HARDWARE: AT Games/Blaze Sega Mega Drive clone

These days its becoming easier and easier to end up buying a lemon on TradeMe. Old consoles were built to last, howoever many have gone through a lot of rough and tumble thoughout peoples childshoods, from being stored in a musty attic or a damp basement in a box for twenty plus years. I cant imagine how much it would suck to discover your old Sega Megadrive, and cartidges, only to find the console won't turn on because the solder went flakey, or the components inside have blown.

Thankfully AT Games have a solution for this, fully supported and lisenced by Sega, they offer up a brand new Mega Drive console, with very few things to complain about.

The AT Games/Blaze Sega Mega Drive is a small little unit that comes with 15 games built in, and plug's in directly into your TV via White and Yellow RCA cords. The game selection is good, offering up enough different styles of play to make it a great introduction to some of the classics released for the SMD. The full title list included in the model I got is: Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Gain Ground, Alex Kidd, Arrow Flash, Columns, Crack Down, Sonic & Knuckles, Bonanza Bros., ESWAT, Golden Axe, Fatal Labrynth, flicky, Decap Attack and Shadow Dancer.

This is only where the system begins. The console itself can take cartidges from any region (I personally have tested it with Japanese, American and NZ/AU region games), which means if you cant find a console at a reasonable price, but dont have an issue locating the games at places like TradeMe, Cash Converters or Overworld) then this is what you need. The package comes with two control pads, each with 6 buttons, should you want to play some Mortal Kombat or Street fighter 2 with your friends.

The sound quality is good, but it's noticibly off at times, as the system itself is only designed only to emulate the hardware of the SMD, thus it doesn't actually carry any of the original graphics or sound chips and is just able to read the game code from the cartidges. Sometimes the sound runs slower than the game, and sometimes the bigger more graphically intensive games such as Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles have some slowdown at the beggining, or when you get bumped by an enemy and there are a lot of spinning animated rings on screen. There is also the occaisional graphical glitch where sprites dont show up properly.

Another limit is the inability to use a 32x or Sega CD with it, as well as any pass through systems like Game Genie, or even the ability plug in Sonic 2/3 into Sonic and Knuckles. Again I beleive this is just the way the system has been built and programmed due to it just emulating everything.

All this is minor, considering the price, the size and what the system comes with- it's not easy to find AV cables for a Model 2 Sega Megadrive, unless you're willing to get dirty with some solder and wires and the motherboard-

The controllers provided are sturdy and responsive, which is very important for a console, so it wins out there- it can also take original controllers should you wish to break those out of your attic box.

Personally I think this system is great. For me it means less risk when taking stuff to a con like Armageddon or Ret-Con, as I can leave the Megadrive at home, giving me one less item to replace in the eventuality it gets treated bad or goes missing. for your it means you dont have to go hunting down working hardware, and if you dont feel like hunting down games you dont need to search those out either.

The AT Games/Blaze Sega Megadrive is fully lisenced by Sega and is available in New Zealand at JB-HiFi for $68.98.