If you ever frequented a pawn shop in the late nineties, one game bafflingly always seemed to be a staple; Sunsoft’s MD Batman - specifically the import.

The game’s wall-made nature, the lack of an abundance of great software in the early years of the MD, and the year-long gap between the game’s Japanese and North American releases meant that a lot of people paid the hefty price to import this one instead of waiting. It’s a a perfectly fine game, but it’s not very hard, and it’s over in less than an hour. That’s not a knock against the game so much as it is a truth about how games were back then - arcade like experiences to be played over and over again in order to master them and challenge your high score.

This copy of the game also came with the original purchase receipt, which outlines the 1991 90 dollar Canadian price tag (170 in today’s money) and the two games he or she traded in.

What is notable about this game is the superb pixel work, solid gameplay, and absolutely amazing music, which used no samples whatsoever for the drums and relied on FM synth for percussion. It’s probably one of the best examples of FM synth on the MD, period.

Enjoy these PVM CRT shots.

More on the Wonermega Soon - but for now, here’s an extremely poorly optimized gif showing the drive door in good working order!

Massive thanks to Dane Olds on retrogameboards for making it happen. I have no idea how I will every thank this guy enough. Again, more soon, but for now, this will have to do.

Konami branched off and moved away from near-Nintendo exclusivity in the early 90s, which meant we saw an expansion of content on MD, PCE, and the X68000.

For whatever reason, I’ve decided the round out the Konami portion of my MD collection by picking up a few new titles. First on my list to discuss is their 1994 sports game, HyperDunk / Double Dribble The Playoff Edition, which was the sequel/remake of their 1980s arcade game.

If Sega Retro’s release dates are accurate, in North America, this game would have been released after the 16-bit NBA Jam home ports but before EA’s NBA Live ‘95. That’s important because Double Dribble was obviously an attempt by Konami to cash in on the sports hungry owner base of Sega’s machine, but their timing could not have been worse. I don’t have any way of verifying sales figures, but I can’t imagine an arcade-style five on five basketball game with no licensing stood a chance on the market against the fully licensed arcade hit NBA Jam, and the fully licensed simulation, NBA Live (which did sell a boat load and topped the 1994 charts). The only real selling point was that this game was one of the very few to offer eight player simultaneous functionality (which would require two four player adapters).

Even by Konami’s own standards at the time, which would have seen the release of their very nice looking arcade game Run and Gun, and the release of the watered down but still technically cool SFC port, Give N Go (which is actually licensed!), this game is a bit of a dud. Which is a shame because the window of release for Konami games on the MD was incredibly short and lasted only a couple of years. Hyper Dribble is not a bad game, and at 2MB, it was double the size of games like Castlevania/Vampire Killer, Rocket Knight, and TMNT - some of which could have benefited from more ROM space.

The game itself is not much more than a slightly revamped version of the 8-bit and arcade classics. The game has no trouble throwing around 10 large sprites with little to now slowdown, good raster effects, and some varied and crunchy voice samples, but I would not pick it over NBA Jam, or Live. It’s very competent and average, but no kid would have asked for this over the competition in 1994, which likely makes it one of the rarest Genesis/MD games (though it isn’t priced that way).

In terms of presentation, this is where the game is the most interesting. Putting aside the weird animations (no shot looks like a proper jump shot, nothing looks like a real dunk - everything looks like layups), you get a very fast five on five game with some brutal AI. In between these matchups is one of the most interesting OSTs on the MD.

There are at least two songs on this OST that are clear rip-offs of real music. Check out track 8 and track 6 which are clear rip-offs of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ and Boom! There She Was, respectfully. The balls on Konami…

To go along with this rambling are some pics of the game in action on a Sony PVM as well as shots of the MD Japan packaging. I honestly can’t believe this game was given a Japanese release, but the MD scene was pretty hardcore in Japan and maybe there was a big enough market - but it’s still an incredible strange choice considering games like Snatcher only got a North American release (but I suppose the PCE version of that saturated that potential market completely).

Pay attention to that wonderful Tom Dubois box art, which was used worldwide, which was also unusual for the time, as Konami ALWAYS had separate art for their domestic and international releases on the MD. While Dubois designed Rocket Knight, the art was slightly retooled for the JPN release - but not for Dribble - it’s exactly the same.

Street Fighter II was one of those games you just knew was special when you first saw it. I distinctly remember watching a pair of adults discuss the game while feeding the machine quarters and clearing it with Dhalsim all the way back in 1991.

Super Street Fighter II, which was released in the arcades in 1993 and ported to the SFC and MD in 1994, represented the very height of Street Fighter Mania in the mid nineties. 1994 saw the release of this port, the Jean Claude Van Damme film, the anime movie, and the arcade version of what many consider the best Street Fighter game ever made, Super Street Fighter II X.

The MD version of Super Street Fighter is the second released version of the series on the system after Special Champion Edition, but actually the third game developed (a vanilla Champion Edition version was set for release in April 1993, but never saw the light of day for various reasons). The story of this version is actually quite interesting as detailed by Hidden Palace when they released the beta of the intended first version for the MD.

This port is in turn a port of the SFC versions of Street Fighter II and is actually pretty decent as it plays just as well as the arcade version, and thus, is an excellent game by default. It is, of course, not as colourful as its SFC original, but it is one of the better looking fighting games on the system. Visually, when viewed on a CRT, the game still pops but unfortunately, the sound is a complete mess. While the hacks that try to resolve the palettes are inessential, as I feel the hackers are trying to make it look better via emulation and on a LCD, the sound driver fixes go a long way to resolve the poor sample playback. Originally, the game has an extremely quiet, muffled and distorted sound quality - but with this hack, at least the garbled samples are cured of their distortion.

Also of note is that this is the largest MD cartridge released officially at 40Mb (5 MegaBytes), which means that is used bank switching as the MD was only ever designed to address 32Mb ROMs. So, it has that extra novelty factor going for it :).

What is fun also about the import MD version is that it comes with a lot of cool inserts promoting additional joysticks as well as the anime movie. Please enjoy these shots as well as a few CRT/PVM pics.