Good morning and welcome to another edition of Games with Coffee!

It’s been just over a year since I had a fantastic conversation with the Hopeful Sega Mage (@carrythegary) about the SEGA AGES Collection on The Well Red Mage. We talked about the games and the numerous features we would like to see from each game in the collection.

Read: “A Hopeful and Hyperactive Discussion About The SEGA AGES Collection”

To celebrate this, I wanted to do a short retrospective on a few games of the collection, in terms of what features have been added to the games. So far, a bunch of games have been released, including but not limited to the following:

• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Phantasy Star
• Thunder Force IV
• Virtua Racer
• Alex Kidd in Miracle World

What’s impressive is the dearth of features M2 added to each of these games. You have your typical ones, like online leaderboards, the ability to put on a CRT scanline filter and the like, but each game has additional modes of play. Some haven’t been released on a digital platform until today, like Sonic the Hedgehog’s Mega Play arcade version; a significantly more challenging version of Sonic 1 released in arcades.

Leading off with Sonic 1, available features include the use of the Spin Dash and the Drop Dash, introduced in Sonic Mania. Two challenge modes – Score and Time Attacks – are available with leaderboard support. Time Attack plays through normal Sonic, but Score Attack uses the Mega Play version and gives you one life to maximize your score as much as possible. Finally, players can switch between the Japanese and International versions of the game.

Phantasy Star has tons of neat gameplay tweaks built into it that alters the game in many ways. Players can play the game as originally intended or they can play the new Ages Mode, which reduces the encounter rate while bumping up experience and gold earned from fights. Additionally, dungeons are mapped, significantly reducing the rate at which players would get lost (due to the way dungeons operate in this game). Players also get a help screen to show what items do and what the truncated names of these items stand for. Finally, players can switch between the Japanese and North American soundtracks, which seems to be pretty awesome.

It appears that the Sega Ages line is going to continue on strongly, what with the announcement that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is getting the Ages treatment. I’m personally hoping for a Special Stage mode featuring tons of alternate special stages, similar to the Blue Spheres bonus game.

What about you guys? Have anything from the Sega Ages collection? What are you liking about it so far? And what would you like to see in the future? Drop a line in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter!

Getting my nostalgia fix in, this has been Ryan from Games with Coffee, reminding you to Keep Gaming and Keep Brewing.