Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack

This review originally appeared on this site in April of 2005.


Back in the days when Crystal Pepsi grew wild on store shelves there was a battle being fought for the video gaming dollar of Young America. I chose to devote my time and resources to the Nintendo front, and somehow managed to almost completely shield myself from the “other” console, only managing to occasionally squeeze in a game or two at a friend”s house while trying to figure out how to hold a controller with no Select button.

Now… several… years later I discovered that in exchange for one portrait of Alexander Hamilton I can get an opportunity to play 15 of the games I never really got a chance to experience, and one game SEGA throws in with everything.

Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack features the following games faithfully emulated on your PC:

  • Super Shinobi
  • Vectorman
  • Altered Beast
  • Sonic Spinball
  • Columns
  • Outrun
  • Phantasy Star 2
  • Golden Axe
  • Comix Zone
  • Flicky
  • Kid Chameleon
  • Shining Force
  • Vectorman 2
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2
  • Super Hang On

The selection of games is interesting to say the least. There seems to be mostly “classic” games in this collection with relatively few games thrown in as “filler.” I do find it slightly odd that they included Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Phantasy Star 2, but not the progenitors of their respective series. The only real dog in this collection (besides Sega Swirl) is Flicky. All the other games in this collection are action/adventure games and Flicky plays more like a bizarre version of Mappy, which I never found to be terribly enjoyable.

I think I walked by a demo of Sonic 2 in a store once, and my memory of how that sounded is corroborated by how this version sounds, so I can assume that the sound for the rest of the games is emulated as flawlessly as can be expected. I didn’t really notice too much of a sound enhancement while playing these games with surround sound speakers.

Graphically the games look exactly as they should… if you stand about 15 feet away from your monitor. Playing low-resolution games on a high-resolution computer monitor makes it look like someone at Activision Value Publishing found a way to animate it using the tiles on my kitchen floor. Heavily detailed games like Comix Zone that would probably look fine if there were some way to zoom out end up looking like a Genesis threw up all over my screen.

If you”re going to be playing any of these games for any length of time (with the possible exception of Shining Force) you should do yourself a favor and get a game pad. In my experience, trying to play games designed for a pad with a keyboard just never translated well enough to be particularly enjoyable.

Game Name: Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack
Platform: PC
Purchased from: Target
Amount of money I wasted on it: $9.99
One word summary: “Acceptable”

2 Responses to “Sega Smash Pack Twin Pack”

  1. [...] A while back I briefly mentioned that Sega Swirl, a freebie game included with multiple Sega products. In saying that it was terrible, I gave it more space than it really deserved, but I suppose I should at least justify my position. [...]

  2. [...] Due to its presence on the Sega Smash Pack I assume that it was in at least one arcade at some point, but not in any that I’ve ever been [...]

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