Sega Classics Arcade Collection 4-in-1

"Almost as good as Sega 6-pak. . ."

I believe the Sega Classics Arcade Collection came as a pack-in disc with one version of the Sega CD hardware, and it's a testament to Sega's arcade heritage that this repackaging of old titles still stands up today.
With this disc, you get the full versions of the original cartridge releases of Golden Axe, Streets of Rage I, Revenge of Shinobi and Columns. All four are decent enough games to begin with, but packed in together, you can't go wrong.

On the other hand, the Sega 6-pak cartridge had all four of these titles plus the original Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Hang-on as well. Granted, the original Sonic is easy enough to come by, and Super Hang-on is nothing to write home about. Still, these extras could have been easily included here but weren't. They should have been.

Gameplay: 10
The four titles included on the CD are all pretty good. There are hours of fun here if you're into older 16-bit games.

Streets of Rage I was the side-scrolling beat-em-up to own when the Genesis was starting out, and it spawned two sequels, each improving over the previous model. Still, the enemies are varied enough and the bosses challenging enough in this first installment to make things interesting.

Golden Axe was a medieval take on the side-scrolling beat-em-up. With a trusty sword/axe and magic at your side, you battle hordes of enemy troops and monsters. The atmosphere and scenery here make up for the lower level of challenge that the game offers. Depending on your market, Golden Axe saw one or two sequels as well.

Revenge of Shinobi is yet another classic side-scrolling beat-em-up. This time you use ninja weaponry and acrobatics to defeat an army of other martial artists. Good music and challenging gameplay helped this title to see several sequels as well.

Finally, we have Columns, a Tetris-clone puzzler. Instead of various rotating shapes, you rearrange colored blocks within falling three-block columns. It's not as much fun as Tetris, but even this game managed to earn itself a sequel. This is probably the weakest title in the bunch.

Story: 7
The first three games have very similar premises: an evil villain has taken over your city/kingdom/realm, and you must battle their army of henchmen and followers to unseat them and free the people. It's all pretty generic stuff. Shinobi even has an actual revenge motif happening for past wrongs against his family/honor.

Columns doesn't have a story. It's a simple puzzle game. As such, you really can't ''win'' or ''beat'' the game. You just keep going through round after round of falling blocks until you finally lose.

Video: 8
All four of the titles included on the CD are early Genesis releases, so the graphics aren't great. The visuals are pretty good for their time, though, and you get four pretty good games in the mix. Individually, each game would probably rank a 7 for graphics, but together, I'm giving them a little extra credit.

Audio: 9
The audio for all four titles is good, but this has nothing to do with CD quality sound. The original music for Streets of Rage has been universally applauded; it's really that good. The tunes for Golden Axe fit the Middle Age time frame quite well, and both Shinobi and Columns have their moments in the audio department as well.
Still, the CD format has some drawbacks. First, there are load times between tracks that the cartridge versions don't have. Second, there are no improvements in audio on the CD over the cartridge: nothing new, extra, etc. It's all the same old stuff. Third, the CD soundtrack is actually dumbed down on Golden Axe. Death cries and moans (both your own and your enemies') have been replaced with a simple ''ouch,'' sounding really stupid within the otherwise decent soundtrack.

Also, I noticed that the CD can't ''loop'' tunes indefinitely when a scene continues past a set period of time like the cartridge version can. Instead, the CD has to fade out a tune, end it, and then start the tune over from the top. The cartridge versions can play a tune continually. Why couldn't the CD have done that as well?!

Buy or Rent: Buy
The Sega CD system went through a massive meltdown when Sega stopped supporting it to focus on the Saturn shipwreck, so used Sega CD titles are relatively cheap to come by if you can find them.

Overall: 9
This is a great package of classic 16-bit Sega games on one CD. If you get tired of playing one title, you can simply reset the CD player and choose another without even changing CDs.

Still, if you had the choice of buying each of these titles individually or as a group (Sega 6-pak) in the cartridge format, you'd get the same playing experience without the load times, sound edits and starting/stopping tunes.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/01, Updated 01/23/01