Genesis Shmups Classics (Custom release)

[MachineAres 1CC]

Updated 1/21/2021, details:
Updated to also work with the EU version of the game, including all updated images and textures.
Removed the non-working Earth Defense game and replaced with the caravan-style homebrew game, Omega Blast


After playing with Sega's official Genesis/MD Classics game lately on PC, I realized it's got a pretty cool hub system, but then also started thinking about how it could be better.

I eventually came to the point where I started modding the game to be a showcase of all the shmups and scrollers that came out on the Genesis/MD and now I've got a pretty "final" product at the moment.

Keep in mind, you still have to own the game and the DLC ROMs that go in it, whether you got it on Steam or through another method, they all should work as long as you have the most up to date version. I'm just providing the modded files, which are just drag-and-drop really. I think the Steam version with all the games included is less than $10 right now.



Most things about the aesthetics here were modified, including the title screen, all the games contained within, and also the spine art and cartridge art for the virtual game room. Even the posters on the walls in the virtual game room were swapped for shmups artwork. I worked like hell to get high quality spine and cartridge art for each game so the game room felt as authentic as possible, trying to keep as much as possible in English without sacrificing too much consistency/organization. I had to re-create or create some game spines/art from scratch since there were no good resources available for some of the more rare/unlicensed games.

There's another added bonus here if you have a VR setup, you can use the virtual game room in VR and see all the games on the shelf that way, plus the official emulator Sega/M2 uses here seems to add a little bit of depth/separation between the sprite layers on Genesis games for VR, making for a pretty cool experience. It feels like a more immersive version of a 3DS game or something, and some forward scrollers are especially cool (Space Harrier, Burning Force, Panorama Cotton)



Again, this isn't providing the whole game to you, you can think of it more like a ShmupMAME or something along those lines, a custom emulator interface/experience.

Hopefully some people can get enjoyment of this and use the cool interface to revisit some of the great shmups the Genesis/MD had to offer.


Titles included:
Oddly enough, the way it worked out is the game supports up to 57 titles without getting broken, and there are JUST about that many shooters on the Genesis/MD, so I managed to get in everything I thought qualified from all regions. Less emphasis on multi-directional shooters and forward scrollers/flight sims, more on traditional scrollers.

Games:

Spoiler

Air Buster
Arrow Flash
Battle Mania Daijingou
Battle Squadron
Bio-Ship Paladin
Bio Hazard Battle
Burning Force
Curse
Dangerous Seed
Darius (Genesis Mini version)
Darius 2
Darwin 4081
Divine Sealing
Elemental Master
Eliminate Down
Fire Shark (Same Same Same)
Fire Mustang
Forgotten Worlds
Gaiares
GleyLancer
Granada
Grind Stormer (V Five)
Gynoug (Wings of Wor)
Heavy Unit
Hellfire
Insector X
Magic Girl
Master of Weapon
Mega Swiv
Musha (Aleste)
Omega Blast
Panorama Cotton
Phelios
Raiden Trad
Slap Fight
Sol Deace
Space Harrier 2
Space Invaders '91
Steel Empire
Super Airwolf (Crossfire)
Super Fantasy Zone
Task Force Harrier EX
Thunder Force II
Thunder Force III
Thunder Force IV
Trouble Shooter (Battle Mania)
Truxton (Tatsujin)
Twinkle Tale
Twin Hawk (Daisenpuu)
Twin Cobra
Undead Line
Vapor Trail
Verytex
View Point
Whip Rush
XDR
Xenon 2
Zero Wing

Instructions:
Once you have the game installed, go inside the following folders and replace the following files. (You could even just create a separate folder to have a backup copy aside from your normal installation of the game.)

Replace all files in the "data" folder.

In the "SEGAGameRoom_Data" folder, replace the "resources.assets" and "sharedassets0.assets" files.

Just boot the game as normal, using virtual game room option for best results, though you can also use the quick launcher instead, which will show the correct game titles, but doesn't support VR.


Known issues:
When you go to the spine of a game in the game room, the pop-up menu will show you the wrong title (haven't figured out how to mod these yet.) Just click play and you'll see the cartridge with the original art being put into the console.

The game shelf/list isn't entirely alphabetical, it's a huge pain to rearrange those after already completing mod stuff, and I think it looks good as-is.

Fairly obviously, achievements and challenges won't work for anything besides Space Harrier 2 and Bio Hazard Battle (they still have their original files there.)


Please give any additional feedback here, I'd like to hear what you guys think or if you run into any other issues. This is my first real attempt into modding PC games, which Sega seems to be encouraging to some extent with this release.

Download here, have fun: https://www.mediafire.com/file/j8ft37hg ... 9.rar/file

[Sengoku Strider]

This is incredible, great job. The original version is a solid collection, but very rpg-focused, with BioHazard Battle as the lone STG representative (unless you want to include stuff like Crackdown & Gain Ground). I'm not a PC gamer so I can't get in on this, but I'd love to see Sega put out a similar Genesis ecosystem that could support new titles and 3rd party stuff.

They could sell titles a la carte after including the usual starter titles, and people could build their own room around that. If they could get a Hamster-like rollout it could be really cool. They could even expand to other systems, people could build their own virtual Youtuber excessive collection room.

[dmk1198]

Seriously cool thnx

Sent from my Redmi Note 8T using Tapatalk

[MachineAres 1CC]

This is incredible, great job. The original version is a solid collection, but very rpg-focused, with BioHazard Battle as the lone STG representative (unless you want to include stuff like Crackdown & Gain Ground). I'm not a PC gamer so I can't get in on this, but I'd love to see Sega put out a similar Genesis ecosystem that could support new titles and 3rd party stuff.

They could sell titles a la carte after including the usual starter titles, and people could build their own room around that. If they could get a Hamster-like rollout it could be really cool. They could even expand to other systems, people could build their own virtual Youtuber excessive collection room.

Thanks! I wish you could try it out, but yeah, it would be great if they could actually expand the library of this a lot further, but due to different games being from different publishers, they just went with the path of least resistance, essentially, by only including their own games.

From working on it and looking through a lot of the files, it seems almost all the files here are able to run on PS4 or Xbox One as well with almost no extra work or modification, the problem there is just being able to change the files on the console's hard drive. Doing so on the modern consoles just has too many hoops to go through, otherwise, I'd definitely be testing this on the consoles right now as well.

Hamster does manage to get a lot of great stuff, though I think that was more the intent from the beginning was to work with other devs and publishers to go back to some old titles. This collection I made definitely satisfies my itch for Genesis, though, since most of the Genesis games I love that weren't on the original collection are now in this shmups setup, with only a few exceptions.

[FRO]

This is a cool idea! I love that you updated the room picture to include posters of games, that's a nice touch.

[MachineAres 1CC]

This is a cool idea! I love that you updated the room picture to include posters of games, that's a nice touch.

Thanks! There's even more posters in the room that you can't see from the screenshots. Did you get a chance to install and check this out? Thanks again for commenting

[DietSoap]

This is cool as fuck, thanks for making this. Btw Sol Deace seems to be missing from the list you typed out.

[MachineAres 1CC]

This is cool as fuck, thanks for making this. Btw Sol Deace seems to be missing from the list you typed out.

Thanks! I just corrected the list to have Sol Deace on there.

I also updated the whole project with a few important things, all detailed in the original post!

[emphatic]

Very cool.