There are five games in this set—Head-On, Tranquilizer Gun, Border Line, Congo Bongo, and Doki Doki Penguin Land—and this time the only thing that unites them is how ridiculously old they are. The most ancient of them all, Head-On, hails from the prehistoric era known as 1979, a time when the very first Alien movie was a brand new cinema release, and the most modern in the set is at the time of writing a thoroughly crusty 38 years old. To go any further back into Sega’s history this volume would have to emulate electro-mechanical games like Periscope.
Every included game has a new and exclusive arrange mode to complement the recreated originals, which is a phenomenal amount of work just so some ingrate like me can play them all for five minutes each and go “Huh, neat.” when I’m done. Think about it: they’ve remade five unrelated games, all trying to do completely different things, with no shared assets between them. That’s an incredible effort to go to for something as generically titled (and easily ignored) as “Sega Memorial Collection“.
Unfortunately the quality and content of these remakes varies wildly. We’ll start with the most disappointing one, just so we can get that out the way quickly. Head-On’s arrange mode tries to give the game a stylishly abstracted update, the sort of thing that’s covered head to toe in shiny colours and if it were given a full release would no doubt be accompanied by some upbeat dance music. But by replacing the cars with glowing orbs that don’t even have a defined front, and the circular track with a wiry lattice, Head-On becomes a cold and bland experience. You can imagine yourself skidding a tiny car around a corner—the speed, the force that pushes you into the side of your seat, the weight of the wheel, the thrill of being chased by another vehicle—you can’t really project any of that onto a ball of light.
Tranquilizer Gun and Doki Doki Penguin Land also choose to focus more on graphical upgrades than anything else, although they’re more successful than Head-On (Tranquilizer Gun sadly has little choice but to stick with the same “Dart endangered species then drag them into your truck in exchange for money” gameplay). Congo Bongo reimagines the lead as an explorer-type individual stealing treasures from a series of completely redesigned stages, rather than chasing after the ape that set fire to their tent (!!) in the 1983 arcade game of the same name. Border Line is the most enjoyably altered of them all, turning the game into a free roaming twin stick shooter set in a variety of destructible environments.
But even though we’ve effectively got ten different games on this disc, it still feels lacking. The manual capably describes each game’s mechanics but lacks the extensive bonus content found in other collections, the closest this volume comes to providing any historical context is listing the year each game released in, the gallery has been reduced to a single lump of art rather than split by game, and there’s nothing else to it other than “Look at this stuff we found”—even the usual title accompanying each piece is missing. Sure, I know which one of these is a cart label and what an arcade flyer looks like and I’m glad they’re included (especially at such a phenomenally high resolution, almost certainly making this gallery the best publicly accessible source of these materials short of owning your own copies of the real things), but I didn’t glean any of that from the information contained within Memorial Collection.
Why are there no museum-like infocards tucked away in here to help people understand exactly what it is they’re playing? Were the arcade boards bespoke, or used for a variety of different games? Did they do well? What did they lead to? Is there any significance to Penguin Land’s use of the now familiar Sega logo? Was it the one of the earliest games to do so? Why is the gunshot sound in 1981’s Tranquilizer Gun so realistic? Is it a clever programmer’s trick, or was it originally created by some sort of cunning physical component, like Q*bert‘s knocker was? It’s hard to grasp even something as basic as how these games compared to their contemporaries, whether they’re representative of the general quality of arcade games at the time, a plucky young company stumbling into an exciting new digital entertainment frontier, or already miles ahead of the pack, and this lack of context dampens the fun you could be having with these old games. Is Border Line’s jerky scrolling a pioneering technical feat, a young programmer’s first attempt, or a compromise forced by a need to make use of an over-ordered, underpowered, component? Sega Memorial Collection will never say.
Sega Memorial Collection will also never let you play Sega’s own SG-1000 ports of any of these games (where they were available), nor can you play the three vertical screen games in the collection (that’ll be Tranquilizer Gun, Border Line, and Congo Bongo) using a rotated TV either. While not necessarily easy requests to accommodate, these are all odd omissions in a series that has on many occasions in the recent past given players the ability to pick and choose exactly which regional variant of a home console port to play, issued fresh tweaks of old arcade ROMs, and fretted over the precise refresh rate of demanding Model 2 arcade games.
Unlike Monaco GP‘s remake, which I felt succeeded because it was always focused entirely on being a remake and nothing else, this volume presents itself as a historical collection of classics only to immediately start backpedalling on the idea the instant you hit the game select screen. This always displays the arrange mode games first, as if nobody would really want to play the old version of Head-On (hi, it’s me—the lady with the adorably tiny JAMMA compatible PCB of the game). It’s a retro collection that’d be happier if you didn’t play the retro games on it.
In spite of all the issues this still remains an essential disc, even if only because it is still, as far as I can tell, the only official arcade-accurate home outing for… all of them, I think—and that’s not the sort of opportunity any gaming history fan should miss adding to their to-play pile. But there was the perfect opportunity here to shine a light on an often overlooked part of a notable developer/publisher’s history—I just wish Sega had taken it.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 