Sega kind of dropped the ball with their Genesis back in the day, quickly abandoning the system for the ill-fated 32X (fo a short time this WAS their focus) and then the rushed release of the Saturn. While Nintendo was supporting the SNES with stuff like Donkey Kong Country 3 and Yoshi’s Island, Sega was busy chasing the “bits” against Sony and to a much, much, lesser extent the Atari Jaguar and 3DO (quick, what was the full name of the 3DO?). Luckily for fans of Sega’s forgotten hit console independent developers have not forgotten.

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior was ported to the Genesis by French developer Lecornec Francois. Anyone that has been a fan of gaming may remember Barbarian was available on many computer platforms but not on home consoles (we got ports of games like Tongue of the Fatman/Mondu’s Fight Palace/Slaughter Sport). Based on the Conan the Barbarian novels (apparently not the movies though), this game is all about gore, swords and weird little creatures.

Before you get excited thinking this is based on the Amiga version (the hardware shares a lot of similarities with the Genesis by the way), the Genesis version is based on the Apple II version. What this means is, low quality graphics, stiff animation and quite a bit of muckiness that simply didn’t have to be, not with a superior Amiga version available. This choice was probably based on a coding issue.

Either way, the game is free from the developer’s website so grab it while you can.

Carl Williams

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