Ostensibly a top-down action game, success in Battletech rests not with reflexes or aim but with strategy and tactics. I'm not sure what to call this genre, so I'm going with the highly original "strategic action", which would include games such as Desert Strike. Battletech has some strong similarities in design to that game: we're not especially agile, are loaded with powerful weapons that are none the less in short supply, and we're a glass cannon; the health meter seems generous until you step into a crossfire or wander carelessly into a minefield and then you're toast in seconds.

Battletech is hard. Very, very hard. After the first mission, which is essentially a (still hard) tutorial, my first impression of every subsequent new planet was that the next mission was impossible. I would get annihilated in minutes. Environmental hazards such as fire, ice and spikes (or better yet, ice that causes you to slide into spikes) are devastating and small mishaps can torpedo a run.

But then I'd start to learn the level layout, remembering where the ammo caches were and the crucial health restoring coolant, which formed a checkpoint of sorts. If I could just get to that first coolant drop without dying, I could extend the run. Then I'd manage it, and inch ever so much further into the mission. Learning enemy locations, avoiding crossfires and traps, and plotting an optimal route through the increasingly enormous levels, crisscrossing to ammo and health pickups just in time. These are the keys to success, and each mission slowly reveals itself to be masterfully designed and well balanced. The final one in particular is an enormous, wide-open gauntlet that leaves it entirely up to us to explore and figure out.

I'd be remiss not to mention the audio: the voice samples are very good! The sound effects are awful, sounding like the worst that the GEMS studio had to offer, and the little music on hand (only playing before and after missions) is flat and lifeless. It's games like Battletech that unfairly maligned the reputation of the Genesis sound chip.

But other than the disappointing audio? Battletech is awesome.

Ostensibly a top-down action game, success in Battletech rests not with reflexes or aim but with strategy and tactics. I'm not sure what to call this genre, so I'm going with the highly original "strategic action", which would include games such as Desert Strike. Battletech has some strong similarities in design to that game: we're not especially agile, are loaded with powerful weapons that are none the less in short supply, and we're a glass cannon; the health meter seems generous until you step into a crossfire or wander carelessly into a minefield and then you're toast in seconds.

Battletech is hard. Very, very hard. After the first mission, which is essentially a (still hard) tutorial, my first impression of every subsequent new planet was that the next mission was impossible. I would get annihilated in minutes. Environmental hazards such as fire, ice and spikes (or better yet, ice that causes you to slide into spikes) are devastating and small mishaps can torpedo a run.

But then I'd start to learn the level layout, remembering where the ammo caches were and the crucial health restoring coolant, which formed a checkpoint of sorts. If I could just get to that first coolant drop without dying, I could extend the run. Then I'd manage it, and inch ever so much further into the mission. Learning enemy locations, avoiding crossfires and traps, and plotting an optimal route through the increasingly enormous levels, crisscrossing to ammo and health pickups just in time. These are the keys to success, and each mission slowly reveals itself to be masterfully designed and well balanced. The final one in particular is an enormous, wide-open gauntlet that leaves it entirely up to us to explore and figure out.

I'd be remiss not to mention the audio: the voice samples are very good! The sound effects are awful, sounding like the worst that the GEMS studio had to offer, and the little music on hand (only playing before and after missions) is flat and lifeless. It's games like Battletech that unfairly maligned the reputation of the Genesis sound chip.

But other than the disappointing audio? Battletech is awesome.

I went into Desert Strike thinking it was a fast, top-down shoot'em up. It's actually a methodically paced, highly strategic action game with a large emphasis on exploration and resource management. Taken on its own terms, it's a brilliantly designed game.

There are four campaigns, each set on large wide open maps filled with enemies, buildings, missions and, critically, resources. While the missions are listed in order in the pause menu, along with the map and a wealth of other info, most can be completed in any order. It was a lot of fun learning what the objectives were and finding optimal ways to complete them.

Exploration, resource management and careful approach of enemy strongpoints are the keys to the game. While there is no time limit, there is an urgency due to the fuel gauge constantly going down, replenished by fuel drums dotted around the map. Some are placed in the open, some have to be found by demolishing structures or vehicles. Likewise the crucial ammunition crates. Civilians and POWs serve as armor restoration when picked up and rescued, and it's this juggling of armor, ammo and fuel management between strike runs that will form the main gameplay loop.

The actual combat takes some getting used to: the chopper is fragile and can be downed in seconds if you take a head-on approach to enemy tanks or AA weapons. You have to take care to peel off enemy locations from the outside in, not get surrounded and always be moving. Even so, death comes fast and often early in the learning curve. The game is hard, but as you explore each map you'll find ample resources to balance out the challenge. The game offers several control settings, and as I understand it some of them play easier than the default "with momentum", but I used the default, adjusted, and enjoyed it.

The most unfortunate decision in the game design was to omit any HUD elements whatsoever. This gives the game a very nice clean look, but you have to pause to see your ammo counts and fuel meters, which often led me to run out of ammo in the middle of a fight - which does not end well - or stray too far away from a fuel drum before the low fuel siren goes off, too late. A couple of counters tucked into the corners would have eliminated a few hundred pauses to check on them.

The lack of in-game music was a choice I enjoyed, as it places the emphasis on the sound effects, which are excellent. I also found the ambiance of the gentle thrump thurmp the chopper makes created a great deal of tension, and hearing it cut with the whoosh of an AA missile firing from nearby was constantly raising my heart rate.

Against this is the unfortunate stereotyping of the Middle Eastern bad guys. I knew this was likely going in, given the setting, but seeing a stereotypical Hollywood brown person with a beard and desert fatigues cackling while lowering a blonde woman into a barrel of acid in the very first scene of the game was jarring, and doesn't get any better from there. 90's racism following Desert Storm had a very particular flavor, and it was not good.

Looking past the wrapper of the setting and villains, Desert Strike is an incredibly well designed and balanced game. I had a lot of fun just exploring the maps and finding secrets, surveying the resources with which to string together the campaign of missions. It stands apart from the many run and gun, shoot'em up games on the Genesis. I'll definitely be picking up both sequels, Jungle and Urban Strike.

Golvellius is a fascinating game from a period when genre conventions had not yet been firmly established and developers were still throwing all kinds of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Taking clear cues from The Legend of Zelda, Golvellius takes several of the same ideas and goes in a completely different direction with most of them.

The quest is simple, even if accomplishing it is not: find seven magical orbs in seven different regions of the titular valley. Each orb is kept in secret by an old lady in a cave - there are lots and lots of old ladies in caves in this game - and you have to explore a large overworld in a top-down view, slay monsters with your sword, find and collect gear, and defeat the boss of each area before she'll give up.

If that sounds like a familiar structure, the actual gameplay loop in each zone is not. In nearly every screen of Golvellius, there is a hidden entrance, and every screen is a small puzzle of sorts as you must figure out how to reveal it. Some come from killing enemies, some from striking certain trees, rocks or other objects, and a few have other requirements. Most of these caves have helpful characters offering advice, items or healing. A lot of them have old ladies, and they want money. So much money.

You start out with tight limit on how much gold you can carry, and the first order of business in each zone is finding old women in caves who will sell you bibles to raise your gold carrying capacity. Yes, actual bibles. No, I have no idea why. The second order of business is to find still more old ladies in caves and buy life meter-extending potions to withstand the steadily increasing onslaught of strong monsters. Still other old women in other caves sell herbs that act as potions when your health meter runs out, or other items. Even when it comes time to fork over the magical orb, they want money. Lots of money. This is basically a game of exploring and getting extorted by old women.

The caves are where Golvellius further differentiates itself from Zelda. While that game featured mazes to explore, Golvellius features gauntlets to survive, in two flavors. One is top-down and auto-scrolling, where the challenge is not getting scraped to the bottom of the screen and kicked out. The other is a very fast, simplified side-scrolling action platformer with lots of enemies, platforms and mini bosses. After either type of cave, there's a boss fight, and they are all well designed.

One of my favorite details is how the overworld music changes: not when you enter a new region, nor when bosses are defeated. Instead, it's when you find a powerful new piece of gear. Finding a great new sword and emerging to find it was so powerful it changed the overworld theme felt great.

The gameplay has one major flaw, in that you can only attack up down, left and right, but the monsters are designed to attack from all angles. This makes many areas a gauntlet of difficult to hit enemies and some areas are pretty tough for it. The caves are not especially hard - the most difficult to took me four attempts, and and they are all only a few minutes long - but they are very simple and repetitive affairs.

Despite these issues, I had a great time with this. Tons of secrets to discover, a challenging and reasonably long quest, a superbly well designed overworld and a terrific soundtrack. The game structure and gameplay loops are quite unique and I found myself really wishing more games in the action-RPG genre had this kind of experimentation. So long as the extortive old women hanging out in caves stay here, in the valley.

Turning a 3D shooter series into an RPG may seem odd if you are unfamiliar with the prior two Panzer Dragoon games. On paper, they are relatively brief rail shooters. Which is true, but for the breathtaking imagination on display, and the richness of the world building each game packs from end to end. In each game we glimpse a small part of a larger world, filled with history, mysteries, political factions, struggle, danger and wonder.

Turning to an RPG to explore some of that world makes perfect sense - Team Andromeda had build too large of a world to be contained in shooters alone. Revisiting Panzer Dragoon Saga for the first time in 15+ years, I'm struck once again by how audacious it is on all fronts. At every turn, this game defies convention and goes its own way, and all if it works. The world is almost relentlessly bleak, with humanity scraping for survival on the ground and fighting over access to ancient secrets in the sky. The art and music combine to create a mood and set a tone that his wholly unique, making the world where humanity is knocked so far down the food chain that hunters are constantly in fear of being hunted themselves feel vividly real.

The combat system has - somehow - never been imitated, despite it's brilliant adaptation of Panzer Dragoon's core gameplay, a system that looks and feels like a shooter but has the bones of turn-based positional battle.

The story seldom takes a predictable turn, yet there's never a twist for the sake of it; this is a character-driven story through and through. The events in and around the gorgeous, ethereal water ruins of Uru form a key sequence where enemies become tense allies, motivations clarify and alliances blur - and the story flows entirely from the clash of personalities and ideas, not contrivances.

I love the world this series, and this game, create. I love the feeling of flying our dragon through valleys, fields, tunnels and the epic Tower. I love the aching, mournful tone that feels rooted in real struggle. The undulating, cohesive soundtrack where every track is perfectly evocative of it setting. And how in an era when developers were discovering boob physics, Team Andromeda had an absolute refusal to sexualize Azel or deploy a male gaze upon her, creating one of gaming's most compelling characters along the way.

The one knock on Saga is the difficulty - simply put, the game is easy. But it's also relentlessly compelling and engaging. Being hard was never the goal: Panzer Dragoon is all about immersing us in a unique, beautiful, evocative and strange world, and it succeeds on every level. A timeless masterpiece.

Turning a 3D shooter series into an RPG may seem odd if you are unfamiliar with the prior two Panzer Dragoon games. On paper, they are relatively brief rail shooters. Which is true, but for the breathtaking imagination on display, and the richness of the world building each game packs from end to end. In each game we glimpse a small part of a larger world, filled with history, mysteries, political factions, struggle, danger and wonder.

Turning to an RPG to explore some of that world makes perfect sense - Team Andromeda had build too large of a world to be contained in shooters alone. Revisiting Panzer Dragoon Saga for the first time in 15+ years, I'm struck once again by how audacious it is on all fronts. At every turn, this game defies convention and goes its own way, and all if it works. The world is almost relentlessly bleak, with humanity scraping for survival on the ground and fighting over access to ancient secrets in the sky. The art and music combine to create a mood and set a tone that his wholly unique, making the world where humanity is knocked so far down the food chain that hunters are constantly in fear of being hunted themselves feel vividly real.

The combat system has - somehow - never been imitated, despite it's brilliant adaptation of Panzer Dragoon's core gameplay, a system that looks and feels like a shooter but has the bones of turn-based positional battle.

The story seldom takes a predictable turn, yet there's never a twist for the sake of it; this is a character-driven story through and through. The events in and around the gorgeous, ethereal water ruins of Uru form a key sequence where enemies become tense allies, motivations clarify and alliances blur - and the story flows entirely from the clash of personalities and ideas, not contrivances.

I love the world this series, and this game, create. I love the feeling of flying our dragon through valleys, fields, tunnels and the epic Tower. I love the aching, mournful tone that feels rooted in real struggle. The undulating, cohesive soundtrack where every track is perfectly evocative of it setting. And how in an era when developers were discovering boob physics, Team Andromeda had an absolute refusal to sexualize Azel or deploy a male gaze upon her, creating one of gaming's most compelling characters along the way.

The one knock on Saga is the difficulty - simply put, the game is easy. But it's also relentlessly compelling and engaging. Being hard was never the goal: Panzer Dragoon is all about immersing us in a unique, beautiful, evocative and strange world, and it succeeds on every level. A timeless masterpiece.