| | | Fighting game for the Sega Genesis.
About 50 Genesis games are available on Steam for 99 cents each; mostly they're the same ones available in the Sega Genesis Classics collection that I have on PS4--but Eternal Champions isn't in that collection, so I thought I'd try it.
When you buy them off Steam, it downloads the whole 1.5 GB Sega Genesis Classics thing, and defaults to running it through the collection's 3d game room front-end, just like on PS4. Or you can opt to run a quick launcher mode that seems to give you quick access to the settings and things, but was in fact awful.
The installer creates an "uncompressed roms" folder in the install directory. So I took the Eternal Champions rom from there, renamed it ".bin," and ran it in the Fusion emulator; once I had right-clicked fusion.exe and set it to Windows 7 compatibility mode, this worked great.
The single-player game in Eternal Champions, though, is not very welcoming. The menus are weird--when you select Single Player, your main option seems to be "Enter Contest," where you quickly get mashed into pulp by a random opponent; this happened even after I got my six button controller set-up figured out in Fusion. There is no difficulty setting for "Enter Contest."
Other than that, there's what amounts to a training mode and a VS CPU mode where you can set up a single fight; these modes DO have difficulty settings: switching those from Player/CPU skill 8/8 to 1/1 let me mash a CPU to a pulp. Swell.
Not very fun, though; the moves have no real flow or feel to them. Glancing at a FAQ, the special move inputs appear to be largely direction+button--and they just sort of happen, in the least compelling way possible. The graphics have a nice, somewhat realistic, dithered look, but animate very poorly, and sound effects are so weak as to serve only as confirmation that, well, SOMETHING happened.
It feels real bad.
Wikipedia says the game was made by Sega. MobyGames says it was made by SEGA Interactive Development Division, who had been an independent California game studio called Interactive Designs from 1984 to 1992, when they were acquired by Sega; they had only made five games up to that point, but from the acquisition to when they shut down in '95 or '96, they churned out 13 games, with 1993's Eternal Champions being the second of those (the 11th being 1995's "Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side," an "enhanced port"). |
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| | | | To be fair to SIDD, most fighting games from 1993 felt real bad. |
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| | | | BlastEm has been recommended to me as a superior Genesis emulator. I have not tried it. |
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