What I did in the game: All 3 games beaten.
The One Picture I have taken: Ending screen for each game (picture 1 at the top is for Earnest Evans, picture 2 in the middle is for El Viento and picture 3 at the bottom is for Annet Returns).
What a weird collection LRG and Edia decided to release. This is a compilation of 3 games following the adventure of Indiana Jones wannabe Earnest Evans and Wind Magical Girl Annet. Those games were made by Wolf Team, yes that same Wolf Team that will end up creating Tales of Phantasia. But before they partnered up with Namco, they were working with Telenet, creator of Valis. And let's just say that their first few creations here were really mediocre. Earnest Evans is a 2D side-scrolling platformer but every limbs of your character are animated, like a rag doll, and because of that it controls REALLY weird. This is also the only game where you control said Earnest Evants. Next is El Viento, which might be the best of the 3. You control Annet, again in 2D side-scrolling platforming stage, but they went back to standard sprite, and as such, it controls really tightly. Only drawback here might be the fact that you have only one life bar before getting a game over. You then have 3 continues, but you have to restart the entire stage. Everything was fine until the final stage, where the game just start to get hellish. And finally, the last game, Annet Returns, is a beat-em-up, but maybe one of the worst one I've played in my life. You can cheese every enemy so there's zero challenge, but sometimes (more like A LOT of times), enemies get stuck off screen, so you just stand there forever waiting for when they get unstuck or you have enough magic to kill them offscreen. The whole game just feel cheap and unfinished.
The highlight though are the animated cutscenes. Earnest Evans and Annet Returns are both Sega-CD games (Earnest Evans also have a Sega Genesis version included), complete with voice acting and red-book audio. Unfortunately, the Carbon Engine doesnt seems to emulate them quite well. If the Sega Genesis games are perfect, there's loading problem with the Sega-CD games. For Annet Returns, the first few seconds of each tracks were cut in my playthrough. And for Earnest Evans, there was actual delay between the sound and the picture, and the game crashed 2 times when changing scenes. They really need to update their emulator here, because it's not great. So overall, I would not recommend this package to anyone except maybe die hard Telenet/Wolf Team fans. Games are mediocre (except maybe for El Viento) and the Sega-CD emulation has big problems at the time of this writing. But, deep down, I'm still glad those games were preserved in some ways, I just love Telenet B-Tier experience from the 16-bits era, so I don't regret my purchase.
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