Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Playthrough with Thud. What a terrible game. It bewilders me SEGA thought this was fit to release, I refuse to believe that when they started making this someone didn't go "this is awful, cancel it". This is one of the worst fighting games I've ever played, mainly due to the core gameplay mechanics: they don't work!
Dark Edge was released in 1993 (despite the 1992 copyright on the title screen). It's a 2D fighter, but makes use of sprite scaling to simulate a 3D arena. This means you can move in and out of the screen, and that's where the game fails immediately: you spend most fights jumping around, desperately trying and hoping to land a hit on your opponent. It just doesn't work at all and to me this is basically unplayable. Due to the joystick moving your character around, you can't use it to jump or crouch. It instead has a dedicated jump button, and crouching normal attacks can only be done by pressing an attack button when your character isn't moving.
This game has special moves, but due to the control scheme they are too difficult to do. Thud's projectile is a charge back, forward + punch but I can't get it to come out consistently. Some of the inputs for other special moves are too complicated for this game's control scheme, I couldn't get some of them to work at all.
And of course the CPU is horrendous as well. They have no problem doing any special move and spamming it whenever they want, and I'm pretty sure they get damage boosts. Thud is the only character I could beat the game with, and that's only because he has a very good move with his sword, which is done with a half circle forward motion followed by a punch button. This slice attack covers a large portion of the screen and does chip damage. The general plan with Thud is to jump in with a strong punch, then do the sword slice move. This works on most opponents, the only ones I had issues with were Goliath and Thud himself.
For Goliath, keep trying to use projectiles and keep him at a distance, if he does his arm swinging move, block it and then counter with a sword slice. For Thud, just keep using the sword slice move, he tends to get in your face a lot so that's all I could come up with.
This game has two unplayable bosses. The first guy is RAM-X, I got stuck here for a while since I couldn't seem to land any attacks on him, whilst his flying clothesline does a lot of damage. The trick is to let him spam missiles, and then move left or right so they all miss. RAM-X will usually always do a flying clothesline after this, so what you need to do is a neutral jump and then try to hit him with a jumping strong punch. The timing on this is really tight, but whether you hit or miss, just wait for him to start spamming missiles and then try again. You're most likely going to have to timer scam him. If there's two nice things I can say about this game, it's that RAM-X looks cool and his theme is pretty good too.
The Ruler is the final boss. Luckily you only have to win one round against him here, whilst he has to win two to beat you. If you can get Thud's projectile to come out consistently you can beat him with just that, you just have to keep moving left and right. However since I can't get that move to work all the time I hard to come up with another strategy: jump in with a strong punch, move back, repeat. You will take damage but should be able to win, even if you do cut it close like I did.
The Astro City Mini was released in Japan late on in 2020, and later got released elsewhere in 2021. I was initially really excited when it was announced, mainly because Virtua Fighter was going to be on it -I was hoping more Model 1 and maybe even some Model 2 games would be included. So it was pretty disappointing when Virtua Fighter ended up being the only Model system game on it at all.
It does include games that had never had console ports before, with Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder being the most notable. But some of these games are awful, such as this game and Arabian Fight. And did it really need to have three different Columns games, but not a single OutRun or Hang-On game?
The games also all lack option settings of any kind, which is a surprising omission. I want to say that all games are on their default settings, but I know Rad Mobile isn't -you start the race with only 45 seconds, when you're supposed to have 60.
Playthrough with Thud. What a terrible game. It bewilders me SEGA thought this was fit to release, I refuse to believe that when they started making this someone didn't go "this is awful, cancel it". This is one of the worst fighting games I've ever played, mainly due to the core gameplay mechanics: they don't work!
Dark Edge was released in 1993 (despite the 1992 copyright on the title screen). It's a 2D fighter, but makes use of sprite scaling to simulate a 3D arena. This means you can move in and out of the screen, and that's where the game fails immediately: you spend most fights jumping around, desperately trying and hoping to land a hit on your opponent. It just doesn't work at all and to me this is basically unplayable. Due to the joystick moving your character around, you can't use it to jump or crouch. It instead has a dedicated jump button, and crouching normal attacks can only be done by pressing an attack button when your character isn't moving.
This game has special moves, but due to the control scheme they are too difficult to do. Thud's projectile is a charge back, forward + punch but I can't get it to come out consistently. Some of the inputs for other special moves are too complicated for this game's control scheme, I couldn't get some of them to work at all.
And of course the CPU is horrendous as well. They have no problem doing any special move and spamming it whenever they want, and I'm pretty sure they get damage boosts. Thud is the only character I could beat the game with, and that's only because he has a very good move with his sword, which is done with a half circle forward motion followed by a punch button. This slice attack covers a large portion of the screen and does chip damage. The general plan with Thud is to jump in with a strong punch, then do the sword slice move. This works on most opponents, the only ones I had issues with were Goliath and Thud himself.
For Goliath, keep trying to use projectiles and keep him at a distance, if he does his arm swinging move, block it and then counter with a sword slice. For Thud, just keep using the sword slice move, he tends to get in your face a lot so that's all I could come up with.
This game has two unplayable bosses. The first guy is RAM-X, I got stuck here for a while since I couldn't seem to land any attacks on him, whilst his flying clothesline does a lot of damage. The trick is to let him spam missiles, and then move left or right so they all miss. RAM-X will usually always do a flying clothesline after this, so what you need to do is a neutral jump and then try to hit him with a jumping strong punch. The timing on this is really tight, but whether you hit or miss, just wait for him to start spamming missiles and then try again. You're most likely going to have to timer scam him. If there's two nice things I can say about this game, it's that RAM-X looks cool and his theme is pretty good too.
The Ruler is the final boss. Luckily you only have to win one round against him here, whilst he has to win two to beat you. If you can get Thud's projectile to come out consistently you can beat him with just that, you just have to keep moving left and right. However since I can't get that move to work all the time I hard to come up with another strategy: jump in with a strong punch, move back, repeat. You will take damage but should be able to win, even if you do cut it close like I did.
The Astro City Mini was released in Japan late on in 2020, and later got released elsewhere in 2021. I was initially really excited when it was announced, mainly because Virtua Fighter was going to be on it -I was hoping more Model 1 and maybe even some Model 2 games would be included. So it was pretty disappointing when Virtua Fighter ended up being the only Model system game on it at all.
It does include games that had never had console ports before, with Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder being the most notable. But some of these games are awful, such as this game and Arabian Fight. And did it really need to have three different Columns games, but not a single OutRun or Hang-On game?
The games also all lack option settings of any kind, which is a surprising omission. I want to say that all games are on their default settings, but I know Rad Mobile isn't -you start the race with only 45 seconds, when you're supposed to have 60.
