Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Sega’s Megadrive console, better known in the US by the name Genesis, was the company’s most successful game console. Here was a powerful and flashy system that went head-to-head with Nintendo’s legendary Super NES and managed to hold its own. The hardware and its controllers went through a number of revisions throughout and beyond their generation before finally sort of fading away in a very messy way around the introduction of the 32X and Saturn.

Years later, a Chinese company known as AtGames has partnered with Sega to produce a line of Megadrive systems designed with a “plug-and-play” mentality featuring a large number of built-in Megadrive games to play. This new design also features a cartridge slot that allows the player to load not only the built-in games but anything they happen to have on a cartridge… from any region in the world. That’s right, this system will play Megadrive games and Genesis games. Here’s how that works.

I love that logo.

It hasn’t taken much conditioning to make the pleasure centers of my brain light up when I see these boxes. I’ve imported a handful of games and some other items from Play-Asia in the past and there’s nothing quite like knowing the box in front of you holds your long-awaited not-available-in-the-US gaming product.

Here’s what’s inside.

That’s the front of the box. “Sega Mega Drive video game console. 20 Sega games inside.
Plug & Play on TV. Twin pads for 2 players games.” No word on who the blue rat is. Ha, I kid.

The back of the box shows the 20 games that are built into the console. It’s actually a pretty impressive selection of titles, but it would have been nice if they had gone for 20 of the rarest games.

OK, so here’s what’s in the box. The console, two controllers, an AV cable and an AC adapter. Also included is an instruction manual and registration card. The manual is in Japanese and English, and includes information not only about the hardware but the 20 games that come built-in. To play a cartridge, you simply turn on the system while there’s a cartridge in the slot. To play an internal game, you start it without a cartridge and select the game from a menu. The menus are all in English.

The two controllers that come with the system are six-button controllers. While they’re different from the six-button controllers that Sega made in the 1990s, they are comfortable to hold and the buttons are responsive. Also, the connectors are identical to those on the original consoles, so system and controllers are interchangeable in case you prefer the feel of the older controllers or perhaps the other way around. The difference in size between this device and the original style systems (see my second-generation Genesis above in a side-by-side comparison) is pretty shocking. The console is not much larger than the cartridges you place into it, and is very lightweight.

Now, let’s get down to business. I’ll start by pointing out that I was pretty disappointed to find that this is not necessarily a product for great fans of the original platform’s audiovisual experience. There is a single RCA port for the video out and one for the audio out. That’s right, that means composite video only and monaural sound. The original Sega Genesis only did mono audio out to your TV unless you used the headphone jack, which was stereo. When I played mine, I ran a line from my headphone jack to the TV so I could use that sound, or I simply wore headphones. The sound coming out of this device falls short of that first generation system, and even to my second generation system, which could output in stereo to the TV with the composite cable. The lack of an S-Video out capability is disappointing as well, and means the only way you can play one of these using that higher end video is through a modded console. It remains to be seen what modding is possible in this new system, but I’ll definitely be looking into it.

When the Genesis was big, most people played it using RF. As a result, this composite video will tend to look a lot better. It does look much better than my second-generation Genesis. However, nowadays we’re used to something quite a bit sharper in many cases, and it would have been nice to see a crisper video option.

Wait, what?

When testing my library of Genesis cartridges, I encountered some issues. One of the more minor issues is shown above. What is that? Small quantities of the text in Warsong come up seriously corrupted. Interestingly, closing this menu and reopening it provides entirely different gibberish characters every time. Testing the cartridge in my Genesis yields normal text, so this is an issue. Here’s how it looks on there.

These issues, sadly, don’t end there. Testing the rest of my library produced even more troubling results. A different (non-retail) NTSC cartridge yielded an error message that it was only for use on NTSC systems. Still other games, including popular fighter Eternal Champions, would not load at all. I gave the cartridges a thorough cleaning and while they work fine on my Genesis, most of my games don’t work on this system. Only Toejam & Earl works perfectly, and I wonder if I won’t find an issue somewhere along the way if I play it long enough.

Final assessment

The value is just great. For $40, you get the compact system and two controllers plus a surprising 20 integrated first-party games. It’s disappointing that the system can’t do as well with cartridges. Composite video out and monaural sound are not the best, but they’re as good as, or better than, what most people experienced of the original console when it launched. Despite the few small issues I encountered as indicated above, this is a good deal for the built-in games. It’s hard to recommend it for its cartridge abilities, since it seems so unreliable. Perhaps it does a better job on games from other regions, which I don’t have the opportunity to test. Play-Asia has announced a number of cartridges with multiple first-party games on them under the AtGames name, it would be safe to assume that since they’re designed for this system, they will work properly like the built-in games do. You can look at one of those here.

The AtGames Sega Megadrive Twin Pad Player, as provided by Play-Asia, gets three out of five, primarily on its built-in games and included controllers. Stereo sound and the ability to consistently run cartridges would have given it a perfect score.