when the Dreamcast was still a new system, and the games were still valuable. Rather than hording the ones that came into his store for his personal collection, he resold them, instead focusing on silly things like “rent”, “staff”, and “utilities”. Between the two of us, we possess maybe 20-30 Dreamcast games, meaning we’re going to have to go out to obtain the rest. Which leads us to…
3. Obtaining all the games would be sort of expensive. In order to review these games, we need to play them. In order to play them, we need the game. And right now, we don’t have about 250 of them. If we could get them for an average of $10 a piece, that would still set us back $2,500. And since the Dreamcast is beloved by one and all yet was totally underappreciated in its time, a lot of the games are rare and sort of valuable, so the average price is closer to $20 each, or $5,000 total.  That’s going to be a bit of a problem since our annual budget for this website right now is “one pizza”.

So those are the obstacles we face right now, and we would love to hear your suggestions. Top 50 or Top 25 (or Top Some Other Number)? Know any place to score Dreamcast games for really cheap? Are you an eccentric DC collector willing to let us borrow your collection so we can make fun of it? Please, leave us a comment, or email us at revokingthesealofquality@gmail.com

Road Rash Series

Grades:

Road Rash  (1992) – A-

Road Rash 2 (1993) – A-

Road Rash 3 (1995) – D

Ranking in Sega Genesis Top 50: 17th

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Years: 1992-1995 (see grades for specific year of each game)

Genre: Commuting

Note: Road Rash 2 was the editors’ unanimous favorite game in this series

We don’t write this blog with a conscious effort to be anti-establishment or populist, but it’s not hard to imagine “hardcore” gamers and other Genesis enthusiasts getting a little bent out of shape upon seeing the Road Rash series finish so high our list. Certainly, this is not a series of games we would expect to see do well if a similar list had been published by, for example, Gamefan magazine back in the old days. The Road Rash games are the kind of thing likely to be looked down upon as mindless, or “just another racing game”, completely lacking the interesting characters or narrative depth of, say, an RPG. To this I would argue that if you can’t properly enjoy a well-made game about racing motorcycles while punching people in the face, then perhaps you’re all taking yourselves just a bit too seriously.

I mean, video games are supposed to be fun, right? It seems like sometimes we get so caught up arguing about their artistic merits that we kind of forget that. And despite what the pundits of “hardcore” gaming will tell you, not every title needs to be an RPG with a complicated story, a 2D fighter with 400 characters that are all slightly different variations of Ryu, or the world’s hardest vertical shooter. It doesn’t make you any less of a gamer if you enjoy, say, a sports game, as long as the game is well designed and satisfying to play. Road Rash isn’t a sport (tragically), but the same principle applies.

Oh hey, there’s a bike based on one of my ex-girlfriends.

Road Rash wasn’t the first game to combine racing in combat, but it does so in a way that’s much more believable and almost perfectly balanced. Think about how weird it would be if you saw a bunch of heavily modified cars racing down the street while firing machine guns and other weapons at each other. Aside being expensive, that’s the sort of thing that would probably attract a lot of attention and probably a military intervention. That probably explains why most “car combat” games take place in some dystopian future. But Road Rash is a motorcycle race, where the competitor’s just happen to punch each other when nobody else is looking because… well, why wouldn’t they? I mean, besides the fact that it’s incredibly dangerous? That’s believable. In fact, for all you know, that sort of thing could be happening right now. You should probably look out a window to check – you wouldn’t want to miss something that awesome.

Of course, the “why wouldn’t they?” aspect of Road Rash’s combat will ruin all normal motorcycle racing games for you going forward. You’ll never be able to battle it out in a tight race without thinking “why can’t I just punch him on the face and take the lead?” ever again. On the plus side, it’s not like there are a lot of great motorcycle racing games out there anyway, so no big loss.

 

They’re neck and punch-able neck going into the final turn.

 The other nice benefit about only allowing hand to hand combat is that it forces the focus of the game to be on racing first, and combat second. After all, you’re going to have to catch up to your opponent before you can kick him into the path of an oncoming car. It feels less cheap than a racing game with ranged weapons, where you can drive poorly but bring down a distant opponent with a missile. Compare this to any of the Mario Kart games, where you can get a red turtle shell that will home in on an opponent so long as you’re close enough to see him in the distance. That doesn’t feel fair at all. In a more Road-Rashian world, instead of firing shells at each other, Mario would pull up alongside Toad, reach over, and slam that little bastard’s face into his own steering wheel, preferably while doing his “Yahoooo!” laugh as Toad skids into the nearest wall.

There are times when Road Rash’s combat feels a bit unnecessary, particularly when you have a significantly faster bike than your opponents and can blow past them before they even have a chance to make a fist. But in a close race, it’s an important aspect of the game, as it allows you to (quite literally) beat back an opponent to take or hold onto a lead.  Besides providing an alternative way to win instead of boring old stuff like, you know, racing well, it’s also incredibly rewarding to pound a tough opponent into falling off his ride. This creates a nice balance between the racing and the fighting – you still have to race well enough to catch up, but it’s your ability to really whale on your opponents that will put you over the top. It’s perfect.

The first Road Rash comes from a time when EA was a fast-growing but still only medium-size publisher from San Mateo, and still developed many of the games they published in-house. It’s sort of interesting to see how the company’s California roots sometimes show through in subtle ways in their earlier products. It’s probably why the cover of the first NHL Hockey has a picture from a LA Kings home game (as well as a secret message about the brand new San Jose Sharks). It’s also a likely explanation of why all of Road Rash’s tracks take place within California. It’s their home territory after all – places the designers probably already knew, or could hop in the car and check out on a slow afternoon. And that’s kind of cool in itself – it lends the game sort of a personal touch, by creating a connection between the player and the people who worked on the game as you get a glimpse of the places where they live. Admittedly, these tracks aren’t anything remotely close to accurate maps of the area, so much as just a collection of California-themed backgrounds. Still, it’s kind of fun to imagine the people who made them driving in to work one morning and thinking “This commute would be awesome if I was on a motorcycle and fistfighting cops.”

Wave to the designers as you go past their house.

Road Rash 2 was sort of the ideal sequel, making minor refinements to the gameplay, improving the graphics a bit, adding some new bikes and weapons, and expanding the courses to locations all across the nation. One nice little touch here is that each course has its own unique background music, and each track’s music seems really appropriate for that location. The Hawaii course emphasizes island-sounding drums, the Tennessee music has a definite bluegrass feel to it, and to the extent that Vermont has a signature musical style, let’s just assume that the game nails it as well. The differences between Road Rash and it’s sequel are almost negligible, so the best way to describe RR2 is that it’s basically the same as the first one, but a little bit better. That might seem a bit unambitious, but as the flaming trainwreck of ineptitude that is Road Rash 3 demonstrates, it is all too easy to mess up a good thing.

Ah yes, Road Rash 3. Well, our goal in doing this Top 50 list was that after years of being negative and hateful towards games, we were going to write positive, loving articles about the 50 games we did like. Let’s just say that Road Rash 3 isn’t amongst those 50 games. Oh, it might have rode in here on the coattails of the more successful Road Rash games, but when we say “Road Rash series”, we really mean Road Rashes 1 & 2. It’s like the Godfather movies – the first two are excellent, and the third is something that people generally don’t acknowledge and eventually everyone sort of forgets it exists.

Still, it’s probably worth discussing Road Rash 3 a little bit, because its badness is pretty symbolic of its time. It’s a bad game from a bad year, put out by a publisher that was in the midst of going from our most to least favorite game company, on a system that was over the hill and practically crumbling before our eyes. For those of you who don’t remember 1995, it was mostly awesome – the economy was going well, there was good music on MTV, good TV shows and movies to watch, it rained gumdrops, and just about everything was great. Except for gaming, where 1995 was this awful year where games had already gone about as far as the technology could take them, but the next generation of consoles weren’t out yet. This hit the Genesis especially hard, because it was weaker technology than the SNES, and also because the games for the system had been so innovative right from the beginning that there wasn’t much left to do design-wise. As a result, you got a lot of newer games that were just way beyond what the system could handle technologically – attempts at 3D graphics, first person shooters, and new animation techniques that looked awful AND made the games less responsive. That’s what happened to Road Rash 3 – the big innovations came right at the beginning of the series (“Hey, let’s have these motorcycle dudes punch each other!”), and by 1995, all that was left to do was add a new graphics engine that ended up looking worse and being harder to control. You ever have a pet that you really loved, but it got old and sick and you had to put it to sleep? The Genesis was kind of like that beloved pet, and Road Rash 3 is a symptom of the disease that forced you to put it down.

Road Rash 3, a broken leg on the horse that is the Sega Genesis.

 Availability: For reasons I’ll never understand, EA has been pretty reluctant to re-release their classic games on a collection for modern consoles. This truly baffles me – I know I can’t be the only one who would rush out to buy a collection with Rings of Power, Road Rash 2, and NHL ’94 all on one disc. My best guess is that EA makes so much money off of Madden that they simply don’t have any room for the additional piles of cash such a collection would generate. Whatever the reason, the Road Rash games aren’t part of any collection (other than the PSP one, which doesn’t count due to the fact that the PSP sucks), and aren’t available for download either. If you want to play these games, you’re going to have to get them for the Genesis.

That shouldn’t be too hard, though. Copies of Road Rash 2 are plentiful and dirt cheap, and you ought to be able to find one at either a used game store, flea market or just order it online. One small caveat is that many of the copies in existence today seem to be cartridge-only, as people who buy games about brawling on motorcycles apparently aren’t real big on keeping their stuff all nice and pristine. Copies of the original are a little harder to come by, but by no means impossible, and only slightly more expensive. Road Rash 3 is the rarest and most expensive of the bunch, but not by much, so if you really wanted a copy… well, then you’re obviously not reading these articles very closely. I did compare playing RR3 to putting your favorite pet to sleep only a few paragraphs ago.

Resident Evil 5

Brad: RE5 takes place in Africa, with longtime protagonist Chris Redfield trying to stop the spread of the virus first seen in Resident Evil 4. Instead of the more traditional zombies we saw in the earliest RE installments, this version of virus turns its victims into fast, aggressive monsters who attack you on sight. Here’s the thing though: while this provides a perfectly reasonable explanation plot-wise for why RE5 is set up the way it is, it’s still a game where mobs of black people are constantly trying to murder you without provocation, and you shoot them in the face. I wouldn’t call it intentional racism on Capcom’s part (we still have Street Fighter for that), but all the same, this feels like a game about the LA riots as designed by Michael Richards and Fuzzy Zoeller.

Stryker: RE5 is a decent game, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend the entire time I played it wishing it was more like Mass Effect. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Quick Time Events (ie – “press the button we just put up on the screen right now or DIE!”) are horrible. If I had wanted to see a revival of the gameplay from Dragon’s Lair… well, it’s pointless to even finish that sentence since no one would ever want that.

Double Dragon Remix Medley

Double Dragon is one of my favorite games of all time, and part of the reason for this is the game’s phenomenal soundtrack, which I would honestly put it right up there with Megaman 2 as one of the best original soundtracks ever made for a video game. Part of the key to this is that it doesn’t have any weak points – the entire score is fantastic from the opening theme all the way to the music for the last stage. Admittedly, there are far less tracks than, say, one of the Final Fantasy games, but it manages to do an awful lot with a little time.

Anyway, while poking around on OC Remix last night, I stumbled upon this remix, a medley of the soundtrack that manages to use every single track in the game. Rather than fooling around with the arrangement, this is more of a straight-up, “here’s what the music would sound like with actual instruments” recording of the songs. Definitely worth checking out.

 Here’s the big, obvious link

Street Combat

Street Combat (SNES) has one of the greatest bonus stages in the history of video games. After defeating the first two opponents, you arrive at a new location and the words “Hit Happy” appear on screen. You are then given a full minute to beat the shit out of a helpless gnome (Happy) while he runs for his life:

Now think about how much the rest of the game must suck in order to cancel out all that awesomeness. Yeah, it’s that bad.

One look at the title ought to tell you everything you need to know. They just took the two most popular fighting games at the time, Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat, and smushed them together to come up with “Street Combat”. It’s not an encouraging sign when that’s the kind of effort being put into coming up with a snappy title.

Still, it would be unfair to think of this game as some kind of a rip-off. SC breaks a lot of the conventions of the fighting genre. For example, while the best known fighting games are fun, Street Combat isn’t. At all. Which is actually kind of refreshing in a way. See, by freeing themselves from the notion that their game somehow needs to be enjoyable, the people who made it then had the opportunity to try out all kinds of unique things, such as only give you one character to play as, and then have that guy be some mulleted dude in a robosuit. Good job, guys! That’s exactly the kind of protagonist we had all been clamoring for.

And yes, he’s the only character available in 2 player mode. Good times.

Beyond Oasis

Grade: B+

Ranking in Sega Genesis Top 50: 18th

Publisher: Sega

Year: 1994

Genre: Zelda-Envy

Beyond Oasis is the story of Prince Ali (and if you can read that name without automatically saying “mighty is he” to yourself, than I think it’s safe to assume we’re from different generations), who is apparently the sole heir to the Kingdom of Totally Not Giving a Fuck. This is a guy who thinks nothing about going off to explore abandoned caves on long-forgotten islands without telling anyone, and when he finds himself alone and in pursuit of some enemies fleeing by ship, he does what any rational person would do in that situation – he hops on board and starts murdering everyone. Does he know how to sail the ship or even where it was headed? No. But why worry about such trivial things? When the time comes, he’ll just crash the ship into the nearest land mass, assume any nearby structure is an enemy fortress and proceed to kick some more ass. That’s the kind of guy Prince Ali is. Traits like “a reasonable amount of caution” or “forethought” are not among the his best qualities. You can’t help but like the guy. Especially when his game looks like this:

Look at that. Believe it or not, that screenshot is from a Genesis game. The whole game looks this good, if not better. If Beyond Oasis isn’t the best-looking game on the system, it has to be pretty close. It’s as though somebody over at Sega flipped over the Genesis, and found that the “nice graphics” switch  had been set to the off position for the last 5 years. Which, given the way they run things over there, doesn’t seem all that unlikely, actually.

Then again, graphics aren’t supposed to matter, right? Gameplay is supposed to be the only thing that counts. Well, except for those times when we arbitrarily decide that its actually the story that’s important, and gameplay doesn’t matter at all (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy). And in rare occasions, it’s even ok to like a game purely for the soundtrack. But never graphics. Real gamers are above such trivial things. Good graphics are for slack-jawed casual gamers to drool over while playing their games based on the latest Michael Bay movie.

But  that’s complete nonsense. The quality of a game isn’t determined by any single aspect on an all or nothing basis. Gameplay might be the most important part of a game (and by the way, “gameplay” itself is sort of a catch-all of numerous important things, such as control, difficulty, and level design), but the other stuff goes a long way to supplement it, too. A good story can make you more emotionally involved in a game, and provide extra incentive to see what happens next. A game’s music engages a player’s mind, can provide a pleasant distraction through a slow part, and is a surprisingly strong motivation to play through a game again (at this point in my life, I’m pretty sure I keep replaying Megaman 2 purely for the music). And graphics set the mood of a game, as well as help players visualize the things going on in the game, which often can be abstract concepts. Don’t think so? Try to imagine Super Mario Bros. as a text adventure:

 

World 1-1

You are standing on a grassy plain. Off in the distance, large green pipes emerge from the ground, and remnants of a brick wall are floating in the air above you. One of the bricks has a “?” carved into it. A path leads right.

A large turtle is approaching you.

>Jump on turtle

You jump on the turtle, causing it to retreat inside its shell and flip over. You bounce off the turtle shell into the floating “?” brick. Doing so releases a gold coin from the brick, which flies into the air and disappears.

You now have one gold coin.

>Wait, what?

Between the hair, the headband, and the people constantly trying to shoot him with a crossbow, the Prince is actually a lot like me.

Better yet, Beyond Oasis plays nearly as well as it looks. The game is an action RPG cast in the Zelda mold – open world, with lots of sword fighting, exploring dungeons, and solving puzzles. Is it better than the SNES masterpiece The Legend of Zelda 3: A Link to the Past? No, but to be fair, that’s an almost impossible standard. A Link to the Past is probably one of the top ten games of all time. Obviously a game that finished #18 on our list of top Genesis games isn’t going to beat one of the ten best games ever made – for it to do so would defy the principles of mathematics. And we hate it when people go around defying the principles of mathematics – it makes our checkbook so much harder to balance. So no, Beyond Oasis isn’t better than Zelda 3.

Thanks to the advanced graphics of Beyond Oasis, this is the most realistic… whatever the hell it is, that we’ve ever seen in a game.

Even so, it does manage to do a pretty respectable job in a lot of ways, and some aspects of the game, such as the combat, are actually better. Was it enough to satisfy the typical Genesis owner’s raging Zelda-envy? I doubt it, but I think that envy was probably a little misguided anyway. Zelda 3 was arguably the SNES’ best game and, as I said a paragraph ago, one of the best ever made. In fact, at the time it was released, a lot of people probably would have said that it WAS the best game ever made. So while a lot of Genesis owners may have thought what they wanted on their system was a really good action RPG like Zelda, what they really wanted deep down was for the Genesis to have one of the all-time great games… like Zelda.

Those are some pretty unfair expectations for any game to live up to. Instead, appreciate Beyond Oasis for what it is – a great looking, fun action RPG with a main character who kicks ass first and asks questions, well, never.

Availability: Beyond Oasis came out a little late in the Genesis’ life, and was released during the dreaded “red box” era, when Sega switched over to flimsy cardboard boxes instead of the superior plastic ones they had been using. As a result, most of the boxes and instructions for the game were lost or destroyed, making complete copies hard to come by (and expensive) for hardcore collectors. If this is what you’re looking for, expect to pay upwards of $20.

Those of you who just want to play it should be in luck, though. Unlike a lot of later games, this one isn’t too difficult to track down. Cartridge only copies can be found online for around $10, and we’ve seen it in a few used game stores for slightly more than that. Additionally, the game is available for the Wii’s virtual console, and was included in the excellent Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Someone Combined Two of My Favorite Things

Ordinarily, this is a blog that puts a premium on original material, and on the rare occasions when we do reference content on another site we try to at least add our own commentary on it. But sometimes people come up with stuff that is just so brilliant that it needs to be shared, and at the same time, there really isn’t anything else that needs to be said. This is one of those times. Behold! Skyrim’s Macho Dragon:

How Not To Pick Game Of The Year

With 2011 safely in our rear view mirrors, websites everywhere have been declaring their choices for Game of the Year. For a lot of gamers, us included, who do not have the time or means to play all the hot games that come out every year, it’s useful to get a recommendation from someone who has.  What’s less useful is to have someone tell you what game isn’t his pick for GotY, which Forbes writer Paul Tassi demonstrates rather effectively for us. Yes, this is an article on why he didn’t pick Skyrim. No, it does not say what game he did pick. And while most of his criticisms are valid, and I happen to agree with more than a few of his points, it’s still an answer to a question nobody asked. If you asked me what kind of car I would buy, and I spent half an hour telling you why I wouldn’t buy a Lexus RX, you’d probably wouldn’t be too happy with my answer, either.

For the record though, my answer is “horse”.

The whole thing comes off as sort of defensive, as though everyone had already expected Forbes magazine to pick Skyrim for Game of the Year, and the fact that they didn’t is some kind of major scandal that requires explaining. But of course that’s preposterous, because nobody in their right mind has ever speculated on what Forbes was going to choose for Game of the Year. That’s just not something that happens. We get about 3 visitors a month and I’m pretty sure we still get more speculation about our choice of Game of the Year than Forbes does.

Don’t get me wrong, writing for Forbes doesn’t invalidate your opinions on gaming, but its not like you’re such a well-renowned authority in the hobby that you have to explain and defend your non-picks. What I’m saying here is that if Sports Illustrated declared Fast 5 the best film of 2011, I wouldn’t write them a letter demanding an explanation of why they didn’t choose War Horse.

Keep in mind, we’re big fans of using process of elimination to come up with a winner. Hell, we did that for the entire Genesis library. And if the Skyrim article had been part of a series of articles where the author had taken a pool of, say, 10 popular games, and then eliminated each of them one by one until we had a winner, we would have really enjoyed that. But that’s not what happened here. Instead, Tassi just declared the winner of Game of the Year to be “not Skyrim”.

So congratulations, hundreds of other games that came out in 2011, you just all won Forbes Magazine’s Game of the Year!

Hooray?

Nah, just kidding, he chose Deus Ex: Human Revolution the next day. A fine choice, by the way, and one that didn’t require a 3 page explanation of why it’s not Skyrim.

Oh, and for what its worth, Skyrim IS our game of the year. But mostly because it’s the only “new” game we played all year. Yes, I know that’s not a good reason.

Once Again, I Got Published On Overthinking It!

Hey everyone, a few quick notes as we deal with the fallout of our month of New Classics. First of all, I wrote an article for Overthinking It. It’s about Skyrim, the “Arrow in the Knee” meme, and why that resonates with so many players. If you enjoy this site, you’ll definitely want to check that out. I don’t want to brag or anything, but it’s one of the better things I’ve ever written (I know, that’s still a pretty low bar). Here’s a quick excerpt:

“Each arrow-crippled sentinel is a reminder of the dangers of adventuring, and its subsequent consequences. As brave warriors within the game, we like to imagine our characters as being nearly invincible. If we even consider the possibility of them being killed, it’s always in the midst of doing something glorious, like fighting a dragon or sacrificing ourselves to save a larger group of people. The idea of receiving a disabling injury and falling into a quiet life in obscurity is a much crueler fate than any we’ve previously considered.”

Toss in a couple of abandoned grain mills and Skyrim becomes a game about Buffalo.

I think my English teacher once taught us that we were supposed to center any quote that went on for three lines or more and not use quotation marks, but that makes it look weird. Or maybe it was just indent. Oh well, we play by our own rules of grammar here. Why are you still reading this? Were you waiting for the big, obvious link? Well, here you go:

Brad’s OTI Article!

Also, we set a record in December with our “New Classics” feature for the most posts in a month since I’ve been running this site! Don’t expect a repeat of that anytime soon, as it provided a pretty healthy reminder of why I don’t normally update that frequently. Still, a big thanks to all our guest writers for pitching in and the handful of readers who stopped by to enjoy it. Although we’re no longer doing a new classic every day, the feature is still “active”, meaning that if we come across any more games deserving of the honor, we’ll be adding them to the list.

Finally, we’ve been getting some love from the guys over at Did Not Finish, and it’s only right that we return the favor. There’s some great writing going on over there, and the premise is one I think most of us can relate to.

In honor of the OTI article, and because we’re exhausted, we’ll be taking a break and leaving this up at the top of the page. We’ll be back next week with more of our usual nonsense.