Midnight Resistance Longplay (Mega Drive/Genesis) [60 FPS]

Developed by Data East and published by Sega in 1990.

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As well as appearing on the majority of home computers around during the early 1990's, Midnight Resistance was also ported to Sega's Mega Drive console. Near-perfect ports of other arcade games had been made for the system, so there was no reason why Data East couldn't bring the arcade experience to the living room with this title.

The game certainly has the looks and sound that one might expect from a top-notch conversion. Unfortunately, the gameplay suffers from an utterly bizarre control scheme that largely ruins the experience.

The game has built-in auto-fire where pressing the 'A' button produces an uninterrupted stream of hot lead and takes much of the fun out of the game. I should point out that this is actually a toggled mode and doesn't even require the player to hold the button down; simply press the button and let go and you become a death buffet open 24/7.

Moving the D-pad moves the character and alters the direction that you fire, but the decision was taken to bind the secondary attacks to 'Up' rather than one of the available buttons. This makes it impossible to fire upwards without firing your secondary weapon and wastes ammo.

This makes the game a matter of pressing 'A' and running to the right while waving your gun around occasionally. Collect a flamer with supercharge and life suddenly gets even easier as most things get turned to smoking hot ash before they can blink.

There are other control methods in the options screen, but they'e all as awkward as each other; the worst being the one that involves holding down the 'B' button to rotate the player's aim at a constant rate.

The game runs at a lower resolution than most other Mega Drive games, but there is still slow-down in certain sections. Considering some of the other titles available for the console were far more advanced, the poor performance is a little surprising.

It wasn't until after I'd played the video back that I noticed the fact that the player run animation has a mere three frames of animation; even the C64 version managed more than that!

All in all, it's a shame that an otherwise solid conversion should have been marred by a stupid control scheme.
#retrogaming