The three most beautiful sights in this world are: 1) your spouse on your wedding day 2) the birth of your first child 3) a walkthrough for Ecco the Dolphin in some long forgotten scrawl. Expect that and more as we explore some rather corking looking Sega Genesis games, starting with a sadly pretty faded star.
Ristar
One of the greatest shames (okay, maybe greatest is an exaggeration, but still) of the SEGA Genesis is the overshadowing of Ristar, which had the potential to become a new mascot for SEGA. Reviews at the time were good, but unfortunately, the very literal star-man launched on the SEGA Genesis at the start of 1995, when the SEGA Saturn had already launched in Japan and was about to in the West too. Other fifth generation consoles were on their way as well, with the hype around the PlayStation’s launch also detracting from any potential excitement Ristar may have gained. Again, it’s a shame because this is actually a pretty great platformer.
Playing as the titular star, first name possibly Ryan, Ristar travels through levels using his massive stretchy arms to grab enemies, ledges, platforms and more. While the gameplay is great, Ristar’s true highlight is the graphics, which push the SEGA Genesis to its limits. The backgrounds and colours on show stand among the best of the console’s entire library, especially due to how vibrant they are. There’s an imagination being displayed in Ristar that makes it a real highlight of the SEGA Genesis, and even though it might have been overshadowed at launch, SEGA have always been willing to give Ristar its flowers on various Genesis collections and re-releases.
Somebody call Matthew Kelly, we’ve got stars in our eyes here people.
Gunstar Heroes
Convincing you that a run and gun shooter developed by Treasure is beautiful might take a bit of work, but that’s only because you’re running through the levels so quickly that you don’t have time to actually stop and smell the roses. Where’s scratch and sniff technology gone, by the way? Could you imagine huffing a big waft of a Dark Souls boss? Maybe not that guy.
Anyway, turns out the roses in Gunstar Heroes are gorgeous, and by roses, I mean the sprites, bosses, backgrounds, explosion effects and everything that makes an action game look phenomenal. The visuals in pretty ch every SEGA Genesis Treasure game are fantastic, with the boss design on Alien Soldier worthy of mention too, but everything about Gunstar Heroes is next-level.
Originally developed at Konami, before the team would leave and form Treasure when Konami didn’t want to develop their ideas, Gunstar Heroes would champion everything that the developer would become known for the next decade after, from amazing graphics, excellent gameplay and boss designs that you didn’t think would even be possible on consoles like the SEGA Genesis.
Because everything about Gunstar Heroes was firing on all cylinders, the game would become a critical and commercial success, and has even seen plenty of re-releases on more modern platforms via straight ports or being featured on collections.
Still, there’s another Treasure Genesis game that we can’t get out of our head. Dy.
Dynamite Headdy
While Dynamite Headdy is also rightly classed among the best Genesis games ever made, it isn’t quite the household, well my household at least, name that Gunstar Heroes is, which is a real shame as Dynamite Headdy’s gameplay and graphics are the reasons why your SNES owning mates would be jealous of your Mega Drive.
Treasure’s sophomore effort, not including a licensed McDonalds game featuring the creepiest fast food mascot of all time, Dynamite Headdy was designed to build on everything Treasure established in their first game.
Playing as the puppet, the game sets you out on a quest to take down an evil king intent on ruling the world, which you’ll do by boshing people with your head like a Scotsman when you call him English. With Headdy’s bonce being the main gimmick of the game, Dynamite Headdy also features 17 different power-ups that drastically alter gameplay, making levels fun and engaging for the entire time. Still, it’s the graphics that are the real statement piece for Dynamite Headdy, especially during the boss fights.
The bizarre creations on show are a testament to Treasure’s originality, but the colour and shading work to simulate 3D are sublime too. Treasure really were in the zone for a while there.
Comix Zone
Is Comix Zone the best game ever to play? Not really, as it’s pretty hard and the controls can be a bit of a pain, but fortunately this isn’t about how good a video game is to play; it’s about how beautiful it looks.
Say what you will about Comix Zone’s mutant filled post apocalypse, but it looks incredible. Released at the very tail-end of the Genesis’ lifespan, Sega were able to put their years of developmental experience to work in creating Comix Zone.
Comix Zone follows nominative determinism victim Sketch Turner, who ends up sucked into the world of his created comic book after a lightning strike. Look, it was the 90s, lightning strikes were the deus ex machina of stories, just go with it. Trapped by the villain of his own story, the mutant Mortus, Sketch is basically forced to batter Mortus’ goons in the hopes of achieving freedom. Again, the gameplay isn’t for everyone, but the way the game is presented as a series of comic panels, and the way Sketch Turner interacts with the comic itself, hadn’t been done before, so much so that SEGA patented the very idea. Now, there’s plenty of imitators, but all of them have Comix Zone to thank.
Beyond Oasis
Given how The Legend of Zelda had basically become Nintendo’s crown jewel, it’d make sense that they’d want a piece of the Triforce for themselves too, so to speak. Enter Ancient, who would develop an absolute looker of a game called Beyond Oasis, which definitely stole from Zelda’s homework in the process, but…who cares? Nintendo typically, but not here!
At least the people who owned both Nintendo and SEGA hardware were eating good, but despite how legendary the Zelda series has become, the sprite work in Beyond Oasis might honestly just be a little bit better?
Known as The Story of Thor in Japan and Europe, with Thor being the name of the kingdom and not some big viking dude swinging a hammer around, Beyond Oasis follows Prince Ali, who has discovered a bizarre, magical gold armlet. The gold armlet was involved in a war long ago with a silver armlet wielder who used the magic for evil, and now an evil silver armlet user is running amok again. As Ali, you have to gather four elemental spirits and stop this ne’er-do-well once and for all, making sure to enjoy some of the best backgrounds, colours and sprite work the SEGA Genesis has to offer. It’s a real visual tour de force.
Thunder Force IV
Even though it might sound like a Saturday morning cartoon that’d air between G.I. Joe and He-Man, Thunder Force is actually a series of side-scrolling shooters that have been dormant for nearly 20 years at this point. Developed by Technosoft, the series started out on the Sharp X1 of all things back in 1983, with the sequel launching on the Sharp X68000 a couple of years later. However, the series picked up steam when it moved over to the SEGA Genesis with Thunder Force 3 in 1990, though it’s the fourth game, Thunder Force IV from 1992, that’s considered the high watermark of the entire franchise.
While the SEGA Genesis, and other consoles for that matter, were filled to the brim with side scrolling bullet hell shooters, Thunder Force IV managed to carve out a niche for itself with its amazing soundtrack and impeccable graphics. Like other games mentioned on this list, the colours on display here really flexed what 16-bit could do compared to its 8-bit predecessors, and the parallax scrolling on the game’s backgrounds helped sell an immense sense of scale. Compared to other shooters, some might say that Thunder Force IV isn’t as intense, but at least those moments of downtime let you enjoy how beautiful this game truly is, a sentiment that everyone should Ecco. Ecco….
Ecco the Dolphin
Perhaps one of the most famous games on the SEGA Genesis, Ecco The Dolphin was the game that your mum bought for you, thinking that because there’s a dolphin on the cover, it must be a nice, wholesome game about loving the ocean or something. Then you actually play the game and end up travelling through time fighting aliens, before coming face to face with this absolute abomination. Your mum probably also thought that games like Splatterhouse would be the one to give their child nightmares, but no. It was Ecco The Dolphin, though before that horrendousness, Ecco is actually one of the most beautiful games on the platform.
As the eponymous bottlenose dolphin, you’ll explore the ocean to find out why a bunch of other sea creatures were abducted by a massive waterspout. Despite being a 2D game, you’ve given all the abilities you’d expect of a dolphin, including coming up for air, echolocation and the ability to “sing”, which is how Ecco can speak to other creatures. It all sounds very groovy and chill, until you get to the game’s combat and you realise it’s one of the hardest games on the SEGA Genesis. Still, the incredibly detailed animal sprites, along with the beautiful nature backgrounds, helped cement the power of the SEGA Genesis. Shame we all struggled to cotton on to exactly what we had to do though.
Panorama Cotton
SEGA are no strangers to the pseudo 3D rail shooters, with their work on the Space Harrier series making up the bulk of their 80s video game library. Space Harrier 2 was a launch game for the Genesis, but a few years later, Panorama Cotton managed to completely outshine SEGA’s original creation. Functionally, there’s no real difference in terms of the gameplay, with the action scrolling into the screen while you shoot pretty much everything that moves, but Panorama Cotton pushes the Genesis way more than Space Harrier 2 ever did, thanks to its imagination, graphics and sheer variety of nonsense the game throws at you.
The third entry in the long-running Cotton series, Panorama Cotton is actually a bit of a departure for the series. While previous games were side-scrolling shooters, similar to Thunder Force, Panorama Cotton adopted the pseudo-3D panorama style it’s named after, to wonderful effect too. The sheer range of levels, along with the enemies you can face, make this an unforgettable experience, and if you feel like playing it for yourself, ININ Games and United Games Entertainment have published it on modern platforms for everyone to easily enjoy.
Earthworm Jim
Beautiful and Earthworm Jim aren’t really words that go together well. Custard creams and my belly? Yeah, that tracks. Cultured Vultures and “PS1 Hidden Gem” videos? You know it. Earthworm Jim and beautiful? Not so much.
The first level takes place in a junkyard, before you’re whisked away to a weird version of hell filled with elevator music and lawyers, and there’s a bungee jumping boss fight against a very literal piece of snot. Without turning this into an “it’s the inner beauty that truly counts” moment, Earthworm Jim still manages to be one of the best looking games on the SEGA Genesis despite its gross-out aesthetic.
Playing as the earthworm who’s managed to stumble onto a spacesuit, Earthworm Jim’s blend of platforming and run and gun shooting helped it become a household name, including toys, cartoons and more, but a lot of that success comes to the hand-drawn style of graphics. While other games were still using pixelated sprites, Earthworm Jim’s graphics felt like they smoothed out those rough edges to create something players hadn’t seen from their games console before. While the odds of getting a new Earthworm Jim game are basically non-existent, unless you still think Tommy Tallarico’s Amico console is actually going to launch (it won’t), at least those first two games are still whippers.
Virtua Racing
We couldn’t talk about beautiful games on the SEGA Genesis and not mention the one game that actually brought 3D to a 2D console: Virtua Racing. Originally developed by AM2 as a proof of concept for a new 3D graphics engine titled Model One, the results wowed SEGA enough that Virtua Racing would launch in 1992 in arcades around the world. Players would immediately fall in love with the bright colours and revolutionary 3D graphics, something SEGA and AM2 continued to push as they moved on to games like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA.
Despite the arcade release’s popularity, most believed that Virtua Racing wouldn’t see a home console release for a long time, because of how far ahead technically the game was compared to the Genesis, SNES and others. In 1994 though, SEGA managed to ship Virtua Racing on cartridge, and while it wasn’t quite as good as the arcade release, SEGA achieved the impossible: giving players a true 3D experience on a console best known for 16-bit pixels, and it looked great. Of course, impossible came with a cost though, as the game used a costly chip called the SEGA Virtua Processor, which meant the game cost $100 in the US and £70 in the UK. That’s as much as a deeply disappointing Star Wars game today, ouch.
Meanwhile, Nintendo shoved four excellent Mario games on one cartridge for just fifty of your English pounds. Take a guess where consumers spent their money.
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