The Weekly Five

SEGA Five: Bein’ bad – SEGA style

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Admit it. When a game gives you the option to be bad, you go for it. Unlike the stupid real world, video games have no repercussions. While game designers may not intend for you to do these bad things, or there are in-game penalties, in the end it’s just a game so you can be bad to your heart’s content, hit the reset button and return to playing the game as it was intended. In this week’s Weekly Five, we celebrate Friday the 13th with five SEGA games which allow you to be (you guessed it) bad.

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The Weekly Five: The Shenmue HD Wish List

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To wash the yucky taste of today’s big news story out of our mouths, let’s focus on something positive. Recently, SEGA has been hinting at an HD Shenmue 1 and 2 rerelease. Given the latest announcement of putting more focus on digital releases, Shenmue HD could become even more of a reality. As SEGA has yet to release an official announcement, we can do what Shenmue fans do best and speculate! This week’s Weekly Five will take a look at what we want to see in a Shenmue rerelease. Let’s begin, shall we? [insert sailor joke here]

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The SEGA Five: Jet Set Radio Regional Rumble

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Continuing the Jet Set Radio hype, this week’s Weekly Five will be taking a look at three regional versions of Jet Set/Grind Radio. Those unacquainted with the US, European and Japanese versions of Jet Set Radio may be thinking: “whats the big deal? A ton of Dreamcast titles were released in three regions.” Well, unlike most Dreamcast games, Jet Set Radio had rather notable differences between regional releases. Each version features unique graffiti tags, unique songs, different stages, different character names and voices and even different titles. Of the three, which is the best? That’s what we’ll try to decide today, by comparing five aspects of the games and choosing a winner! Let’s begin.

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Five Things You May Not Have Known About Jet Set Radio

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While I may write about Sonic a lot, my favorite SEGA franchise is actually Jet Set Radio. Ever since playing the original game in 2000, my perception of games has never been the same. Jet Set Radio was more than just a fun game, it was an experience. It introduced me to a world that oozed with color, funky music and over the top characters and settings. Unlike Sonic, however, the Jet Set Radio franchise is insanely small. All fans really have to soak up are two great games, a fun handheld title and the upcoming port. Articles about the series are rare, and the amount of Jet Set Radio merchandise produced could easily fill a small shelf. As a tribute to my favorite SEGA game, I thought I’d increase the web article count by one with five things about Jet Set Radio that the regular SEGA fan may not know about. If, after reading this weekly five, you have learned nothing then consider yourself a Jet Set Radio super fan!

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The Weekly Five: Movies to watch before you play Binary Domain

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Sometimes you have to watch a motion picture to get truly excited about a concept in a video game, at least this is the way Binary Domain has been working out for me. I have always been a big fan of Sci-Fi films, so when I heard that SEGA was tackling down some robotic action, I was all in. Time to post five of the best sci-fi films to get you all pumped up to play Binary Domain.

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The SEGA Five: Star Wars Games on SEGA Consoles

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When I was a kid, most of my free time involved the three S’s: SEGA, Star Wars and The Simpsons. Sometimes, though very rarely, these things would mix. Simpsons games would appear on the Genesis, The Simpsons would parody Star Wars and Sonic 2 would feature the Death Star inspired Death Egg. Despite all this intermingling of my favorite media properties, I never was able to play a Star Wars game on my SEGA Genesis due to Nintendo getting all the games. I recall seeing the Super Star Wars Trilogy in magazines and thinking “why can’t the Genesis get those!?”. As time went on, Star Wars games began to appear on SEGA consoles, and in 1999 I finally owned a console that would receive some of these games. Now, in 2012, I’ve amassed most of the SEGA consoles and all of the Star Wars games. With The Phantom Menace 3D hitting theaters this weekend, I thought it would be fitting to look back at five of my favorite Star Wars games that appeared on SEGA consoles. Do they still hold up? Let’s find out!

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The Weekly Five: Celebrating 18 Years of Sonic 3

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February 2nd, dubbed Hedgehog Day, marked the 18th anniversary of the American release of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Damn, does that make me feel old. Sonic 3 marked a very important point in the Sonic franchise. At the time of release, Sonic mania was in full force. The franchise had multiple TV shows airing, comic books, fast food promotions and even had a float in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. In early 1994 it was near impossible to avoid Sonic, and the release of Sonic 3 only made the franchise even more of a hot commodity. It’s no question that SEGA had a lot riding on the success of the game. Of course, 18 years later we’re still talking about it, so clearly SEGA was successful. In this week’s weekly five, we’ll take a walk down memory lane and look back on just why we love Sonic 3 so much.

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The Weekly Five: The Most Disappointing SEGA Games of 2011

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2011 was an unbelievably great year for SEGA…for the most part. Even the best game company will always have its strings of hits and misses. However, last year I could only really think of one bad stinker. One starring a certain Norse god you will read about later on. With that in mind, I decided to comprise a list of SEGA games that disappointed me in some way. Games that while not outright bad (except one), did not live up to their expectations. If you find a certain favorite of yours on the list, do not take it personally, as this is mainly coming from my own personal view. Read on to find what SEGA games left me a little flat.

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The Weekly Five: SEGA CD Games that Deserve the Christian Whitehead Treatment

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Given the success of the Sonic CD rerelease, both critically and in sales, I think it’s about time SEGA gave Retro Engine creator Christian Whitehead his own studio tasked with rereleasing more classic SEGA games from the Genesis/Mega Drive era. While the Retro Engine can cover more than just SEGA CD titles, I think the SEGA CD library is long overdue for some ports. While the SEGA CD console gets a fair share of shit from the gaming community, there is no denying that the add-on had a number of awesome games. In this week’s Weekly Five we’ll highlight five great SEGA CD games that deserve a rerelease utilizing the Retro Engine. I’ve tried to keep the list tied to games that SEGA could conceivably rerelease, so there is no Snatcher due to that title being owned by Konami.

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The Weekly Five: A Salute to Miles “Tails” Prower

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The secondary playable characters of the Sonic series get a lot of flack. Some, like those who veer the series into bizarre directions, deserve criticism. I like Big the cat as a character, I think his design is great, but the fishing gameplay? Ugh. But I believe there are some who wrongfully receive such hate. I have never been a fan of the term “Sonic’s shitty friends” because it gives an undeserving label to a number of good characters. Some cite the center of this week’s weekly five as the one who kicked off the “shitty friends”, but those folks couldn’t be more wrong. Not only did Tails prove that characters other than Sonic could offer similarly fun Sonic-style gameplay, but he also introduced a new way to traverse zones. To honor Sonic’s sidekick, who has his own 20th anniversary this November, we’ll take a look at five of the fox’s best moments from over the years.

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The Weekly Five: The Games of 2012

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Last week we shared our favorite games of 2011, and while we didn’t officially announce winners or give out some award for SEGA to stick on their box art (I’d imagine we’d award a gold Opa Opa statue nicknamed “the bitty”), the “winners” deserve another mention. Sonic Generations and Yakuza 4 were the top picks, while Guardian Heroes was picked as an excellent download release. Shinobi for the 3DS also earned a spot on the list. Other notable games included Shogun 2, Sonic CD, Daytona USA, Virtua Tennis 4 and Football Manager 2012. Overall, 2011 was a great year! Being only a week into it, 2012 is still young. However, SEGA has a number of great looking releases on the horizon. In this week’s Weekly Five we’ll look at five of those hotly anticipated titles. Could any of these become our favorites of 2012? Probably.

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Five Great Santas in SEGA History

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Consider this a SEGAbits exclusive: Santa is real! Yes, as it turns out the annual gift giver is the real deal. All those Santas we see at malls? They’re just the middle men. They’re the guys that report to the real Santa. How about all those variations we see of Santa in the media? This is a marketing effort on the real Santa’s part to keep his image alive. Proof of this exists everywhere, but today I thought I’d highlight five notable Santas in SEGA history. After the break, we reveal our Claus.

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The Weekly Five: SEGAbits Holiday Gift Guide

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‘Twas two weeks before Christmas and all through the site, SEGA fans deserved presents, whether naughty or nice.

Okay, “site” and “nice” don’t rhyme. But you get where I’m going with this. The holidays (Christmas specifically, let’s not beat around the bush) are approaching, and you need ideas for what to give the SEGA fan in your life. If you don’t have a SEGA fan in your life, chances are YOU’RE the SEGA fan in your life. So what follows are five unique gift ideas for the holiday Christmas season.

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Five of the Weirdest and/or Worst SEGA Accessories

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SEGA is awesome, there is no doubt about that, but they’re not infallible. Back in the hardware days, SEGA made their fair share of mistakes. I won’t name off the 32X and SEGA CD like a lot of gaming sites do, because to be honest, as an owner of both systems I have to say they have some really great titles. I’ll even defend accessories that only exist for the sake of a few games. Just because the Dreamcast fishing controller is rarely used, due to the limited library of fishing games, does not make it a bad accessory. It’s just highly specialized, and when put to use it is very effective. Same goes for the Samba de Amigo maracas and Virtual-On’s twin sticks. But there are SEGA accessories and add-ons out there that were failures, or were simply too weird to take seriously. This week we’ll take a look at five of these hiccups in SEGA’s history.

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