ANatA: Golden Axe & Sonic the Hedgehog

Xbox Live Arcade has been on a retro kick lately, with last week's release of the tepid, Missile Command and this week's dual release of 2 Sega 16-bit classics, Golden Axe and Sonic the Hedgehog. Both games were featured among a bevy of Arcade previews during E3 and were announced for download at the show.

Hack and slash the jump for more coverage...

For my money, Carcassonne has been one of the best Arcade tiles of the spring and summer, so these retro released do not excite me very much. I'm fairly certain the trial versions of Golden Axe and Sonic are timed; I kept on falling onto spikes in the latter but played through several stages of Golden Axe before the pulled the plug on my fun.

If you're a fan of beat'em ups from the '80s and '90s, Golden Axe is one of the enduring classics. When it came out in the arcades in the late 1980s, it blew my prepubescent mind. It was the first game to take the beat'em up genre and throw it into a fantasy setting. I do believe it was also the first game of its kind to introduce mountable beasts, like dragons and those bird-beaked critters with the nasty whipping tails.

I played this game to death when it was in the arcades, then played it to death some more when it was ported over to the PC in the early '90s. Playing Golden Axe today definitely reveals the age in the gameplay mechanics. You don't have many moves in your arsenal, so the action does grind after a few levels. The 3 character types also do not play very differently despite their unique appearances. The graphics are, surprisingly, still quite attractive and evoke a brutal fantasy world like the one found in Conan. Another saving grace for this game of course is the co-op play, which typically bumps any average beat'em up game into the realm of greatness.

Sonic the Hedgehog was the flagship franchise for the Sega Genesis system back in the day. It was the first real contender against Mario in the war of the 2D mascot platformer. I only briefly owned a Genesis when I was in high school (I "shared" it with a friend) and never did get into the Sonic craze. The XBLA version seems pretty faithful to what I remember of the original and is pretty fun to play if you enjoy the standard 2D platformers with a little burst of speed. Aside from the usual jumping maneuvers, Sonic also has the ability to pick up incredible momentum as he runs and buzz through the air and along the ground as a whirling ball of... well, hedgehog. It really breaks up the typical flow of jumping from platform-to-platform and the levels go out of their way to take advantage of Sonic's speedy abilities.

It still doesn't seem to have the depth and replayability of some of the best Mario games of the era, but if you missed out on Sonic the Hedgehog the first time around, 400 MS points is hardly a steep price to pay to enjoy this landmark Sega title.