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Welcome to the third part of our weeklong video reimaginings of modern games as retro classics. So far, we've seen God of War as a Commodore 64 game and Uncharted as a Game Boy title screen. Today, it's the turn of Marcus Fenix. We've been travelling forward through the timeline of classic consoles which brings us to Sega's 16-bit baby. Yes, this is Gears of War as a Mega Drive game (that's a Genesis if you're from the US of A). Roll tape...
So what's happening here? Firstly, the game is called 'Marcus the Space Marine', in true Something the Something '90s style. That massive pixellation effect that flickers into focus was a pretty special effect in the early 1990s, as were huge sprites with only one part that was animated.
But don't dismiss that moving arm as basic - a simple rotating sprite was a big deal on Mega Drive and would have had the 11-year-old me salivating. Yes, 11-year-old me was a graphics whore.
Music-wise, this is the music from the actual Gears 1, only compressed down to fit the cartridge. I would imagine it would take up even more than the 1/8th of the entire cartridge that Sonic 1's 'SEGA' chant did.
The graphics may look a tad advanced for 1994, but that was the year of Sonic 3, and Donkey Kong Country, both of which used sprites of 3D models in their intros... not to mention Red Zone which even featured FMV in its incredible title sequence.
So, leaving Marcus to ponder his COG tags all moodily, we move on a couple of years for tomorrow's video, starring a couple of platform heroes...
05 Oct, 2011
