(Never mind that Dave already reviewed all these!)
I was an Early Adopter of the Genesis in , I THINK 1990 or 91 (whenever it came out..maybe even '89, my memory is bad here!); anyway I know only the TG16 was available at the time the Super Famicom was in Japan but the SNES was far in our future... so there were only a few games available for it. I saved my pennies for 3 months, sold 4 NES games and had my Dad drive me to AMES to buy the GENESIS and pack-in ALTERED BEAST and THUNDERFORCE 2 (at the time I wondered what happened to TF1? Turns out it was only a European release...)-I had already played ALTERED BEAST at the local bowling alley's arcade room andcouldn't wait to get home to hook this baby up!
The Saturn reviewer said he thought THAT system was sexy-I was in LOVE with the super curvey flying saucer-crashed-into-a-black- box design of the first Genesis. This sucker looked awesome before you even turned it on! And when I DID power up Altered Beast my jaw dropped at the thumping audio that pounded from my TV...then "RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE" said Zeus, and I was hooked!- of course AB was super easy and took two days to beat but it was quite a graphics/sound showcase, IDENTICAL to the coin -op (not 100% identical but maybe 98%, closer than any system ever)! But THUNDERFORCE2 was my true love-I LOVED shooters and although the overhead screens were a bit dull, the side scrollers made up for it as my jaw dropped again (behind the damn TV, took me forever to get it) and my eyes bugged out at the sight and my ears exploded (god I was a MESS that day!) at the voices and music. A sexy Japanese chick said "Breaker is On!" "Hyper!", etc... and boss ships filled the screens. The color was amazing.
I soon added more early Genny games like Last Battle, Alex Kidd and Shinobi....and one word entered my head... "90's COLECOVISION!" ok, two words. At any rate I thought the QUALITY of these smooth, nicely plastic-packaged games were just like the quality of early CV games, EXCELLENT. I had no doubt that the Genesis was turn to toast the TG-16 and upcoming Nintendo "SUper System"....
Of Course, today I can look back with a wisened eye at the ups and downs of the system. Sonic was a deffinite up, but too many average platformers like DECAP ATTACK were rushed out, and soon the huge sega library had its share of dogs as well. The controls felt good, but of course we had to upgrade to a new 6-button once STREET FIGHTER came out. And the SNES humbled the system a bit- both had palletes of 512 colors but Genny could only display 64 at once, while SNES could show 'em all! No doubt the SNES had a better audio chip, and onboard scaling/ rotation as well. Ad in MARIO and better controllers and I was for awhile wooed over to SNES-but ONLY for awhile, I picked up a Genesis model 2 (a mistake, the worst of the 3 models) much later and began to build my library again...
Today I feel the Gen is superior for shooter fans as it is faster and simply has better titles overall (Super EDF non withstanding)
but SNES may have an edge in "cute" games (sonic nonwith...); the good news is now both systems are cheap enough that you can own both! Who wouldn't want to? The Snes may have the purple passion but remember, Genny is Soooo sexy!
