Mega Games I

Buy a Mega Drive and this is the cartridge in the box. Sega have taken a puzzler, a racer and a football game, put them on one cartridge and called it Mega Games I. The numeral on the end tells you they have more of these planned. We have reviewed all three on their own. The question here is different. As the first cartridge a lot of new owners will ever play, do they add up to more than their parts, or is one strong game carrying two passengers?

The answer sits between the two. Two of these games are worth owning. The third is along for the ride.

The front door

Switch on and you get a splash screen with an icon for each game. Push the d-pad (the cross-shaped direction pad) to pick the one you want. It does the job without fuss.

The music behind it is a track lifted from World Cup Italia '90, so the first thing this cartridge plays you comes from its weakest game. The football's music is one of the few parts of it that works, so the choice makes more sense than it sounds.

Columns

Columns is the best game on the cartridge and the one you will still be playing long after the other two have gone quiet.

Stacks of three jewels fall into a narrow well. You cannot rotate them, but you can cycle the order of the colours as they drop, and the aim is to line up three or more of the same colour horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Matched jewels vanish and everything above falls into the gap. A well-planned drop sets off a chain, with one clear triggering the next. The diagonals are what separate it from Tetris, because they are the matches your eye misses. The magic jewel, a flashing stack that wipes out every jewel of the colour it lands on, gives you a way out of a lost position if you save it for the right moment.

Three classes, a starting level from 0 to 9 and a time trial mode let you set the difficulty, and the versus mode puts two wells side by side for you and a friend. That versus mode is the reason Columns keeps coming out of the drawer. The three music tracks, Clotho, Lathesis and Atropos, are by Tokuhiko Uwabo, credited as "Bo", and they suit a game that starts calm and ends in panic.

Super Hang-On

Super Hang-On is two games in one, so this cartridge is four games wearing three names.

Arcade mode is a faithful conversion of Sega's coin-op. Four continents make four courses, from the six-stage Beginner run across Africa to the eighteen stages of the Expert class in Europe, and you race the clock from checkpoint to checkpoint with leftover time carried forward. Past 280kph the turbo kicks in and the bike climbs beyond 300. The trees, lamp posts and advertising hoardings lining the road are waiting for anyone who runs wide, and the Bird Bird sign has claimed more riders than any rival.

Original mode is the part built for the Mega Drive. You race a rival and win money from your sponsor. The money goes on frame, engine, brakes, exhaust, oil and tyres, and the bike improves race by race, with a password to carry the season over. Arcade mode gives you a half hour of speed. Original mode gives you a reason to come back next week.

It is one player only, which is a shame on a cartridge that otherwise suits the whole house. The four tunes, Outride a Crisis, Sprinter, Winning Run and Hard Road, carry the arcade's energy, with the Mega Drive music handled by Katsuhiro Hayashi, Koichi Namiki, Shigeru Ohwada and Chikako Kamatani.

World Cup Italia '90

And then there is the football.

World Cup Italia '90 is the weak link, and it is not close. The team selection is the best of it: a map of the world, nations rated to match their reputations and a line-up picked from menus. Penalties, corners and goal kicks switch to a view from behind the goal that looks the part.

On the pitch it falls apart. The overhead action is too fast for any skill, and there are no fouls at all, so every match turns into a slide-tackling contest. You can scythe a man down in his own penalty area and the referee waves play on. Each half lasts around six minutes with no option to shorten it, and twelve minutes of the same three moves feels like an afternoon. The audio is three background tracks by Keisuke Tsukahara and a single muffled "GOAL!", with no crowd at all.

Friendlies take two players, so there is a laugh to be had against a mate. It will not last.

The sum of the parts

Taken as a package, Mega Games I covers a lot of ground. A puzzle game, a racer and a football game on one cartridge means there is something here for most people in the house. Two of the three support a second player, and the better two-player game is the puzzler, not the football.

The balance is lopsided. Columns and Super Hang-On carry the cartridge. World Cup Italia '90 is filler, and it is hard to believe anyone at Sega thought otherwise. A compilation earns its keep when every game on it would justify a slot in your collection. This one manages two out of three.

As the cartridge that comes in the box with the console, two out of three is a good return. A new Mega Drive owner gets a puzzler that will last for years and an arcade racer with a season mode built in, before spending anything on software. That is a better start than a single game would give, even with a dud in the set.

In Hindsight

Mega Games I never got a review of its own in the magazines. They had covered all three games separately, so the compilation's reputation was borrowed from its contents. The Codex follows the same route: each game has its own full write-up, linked above, and this page is about what happens when the three share a box.

It started life as a pack-in, the cartridge that came in the box with the console, and was later sold on its own through high street shops such as Argos and Currys. As a pack-in it was the first cartridge many UK owners ever put in the machine. That is how a puzzle game ended up in the collection of someone who only wanted a racer.

The numeral turned out to be a promise Sega kept. Mega Games 2 and Mega Games 3 followed, then Mega Games 6, Mega Games 6 Vol. 2 and Mega 6 Vol. 3. World Cup Italia '90 kept turning up along the way, appearing on Mega Games 6, Mega Games 6 Vol. 2 and Mega 6 Vol. 3, the last of which renamed it Sega Soccer.

Two out of three is a fair return. The Codex keeps all three, including the one you will play twice.