fighters megamix has the best roster you may ever find in a fighting game, for it's time especially it's downright absurd with how many games it covers and how much variety there is in the characters, you'll have your whole virtua fighter 2 and fighting vipers cast (complete with their respective gimmicks and the VF characters even have some mechanics from the then upcoming 3, a teaser for what was to come on the dreamcast) you have some sonic the fighters characters with beam the dynamite and bark the polar bear, you have janet from virtua cop, rent a hero and the hornet from daytona, you even have some virtua fighter kids varients and siba, a cut character from virtua fighter 1 and there's even some original characters like deku, a cactus creature, mr niku who's a walking meat chunk and reportedly the AM2 palm logo, but i couldn't unlock it, personally i spent most of my time with the likes of janet, honey from fighting vipers, the hornet, kumachan and bark the polar bear. it's an almost perfect roster and probably the games best selling point, though it is missing pepsiman from the japanese saturn version of fighting vipers and that's a crime i just can't forgive.

they all play super well too, like i said before the Virtua characters have some mechanics from 3 making them play the best they do on the console with the shift button for moving lanes making it play so much better i think than virtua fighter 2 did and it's also much easier than at least the arcade version of 2, though about the same as that games (much better) saturn port, the fighting viper characters remain about the same and are as fun to play here but they feel like they can air juggle so much better than i ever remember them doing so in the original, i always found myself preffering that games strong attack and armour systems as well as its character designs with the likes of honey and bahn and pepsiman so i gravitate towards them, it's just the better playing game i feel, but the two mix well and neither feels particularly imbalanced, i did have an easier time with the vipers cast but i think that's just down to prefering them. there's a decent amount to do here too, a bunch of mini-arcade modes wherein you unlock the majority of the roster as well as where a lot of the cool credits music and some really cool cgs are, which should last you a full night of play plus your usual training and survival modes, it's not a ton but you'll get a good night out of it and the game is so fun to play that you will want to come back to it, there's depth too with this many characters playing so differently and both games's systems are so well designed to begin with that it's almost like having multiple fighting games to play at the same time, it's a weird feeling, like that one piece game for 3ds that could fight against a sister dragonball game online, but significantly more balanced, joke characters aside the game is good for that.

it's a beautuful game though, the animations are all super good and it's clear the game has some budget behind it, even the jokey characters like the daytona car had a lot of work put into them..... except kumachan who is intentionally devoid of real animation, but that's hilarious i mean look at gameplay of it and you'll see what i mean, it's all just so charming, all the backgrounds are varied and all have their gimmicks from their respective games like the ropes in the wrestling ring or the ringouts for the fighting vipers characters and it's all sega blue skies era at its best, some of the sunniest beaches, coziest snow stages, underwater ruins, flying carpets and cityscapes, elevators, heck even the docks from virtua cop, green hill zone and the race track from daytona are here but sadly some of the fighting vipers stages are lacking the pepsi, but as good as it looks, it sounds so much better, it has outright one of the best soundtracks on the saturn and it's by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi who had up to this point worked on the prior virtua fighter OSTS as well as games like manx TT and DAYTONAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and he'd continue to work on great games after with more daytona and virtua games as well as one of the best osts of all time, shenmue, he still works at sega and has worked on stuff like many more recent yakuza games and sonic 06, the songs can loop a little too fast for me but god are there some hits here, the credits themes alone would get it into the best saturn list but the amazing individual themes from virtua and fighters both making appearances as well, plus last wave from outrun is here for the name entry screen and you also have vocal themes for rent a hero and the hornet? i mean come on it has daytona music, you can't top that, and to complete it all, because it's saturn it will work fine on any cd player so you can check out the games music outside of it and you will want to do this because the soundtrack really is that good, it's up there with daytona, nights and gale racer for the best of sega's saturn sound output.

the game is the best sega fanservice you can get for anyone into their older output and thankfully it's also one of the cheaper saturn games, it even has a game.com port if you really want that and i do, one day i'll play that because the fact it runs at all is a miracle, sadly it's never been re-released beyond that or given a real sequel, while games like virtua fighter, sonic the fighters and fighting vipers all did back on ps3, with 2 of the 3 eventually also showing up in yakuza arcades (plus FV's sequel) it's strange this never has, i don't know if its because saturn or if it's just licencing, but i hope it does some day, it's the best of the lot and it really deserves its time back, it feels like a last goodbye from this era of sega before they would move on to their much more stylish dreamcast days, even though it was far from their last game for the system, it just feels that way to me, a good game for them to have went out on if thats how it went down. sega AM2 were at the helm here and they were one of the best development studios around, the amount of classics they made is almost unrivaled, all the games featured here from FV to daytona to sonic the fighters and pretty much every VF game, throw onto that games like shenmue, virtua tennis, outrun and tons of other arcade hits, though their usual goto guy yu suzuki didn't do as much here as usual with the game being directed by hiroshi kataoka of fighting vipers and outriggers, he was a usual am2 collaborator but also worked on other stuff like sonic and sega and some monkey ball things.

this episode of reviews on the run was a lot more basic than the last few, while fighters megamix was undoubtably the standout, the other games just aren't as iconic or i think all that known, porche challange does look like a lot of fun though and i will for sure pick it up one day, but versus some of the absolute hits we've had the past few shows it and a fairly benign golf game just don't do much for me, a slow week, really, but fighters megamix does some heavy carrying here and it and the golf game does give some insight into where their platforms were at the time, sega still with the arcade bangers like we saw in prior weeks with things like manx TT and their soccar game and the PC showing some fairly shallow software game that was more of a timewaster than anything, it reminds me a lot of early mobile games in that way, but this isn't a scene i'm familiar with at all, the only pc game's i've played are otome and yaoi vns and a few zoo tycoon games. next weeks reviewed games are not much more interesting, with 3 baseball games but it did have one much more interesting title covered that i hadn't played much of, goldeneye, so that's what i'll cover next.