Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Old-school"

Surely, you can go download each game individually from the Nintendo Wii for eight bucks a piece without risking to buy a crap game, but that would be so expensive and memory-consuming that it should not be worth it. How about spend thirty bucks on forty Genesis games that are all up-scaled to HD? That is a steal! And fortunately, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection features enough good games (although there are stinkers) to warrant any SEGA Genesis fan's purchase, and the non-fans would probably like to buy this game after renting it for their curiosities.
Is is not unbelievable that forty games can be played on one disk as well as seven arcade games and two SEGA Master System games, and they are all in HD? It is, and you would certainly feel stupid to have spent pools of money on the Virtual Console or on Ebay, or guilty downloading these games illegally, considering that you can get each game for about seventy-five cents, not including the bonus games. Some of the games you can play are all four of the Phantasy Star games (after unlocking the first, which I will explain later), which are worth the thirty bucks alone, all of the Streets of Rage games, all of the Vectorman games, and as the name suggests, all of the Sonic games on the Genesis (but no lock-on games from Sonic and Knuckles). The so-called "stinkers" of this collection, however, are the following:

Alex Kidd (Genesis, of course)
Altered Beast (Wise fwom your gwave...to fight thwough cwap!)
Bonanza Bros. (Nothing really special)
Fatal Labyrinth (You can get stuck)
Gain Ground (Pretty boring)
Congo Bongo (Too much like Donkey Kong)
Shinobi Arcade (Nothing like the Genesis games)
Zaxxon (How am I supposed to know where to go!?)

Even some of the arcade games stink and are not worth! I wish that they would replace all of those arcade games (even the good ones) just so they would be able to fit the Sonic and Knuckles lock-on games into a DVD for the sake of completion. (We know for sure that everything would fit on a Blu-Ray disc, but the PS3 versions almost never get special treatment). Also, where the hell are "Revenge of the Shinobi" and "Gunstar?" "Revenge" should be there to complete the trilogy, and if one of Treasure's (company) games, "Dynamite Headdy," is here, so should "Gunstar."

Here is the rest of my evaluation:

GRAPHICS: 10

Each game is upscaled to HD. You can stretch the image to 16:9 mode and even turn on the smoother option to get rid of a lot of the pixels. They all look great in my opinion, and they look like they are almost moving at 60 frames per second!

AUDIO (Music-wise): 10

I love Genesis music almost as much as Super Nintendo music (though sometimes more than the other), and I believe all of the music from all of the games sound awesome! Yuzo Koshiro still kicks ass, even!
Oh, yeah. I forgot. The menu music is good, too. Appropriate.

AUDIO (Effect-wise): 8

The sound effects may seem perfect on each game, but I noticed some loud, grating static noises that were not apparent on the original copies of the games, and Sonic's jumping sound in his first game does not sound perfect in my opinion. But these flaws can be overlooked considering that the rest of sound is spot-on.
I cannot complain about the menu sounds, either.

GAMEPLAY:

Before I give a score for this category, I should explain something nifty about this collection; there is a rating system for each game.
When you start the collection in the main menu, next to each game is a certain number of bars. You can press left or right to make less or more bars, respectively, from one to five. The higher the number, the better the game you think it is. Do you think Alex Kidd sucks? Give it a one or two. Do you think Streets of Rage 2 rocks? Give it a four or five.
So what I am going to do is give each game a score out of five.

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle: 3
· Alien Storm: 4
· Altered Beast: 2
· Beyond Oasis: 5
· Bonanza Bros.: 2
· Columns: 3
· Comix Zone: 4
· Decap Attack starring Chuck D. Head: 3
· Dr. Robotnik's MBM: 3
· Dynamite Headdy: 5
· Ecco the Dolphin: 3
· Ecco II: The Tides of Time: 3
· E-SWAT: 4
· Fatal Labyrinth: 2
· Flicky: 3
· Gain Ground: 2
· Golden Axe I: 3
· Golden Axe II: 3
· Golden Axe III: 3
· Kid Chameleon: 4
· Phantasy Star II: 4
· Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom: 4
· Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium: 5
· Ristar: 4
· Shining in the Darkness: maybe a 4
· Shining Force: 4
· Shining Force 2: 4
· Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master: 4
· Sonic 3D Blast: 2
· Sonic and Knuckles: 4
· Sonic Spinball: 3
· Sonic the Hedgehog: 4
· Sonic the Hedgehog 2: 5
· Sonic the Hedgehog 3: 5
· Streets of Rage: 4
· Streets of Rage 2: 5
· Streets of Rage 3: 4
· Super Thunder Blade: 3
· Vectorman: 4
· Vectorman 2: 3

· Golden Axe Warrior (SEGA Master System): 3
· Phantasy Star (SEGA Master System): 4
· Alien Syndrome (Arcade): 3
· Altered Beast (Arcade): 3
· Congo Bongo (Arcade): 2
· Fantasy Zone (Arcade): 3
· Shinobi (Arcade): 2
· Space Harrier (Arcade): 4
· Zaxxon (Arcade): 1

OVERALL: 6

Okay, so the average does not seem to be very good, but trust me when I say that the whole collection is worth it anyway because of the really good games. On top of that, once you get a trophy/achievement for a particular game (for there is only one per game, but the arcade games have zero) So, I will give extra credit for their quality and the trophies/achievements, and I will give the gameplay a 7.

So far, this is the only collection of video games for current-gen consoles and perhaps the most ultimate collection of games ever.