Steve Brandon

Taz-Mania for the Sega Genesis was basically the first sprite-based video game to fool me into thinking I was watching a cartoon for a few seconds back in the summer of 1992 when I first saw the demo running on a little TV that the long-gone Compucentre store in Fairview Pointe-Claire shopping centre used as a monitor. I have the game (well, technically it belongs to one of my brothers) and I enjoyed what I could play of it, especially how the music changes tempo with the action (a minor touch that was still novel to me in 1992), but it does have annoying minecart levels that are completely reliant on memorization to avoid dying and I was never able to finish the game due to an "impossible" (at least to me) jump in one of the later log-jumping river levels. I have never played the sequel, Taz in Escape from Mars which seems to be regarded as the better of the two Tazmanian Devil games on the Genesis. I rented the Super Nintendo Taz-Mania once back in the 1990s but it's a completely different game, sort of a pseudo-3D Mode 7 scaling Taz rampage game. It was obviously more technically impressive but I still prefer the basic platformer Genesis game.