"The Good Ol' Days"

As I had mentioned in my Tetris article, we had always had game systems in our household growing up (much to the chagrin of our parents). The NES had served us well for many years. So many years, in fact, that it completely stopped working. Jesse still blames that copy of Mappy we rented. It was the last game that ever worked on that console…

We were surprised when our mom came to us with a deal. If we were able to come up with half of the money, she and our dad would make up the difference on a new game system. The Super NES was out, but the price point was just too high. The Genesis had been out for a while, and one of my older brothers, who was coming up with the majority of our share of the money, preferred the Genesis. He had rented one a few months before this and was taken in by Altered Beast. I can’t speak for him. I wasn’t allowed to play it because of all the monsters and the killing. Still, the Genesis now came with Sonic the Hedgehog, which I was dying to play.

Jason, my older brother, was given the money. Jesse, Jason and his girlfriend (no idea what her name was) and I all packed into his car and drove out to pick up the console. I was very excited, and yet, it still felt a little odd picking up a console box that didn’t say Nintendo.

On the ride home, Jesse and I poured over the box, looking at all the games listed on the back that were exclusive to the Genesis and now available to us. We kept making fun of Decap Attack’s mascot “Chuck D. Head”, which lead to Jason’s girlfriend thinking we wanted that game. We had a good laugh.

Once it was home and hooked up, we took turns playing “Sonic the Hedgehog”. I was blown away. Everything in the game was so bright and vibrant. There was so much personality there to love. Even the “baditute” wasn’t enough to sour me on the experience. It was at that moment that I realized something: Fanboy loyalty to a single console was foolish.

There were some really strange and unique games coming out back then like “Toe Jam & Earl”, where you are two funky aliens trying to repair your busted space ship, “Global Gladiators”, a surprisingly good game in which you save the world from pollution, but which is also a strange McDonald’s tie-in, and “Ecco the Dolphin”, where you, as a dolphin, save the world from an alien invasion.

It also had the better versions of some games that were for both consoles. The game based on Disney’s Aladdin was actually a port of the arcade game from Japan, unlike the kiddified SNES version. Jurassic Park, which was huge at the time, was a much different game for the Genesis. The SNES version was a terrible port of the PC game while the Genesis version let you play as a tricked out Dr. Grant (with a rocket launcher) or the velociraptor.

The crazy part was that a lot of the games were pretty easy to get through in a weekend’s rental, but then the end boss was impossibly hard. I don’t know what it was about Genesis games, but there were a lot that did this. Difficulty curves aside, we had a lot of fun on the console for a few years.

Then, out of nowhere, Jason bought Jesse a SNES. Those old fanboy tendencies started to well up inside of me once again, and the Genesis was rarely played after that. Part of me still looks fondly on those odd couple of years with the Genesis, but it never hits that same nostalgic spot that our old Nintendo consoles do.

I recently picked up “Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection” on the Xbox 360. Browsing through it’s forty plus games, I was surprised to realize that, while I have played most of the games on the collection, the majority were not from when I owned the console. Many were either on other game collections or were the arcade versions. However, I was pleased to find that many of the games were still fun to play. I had missed a lot of what are considered classics on the Genesis, like the “Streets of Rage” series. Even without the nostalgia, I am enjoying the collection a lot. I think that is a testament to how good some of those old games were.

Tags: Altered Beast, Chuck D. Head, Decap Attack, Mappy, NES, Sega Genesis, Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, Super NES, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.