You’re on a bit of a hiding to nothing as a reviewer covering old Sega titles. After all, the sheer quality of the former giant’s output between 1988 and 1995 was such that there can be no gamer who wouldn’t want to play at least something in here. On the other hand, some pretty major technicalities do spoil things for people who can take their rose-tinted specs off.

First, there’s the pretty obvious fact that anyone remotely interested in this compilation will have spent 15 quid or so plundering Sonic 1 and 2, Streets Of Rage 2 and Golden Axe from Live Arcade, taking the total down from 40 to 36. Then, beyond the awful graphics filter Sega has applied to all 360 retro releases, there’s nothing to bring the experience into 2009. It would have been nice to see sound faults, cutting layers of music temporarily when too much is going on, removed, even if only as an option.

Also quite bizarre is the removal of Sonic & Knuckles’ trump card: an ability to connect with Sonic 2 and 3. Since spotty teenagers in their bedrooms seem to have solved this emulation problem on an amateur basis, we’re at a loss as to why Sega’s funds can’t sort this out. Finally, with such a light workload, it would have been nice to see Achievements that involved more than getting out of a game’s first level. Quite simply, where’s the challenge? Why can’t we be pushed to finish Sonic titles in under an hour, or kick a number of Golden Axe’s treat-bearing imps?

More positively, besides perhaps the greatest first-party era gaming has ever known, there’s a neat mechanism for navigating to favourite titles quickly. Interviews with the people behind such titles as Columns, Ristar and, of course, Sonic feature too – although not many truly big names appear. Naturally, there’s another opportunity to debate where the Sonic series went down the toilet too, whether it was when Shadow bore arms or earlier on when Sonic 3D decided that collecting little animals was exciting in its own right. To summarise, then, many of this release’s trump cards have already been played via DLC. While we’re hardly scraping the barrel with what remains, £30 still feels a little rich.