Recent reviews by DustyShinigami

Fail to the King!

Duke Nukem 3D is a great retro FPS, but this port is a bit poor, and definitely not recommended compared to the previous Megaton Edition that was removed. This port should have been handled by a more capable studio, such as Nightdive, who would have done it justice! Instead, Gearbox have released something a bit shoddy and I'm so glad I only got it for a few quid. Nightdive would even have included Duke Nukem 64 into the bargain!

This port is marred by issues. Even though 3D acceleration can be enabled to give improved graphics, some areas, such as the end of The Abyss level for me, run poorly and are just badly optimised! Even switching to classic mode has no effect! I mean, seriously...! What the hell is going on?! The game is old and should not be having performance problems! Even picking up certain items and activating triggers cause the game to stutter momentarily!
The next issue encountered is that I keep randomly dying throughout the game! It's great this version includes a rewind option after you die, but I keep getting this popping up even when my health hasn't depleted to zero, and nor have I been shot to death!
I also keep encountering an issue where I'm no longer able to perform an action on a switch! I'll keep pressing 'E' on a card reader and nothing happens! I have to move around or try to reload to get it working again.

There is also still the problem where some enemies either don't spawn, get stuck, or getting one squished doubles the amount killed, preventing you from getting the full/correct kill count. This, apparently, has been an issue since the beginning, but it's still present here. I suspect these bugs would have been stomped out if Nightdive had released it.

The sad thing is, is that it's highly unlikely Gearbox will fix any of these issues. :-\

To add insult to injury, I've reached Pigsty, and using the blue keycard just once appears to 'remove it' and the other blue-coded doors no longer open. This makes finishing the level impossible without cheats.

As things are, I can't recommend this collection. I've spent way over 2 hours so I'm unable to get a refund, but it's taken me the whole game to reach Sonic & Knuckles only to discover there's a save corruption bug. The first time, I had no idea what had happened, and I thought I'd lost all of the progress made. Thankfully, I'd been backing up my saves to OneDrive due to using the mod manager, and as Cloud Saving was disabled, I was transferring my progress between my PC and laptop manually. OneDrive makes its own backups, so luckily I was able to retrieve one at the end of Sonic 3. Problem is, as soon as you enter Sonic & Knuckles, the game saves, you quit, and once you attempt to load it back up, you're greeted with an error saying there's a problem with the save. In other words - corrupted. It's good I can go back and keep the progress I've made before that happens, but it's still incredibly poor, and God only knows how this slipped through QA.
A few others have run into this problem as well and despite reporting bugs to Sega Support, it's anyone's guess if any of the issues will get fixed. :( Because of this save corruption, I'm unable to finish the game, so I feel like it hasn't been money well spent! I've also discovered bugs that shouldn't even be in the games, and they certainly weren't in the original Mega Drive/Genesis versions either! Thank God I own the originals...

Apart from this issue, I'm fairly happy with the collection. I certainly think much more could have been added though. And some things shouldn't be the way they are. I've yet to play the Game Gear titles, but even with the inclusion of Amy and Knuckles in Sonic CD, so many new challenges and achievements could have been added. Such wasted potential... Therefore, I don't see the point in going through the games as the other characters. Not any time soon anyway. Perhaps if there were achievements for playing as them...
The missions are a nice little diversion, but there are a few that are frustrating and yet have a 3-4 star rating in difficulty when they should be 5! Others feel too simple. Likewise with some of the unlockables - there's some nice stuff there, but I feel the Premium videos could have been much better. The majority consist of test/line-drawing/storyboard animations of the cinematics. Would have been cool to have had some behind-the-scenes documentaries instead.
And yes, there's also the issue with the original Sonic 3 music being absent. Thank God for mods, is all I can say! It's ridiculous though that we have to rely on modders and the fan community to fix many of the issues present! Story mode is cool with the inclusion of the new cinematics and how you'll go through each game one after the other. Anniversary modes are essentially the mobile remakes, which can be loaded onto PC for free anyway, so it feels rather cheeky to basically charge for them in this collection.

Unless the game is patched and the save corruption bug is fixed, this review will be sitting with a negative rating permanently.

A great game, one I would love to recommend, but one that's sadly let down by an awful port. The game is plagued by technical issues that still haven't been fixed and most likely never will thanks to Square Enix. The lack of support and communication is shocking, frankly. And it's pretty pathetic that a gamer - a customer - has had to create a mod to fix a number of issues that the developers haven't bothered to address. And then they have the cheek to charge £39.99 as well as some DLC that costs extra.

From resolution issues. to white screen crashes, choppy pre-rendered cutscenes, bugs/glitches, frame rate drops, stutter/hitching, misleading graphics settings (anti-aliasing that uses MSAA but doesn't say, which can lead to confusion as to why the frame rate is hit hard), and the fact that some people still can't play it and won't be able to unless it gets patched.

If you plan on buying I'd strongly advise waiting until it's greatly reduced and use the FAR mod.