Sega Mega Drive Classics PS4 Review
Posted on: 2018-06-10
Our rating:
Overall the Sega Mega Drive Collection is a fun nostalgic ride, with a great selection of games within.
Sega Mega Drive Classics PS4 Review
It seems that the game industry is capitalising on people’s nostalgia with old games, with Nintendo releasing their mini consoles the NES and SNES mini respectfully. Sega is now jumping on the bandwagon with the Sega Mega Drive Classics collection, a compilation of 50 Mega Drive games from the late 80’s to the mid 90’s. Is it worth your time to revisit this nugget of history? Yes although it is missing some notable titles.
What games do you get in this collection of Sega goodness, well you get 50 games for a low price some of them great others hit and miss. There are classics such as Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2, Alex Kid, the entire Streets of Rage and Golden Axe trilogy to the more obscure such as Vectorman which is one of my favourites. However there are few omissions in this collection such as Sonic 3 and Knuckles, but I think this is due to the music licencing and they don’t want to pay through the nose for royalties. Overall the game selection is good and you can play them in local co-op or you can take some games online and play with others which it is a small but nice touch.
What I love about this collection, and this may come across as strange is the main menu it is presented as a kids bedroom from the 90’s with a small CRT TV, a shelf with the games you can play and tape deck it just screams early 90’s nostalgia. This collection is presented so well, it will give people a giddy feeling who grew up during that period whether you owned a Mega Drive or not, it is amazing that Sega bothered to put this much effort into a main menu when they didn’t have to, it shows how much polish they are willing to put in.
You are given a decent amount of options in terms of tweaking the visuals, it’s like having a Sega Mega Drive emulator on your PS4 but it’s legal. You can change the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 widescreen, but in my honest opinion I would recommend keeping the aspect ratio in 4:3 because the sprites and pixels look stretched when they are in widescreen. You can choose various filters to smooth out the graphics and pixels and I would recommend changing the filters from the original look, as I played this collection on a 50 inch television and it looked a bit too pixelated.
The only real issue I had with this collection was that the emulation was a bit jerky in some areas, I only really noticed this when I was playing Sonic 2 as the game had a habit of stuttering when things got a bit busy. I went back and checked my original copy I own on my Mega Drive and it was not present in the original 1992 release, so the emulation can be a bit spotty in parts. Another issue is that the audio can be off in places too, where they replace certain sounds or sounds altogether start to crackle or don’t appear at all, but it doesn’t happen too often.
Overall the Sega Mega Drive Collection is a fun nostalgic ride, with a great selection of games within. If you had a Mega Drive back in the day and want to relive some memories then pick this up or if you’re younger and want play some history I can’t recommend this enough, plus it is at a budget price so you can’t argue with that.
4/5
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
