The next time I start getting nostalgic about playing some old school games from my informative years can somebody please stop me? I’ve been eagerly awaiting Sega’s Ultimate Collection on the 360 since it was first talked about last year. Today I finally got to play it and to be honest so far I’m a little bit disappointed!
For a start (and this can’t be avoided) the graphics. If you’re like me you’ll have fond memories of the games to be found on this collection. They were cutting edge at the time and the graphics in the likes of Streets of Rage, Sonic and Echo were very much cutting edge. Sega have also made a point of selling this as being HD. I knew they weren’t going to redo the graphics, it would take far too much time for what really is a budget title, but you can’t appreciate just how bad these old classics look until you’ve tried them. My gaming setup involves a top of the range 47 inch Phillips LCD and these games look like the blockiest things you’ve ever seen. Think back to the Spectrum and Commodore 64, because on a large TV that exactly how blocky Sega’s Ultimate Collection looks. They have done their best by really limiting ho much of the screen is used for the game itself but it just doesn’t help that much. Of course if they did reduce the size back to the native resolution you would need binoculars to see the action but you’d think they could have come up with some way of effectively scaling the sprites?
But these games are about way more than graphics? Yes I remember when playability was king too. Unfortunately (and I’m talking as somebody who used to write games back in the days of 16-bit) I think we’re all holding on to some rose tinted views. The platform games have slightly dodgy collision detection that just wouldn’t make the grade these days, the beat-em-ups (Streets of Rage, Golden Axe) are nothing more than button bashes. Great fun for 2 minutes but then….then the reality of what these games were begins to bite. I haven’t played through them all yet but I have played through quite a few and without exception the reality just doesn’t live up to my memories, perhaps this is where these games are best left, as fond memories?
In saying all this there are some nice touches. The ability to save your game progress is quite rare when these types of compilation are put together. There’s also the opportunity to unlock extras which should provide some encouragement to keep on playing. But overall I think that for the money this is expensive, it’s the type of compilation that you buy on a whim and when you’ve got Fallout 3, Fable 2 and Gears of War 2 to play it never gets near you console again.
