Review – SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

Known as “Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection” in America for reasons we won’t go into as it only resulted in lots of complaining that S3&K wasn’t in it, this early 2009 complilation was the first of its kind for the 360 and was a collection of a vast majority of the available Mega Drive (or Genesis) titles worked so they could be played on PS360 by Backbone – who were responsible for the SEGA Vintage Collection. Certain titles couldn’t be put in for licence purposes (like the lawsuit-rific The Revenge of Shinobi, featuring Spider-man, the Termiantor and Godzilla to name but three) but it featured multiple titles from Golden Axe, Streets Of Rage, Phantasy Star and of course Sonic as well as other forgotten gems such as Kid Chamelion, Decap Attack and Fatal Labyrinth.

The SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (SMDUC for short) is a collection of over forty Mega Drive games as well as some SEGA arcade / Master System games and also interviews all bundled into one very nice disc.

There’s a load of choice here from different series such as Sonic, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, and Phantasy Star as well others, too many to review one by one. Though admittedly I’ve only heard of half of these games and played a quarter of them as a kid, so it’s nice to play some games I never even knew existed until I got older.

Currently the RRP is £29.99 which is quite good considering the playback value is excellent, there are also achievements and trophies to unlock and gain though it seems that many games don’t have an achievement to get and most of them are for literally simple tasks such as getting one chaos emerald for example.

There’s multiplayer for another controller on the same console (this is needed to unlock a game which leads to an achievement, very tedious on the Xbox 360) but no online multiplayer, though this may be asking too much seeing the price and the amount you get on it.

One thing which has been explained is the lack of the “lock-on” games such as Sonic 3 & Knuckles, though this takes away somewhat from the “Ultimate” collection it’s really not that big of a loss, that and everyone has their own opinion on certain games from the past would make an ultimate collection.

Most of these are minor nit-picks at the collection but it is indeed a true timewaster (in a good way) whether you enjoy unlocking and gaining achievements or you just want to play some of the classics.

You can sort games into different categories depending on year of release and genre, one nifty thing is to be able to change what you rate it and then put the filter on favourites to show the ones you prefer to play the most.

The interviews are from various SEGA game developers, and translated into English which you can see at the bottom of the screen, these can be hit or miss, depending if you’re interested in these things.

There’s not really much more you can say for a collection as we’ve seen most of it before, so if you’re an old school gamer you should already have this. If you liked the Mega Drive and haven’t kept the old console (such as me) you’ll find a load of fun games from the past.