Radica Megadrive 6-In-1

Apart from the Sonic-coloured control pad being swapped out for one sporting a more lurid Robotnik shade of red, the second Radica Megadrive 6-In-1 is pretty much the same hardware as the previous unit I’ve already taken a peek at. The dinky, shrunken Megadrive 2 is still exceedingly cute, the pad still resembles the Megadrive controller and retains the reasonable build quality and the battery life is still only slightly shy of utterly phenomenal.

And as with the previous device, the six games included are something of a mixed bunch; obviously the lead title is the domain of the blue spiky geezer’s second outing, but he’s joined by two other big name Sega characters, Alex Kidd and Ecco the Dolphin. As before there’s something for puzzle fans included and this time the role is taken by the excellent and now rather heavily cloned gem stacker Columns, whilst the less recognised part of the Sega back catalogue on show this time are Gain Ground, which is presumably what happens when a role playing game and a shoot ‘em up mate, and The Ooze… which doesn’t defy description as such, but the idea of being a puddle of slime and dribbling around the levels is pretty bizarre.

Radica Megadrive - Sonic 2

Speaking of strangeness, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has a two player versus mode based on the Chaos Emerald bonus runs, but this is rendered all but useless by the hardware only offering a single controller; no, it’s nowhere near a deal breaker but rather puzzling as to why it’s been left in place and once a race has been started, the player has a choice of either wading through five minutes of boredom or hitting the reset button. But that and Columns constantly blinking a “press start” message for a second player that will sadly never come aside, there’s a fair bit going for this DTV; I’d honestly forgotten how much fun Gain Ground was to play or indeed how beautiful a game Ecco the Dolphin is generally, along with those spiffy graphics it also has that wonderful soundtrack that always vaguely reminds me of Paddy Kingsland’s work on the incidental music for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy…

Radica Megadrive - Gain Ground

If you don’t already have the major titles included in another form it’s worth at least considering Radica’s second attempt at shrinking the Megadrive; most of the games included still hold their own apart from The Ooze (which is nicely presented and probably superior to a couple of the other titles visually but just didn’t grab me personally, everyone else’s mileage will possibly vary) and, despite being the plain Jane of the pack, Gain Ground is a real “sleeper”, that spends it’s time sidling up to unsuspecting players who were “just having a quick go” to make sure it worked and purloining an hour of their time. Whilst it’s almost a crying shame that there still haven’t been any kick-arse scrolling shoot ‘em ups included here, Gain Ground does at least go some of the distance towards soothing those itchy trigger fingers.

The screenshots for this review were taken from an emulator, unfortunately the (t)rusty old Retro Tat grabbing hardware gave up the ghost a few months previously and the current solution is utterly incapable of locking onto the signal being kicked out by this DTV!