Alfredo Bontempi - City Ruins (Avaron)

Mega Final Fight - DIPSWITCH

After having successfully shrunken arcade Final Fight down to a Mega Drive-sized cart file, fan devs CFX have, quite apparently, gotten drunk on their power. Not only have they added a scroll feature to the character select screen that reveals two brand new player options - Captain Commando and Maki from Super Nintendo exclusive Final Fight 2 - but extra moves have been added to the three original selections. Cody inherits elements of his Street Fighter Alpha 3 move-list while Haggar gains a meaty double axe handle-style strike. 

Savaged Regime - Toad Man (YM2612 Cover)

Final Fight Ultimate - 2P

Another look at CFX's Final Fight Ultimate, a modern fan project that squeezes Capcom's seminal coin-op down to a blast processing-friendly size. This latest clip shows off a gameplay mode missing from the SNES' 1990 adaptation (a Japanese launch title no less, which probably explains why the cart was a little feature poor): simultaneous two-player action. 

Savaged Regime - Chytrid Mind

Final Fight Ultimate - BLASTED

First look at a Final Fight fan project that shrinks Capcom's seminal coin-up down to Mega Drive dimensions. Although there's not much but menus in this clip, Edmo Caldas, Master Linkuei and Mauro Xavier's Final Fight Ultimate already looks about on par with the nearest equivalent adaptation, the 1989 Mega CD release, and conclusively trumps the period SNES cart(s) by allowing players to chose from all three street fighting characters. Although hardly a fair match-up, given the intervening decades of accumulated compiling know-how, it's still fun to see Sega's humble 16-bit system pushed to its limit. 

Keisuke Tsukahara - Burning Downtown 1 // Statue of Liberty

Sega Genesis / Mega Drive Characters by Sam McKenzie

RoboCop Versus The Terminator - VIOLENCE MODE

Replay Burners' latest playthrough vid is especially exciting. This longplay of the Mega Drive / Genesis version of RoboCop Versus The Terminator takes place with the violence mode cheat code activated - this optional input introduces extra enemies to the game, including Terminator dogs in the future and female criminals in the present; RoboCop can also catch on fire, forcing the player to either shoot a fire hydrant or hunt down an automatic sprinkler system. That's not all though, the player behind the run, Jarl HL 3.0, makes a bee line for the game's many hidden stages, reminding me of a long-held query of my own. When you finish RoboCop Versus The Terminator, the closing credits ask you if you are sure you have found all the game's secret levels. This pointed needling always made me wonder if there was an alternative credit sequence that would then congratulate the player for finding all of the game's concealed areas? 

Since I was 12 when the game came out, I had more than enough time to play then replay this game, pushing RoboCop up against every wall and surface to see if they could be passed through. Make it into one of these offscreen spaces and (sometimes) a secret stage could be accessed by pressing up on the d-pad. Happily Jarl, on this impressively thorough run, doesn't discover any more areas than I had done myself. The hidden OCP office packed with Terminator found in the second stage or the Secret Remote Base - complete with background tile designs shamelessly cribbed from the industrial landscapes seen in Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira - were, I think, relatively well known but Jarl even hits areas I remember thinking were particularly obscure, such as the Secret Streets Exit found in the OCP building or the olive coloured, alternative version of Delta City. Watching today, these secret stages offer a slightly more experimental approach to the game, usually by packing the area with enough enemies to simulate a sort of bullet hell but also, in the case of an unfinished, palette swapped city, by focusing the level around a trepidatious, vertical, progression. 

Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi - BIG FIRE WHEEL

I had thought that the bouncing, burning wheel - seen here at 14:15 - was the last boss in Mega Drive exclusive Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi, likely because it was as far as I ever got. Turns out there are several stages afterwards; remix encounters that take a short, basic, layout from the second level of the Shinobi coin-op then stuffs it with a barracks worth of enemies. Limp through these ambushes to face a seated final boss who summons even more minions. No idea why I had trouble with the orbiting fire hazard either. Looking at it with 2021 eyes, the pattern looks pretty straightforward, even if the windows for damage are pretty narrow. Probably, my pre-teen brain couldn't handle the idea that the tumbling rock arena didn't mean that the fight was on the clock, requiring a quick resolution. 

Mega Drive - ZPF

Coming soon to Sega's 16-bit home system! ZPF, an absolutely gorgeous arcade shooter (that looks like Gynoug by way of Mega Turrican) from Gryzor, jgvex and Tanzer vet Mikael Tillander. 

Savaged Regime - For The Love Of (YM2612 Rearranged)

Savaged Regime - Mystic Cave Zone (YM2612 Rearranged)

Xeno Crisis - BUG HUNT

Not long to wait now, Bitmap Bureau's twin-stick arena shooter is due at the end of October. The difficulty now (for me at least) is deciding between a digital download off a modern storefront or forking out for a lovingly recreated Mega Drive box and cart.

Xeno Crisis - SHIMA

With Mega Drive super-brawler Paprium missing in action - despite a leathered-up launch party late last year - it falls to Bitmap Bureau's Xeno Crisis to deliver on modern, tricked-out 16-bit thrills.

Savaged Regime - Xeno Crisis Area 1

VISUAL SHOCK // SPEED SHOCK // SOUND SHOCK

Mega Drive - Godspeed Us to the Stars

RULE OR DIE

In the market for a scrolling beat 'em for up for a dead and buried 16-bit system? Watermelon Games got you covered! Paprium is a gorgeous looking post-apocalyptic brawler in the Streets of Rage vein; a title so monumentally massive that it needs an 80 Megabit cartridge (that's twice as much space as Capcom's Super Street Fighter II conversion took up) to contain its majesty. Hell of a trailer too, Body Hammer era Shinya Tsukamoto, eat your fucking heart out.

Koichi Namiki, Katsuhiro Hayashi and Tohru Nakabayashi - Type II / Beyond the Galaxy