Developed by Core Design and published by JVC in 1993. Follow me on Twitter: / al82_retro Add me on Google+: Having played the Mega-CD version of Wolfchild, I decided to play the bog-standard Mega Drive version purely for the sake of completion; this rounds out my longplays of all 16-bit versions of the game. You might think that Mega-CD and Mega Drive versions of the game should be identical (apart from the music/sound of course), but there is at least one notable difference. In this version, you can only fire a single psychic claw projectile the default wolf weapon) at a time and this makes killing some enemies substantially harder. Level four becomes near-impossible on medium difficulty as the jet-pack guards all require multiple hits to defeat and they spawn in packs of two or more. Unless you have a good supply of smart bombs, you simply won't survive this section; even using save states and lower emulation speeds did little to help. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but the Mega-CD version allows the player to have two shots on screen at once, which made this section manageable whereas this version just seemed ridiculously tough. The music in this version (scored by Matt Furniss) recreates many of the tracks from Martin Iveson's original Amiga score, plus a few tracks from the console versions. While the music is very good, the same cannot be said of the sound effects. I'm guessing that the digital effects present in all of the other versions just couldn't be replicated to a satisfactory standard (or took too much memory perhaps?) and we have to make do with some blips and bloops that just don't do the game justice. Even with slightly iffy sound effects, I still prefer this over the SNES version purely because the graphics are sharper and the colour palette maintains more realistic tones and less use of gaudy primary colours in the backgrounds. The toughness of level four detracts sharply from the enjoyment and I don't know how many players would have got past the elevator sections.This issue aside, it's a decent conversion, although the Mega-CD version remains the definitive version for me. #retrogaming
