I didn’t know much about the Mega-CD (or Sega-CD) peripheral for the Mega Drive (or Genesis) until the Mega Drive Mini II came along back in October 2022, where it was represented by twelve of the sixty titles included on there. Of those twelve, I was immediately hooked by the neon landscapes and dramatic skylines of 3D shooter Night Striker, to the extent it wasn’t long before I was writing a deep-dive covering all its Out Run meets Space Harrier glory, although I do seem to be in the minority as far as a lot of my opinions on that game are concerned! Anyway, moving on, that deep-dive also mentions how much Sonic CD got its hooks in me too, and as I write, well over a year on, started a journey that would take me back to the original Sonic the Hedgehog game I didn’t really pay much attention to on my brother’s Mega Drive, then all the way through all twenty or so cannon 2D Sonic games, right up to Sonic Superstars from the end of 2023 on the Xbox Series X. (Future me will come back here at some point very soon and link to my planned top ten countdown of those too)!

I didn’t really cover any of the rest in that deep-dive, except for Sewer Shark, which was a game I did actually know about pre-Mini II and had always fancied, although as much as I seemed to be enjoying it while I was playing Night Striker, it was hardly the game we’re about to get into that’s hanging around my big list of all-time favourites like it is now! Of the others, I’d also already count the highly controversial (at the time) interactive full-motion video horror yarn Night Trap as an all-time favourite, having obsessed over completing it a few years back… And I’ve still got the notebook full of super-nerdy timings to prove it! I’ve also become a big fan of pseudo-3D shoot ‘em up Silpheed, with its spectacular environments and big-scale set-pieces. I do like the odd game of the very decent ports of side-scrolling beat ‘em ups The Ninja Warriors and Final Fight CD too, whenever I notice them on the Mini’s games carousel, and I’m intrigued enough by what I’ve played so far to properly throw myself into creepy first-person FMV adventure Yumemi Mystery Mansion at some point too, but that’s about where my long-term interest in Mega-CD on this console ended. However, I was also intrigued enough to not stop there…

I’m not sure I was quite ready for the amount of full-motion video and gallery shooters (and mostly combinations of both!) that were about to be shoved down my throat when I decided to cast my Mega-CD net beyond the Mega Drive Mini II and into its library of two-hundred plus games! There was more to them than that too, although it did make me appreciate the twelve games I first encountered because, as I was only to find out a very long time later, I’d struggle to put forward another twelve! Let me quickly run through the best of what I did come up with though… Batman Returns was the very first game I played outside of the Mini, mixing a brand new and pretty stunning 3D driving game with the less stunning old Mega Drive platformer of the same name. Probably the non-Mini game I’ve played the most since too! Tomcat Alley isn’t far behind though, playing more like Night Trap in a Top Gun skin than After Burner, with some really atmospheric, interactive, full-screen FMV. While I wasn’t so keen on Dragon’s Lair, this version of its laserdisc sequel, Space Ace, is a bit grainy but isn’t bad at all.

Is there any bad version of NBA Jam? Not sure, and I’m also not sure if this version is the best, but I had a lot of fun with it all the same! And that also applies to a way more specialist sports game, NFL’s Greatest – San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993, where you have the choice of those two teams, call the plays, then watch what happened in a grainy little FMV box! There might not be a lot to it but I like what there is. I’ll go with a couple of classics I’ve only really played enough of to know I want to go back to now, and those are interactive cyberpunk adventure Snatcher and spectacular cartoon-FMV laserdisc conversion Road Avenger. Similarly, while it didn’t have quite the immediate impact as they did, there’s clearly something I should like in equally spectacular 3D shoot ‘em up Soul Star and slightly more grounded (albeit in a helicopter) AH-3 Thunderstrike, so I plan to go back to those as well. Being a huge fan of the film, not to mention Winona Ryder’s, er, performance in it, I really wanted to like FMV-enhanced action-platformer Bram Stoker’s Dracula too but it’s absolutely awful! Fortunately, I found my vampire fix elsewhere, with Dracula Unleashed, which picks up Bram Stoker’s tale in the winter of 1899, ten years after the original novel, but with a lot more interactive FMV than in that!

Maybe not as much as Sewer Shark though – which I believe was also the first game ever to use real-time FMV for its core gameplay – so that’s probably a good time to start wandering over there… While there’s nothing particularly unusual (for the time) about its North American release in November 1992 then elsewhere in June 1993, things do get a bit convoluted when you throw in the timeline for the Mega-CD or Sega-CD unit itself, which will be some nice context for all the games I just mentioned and is fairly relevant to Sewer Shark in particular, so I’ll do my best to really quickly recap! The Mega-CD, as the Sega-CD is known outside of America, was first released in Japan at the end of 1991, boosting the capabilities of the Mega Drive console to compete with PC-Engine CD-ROM and take advantage of the relatively huge storage capabilities of a CD versus traditional cartridges, allowing for “Hollywood-tier” graphics and music… Hence all the FMV! It also included a new graphics chip, which enabled hardware scaling and rotation, and a new sound chip, but unfortunately all of this proved too much for the poor old standard Mega Drive processor, so it got a new one of those too, as well as a load more RAM, price be damned! It would take almost a year for the Sega-CD to launch in North America at the end of 1992, with the Mega-CD then finally arriving in Europe in April 1993, which coincided with a second, smaller model with a few cost-cutting and mechanical tweaks, being released in Japan around the same time. And when this new revision launched in North America a few months later, it was bundled with a copy of Sewer Shark, although the game (which I promise I’ll get to in a sec!) had already sold 100,000 units by then, and would go on to ship 750,000 units in total, which makes it one of the system’s biggest sellers.

In reality, sales of the Mega-CD were already in decline in Japan by this point, and North America was losing interest as stuff like the 3DO came along, while in Europe the Amiga CD32 was the CD platform of choice for many, so it struggled to get a foothold. It just about hung on until the arrival of the Sega Saturn in 1995 though, with games like Fahrenheit and Lords of Thunder still surfacing that year, although stuff like Myst would eventually get canned, as would the system itself the following year, having sold a total of almost two and a quarter million units, which, when you throw in the similarly disappointing reception for the subsequent 32X add-on, was seen as a bit of a failure all round. Maybe price shouldn’t have been damned after all! Anyway, back to Sewer Shark, which actually started life on an even bigger failure, Hasbro’s ill-fated Control-Vision console, which was going to use VHS tapes rather than cartridges (or CDs) had it ever materialised! Together with Night Trap, it was supposed to be a system seller on there, but Digital Pictures eventually took both to the Sega-CD and here we now are. I’ll go with a crappy phone pic of the blurb behind the Mega Drive Mini II menu on my crappy TV to set the scene, where environmental destruction has forced humanity underground, and it’s up to you to clear the sewers and transport supplies to hidden outposts…

Without wanting to get back into “Hollywood-tier” all over again, at this point it’s probably worth taking advantage of the manual for a bit more instead, which isn’t included on the Mini but Sega has made easily accessible online for all its games, either as dedicated individual files or a download of all of them at once. And while this game is relatively simple to play once you know how, you probably want a quick read of it regardless because pre-dual stick first-person rail shooters, where you control your direction as well as a crosshair, aren’t necessarily intuitive! I’ll come back to that in a sec, but just to flesh out the plot, you’re a rookie “sewer jockey” and your job is to keep the mass of post-apocalyptic sewers under the utopian paradise of Solar City – overseen by the evil Commissioner Stenchler – clear of monstrous mutations. You’re supported by your co-pilot, Ghost, who, along with Stenchler, you need to keep happy and will continuously judge your ongoing performance, while a robot scout called Catfish will travel just ahead of you and tell you which way to go next. And all of this with the promise of one day being admitted into Solar City if you do your job well enough, although more immediate rewards are provided by less insulting call-signs (on top of simply being allowed to keep playing)!

Things do take a few unexpected twists and turns along the way, particularly when your friend and fellow sewer jockey Falco, who’s possibly onto something she shouldn’t be, gets abducted by Commissioner Stenchler and getting to Solar City to rescue her then becomes your priority, but as far as gameplay goes, it’s always follow sporadic directional prompts (not unlike the aforementioned Dragon’s Lair) or shoot stuff! The action takes place from the cockpit of your Exterminator Class Sewer Shark vehicle, where your attention will mostly be divided between the main display showing approaching tunnels and targets for your Gatling gun, and the tube jump indicator, which consists of four illuminated arrows at the top of the screen. While these show every turn and every new tube available, they’re not always the best ones to take, so you need to use this together with the instructions from Catfish, and just to spice things up a bit, these come in the form of “twelve o’clock” for up, “three” for right, “six” for down and “niner” for left. And they’ll come several in quick succession as he opens up new hatch doors and sewer tubes to get you to your target location, so you might get a “three, niner, six” meaning take the immediate next right, then the next left, then go down. It works okay after a while but is a constant source of potential panic because getting one wrong or missing one then trying to recover while Ghost shouts abuse at you is likely going to result in a dead-end and the subsequent huge explosion!

While I didn’t play Sewer Shark at the time, I was very familiar with Night Trap, so can attest to quite how cutting-edge and downright spectacular those full-motion explosions and full-motion everything else would have been, even though they’re obviously a lot harder to appreciate now! As has generally been my experience with FMV as I’ve explored the Mega-CD and Sega-CD libraries (because there were quite a few regional variations), it’s very grainy by today’s standards, however small the area it’s crammed into to try and disguise it is! That said, in the case of Sewer Shark’s main gameplay videos, it works absolutely fine, translating into a smooth and reasonably varied tunnel ride that throws you around and changes direction way more than you’d have ever got out of “real” graphics for years to come! It is just a tunnel ride though, so there’s none of the hinderance from bright lights or general lack of detail you get in the more “cinematic” cutscenes. These are fully acted, with exactly the cast of cringeworthy characters you’re probably imagining, straight out of a straight-to-video eighties action movie, with some truly dreadful scripting that also works absolutely fine here! The production is decent though, even if it doesn’t always keep some of those limitations in mind, and again, put on a pair of early-nineties eyes and I reckon it’s a really impressive package!

The years have been much kinder to the audio, with CD-quality everything, from the relentless sci-fi gunfire and shrieks from the poor critters you’re massacring to the relentless “motivational” chatter from your co-pilot and instruction from your robot guide. I’m not sure the generic synth-rock soundtrack pounding away behind everything is quite as timeless but it’s certainly not offensive and does its job to add even more urgency. I guess all the stuff you’re shooting at is the only thing your senses never really adjust too, because they’re just very bland, regular sprites playing out against actual video footage, which is par for the course with these things but all the same, they often seem almost like placeholder graphics that someone forgot to replace. To begin with, they mostly consists of bat and ratigators (exactly what it says!), neither of which seem to do you much (if any) harm if you miss them with your crosshair, which I should say feels as good to control as any can on a d-pad. They do all add to your weight tally though, which is one of the few non-lethal performance indicators you’ll come across! You’ll soon come across much bigger (meaning heavier) scorpions, which take multiple hits to bring down and will hit back, although not as hard as the moles, which are ten times more valuable but you’re in trouble if you don’t take them down first! According to Sewer Shark lore, these were actually your sewer cleaning predecessors, until they went renegade! Anyway, last enemy type you’ll encounter is the zerk, a huge firefly-type thing that means even more trouble if you let it come anywhere near. You might also happen across “The Crazy Looking Thing” which you want to approach with caution if you ever see him but maybe he’s not so bad after all…

I wasn’t really keeping score but I reckon each stage lasts five to ten minutes, and the tension is maintained throughout, with your finger constantly jabbing at the fire button as you wait to catch the next set of directions, then there’s a nervous wait until your target direction is indicated, which could be ages as tunnels teasingly fly by to other places that might end up somewhere near if you take them anyway. Maybe? Maybe not worth the risk though, but then you’re panicking because maybe you just missed an indicator, or there simply wasn’t one as you heartbreakingly watch that “niner” tunnel pass by to the left you could have gone down if you’d known! I’m not sure if that’s intentional or not but I am sure those indicator arrows aren’t always reliable! But what can you rely on in a radioactive sewer where nothing’s as it seems? Well, occasionally you’ll come across a recharge station to recover some of the lost energy that’s always ticking away on your cockpit display, although even that’s not straightforward, with only one of two entrances to it ever open at any given time, which means a last-minute left or right turn indicated by a green or red light for one or either. As mentioned earlier, you’ve got crosshair and steering control on a single directional pad, and as standard it’s moving the crosshair (with A always to fire) because you’ll spend most of your time shooting stuff. However, when you need to make a turn, you need to press B to disengage that and switch to steering, and like I also said, that’s quickly intuitive and probably the best possible solution. I think the only other thing you need to worry about is the hydrogen indicator, which will eventually increase to dangerous levels the further into the sewers you go, when you’ll then need to burn it off by shooting off a flare before it gets too high, done with a press of C.

And that’s Sewer Shark! A living b-movie that demands concentration, quick reflexes and an even quicker trigger finger. Once you’ve got your eye in, a single game is going to keep demanding for some time too, with the first parts soon becoming relatively easy, which is possibly part of the game’s main shortcoming – you’ve got one life, and there’s no checkpoints, and before you even think about saw-toothed moles and the like, one over-enthusiastic wrong turn anywhere is likely to mean going head-first into a brick wall and being blown to smithereens before too long, in turn meaning you’ve got to do everything all over again, albeit (I think) randomised each time, for what that’s worth in this kind of game. There are quite a few different ship explosions to enjoy though! Potentially some different end-game scenarios too, but having only ever got about half an hour maximum into what I understand is about forty minutes total, I can’t yet confirm. And I’m pretty happy with that scenario because it means I’ve got a whole lot more Sewer Shark ahead of me, with all the grainy FMV that involves, which is as fine with me now as it would have been thirty years ago, even if we’ve all aged considerably since!

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