Description
A playthrough of Sony Imagesoft's 1994 license-based beat 'em up for the Sega CD, Ultraverse Prime.
Played on the normal difficulty level.
43:25 A featurette of Prime's writers and artist talking about the comic
46:29 Flipping through the first issue of Prime while the game's main theme plays in the background
Ultraverse Prime is a Sega CD-exclusive belt-scroller based on Malibu Comic's "Prime" that ran from 1993-1996. It never saw a standalone release and was only sold in one of Sony's "Double Deal" 2-in-1 packs, bundled with a copy of Psygnosis's Microcosm. It seems that nobody had confidence that Prime would sell on its own merits - probably because it's a half-baked port of an unfinished SNES game - and that it was being dangled as a carrot to offload unsold copies of Microcosm.
I've never read the comic, so I don't know anything about it or its background, and there's no intro to explain what's going on. Digitized scans of fifteen issues were included on the disc as a bonus, but the image quality is so poor that I have to wonder why they even bothered.
The game itself isn't a total bomb, but it's clear that this is more a functional prototype than a finished product. There's no weight to the controls, the hit detection is flaky, the challenge is practically nonexistent, the enemy variety is lacking, and your full range of grapples and throws only work on the small handful of them. The art style and the breakable background elements are cool, but this looks like a game that belongs on a cartridge. There aren't any cool scrolling effects, the character animations aren't particularly smooth, and the cutscenes are just static images with text overlays. It would've been nice had they at least made the playfield fill the screen.
The only real benefit that comes from it shipping on a CD (aside from production costs) is the Redbook audio. The Follin brothers once again delivered a soundtrack that completely outclasses the game it was written for. The tunes don't match the tone of the action in the slightest, but they're excellent. The title theme is especially worth a listen. Beneath the cringe-inducing vocals is a sweet prog rock track.
Ultraverse Prime had the potential to be a decent console brawler. All the pieces are there, but it sorely needed a few more months in the oven to bring everything together.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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