TheBoySaunders.com

I’ve recently mentioned my personal computer gaming renaissance.

It started, innocently enough, with the realization that my under-powered PC could, in fact, run Half Life 2 quite easily. This was a good thing as I had enjoyed the original greatly whilst at University.

After that, I started thinking of other games that I had enjoyed older versions of. Warcraft 3 fulfilled that critera. Soon, even my dusty old Playstation 2, neglected for the previous two years as little more than a downstairs DVD player, was back in full-time use as I revisited old WWE Smackdown vs Raw games.

The nostalgia hit top-gear when Ellie bought me the Sega Megadrive Collection for my birthday. I revisited Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, Comix Zone and the previously-unreleased-outside-of-Japan Golden Axe 3. But, best of all, they had a version of the old-classic Columns packaged in with the disc, the game that kept my Dad and I playing every evening for six months, almost a decade and a half ago. Somehow, incredibly, I managed to get Ellie addicted. Somehow, incredibly, I managed not to shout at the game for its use of the word Lathesis (sic).

But there’s a drawback to this collection. There’s some obvious ommisions from the list of included games. There’s no Streets of Rage, no Shining Force. And worst of all, no Gynoug (or Wings of Wor, as it was known Stateside.)

Never heard of Gynoug? That’s no surprise. It was an unsuccessful, badly programmed side-scrolling shoot-’em-up with little to redeem or distinguish itself. The only reason I love it so much is visualising the looks on the faces of the programmers, when they realised that they had managed to sneak this level past Sega’s censors:

I mean, really… That’s not even subtle.