Space Harrier II (M2)

Space Harrier II is a new, updated version of the game created by M2 and included on the Genesis Mini 2.

The original Space Harrier II was created as a launch title for the Sega Genesis, and it recieved mostly middling reviews, both at the time of release and today. Most reviewers made negative comparrions between Space Harrier II and its predecessor, the superior Space Harrier arcade game, and they were especially critical about Space Harrier II's visuals. However Space Harrier was one of the most expensive and technically advanced arcade cabinets of 1985, and even at the time of the Genesis's release three years later, a home console couldn't really be expected to compete with it.

For their remake of Space Harrier II, M2 imagined what the game could have been if the Genesis was a more powerful system. M2 created a virtual console they named the Sega Mark V, which is a technologically enhanced version of the Genesis that could have been released by Sega with the technology that was available in 1988. The Sega Mark V has additional sprite scaling capabilities, but it retains most of the original Genesis hardware limitations, including its sprite limits.

M2's new version of Space Harrier II was rebuilt from scratch for the Mark V virtual console, and it looks, and plays, much better than the original Sega version. However, because of the Genesis's sprite limitations, it has a lot of flicker. There's a hidden option to remove the flicker, but this comes at a cost in other areas.