Mega Games I is a three-in-one compilation cartridge Sega released in Europe in 1992, bundling the falling-block puzzler Columns, the arcade motorcycle racer Super Hang-On, and the soccer game World Cup Italia ’90 onto a single Mega Drive cart. It was sold on its own and, most famously, packed in with the redesigned Mega Drive II console, making it many European players’ first look at all three games at once.
How to Play
Starting the cartridge drops you into a menu where you pick one of the three games before it loads. From there, controls follow standard Mega Drive conventions: the D-pad (arrow keys in the browser) steers and navigates, the A/B/C buttons (Z/X/C) handle each game’s actions – rotating and dropping jewels in Columns, accelerating and boosting in Super Hang-On, passing and shooting in World Cup Italia ’90 – and Start (Enter) begins a match or brings up menus.
Tips
- In Columns, don’t just clear jewels as they fall – stack same-colored gems around the flashing “magic jewel” to trigger a Flash Column, which wipes every jewel of that color off the board at once and is the best way to keep up as the drop speed ramps up.
- Super Hang-On rewards holding the throttle through straights and easing off before hairpins. Its four courses (Africa, Asia, America, Europe) get progressively tighter, so learning a track on the easier difficulty before jumping to Expert saves a lot of wipeouts.
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