Nintendo Switch Online Is Adding Four Retro Sega Genesis Games Today
The list of titles already includes legendary classics like the arcade-perfect port of Strider, the original Golden Axe, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Streets of Rage 2, and Gunstar Heroes. Whoever's picking the games for this service has some real taste, though, as there are also some more obscure excellent titles, like Beyond Oasis, Kid Chameleon, Pulseman, and classic meme title Zero Wing.
Nintendo's just announced that four more Sega Genesis games are being added to the Switch Online library today, and they run the gamut from impressive early launch titles all the way up to one of the rarest and most expensive games available for the original hardware. Let's check 'em out.
Starting from the earliest release, we have the 1989 release of Ghouls 'n Ghosts from CAPCOM. If you weren't around in 1988, Ghouls 'n Ghosts was a massive hit in the arcades, with lush 16-bit visuals and difficult platform-action gameplay. The port to Sega's nascent home machine is nearly arcade-perfect, and while the audio is hard to listen to in 2023, that's just what it sounded like in the arcade, too.
Revenge of Shinobi is actually a sequel to the original Shinobi arcade game, and for its time, it was a relatively-deep side-scrolling action title. In addition to challenging gameplay, it boasts an awesome soundtrack by none other than Yuzo Koshiro, a composer so skilled he put his name on the title screen for every game he worked on—an impressive repertoire including games like Streets of Rage and Actraiser.
Taking things in a more role-playing direction, we have the isometric action-RPG Landstalker. You play as Nigel the Forest Elf as he struggles his way through challenging puzzles and difficult mazes. Landstalker is one of the most-overlooked games on the system, and it also has an excellent soundtrack along with richer visuals than most folks would associate with the Mega Drive hardware.
Finally, we have a fairly late release for the system, Shin Souseiki Ragnacenty—known as Crusader of Centy in the US and Soleil in Europe. Despite that this game is widely described as "SEGA's Zelda," it's actually a deeper and richer experience than the classic SNES game—only to be expected given that it came out three years later. Besides being an excellent game in its own right, this is also one of the rarest titles in the collector market; complete copies can go for thousands of dollars.
Genesis games on Switch Online are a fancier than playing them on real hardware, as you get a lot of common emulator features, like rewinding, save states, and even netplay with voice chat for couch co-op games. If you have a Switch and already subscribe to the Switch Online service with the Expansion Pack add-on, you don't have to pay extra for these games at all; just download the Sega Genesis app for your Switch and they should be in your library.
