What is the worst SEGA game?

[Scotty]

Sonic 06.

 

[RETRO-VETRO RETRO-VETRO]

Sega titles I personally consider to be poorly made or disappointing:

• Sonic '06
• Shadow the Hedgehog (I liked this one.)
• Rise of the Robots
• Shaq Fu
• Dark Castle
• Sword of Sodan
• Heavy Nova
• Action 52
• Last Battle
• Batman Forever
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers
• Virtua Fighter Animation
• Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble
• Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Game Gear)
• Ultraman: Towards the Future
• X-Perts
• The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
• Pit-Fighter
• Ballz 3D

 

[Scotty]

Sega titles I personally consider to be poorly made or disappointing:

• Sonic '06
• Shadow the Hedgehog (I liked this one.)
• Rise of the Robots
• Shaq Fu
• Dark Castle
• Sword of Sodan
• Heavy Nova
• Action 52
• Last Battle
• Batman Forever
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers
• Virtua Fighter Animation
• Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble
• Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Game Gear)
• Ultraman: Towards the Future
• X-Perts
• The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends
• Pit-Fighter
• Ballz 3D

"Shaq Fu" had cool rotoscoped animation and good music, at the very least.

 

[bjork]

Actually by Sega? It's probably still Cyber Shinobi, all these years later.

 

[moonbits]

Either Sonic 06 or The Secret Rings.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Sonic 06.

I felt that it was a super low-hanging fruit to even bring up, but yes... It truly is garbage.

I don't even know what it's trying to be: the intro feels like someone had modded Sonic into Final Fantasy, the actual gameplay felt like a bad port of Sonic Adventure; and the writing seemed straight out of the cartoon, the one that had the Sonic Says segments.

That said... Chaotix is still the worst one for me, even when it felt cool and had great characters. Much like how Nintendo forfeited having an original Mario game on the Virtual Boy, barring Sonic from its sole 32X entry felt like an admission of defeat.

 

[Scotty]

"...Secret Rings."

Too many painful memories I had with that game as a kid lol.

 

[Lod 10]

I've never played Sonic 2006, but I know what the game is like, and the videos I watch are awful.

 

[Ferik]

I actually love playing '06. It's a mess, but it's a really funny mess. PS2 Sonic Heroes and Game.com Sonic Jam are just painful. They stop being funny almost immediately.

I don't know what the absolute worst game is though. Afterburner 3 is one that pisses me off.

 

[qw90700]

Shenmue games without a doubt. I admire what they tried to do but it suck ass royally.

 

[werewolfx]

sonic adventure 2.
Oh boy i get to play the same character twice

 

[PhaseJump]

Shenmue didn't finish it's own plot, but it sure as shit did finish Sega.

 

[Mubashureta]

Alex kid the lost stars is doo doo fard shid

 

[Luxfin]

The One and Only Terrible Sonic RPG that ended on a cliff hanger due a stupid lawsuit. (Thanks for that one Ken)

 

[csanjuro]

Sonic's Schoolhouse

 

[UnDubious]

I thought the game was fine. Not good, but fine. One hit deaths and Jan-ken are the two things that ruined it.

It's decent IMO. I like that it starts with these purely exploratory levels where you're just gathering money and buying items for your journey in town, then it turns into a real platformer 1/3 of the way through, and then it ends with a giant castle that's almost a mini Metroidvania in itself. Unusual structure. Jan-ken doesn't ruin anything, just buy the ring that lets you read their minds and it's not too hard.

 

[Miles Miles]

The One and Only Terrible Sonic RPG that ended on a cliff hanger due a stupid lawsuit. (Thanks for that one Ken)
View attachment 125691

It probably has the worst SEGA OST lol

 

[Luxfin]

It probably has the worst SEGA OST lol

If I hear the battle theme from that game one more time. I think I would need take some mint candy to erase the pain.

 

[Ferik]

It probably has the worst SEGA OST lol

That remix of Diamond Dust Zone in particular for Central City always kills me.

 

[UnDubious]

Wasn't the Sonic RPG made by like Bioware, of all people? I always thought it sounded like the weirdest fit.

 

[Alarond]

Man, if you want to know a VERY VVEEERY bad game from Sega...
...You need to know Sonic Eraser.

What is Sonic Eraser? It is an official game from Sega, and (maybe) the VERY first game Sonic is used as the protagonist.

It is a VERY obscure game even today, but I repeat, it is an official game, by SEGA.
Sonic Eraser is a Mega Drive game from 1991, and was released using the "Sega Game Toshokan" (Sega Game Library), a download service for the Mega Drive (yes, a download service, for the Mega Drive, in 1991, by telephone line) using its Official Modem, only in Japan, years before the more famous "SEGA Channel". The "Toshokan" service distributed, basically, exclusive games, and very few commercial games you could get in a physical store (SEGA Channel, years later, will focus on distributing commercial games you could find in the stores).

So... in 1990 SEGA created the Mega Drive official modem, the "Mega Modem", an add-on you only can use in your Mega Drive... if you have the original internal board of that system, or maybe one of the very first revisions of the Mega Drive Model 1 board. Not ANY Mega Drive Model 1 is compatible with the modem: you need an old Model 1. Why? because Sega just cut costs and eliminated the port to connect the modem... around 1992, or maybe late 1991.

The port for the modem was, in those old models, behind the console (behind, NOT under), and is basically a female DE-9, like the 2 controller ports of the MD are... but this one, being "female" instead of "male" (probably to avoid some players trying to connect one controller in it).

Using the modem, along a "Special" cart (which basically seems a normal japanese MD cart) and paying a subscription, you could LITERALLY download games to that cart, and your MD play them as normal games. Being all of this in 1990-1992 (maybe including some 1993), 1 simple MB was a lot of data to download (using expensive telephone calls to some server of SEGA), so originally the games were not very big, and that means they were simpler games (I do not remember well, but I would say all Toshokan "exclusive games" weight less than 1MB or even less than 512KB).

Anyways, Sonic Eraser (apparently) was one of those games you could download, and it has one of the WORST music I've ever seen in a game. The game itself? is just a crappy puzzle game, a "Tetris/Columns" mix clone, but very bad. It uses two "Sonic 1" sprites, which appear all the time and SOMETIMES (sometimes... meaning almost never) react to what is happening, "fighting" against each other. The game never had a physical release, but you can find the rom, and play it.

The existence of this game was not "discovered" by the western public, until 2004, many years after its release, only because then, SEGA re-offered the game in some kind of "pay-per-play Mega Drive games service" (only in Japan), using its website and a "hidden" emulator. Some western user discovered this game in the catalogue of this service, and decrypted the rom (the games of the service were encrypted), "liberating" it.
It also seems SEGA thought, at some point, to include this rare game in the "Sonic Gems Collection" around that same era, in 2005, as one of the extra games... but they finally didn't (internal files of the compilation shows some references to Sonic Eraser).

It is, apparently (although it's not 100% clear to me) the very first game you can "play" with Sonic, because it seems Sonic 1 was not still in the market (but... I don't know if this is 100% sure. Sonic 1 was released in Europe and US in June 1991, and it is not clear when Sonic Eraser was "downlodable" from Toshokan, that same year).
It is NOT the first game you can see Sonic, for sure, because that game is "Rad Mobile" a "superscaler" arcade racer game released by SEGA, in the arcades, some months earlier in 1990, which have some little "Sonic doll" hanging from the rearview mirror of your car, as pure decoration.

If you have a Genesis/MD, and an Everdrive or similar, you can play this and other "Toshokan" games in real hardware. Many of them are mediocre games (they are basically like little demos), but boy, Sonic Eraser is one of the worst. I don't know if all of those games were preserved, but a lot of them are, because later, SEGA sold many of them in 2 compilations for Mega-CD, both sold inside metallic cans (nice cans, in fact), and another compilation for Mega Drive, this being exclusive for the japanese "Sega Channel" (this MD version apparently was also included in the japanese version of the Mega Drive 2 Mini, few years ago).
But they never included "Sonic Eraser", so, it was not until 2004 when "some western guy" discovered the game to the rest of the world.

The music of the game is fucking HORRIBLE.
The game? also horrible.

 

[UnDubious]

Man, if you want to know a VERY VVEEERY bad game from Sega...
...You need to know Sonic Eraser.

1MB was more than the first wave of commercial Genesis games. Revenge of Shinobi is 512kb or so. Those SegaNet games are half that - a quarter when compressed. They're really just mini-games. The novelty of downloading games was crazy for the time but retail games were in a different league. I think Fatal Labyrinth started as a SegaNet game, though? That's basically the precursor to the Mystery Dungeon series, the original Japanese roguelike.
Pyramid Magic is an okay puzzle series too. Nothing amazing though.

 

[Alarond]

1MB was more than the first wave of commercial Genesis games. Revenge of Shinobi is 512kb or so. Those SegaNet games are half that - a quarter when compressed. They're really just mini-games. The novelty of downloading games was crazy for the time but retail games were in a different league. I think Fatal Labyrinth started as a SegaNet game, though? That's basically the precursor to the Mystery Dungeon series, the original Japanese roguelike.
Pyramid Magic is an okay puzzle series too. Nothing amazing though.

Look, this is going to be a big off-topic here, if I answer you, so... But I want to answer you later, in another NEW thread.

 

[Ferik]

It's important to note that 1 megabit (Mb) is the same as 128 kilobytes (KB), and thus 1 megabyte (MB) is 8 megabits.

It's entirely possible the games were listed in Mb as opposed to MB

Sonic Eraser is 256KB or 2Mb

 

[UnDubious]

It's important to note that 1 megabit (Mb) is the same as 128 kilobytes (KB), and thus 1 megabyte (MB) is 8 megabits.

It's entirely possible the games were listed in Mb as opposed to MB

Sonic Eraser is 256KB or 2Mb

Yeah, back then they advertised games by the number of "megs", meaning megabits. "Mb" wasn't used. For example, the back of the Phantasy Star IV box says "24 megs of role-playing challenge!". But ROM was still very expensive in the late '80s and early '90s, so it took a few years before you started seeing bigger 16-bit games, so the point remains - early Genesis games were still rather small, and SegaNet games were smaller still.