Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sonic Mega Collection Plus for the PC.



So I picked this up at Sg. Wang for RM24.90 (that's about...just USD7 at time of post). Not a bad deal....considering it's original. Is this a really good bargain?

The compilation covers pretty much every Sonic game in the Sega Genesis (not including any of the add-ons such as the Sega CD or the 32X). There's also a few Game Gear games in there as well. At first glance, it's a nice buy, and since I'm a Sonic fan, it would be nice to own the collection legit.

Playing the game so far though, it's like playing a game straight out of the Genesis. No graphical enhancements, no sound enhancements. It's the exact same game a decade ago. However, I did notice slowdown with some (actually, most) of the games....and I found out why - apparently the PC version port uses the PAL 50hz version of the games instead of the NTSC version - and this means the game plays slower (and no, there is no way to "fix" it). And having played the games before...the slowdown is quite noticable. I haven't played the game long enough to say if it sucks or not but although it hasn't really messed up my timing in terms of jumps or dash somewhat, it does kill the tempo of the game slightly since the game's all about speed.

The game also comes with a bunch of extras (movies related to Sonic Heroes, comics, manuals etc), which is nice, but really, only for novelty reasons....and to be frank...the movies are the whole reason why the default install is 3.2gb. (Installing just the games, letting the movies run from disc is just 470MB...that's like nearly just 1/8th of the install!)]

So far, this looks like a decent buy, but that's it. The slowdown gets quite annoying...especially when you've played the faster NTSC versions. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty lucky that I seriously didn't pay more than RM25 for this. Nice compilation, but seriously, could be better.