Sonic Mega Collection Plus or STEAM?

[ChrissyCreme]

I'vebeen looking into playing thwe classic Sonic games on my pc but cannot decide between the two. Mega Collection seems like a great bang for my my buck but have been hearing that the resolution cannot be changed. Can anyone confirm this? If so how does Mega Colection fare against the classic Sega games on Steam?

[c5]

I have both and I like them both, but there are several differences to take into consideration. The resolution indeed can't be changed on Mega Collection plus and there are reports of issues with controller compatability, although I've never had any problems with it. Mega Collection Plus has several pretty decent Game Gear games and a bunch of cool bonus features (including the manuals to all of the games), which Steam doesn't have any of. Mega collection plus also lets you switch to different versions of some games using a cheat code (so for instance, you can access the Japanese version of Sonic 1, which fixes the spike glitch and adds more layers of parallax scrolling to the backgrounds). If you just want the Sonic games, it would be cheaper to get MC+ off of Amazon ($8 new for pc version) than it would be to buy them individually, even with the winter sale. Another thing to note is that some games have to be unlocked in MC+, so you won't be able to play the various lock-on games until you've played various games a certain number of times, and there are a few other bonus games (Comix Zone, Ristar, and The Ooze) that are like that as well. From a content and price standpoint, MC+ beats Steam (at least in regards to the sonic games), but from a technical standpoint, Steam has better support for high resolution monitors with cripser upscaling, whereas MC+ looks really blurry upscaled. Also, you need to have the disc in the drive to play MC+, whereas you don't need that for steam, which is much more convenient and better if you just want to play a quick game of something for a couple minutes.

Hope that helps

[ChrissyCreme]

Yeah that's the answer I was looking for :D thanks much I wanted someone with the actual Mega Collection + to give feedback. Do you know if the steam versions hve that extra "cartridge ability". I remember that if you connected Sonic 3 and Knuckles or something you could use Knuckles in Sonic 2. How are the resolutions though specifically for the steam versions?

[c5]

The only Steam game that supports the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge ability is Sonic 3, which you buy in the form of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so you can't play Sonic 3 or Sonic and Knuckles standalone. Mega Collection Plus not only gives you Sonic 3 and Knuckles, but also Knuckles in Sonic 2 and the Blue Sphere game you get from hooking it up to Sonic 1, so if you want that extra Knuckles functionality, MC+ is what to get. Plus, you can play Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles standalone if you want to. As for resolutions, the Steam version supports any resolution you want, whereas MC+ is stuck in 640 x 480, which looks very blurry on a higher resolution monitor. The Steam version also offers some visual filters which is pretty nice. You can choose to have no filter, which is what I use and gives a very vibrant, sharp picture that looks fantastic. There's one called "linear", which is very blurry looking and is essentially what you would get playing the PC version of MC+ upscaled higher resolution. They also have a filter called "TV", which puts fake scanlines on the screen to sort of recreate the look of playing on a CRT television which is kind of cool. The last filter is called "enhanced", which is what was included in the Ultimate Genesis collection for Xbox 360 and PS3, and sort of smooths out the graphics to look less pixelly and sort of has a watercolor effect, which is kind of weird looking and takes out a lot of detail, so I don't use it much.

[ChrissyCreme]

Ahh very informative thank you this is just the info I needed. Thank you for the help and vast amount of information you provided. This was just about everything I was looking for ^.^

[c5]

No problem, glad I could help.