Pacsonic9000/sandbox/Golden Axe (PC Engine CD Port)

Golden Axe is a beat-em-up arcade game from 1989 from Sega. In the game, you control one of 3 warriors and go take down Death Adder and avenge their friend Alex.

The game was ported to many consoles and computers at the time with the Sega Genesis port being the most notable. While the Arcade original and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive port were good, the PC Engine CD port which was outsourced to Telenet Japan was poorly received for good reasons.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) It is very unfaithful to the arcade and inferior to the Sega Genesis port. For example, the sprites are smaller than the sprites in the Genesis version, the backgrounds and the sprites are less detailed and vibrant than the Genesis version, and the character animations are stiff as the Arcade and Sega Genesis versions have more fluid animations.
 * 2) There are long unskippable unnecessary cutscenes that weren't in the arcade original nor the Sega Genesis port.
 * 3) Speaking of the cutscenes, these cutscenes are also in a small window and despite it being a CD system capable of full-motion video, they're not video cutscenes but are instead, just basic stills and they're not even animated one bit. Due to this, they're not fun to watch and can slow the progression of the game.
 * 4) The play area is in a small window that's cropped while the Master System version plays in full screen despite it being a less powerful system than the PC Engine/TurboGraphx 16, though the Master System port is quite choppy due to a lot of the sprites being rendered on the background plane as opposed to sprites.
 * 5) Even though there are not a lot of enemies on screen at a time, the game for some reason suffers from slowdowns which is shameful considering how other games on the same platform have more enemies on screen at a time and don't slow down.
 * 6) The enemies are hard to fight as you can't hit their head with the bottom of your sword nor throw them which you can do in every other port of the game but instead, can only just basic attack them. To add to the enemy's difficulty, the enemies instantly recover from the lie-down position instead of their being more time until they get back up. To top it off, telling what plane you and the enemy are on is difficult which will lead to some of the magic attacks not hitting the enemies.
 * 7) The sound effects are pretty poor as they consist of sounds that sound like they came from an Atari 2600 instead of the PC Engine CD in which there are even PC Engine games on Hu Cards that have better sounding sound effects.
 * 8) It's only 1 player meaning that there's no 2 player co-op unlike the arcade original and the Sega Genesis version.
 * 9) There are missing bosses where the bosses should be which throws off players who played the other versions of the game.
 * 10) The controls are stiff and for the most part unresponsive.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The music is the typical cd quality that you get from PC Engine CD games and is nice to listen to.
 * 2) Despite the sound effects being of poor quality, the voice acting in the game is quite decent.
 * 3) Despite the cutscenes being long and boring stills, they are still nice to look at and are well drawn.

Reception
The port was met with negative reception. The website Video Game Den gave the game 1 out of 5 stars calling it a disaster and a missed opportunity while at the same time praising the CD music and the introduction sequences. Classic Gaming Quarterly gave the game a 1.5 while questioning why the developers spent more effort on the cutscenes and music and not everything else. Game Sack called it the worst port saying that it's worse than the Master System port. They even claimed that the game made the PC Engine look weaker than it is.

Videos
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