I've received mine but I really haven't had a chance to play it. Well, play it properly. Packages like this I have delivered to my work place as I don't trust my neighbors at home. And sometimes the postal person gets the location wrong (there's a north and south version of the street I live on-I've had a gift delivered to the wrong house. Thank goodness for GPS!) I have a monitor on my work bench that has HDMI but no sound but I tried it out anyways. The games look great with the CRT filter (at least on the monitor) and play pretty well. I played "Final Fight CD", "Night Striker", "Afterburner II" and watched the intro video for "Sewer Shark".

"Final Fight CD" I swear looks more colorful than I remember but that could just be my memory. I owned it when I had a Sega CD but I also remember reviews for it in a magazine stating it didn't have as many colors, so I'm not sure if my memory is tainted by that narrative. Anyway, it played pretty dang smooth.

"Night Striker"-I played this a lot in the arcade and I never knew it came out on Sega CD in Japan. It is a pixelly mess and your vehicle doesn't seem to have great control. I don't remember in the arcade when turning that you quick zip to the edge as quickly as you do in the home version. Eh. It's also hard to shoot stuff as your craft covers your line of fire.

"Afterburner II" played well. I'm used to the 3 button controller more than the 6 button but I did find it hard to pull off barrel rolls. The D Pad has the same sort-of wobbly feel as the original, so I'll try playing with the 3 button to see if that makes a difference. Otherwise it looked great and I could still get some good kills. Sega also kept in the secret controller commands to get more missiles during the restock phases!

"Sewer Shark" is the one of my personal jewels of the Sega CD. Like "Super Mario 64", it was the "tech demo" that really sold me on the system. Yeah it's an on-rails shooter but the cheesy sci-fi video with the simple action sits well with me. It's what I used to sell the idea of me buying a Sega CD when I was a teenager to my mom, who was not thrilled with me dropping that kind of money. "Sewer Shark" changed that. On the mini, the video itself looks better than on the original, which made me think if they used the 3DO footage. However it still has that lack of color to it which makes me believe that the 720p upgrade might have helped the clarity of the footage. After all these years, I never could make out what a door Falco passes by in the beginning says. You could see words but it never stood out. Now I see that it says "Don't commit suicide". I can't say I noticed it on the 3DO version when I had the system, but then I wasn't paying that close attention.

The box itself, like shown in the videos, is tiny. The system itself is probably not much bigger than my iPhone mini. The controller feels good and solid with the "mode" button also being used for getting to the menu screen (though you can adjust it to take a longer press as I think at least one game needs to use that button for something). The whole thing includes the HDMI cable, power cable and power plug.

I'm hoping I'll get a chance to play it this weekend. I'll post my thoughts when I can actually hear it.

@Az-on the preservationist side, I agree that was lame to remove the character and a chunk of a level. I wonder if they juggled with which would anger folks more-removing the character and a part of the level or reskinning the character? If the latter, WHAT would you reskin it to be that could keep the general feel of the character but not change the moves? By changing the character to a full on woman, would that have caused even more issues? Hard to say. It does sound like this character was removed from all Mega Drive Mini 2s as well.

On the personal side, I never played either SoR 3 or the Bare Knuckle versions of any of the games, so if you told me it was removed I wouldn't have known.

Makes me wonder if in an online manual for Super Mario Bros 2 (USA version) if they changed the description of Birdo at all.....