As a fan of the MegaDrive and Sonic the Hedgehog in particular, I’ve been waiting for The Ultimate MegaDrive collection for 360/PS3. Of course, I have a MegaDrive and most of the Sonic collections that have been released over the years but the convenience of having a PS3 disc that doesn’t require any backwards compatibility shenanigans appeals greatly. Add to this the fact that Sonic is a perfect game to play with my and friends’ children who are just beginning to explore gaming and that this is a collection of no less than 40 games. That’s right. 40 games. I used to pay £40 for these cartridges in the 1990s – in fact, Sonic 3 cost a good deal more than that if I remember rightly. I don’t remember thinking these prices were outrageous at the time (though to make my pocket money go further I’d have happily paid less), and these remain games that I want to play, so the retail price of 30 quid for 40 of them seemed like a steal.

Being a prudent individual, I didn’t go out and buy it in the first shop I came across so I shopped around a bit. Plus, I wanted to find out whether there were any differences between the 360 and PS3 packages (remember the differences in the antialiasing between the console versions of SFIV). Pointing my browser at some online retailers, I quickly found out that I could save a fiver which was nice but there was a bigger, and altogether less welcome, surprise in store. Reading through the customer reviews I was taken aback by some of the comments. OK, so some people thought the games hadn’t aged as well as they’d hoped and their sepia-tinted nostalgic memories of these games had caused them to overlook some of what they now thought of as repetition. I understand that and those comments seem perfectly reasonable. They’re not necessarily sentiments I share as I find many of the most recent games I’ve bought and played to be unnecessarily complex and lacking the essential focus on fun that characterises games like Sonic, but they’re sentiments I can understand. After all, there are films, television programmes, records – and games – that in my youth seemed to represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement but that now make me cringe as an adult. Tackling players’ changing qualitative judgements and expectations about structure, aesthetics and form as well as confronting the fogginess of our collective ludic memory are among the issues we have to deal with at The NVA as we seek to encourage an appreciation of these important, influential – and we think – still enjoyable and informative titles.

However, one thing I wasn’t quite prepared for was the quantitative approach to measuring the value of a collection like this. Let’s take a look at some of the comments…

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“Ultimate” Collection? 32Mb of games on a Blu-ray disc?
I am a massive fan of the Sega Megadrive and have been looking forward to this release since it was first announced. Seeing the list of games was an abrupt smack in the face. Let’s do the maths, shall we? (as I can, ahem, vouch for the size of every ROM)…

There are 40 Megadrive games at a total of 31 Megabytes of data. This was taking the Michael on a DVD release for the PS2 (or even on a UMD for the PSP), but for a format that can store 50 Gigabytes of data, it’s an insult. Sega’s entire back catalogue of Megadrive games only comes to around 800 Megabytes – they could fit that several times over on a DVD.
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This is extremely cynical of Sega… and I won’t be parting with my cash this time, as I’m forunate to have a PS3 that already plays the previous “Mega Collection” that was released for the PS2.

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Don’t mistake “old” for “classic”.
Let the past remain in the past.
As a wii owner (as well as PS3), I’ve downloaded a fair few “classics” from SNES and Megadrive from the Wiistore that I absolutely loved first time around. Now? Honestly, they’re just dull and a waste of money.
Even the most historic, awesome games like Streets of Rage 2 and the Golden Axe trilogy feel tired and repetitive. Some of the titles on offer in this bundle were rubbish first time around too (Ecco, Super Thunderblade).
Amazon has some great REAL classics on offer for PS3 that were designed for PS3 and still look good on PS3. Go and have a look through those before getting a collection of 18 year old games…

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Wtf, only 40 games?
Ehm, why would they only put 40 games on a blu-ray disc.. its like taking a pinch of an apple, and just let the rest of it rotten. and besides that.. where are all the good games i used to play? i cant remember all the names becouse i was probably 5 years old, but that ninja game i used to spend hours and hours to complete.. oh yeah they remembered the sonic and golden axe games.. but if you look at the fact that one game rarely fill more then one MB its an insult to release it on the PS3, a PS1 would run this piece of fail

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Only 40 games? Throughout the time I owned my MegaDrive, which I bought on the day it was released in the UK, I never owned 40 games. Even accounting for all the games I played on friends’ machines, the total probably doesn’t come to considerably more than 40. But now, 40 games seems almost an insult. And if we judge these games only in terms of how many megabytes of memory they occupy, then it is hardly surprising. But are we really so sure that we should measure the value of out ludic heritage with a set of scales or a bucket? Are these not games that we should judge through play – on their own terms as experiences that deliver entertainment, challenge…a whole range of pleasures?

If the influence of supersession and the reduction of videogames to inevitably obsolete technologies is seen anywhere it is in these comments. How could a game still be of value when its entire codebase barely registers as a pit in the 50GB Blu Ray disc that is the contemporary currency of fun? 32Mb of game must be twice as good, or at least better, just as 1080p is superior to 720p and 50MHz is faster than 25MHz. I should be clear, I am not criticising the commenters and reviewers here, I am merely drawing attention to the pervasiveness of the idea that links the technologies of delivery to the experience of play. My concern is that we have equated the the measurable, quantitative facets and specifications of gaming technologies and systems with the altogether less tangible, more difficult to express, but ultimately medium-defining qualities of gameplay, performance and experience. The reviews expressing consternation at the paltry collection of games on offer in the collection appear to be expressing their prior to play. These don’t seem to be the reviews of disappointed purchasers post-play (there are some of those on the site, of course) but rather many of them appear to be the manifestation of consumers’ expectations and a clear indication of the value that we have learned to place on old games.

Can we envisage other media being treated in this manner? ‘The Ultimate Beatles Collection’, you say? Only 13 albums, recorded in the 1960s, and you want how much for this? 10 pounds? Yeah, I think I’ll wait a month and pick it up for a fiver in the bargain bin…