REVIEW: Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection (360/PS3)

Scribbled on February 20th, 2009 by Jonathon Howard
Filed in Microsoft Xbox 360, Retro, Reviews, Sony PlayStation 3

I grew up with Nintendo. My parents bought their children an NES in 1990, and we bought our own SNES in 1995. I knew kids at school with Sega’s console, the Genesis, though I never met one who had the Master System. I felt sorry for them. The pictures of Genesis games just seemed so sad compared to the bright colors that were on display on my television at home. It wasn’t until Sonic the Hedgehog came out that I thought that Sega might have something worth playing, but I was just a kid and I didn’t have the money to sink into a whole new console.

Turns out I missed quite a few great games besides Sonic: the Phantasy Star series, the Shining Force games, the Streets of Rage trilogy, the Ecco the Dolphin games, Ristar - the list goes on. All of these were great games I never had the chance to play until now.

Sega’s Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection has 49 of these classic genesis games on it. 49! Aside from the ones I’ve mentioned and more obscure titles like Columns, E-SWAT, Flicky, and Comix Zone. The collection does contain some clunkers like Altered Beast, Super Thunder Blade and the Golden Axe games but you couldn’t call this the “Ultimate Genesis Collection” without including the games that made the Genesis so popular. Even if you dislike the games, at least you still can get Achievements/Trophies for them.

Backbone Entertainment was in charge of the emulation of these games, and they’ve done a good job, as far as I can tell. I haven’t experienced any slowdown, hiccups, any static or sound problems. I don’t know how faithfully these play to the originals as I never experienced any of them on the Genesis itself. The only issue I’ve had so far is that some of the games (Phantasy Star 1, Shinobi Arcade, etc.) require you to unlock them by doing something else in another game. There are also numerous videos that can be unlocked. While annoying, they don’t seem that difficult to do which is nice, but why bother at all with unlocking? Why not simply provide the extras without bothering with the extra hoop to jump through, even if it’s an easy one? At least you sort through games easily, and can even rate each game for even faster sorting. Unfortunately, there’s no online leaderboards which the Xbox Live Arcade versions of some of the games do have.

Oh, and did I mention you can get all of this for the low price of $29.99, and you can save anywhere in any game? Why are you waiting? You won’t find a better deal this year.