...by Warp.
You often hear Western gamers wailing and gnashing of teeth when it comes to the conversion of Japanese games to English. Somehow we in the West think that the Japanese are holding out on us.
It's like the French - we often suspect they hoard the very best wines and send us the stuff generally used for rinsing cat pooh off the stairs - turns out that when it comes to Japanese games, this often isn't the case.
Although I'm still suspicious of the French and their wine.
4,800 Yen that was the price for Megadas in 1995 - you would be surprised how often I get asked that. That is £24.00 or $48.00. Cheap?!? More gnashing. More wailing. Don't dispare I've played this and it still seems a little over priced and I only paid £4.00 on eBay for it.
Say 'Warp' to any 3DO fan and they immediately wax-lyrical about D's Diner or perhaps mention the much delayed D2 for the 3DO M2 that never materialised and that the Dreamcast version that did materialise was nothing like the version destined for the M2. Us 3DO fans being real wows at diner parties. Not unsurprisingly, we 3DO fans don't mention Megadas.
You're dying to know why I guess - or perhaps not, but here goes.
The premise is that it is a Warp TV channel. You get a News channel, Weather, Shopping, Movie, Educational, Adult and the game channel - Megadas. They are all pretty sorry.
The News channel, called WNN which stands for Warp News Network I guess, is a job advert, inviting people to send their CV. The weather channel suggests that on Christmas day 1998 Puropon-kun will feature predominately - don't ask. The Adult channel invites you to pay more. The movie channel is an advert for D. Perhaps an attempt to prove that all Warp games aren't this bad and finally an Animal channel.
From this selection of channels there are three games in total. The disks name sake is by far the worst - Megadas. You versus the computer or you versus a friend. The objective being to push the other robot out of the game area. The controls are confusing and it doesn't work well. The split screen action has two of a possible four robots battling in a Sumo style to push each other out of the ring. ...or rather square.
The next game is on the Animal Channel. Matching pairs meets Tetris, while against the clock sums this up nicely. The animation is nothing to write home about but all-in-all this is the best of a bad lot. Relatively fun and certainly better than anything else on this disc.
The final game is called "Oda Nobonaga over sleeps". The objective being to wake this major daimyo of the Sengoku period of Japanese history by slapping away at the 'A' button and eventually waking him up. Once he's awake you get rated.
Why Megadas never came to the west is beyond me, all I know is that I'm grateful. ...apart from the fact I own a copy now... Oh - and before you ask - this game is entirely in Japanese.
The only bit of none Japanese is the title - Megadas. Which has no meaning in either language. Great...
To summerise; some people might say this is a qwirky, mad-cap, typical wacky Japanese ultra collectable title from a respected 3DO Developement house, I on the other hand would say it is crap.
Rare. Very.
3DO Kid.
Nice write up - I rather liked several of WARP's games (though I didn't like D, since it was a game that could be completed in less than 2 hours and had absolutely no replay value what-so-ever), and to see coverage of this is great. Also, you were linked to by GameSetWatch:
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2006/07/warps_fortunately_lost_3do_gem_1.php
This "blog" certainly has its followers, and not just ardent 3DO fans. Tbh, I think of it more as an informative website - "blog" can sometimes have negative connotations to it.