Today, Sega announced a follow-up to its successful Mega Drive Mini. And this time, Mega CD games will be included!
Games revealed so far:
Bonanza Bros.
Fantasy Zone
Magical Tarurūto-kun
Mansion of Hidden Souls
Popful Mail
Shining Force CD
Shining in the Darkness
Silpheed
Sonic CD
Thunder Force IV
Virtua Racing
There will be 50 games in total. The next set of games will be announced on June 24th.
Would love to see them take another stab at the Game Gear Micro but I guess the Analogue Pocket’s cartridge adapter now has it covered.
Releasing the original Micro at 4000 yen was a mistake, it just wasn’t anywhere close to good enough and sort of transformed the handheld into a throwaway desk toy when it’s much more.
Yeah gotta say I’m sick of Sega doing Mega Drive over and over and over… and it’s my least favourite Sega console. Would buy any of the others as a mini in a heartbeat.
But in the end, it sold almost as much as all their other consoles put together. It is their only major legacy as far as the console market is concerned I guess.
A Saturn or Dreamcast collection for modern consoles as a stopgap release would also be nice, but Sega might not be keen on doing that since those might devalue an eventual Mini console.
Yeah the chip shortage would have prevented them access to more capable ARM SoCs that could actually handle Saturn or Dreamcast appropriately - even the extremely modest one powering the Play Date was sold out for two years forcing them to look for an alternative.
And the Switch’s Tegra X1 even struggles with lag-free Saturn emulation as we’ve seen with the Saturn Tribute releases though it would be good enough for a Mini console.
This is pretty cool, as there were a bunch of games I wanted to play that never made it onto the first one. With 50 titles I’m thinking almost all of them should end up with a place now. I hope they also take into account the regional exclusivity of before, as I’d like to give a spots to several that weren’t on the JP Mini.
So we’re looking at 15 additional CD games and 24 additional cart games to be announced. Just in the first batch alone, there were some hard to predict inclusions that makes guessing the remainder tricky (not being super familiar with what was popular in Japan). There’s also licensing issues, games that already have versions elsewhere, and surprises to take into account … here’s my guesses!
CD:
Final Fight CD
Keio Flying Squadron
Night Trap
Road Avenger
Snatcher (It’d have to be the English version but that might be a nice draw for JP fans?)
Robo Aleste (dream scenario is M2 ‘finishing’ the sequel that was announced but never made)
I was wondering if this would include the same language/rom region switch that the original did, since adding several versions of 20 CD games could use up more storage than they’re giving this thing, so i asked Okunari on Twitter. Unfortunately he doesnt want to confirm anything that they havent said officially yet
Worth keeping in mind in case anyone was thinking of importing the JP release ahead of any international releases… don’t count on English versions being on there until it’s confirmed.
I also noticed on the official site, the USB power requirements have gone up from 1.0A to 2.0A. No big deal but worth mentioning since a lot of people had issues powering the Egret 2 Mini because they didn’t see the info about that one.
So in this video 『メガドライブミニ2』プロモーション映像 - YouTube, towards the end are a bunch of blank box arts, except they’re not quite blank! With a bit of contrast adjustment some can be recognized:
Super Street Fighter 2
Fatal Fury 2
Alien Soldier
Ragnacenty/Crusader of Centy
Whether they’re actually on the lineup or if they’re red herrings, we’ll have to wait and see! The fighters are kind of odd choices but I guess again they want a spread of genres and games that use the 6B pad still.
Some of the other covers seem like they should be easily identified, but i went through the lists over at https://megadrive.me/mega-drive/ and drew blank. I’ll post the pics later and maybe someone can recognize them.
The Mega CD blank covers just appear to be the 5 already announced.
Here’s the screengrabs with games identified. A japanese youtuber メガドライブミニ2の隠しタイトルが早くもネタバレ?予想ではなくプロモーション映像に映り込んでいた収録タイトルと隠しタイトルの一部と思われる画像を分析。 - YouTube had the same idea and has seemingly identified one more, Super Locomotive, an arcade only game from 1982. Maybe the rest of the purple ones are surprise inclusions like that, which would explain why they’re harder to identify!
More games have been announced, from the live stream last friday:
Outrun
After Burner 2
Night Striker
The Ninja Warriors
Starblade
Splatterhouse Part 2
Fushigi no Umi no Nadia
Megapanel
Puzzle & Action Ichidant R
Columns 3
Star mobile ( bonus game - a previously unannounced and unreleased port of an X68000 game)
Of those I only predicted Outrun and Night Striker, so I did pretty bad heh.
It also appears the bonus games are like last time; in addition to the 50 games. We might end up with 55 total if they have one bonus for each of their remaining streams.
As well as those, another game was confirmed on a broadcast of some sort for an anime “Uncle from Another World”, and confirmed by Treasure:
Alien Soldier
Which confirms that past region exclusives aren’t off the table.
So given rumours and what we know now (i’m assuming there won’t be any more Namco or Taito games), updated predictions:
Sega has announced that the new Mini console will be officially released in the West.
So far, these games have been confirmed for the Western version:
After Burner II
Alien Soldier
Bonanza Brothers
Fantasy Zone
Lightening Force
Mansion of Hidden Souls
Night Striker
Ninja Warriors
The Ooze
OutRun
OutRunners
Rainbow Islands Extra
Rolling Thunder 2
Shining in the Darkness
Shining Force CD
Silpheed
Sonic 3D Blast
Sonic CD
Splatterhouse 2
Star Mobile
Super Hang-On
Vectorman
Virtua Racing