Brad: Playing through the Super Star Wars games today is like digging out a bunch of your stuff from high school and realizing that the insanely hot girl you had a crush on was actually pretty average looking, your favorite band back then was just a run-of-the-mill pop/rock group with a few mediocre singles, and your favorite movie was about John Travolta stealing nuclear weapons from Christian Slater. It’s kind of strange, really – I specifically remember these 3 games NOT sucking when I was a teenager. But playing them now, they’re just a mess of cheap hits and winning by attrition. Considering that the games themselves haven’t changed, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that as a 15 year old, I didn’t have very good taste. Which probably also explains why I remember so much about NBC sitcoms from that era.

Han does his best to pretend not to notice that a ridiculous giant robot that wasn’t from the movie has flown through the ceiling.

Stryker: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away games like Contra didn’t exist, so apparently it never occurred to game designers that a character could both run AND shoot at the same time. Instead, Luke spent most of his time blindly plowing through levels and hoping to just barely avoid taking enough damage that he could get to the end of the stage. Force power!

Oh my God! What’s that noise?! Is my Dreamcast being attacked by a submarine? Aaaah!

Hmm, it sure is lonely out here…

Stryker: Once the PSO servers went down, playing this game became pretty pointless. I mean, if I’m going to play a long-forgotten online RPG, it’s going to be Everquest. That way, it’s at least theoretically possible for someone else to be playing it with me – you know, like a hipster trying to be ironic or maybe a confused traveler or something.

So without further delay, let’s begin the lightning round:

One of the few upsides to having your console only last for a few years is that most of your franchises don’t have enough time to go through the cycle of improvement, peak and decline that you see elsewhere (Madden Football, we’re looking at you). Additionally, as much as we like sports, we don’t actually need more than one football or hockey game. Therefore, we’re going to keep the last release of every one of the 2K sports games, and safely say goodbye to the following titles:

NFL 2K

NFL 2K1

NBA 2K

NBA 2K1

NHL 2K

World Series Baseball 2K1

Sorry guys, but that’s what you get for improving every year.

Speaking of which, considering that the 2K franchises pretty much established themselves as the premiere sports games on the DC right away, I’m pretty sure other publishers were only releasing their own sports games as a way to trick old people shopping for the grandchildren’s birthday presents.  As somebody who received WCW merchandise for one too many birthdays, I have no tolerance for such underhanded tactics. Therefore it is with a misguided sense of vengeance that we eliminate these games:

NFL Quarterback Club 2000

NFL Quarterback Club 2001

ESPN NBA 2 Night

I mean seriously, nobody in history has ever looked back on the purchase of an NFL QB Club game and thought “That worked out pretty well.”

Switching gears a bit, I’m not sure if we even can revoke Sega Swirl’s Seal of Quality, since I’m pretty sure it never got one. You know, that tends to happen with games that are being given away for free with magazines. Oh, you know what else generally happens with free games from mags? They aren’t very good. Seal or not, consider it out of the competition.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Calling a re-release or retro collection one of the best games for the Dreamcast would be like saying syndicated reruns of “I Love Lucy” were one of the best TV shows of the 90s. If you have to justify a title by saying it was “technically” a Dreamcast game, it wasn’t. This means the following games are disqualified:

Atari Anniversary Edition

Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits Vol 1

Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits Vol 2

Namco Museum

Sega Smash Pack

What does playing casino video games have in common with driving 100 miles just to play a couple dollars’ worth of nickel slots? No matter what kind of crazy winning streak you end up on, you’ll never make back the money you spent to get there in the first place. Let’s save the trip and cross off these two games:

Caesars Palace 2000

Hoyle Casino

Thus ends the lightning round.

Quick question, loyal readers – do we need to keep a running list of the DC games that are still in the competition? We did that for a little while with the Genesis games, and it seemed like nobody ever looked at it. Let us know in the comments.

And all of this is awesome, except… well, except they forgot to actually put a game in with all this grinding. It’s just the same 10 seconds of gameplay repeated over and over forever. And that’s just one of several things the developers never got around to finishing  -  the graphics are horrendous, there is literally no music, and the sound effects  might have been recorded in a fast food restroom with whatever happened to be on hand. Oh, and the story, all 10 seconds or so of it, is completely incomprehensible.

So yeah, have fun killing the same enemy repeatedly for hours.

Oh, one last thing – we were going to include a few screenshots for this article, but in keeping with the spirit of the game, we just never got around to it.

Ranking in Sega Genesis Top 50: 16th

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.