 SEGA... DRUNK! Back when I was a kid in the early 90s there was no internet, at least not yet in our house, so there weren't any YouTube channels featuring smug obnoxious dorks who weren't even drunk. To tell me what games are good and what games aren't good, we had to rely on stuff like word of mouth, gaming magazines, and the box art of the game itself. The problem with the latter is that some games had some truly god-awful covers, cover art so bad that it kept you from playing the game, even though the game itself could have actually been pretty good. I've done a couple videos about this for Super Nintendo games, so now let's take a look at some Sega Genesis or Mega Drive games that share this same problem. One of the most popular Genesis games ever is Strider. It's one of the best action platformers of its time, and it holds up pretty well today, but back then, if you're sitting at a rental store just looking at this cover, you'd think this game were based on a movie starring Matthew Modine or something, or at least Matthew Modine borrowing Jeff Daniels' hair. The character in the game looks like a total badass, but this dude here looks like he's gonna perform magic at your kid's birthday party. Okay, everybody already knows Strider is a badass game, but this is just kind of an obvious one that I had to point out. Plus, check out the artwork Japan got for this game. Now, that is more like it, and it actually looks like the character you play as. Imagine that. Another obvious game I'll get out of the way right away is Landstalker. Alright, I admit this game may not be for everyone. Adventure games with this kind of isometric viewpoint can be insanely frustrating for all the wrong reasons, but Landstalker has a lot going for it. It's your traditional adventure structure. The combat is fun, the story is actually pretty funny, but this cover is just ugh. This looks like some counterfeit Disney thing your friend would bring home from his trip in Southeast Asia. Oh, and nice job putting this dude's junk front and center so you can't miss it. This is another case where the publisher demanded the cover art have a certain look to it, where the US got dollar store Disney, and Japan got this. Yeah, that's way better. Even if the main character clearly looks like a link ripoff, it's still a big improvement over what we got here. Next, there's Alex Kidd in The Enchanted Castle, and this game is, oh my god! That is just straight up terrifying. Yeah, let's give this poor kid giant eyes, a fat nose, and ears the size of this ocean sunfish here, but let's keep his skull really small so everything's just crammed on there. Geez, what the hell are they thinking? Poor Kidd, poor Alex Kidd. This cover is especially weird considering this dude looks nothing like the in-game character. I'm so confused. But anyway, once you get past the genetic disaster on the cover, Alex Kidd in The Enchanted Castle is a perfectly okay platformer. It's the fifth game of a series that started on the Master System. It's an early Genesis title so the visuals aren't gonna wow you, but it's a decent side-scroller with a good amount of gameplay variety through 11 different levels. Dynamite Duke is a gallery shooter that's a short but fun playthrough. It's an arcade port featuring six stages with really simple gameplay where what you see is what you get, just shoot at everything that moves. But for the cover, they chose to hire a guy that looks like every high school gym teacher ever and told him that a couple of kids are skipping his class to go have a smoke. Well, either that or he's just doing the Keystone Light Bitter beer face. But yeah, this is a perfectly good game. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with The Menacer since that came after this game was made, but it's still a fun time if you like shooting at stuff. Here's another decent game I'd never heard of before. It's Generations Lost. And yeah, as you can see, this one looks, sounds, and plays like an X-Men clone, only with backgrounds and settings that you might see in a game like Flashback. It's a solid game, but it's like the dev team couldn't decide if they wanted to make an X-Men style action platformer or a cinematic platformer. So as a result, the controls are kind of wonky and have a weird delay to them. There's also no boss fights here, which is a bummer. So how did they choose to sell this game? Why with putting a confused looking oiled-up shirtless dude on the cover? Who has that, the greased-up deaf guy from Family Guy? From a distance, you can't even make out that this is a person. It looks like more of a side of bacon or something. Anyway, Generations Lost is another solid game that's been obscured by a bad cover. Next, we have Elemental Master, starring Mike Hampton. Yes, before he pitched for the Houston Astros and later the Mets and Rockies, he dressed up in a cape and threw wadded balls of Saran Wrap at monsters. The game itself is a top-down, vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up where you can either shoot up or down through seven different levels. But what's nice here is that you can choose the order you go through the first four levels. Some of the boss fights in this one are super fun too, and plus this game has a great soundtrack. So while it might seem a bit weird to play as Mike Hampton or Steve Iserman or John Claude Van Damme's second cousin or whoever this is supposed to be, Elemental Master is still a perfectly decent playthrough. Haunting-starring Polterguy is a strange title, a strange game, and a strange cover. The game itself is pretty interesting in that you play as a ghoul trying to scare a family out of their house, and you do that by possessing different stuff scattered throughout. It's a unique slant on a kind of strategy platformer, I guess? I'm not even sure what genre this game would fall under. But one thing I do know is that this cover is doing nobody any favors. The giant mouth on the couch is something in the game, sure, but on box art, it's just weird and confusing. Plus the layout here is just a disaster with all the different colors, the clashing fonts. I mean, come on, there's five different fonts here. My worthless graphic design associate's degree is spinning in its grave. And plus, of course, Polterguy's hair makes even kid-in-play blush. Still, this is a unique game that's well worth checking out, especially around Halloween time. Finally, of course, I gotta talk about Kid Chameleon. This is a classic case of a cover where a bunch of people in their 50s got together with their MBAs and said, We need a cover that appeals to kids, featuring a kid who looks cool. Someone every other kid will point to and say, Yeah, I want to be that kid. And what ends up happening is every kid sees this cover and says, Look at this dork, who even looks like that? It's some of the most early 90s cover art ever, up there with Super Buster Brothers. But Kid Chameleon the game is an interesting one. It's a side-scrolling platformer where you take the form of a ton of different characters featuring all sorts of different weapons, and it has an arcade structure where this one just goes on and on and on for over a hundred levels. Some people slag on this one for being too generic and it definitely gets boring to play after a while. But I like this kind of arcade style where seemingly an endless amount of content to plow through, and plus some of the power-ups are really fun. Kid Chameleon isn't gonna compete with Mario or Sonic or anything, but it's still a good time. Alright, I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.