Golden Axe is a early Conan-styled beat-em-up originally made by Team Shinobi part of Sega of Japan for the arcades in 1989. It became a big hit and soon was ported by Sega of Japan onto Sega Mega Drive around 1989-1990. 4 Megabit ROM cartridge, up to 2 player action, ayiep.
Golden Axe was ported to other places, such as Sega CD, Engine PC CD thing and a usual bunch of computers. And maybe others.
The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version. It's revision 01, the latest one, which means less bugs.
Now, technical part about Sega's emulation here:
The Sega Classic games that you purchase on Steam count as DLCs for "Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics" game that should appear in your library.
It has Bedroom HUB which is the one with many features yet lags for many and Simply Launcher which lacks Workshop and Online but at least it works just fine for everybody.
However, Simple Launcher has it's fair share of glitches as well. It can crash. And it does the second time you go to main menu, so always quit after saving there so it doesn't crash when you want to save next time!
Emulation itself, mostly sound, isn't that good but it does it's job. Also, yes, emulator supports quick saves.
As alternative, you can use external emulator to run games that you purchased. Sega kindly placed in all games that you purchased in "uncompressed ROMs" folder that program itself doesn't use, just change file extension to ".bin" or so. The file for this one being "GAXE_W.68K".
I also demand you to read digital manual of this game first. You can find it here on store page or go to "manuals" folder of game root and open "GA_PC_MG_EFIGS_US.pdf".
Has online (in Bedroom HUB only) and local multiplayer.
The plot of Golden Axe takes us on a journey of Ax Battler, the barbarian, mother massacred by Death Adder, Tyris Flare, the amazon, parents murdered by Death Adder, and Gillius Thunderhead, the dwarf, brother killed by Death Adder. They all want to get to Death Adder for obvious reasons. Oh yea, and apparently Death Adder stole the powerful Golden Axe and is invading Yuria land so it's time to go barbarian-style on him.
My favourite part of Sega Genesis port however is that it doesn't have golden axes in it. While in original both Death Adder and Gillius had one, for some reason.
Golden Axe is a old-school beat-em-up, movement in any direction, attacking left or right only. It's somewhere between Double Dragon and Final Fight eras. You move around and attack enemies with your close-range weapons, occasionally riding Bizzarians, that are dragons, when there is one around. Oh yea, and you can collect magic pots and use them when you think the moment is right.
I would say that the main focus of this game is more on avoiding the enemy groups than just outright coming in and punching everything in line. This game isn't simple as you can't usually walk toward enemy in straight line and not get hit by something huge. The AI of enemies is also made to always surround you and try to double up on you, comboing the hell out of you, so you really can't take any time whacking a single enemy. This game is going to make you want to dance around battlefield. No block button, no avoid feature, it's going to make you learn the reason why beat-em-ups have vertical movement in hard way. So you better use it to both approach and avoid enemy.
It also varies up with the fact that levels have elevations, pits and walls. Yup, ain't just tubes like in Final Fight era. And you should make use of those if you want to succeed. Or just because it's fun. Always take the higher ground to knock back baddies trying to jump onto it and have fun throwing all the enemies into pits, even figuring out how to use the ones that are off-screen. The exclusive level that Sega Genesis got is incredible fun with all the pits, a great break after the original final boss. And yep, Genesis port has extra stuff in it not found in arcades, adding exclusive new level and a new (read: recolor) final boss. Though I think that other home ports got them as well. Ending was changed too, no 4th-wall smashing there.
Though, this game is quite weird at times. And port is quite unpolished and not only in a sense that it had to cut animation frames and lower down sprite size. And scream sound that are now ridiculous. Though the music is still epic, but that's a default state with Sega. For example, the throw move is useful but in weird way. You can't knock others by throwing enemy body. Instead you do it because for some reason enemies don't attack you while you do it and all the dash attacks miss you. AI is pretty much one-trick pony, doing same things, while game keeps throwing 3-man groups at you all time. But it also slightly glitchy in Genesis versions, sometimes they run backward and even move unsually fast vertically and sometimes they just freeze in animation until you hit them.
It also doesn't help that you can cheese your way through the game easily by doing cheap moves. Or more exactly, by spamming dash attack. It pretty much turns any 2-man group into no-brainer. Or you can spam Gillius rolling attack that counters bosses well too. Try to restrain yourself from going cheap. Otherwise you end up with game that is hard (not really) to learn and easy to master.
And yep, got three characters there. Amazon has powerful magic but range of weapon is very small. But her dash attack beats anybody aside from amazon. Barbarian is not-exciting average, with decent magic and weapon range. His dash attack also fine, but doesn't work on knight bosses. And dwarf has axe and beard so he is everybody's fav, having less magic but really huge weapon range. His dash works on bosses really well, poor them, but normal enemies out-cheap him. And if you press jump+attack you get a backroll attack which is also cheap against bosses, while amazon and barbarian don't really move with their backward attacks.
Genesis port also added two new modes and options. In options you have access to controls and sound test to listen to music. And you can change amount of life bars from 3 to 5. That's the only difficulty-wise thing you can change, sadly.
One of the added modes is Beginner Mode. It's a complete pushover. You can play only the first three stages, everything is super-easy, magic uses up only 2 bottles instead of them all. But hey, Death Adder Jr.
And another mode is The Duel. What it does actually depends on if you started game in 1 or 2 player mode. In 1 player mode it's an endurance mode where you have to face off 12 rounds of Death Adder's minions. It's quite fun to see how far you can get. There is also no magic so Gillius is clearly the best character, oh well. It also has a timer for some reason, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe it improves the final score if you beat rounds in time.
Oh yea, and you can play Golden Axe with another player. In normal modes it's usual beat-em-up coop. Two players select different characters, they have separate lifes, there is friendly fire so watch out. Should be neat.
For The Duel it's 1v1 duel event. But since it's old-school beat-em-up and not Street Fighter 2 it sucks. Well, to be honest I didn't really get to play it but really, beat-em-up rules don't fit such mode. Looking at all those huge health and a really long invincibility period after getting knocked out, it's probably going to be just two person trying to catch each other.
In the end, setting, with artistic backgrounds, is awesome and game is satisfying to beat up baddies none the less. And this port has more modes and levels than Arcade, whoop.
