Remembering Sega's classics the right way

I finally got to see Abel Gance's Napoleon last weekend, and like pretty much anyone else who's been fortunate enough to witness the six hour silent epic, I've been obsessed with it ever since. It's sadly too rare an occasion to be able to see Kevin Brownlow's restoration of the 1927 visionary masterpiece, thanks partly to some unpleasant business with Francis Ford Coppola, but largely down to its grand Polyvision finale that requires three projectors and three screens.All of which has meant, for much of its life, Napoleon has gone unwatched and unappreciated: its omission from Sight & Sound's top 100 has more to do with the difficulty in watching the film rather than the film itself, which is certainly more than just one of the greats of the silent era.http://images.eurogamer.net/2013/art...x-1/quality/70This is pretty much what Diana Ross sees every day.

It'd be a shame to see classics of video game's own brilliant dawn lost or forgotten in similar circumstances, but thankfully we've got some truly talented people working to make sure that they're within easy reach, and that their original brilliance isn't diminished by age or circumstance. Following a string of revivals of Sega classics on the 3DS, it's Tokyo studio M2 whose work has been most notable of late - and since picking a handful of them up last week, they've fast become another obsession.If you've ever dabbled in Sega's back-catalogue before, you may well already be familiar with M2 - it's a studio that's been working wonders ever since it managed to port Treasure's Gunstar Heroes, a slick wedge of action that was already pushing at the boundaries of Sega's Mega Drive, to the Game Gear. In the 20 years since, it's a studio that's quietly made a name for itself through other such feats, whether that's been delivering impeccable cover versions of old standards such as in 2009's WiiWare outing Gradius Rebirth, or retouching classics as it did throughout the PlayStation 2's Sega Ages series.But M2's finest work, to my mind, has been the recently released 3D Sega Classic series. They're restorations that go beyond mere emulation, exploring the context and eccentricities of each game under the spotlight. And the work produced in Sega's golden age that stretched from the mid-80s to the early 90s is certainly not short of some delightful quirks.

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