Sega Genesis/Mega Drive |OT| WELCOME TO THE NEXT TOPIC


Release date

JP October 29, 1988
NA August 14, 1989
PAL November 30, 1990

I was the weird kid on the block in the late 80’s with a Master System, which was great but the schoolyard battles of say Ghost House vs Castlevania were obviously not in my favor. come spring of ‘89 though, that all changed! A couple friends a few houses down frantically called me over to see Altered Beast, Thunder Force 2, Space Harrier 2 & i wanna say Last Battle? our 8-bit systems were home to many distant ports from the vastly superior arcade offerings, and this was one of the first times I felt I saw that gap close a bit - Tekken 3 would do it years later, and of course the Dreamcasts’ Soul Calibur was the one to finish the cycle for me (a fitting end to both closing said gap & sega’s hardware finale, i thought).

A year later, we’d mostly play Moonwalker until I finally got my own system with Phantasy Star 2, my first real JRPG (i still have a polaroid shot of the ending!). To this day, I’ve hadsome of my best co-op experiences on it, from ToeJam & Earl, Streets of Rage 1/2, Bonanza Bros and so many others - i managed to wear out several pads & an arcade stick, and i don’t drop those things. Good times.

Not to indulge the aforementioned schoolyard battles too much here, but while SNES is (rightfully) cheered on here for many classics, the Genesis had more than its fair share of fantastic arcade action, JRPG, SHMUPS and many others - if you only play the many rehashed collections Sega puts out now, you’d really miss out.

On that note: what were some of your lesser-known favorites? Mine were:

  • Valis 3
  • Rolling Thunder 2 (never could find 3!) oh yeah MERCs too
  • Gunstar Heroes is kind’ve a given
  • General Chaos
  • MUSHA (Elemental Master was dope)
  • Shining Force 1 & 2 are still better than any Fire Emblem
  • ESWAT
  • Wonder Boy in Monster World
  • Starflight
  • Strider was like the best thing ever
  • Castle/World of Illusion - also, the superior Aladdin (i remember Quackshot being fun too)
  • Flashback
  • Zombies ate my Neighbors (though this is cheating for me, as i had it on SNES)
  • Shadowrun
  • El Viento
  • Thunder Force III + Lightening Force
  • Battle Mania Daiginjō/Trouble Shooter 2
  • Alisia Dragoon
  • Mega Turrican
  • Punisher (Spider-Man was fun but Sega-CD had definitive version!)
  • Mutant League Football
  • The Haunting
  • Alien Storm, i’m like the only guy who liked this better than Golden Axe
  • Bonanza Bros was my shit - I dug the Crack Down port too
  • Micro Machines (Super Off Road too!)

Useful Links:

Sega Genesis / Megadrive 101: A Beginner’s Guide

Games That Defined the Sega Genesis / MegaDrive

GUIDE: Telling apart good Genesis 1s and Genesis 2s from bad ones.

GUIDE: Import gaming on your Mega Drive/Genesis

Full region/compatibility list

Retrospectives: Fors Yard, Generation-16

finally: anyone thinking of getting a Genesis :

If you’re really into getting the good sound, you want the one actually labelled “HIGH DEFINITION GRAPHICS” (it wasn’t on all the Genesis 1s), and lacking copyright protection screen at the beginning. The Walkman-style headphone jack gives it great bass. Pop in SoR2.

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Welcome aboard, Irish.

Great OT, Irish. I was always a huge Sonic fan, so they never strayed far from my Genesis growing up. Jurassic Park and Aladdin also got a lot of play time growing up. I played a lot of the classic, Gunstar Heroes, Contra Hard Corps, Streets of Rage, however most of those were rentals, so I wasn’t familiar with a ton of the “Classics” until much later.

I’ve discovered a lot of great classics for the system: it really was special. So similar to what Nintendo was doing, however so different in its philosophy and appeal. I highly recommend the book Console Wars by Blake J Harris for a great look at Sega during the meteoric rise of the Genesis/Mega Drive.

Are you in the 1 image hell too? Peltz might need to up your user permissions.

Nobody should be. New users should be able to post 100 images if they want to.

great to see y’all!

[quote=“BTails, post:3, topic:262, full:true”]
Great OT, Irish. I was always a huge Sonic fan, so they never strayed far from my Genesis growing up. Jurassic Park and Aladdin also got a lot of play time growing up. I played a lot of the classic, Gunstar Heroes, Contra Hard Corps, Streets of Rage, however most of those were rentals, so I wasn’t familiar with a ton of the “Classics” until much later.

I’ve discovered a lot of great classics for the system: it really was special. So similar to what Nintendo was doing, however so different in its philosophy and appeal. I highly recommend the book Console Wars by Blake J Harris for a great look at Sega during the meteoric rise of the Genesis/Mega Drive.[/quote]

i think that’s how it was for many of us - we all played sonic, streets of rage, aladdin, jurassic park etc, i just happened to live on a block with a lot of other sega kids so we’d all trade and rent a lot of stuff to try out. there’s still a ton of great games i only learned about years later with my mega everdrive!

also stuff like Game Sack, Classic Game Room Generation-16 etc put me onto even more quality.

and yeah, i dug Console Wars as well…there’s a crowd at sega-16 that feels it slanted too pro-Kalinske, but i got love for dude. speaking of, Melf over there wrote a sega book i’ve wanted for a while now, and that Megadrive book i kickstarted years back turned out amazing! wish we had more like it.

If you had Kenseiden instead of Ghost House, it would have been a better fight. :slight_smile:

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god, it really would’ve been! it’s funny, i boot up stuff like that or Lord of the Sword now and just play them in short bursts, but i know if i’dve had them as a kid i would’ve been all over them

On that note: what were some of your lesser-known favorites? Mine were:

Valis 3
Gunstar Heroes
Alisia Dragoon

These are in my list too.
Also, a couple of B (C?) tiers amongst my personal favourites: Mazinsaga, Ex Mutants, Gynoug…

So many great games, the Mega Drive is definitely the system I love collecting for the most, at the moment.

Irish! Thank you so much for following through with the OT! Wonderful job!

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My favorite game on the Mega Drive and of all time is Alien Soldier. Its pretty much Gunstar’s big brother. The genesis itself is the reason I started my youtube channel. I feel like when compared to other consoles, it’s really misunderstood and has aged quite well! 68000 HEART ON FIRE!

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I love alien soldier even though I’m terrible at it. I think I considered it a moral victory when I got to the third area

Nice work Irish. Happy to see an OT from you here.

On a related note: I was always more of a SNES kid, but I do have some fond memories of Sega Genesis… mainly Green Hill Zone Music from Sonic

Ahhhhh I’m home!!
Thank you Irish

Irish in the house! And a much needed Mega Drive thread.

I’ll use this thread to repeat a question from the Discord:

Anybody open up Virtua Racing to clean out and replace the thermal paste on the SVP chip? I’m kinda thinking I should as it will be real old and dry now.

It does have a steep learning curve but once you learn to how to play it becomes a whole new ball game.

howdy y’all!

and yeah, VR has a curve but then tehre’s stuff like Herzog Zwei & Sub Terrania that i’ve had years & still never learned how to play right, haha

just realized i’d preodered Paprium & L’Abbaye des Mort, wonder if either will ever show up here

For what it’s worth, I asked the guys at Watermelon about the current preorders situation (since I didn’t preorder, back then, and wondered if it’s still possible to buy the game these days), and I’ve got a reply just yesterday. Apparently, they’re still having issues with PayPal, and ‘will let me know’ as soon as it’s all sorted out.

Thought you guys may be interested in what I’ve been doing with my Mega Drive. I have a PAL-I Asian model, and I’ve been upgrading a few things here and there

Firstly, I did the standard region/60hz mod but kept the switch hidden inside the console as I’ll be keeping it NTSC. I wanted to try out the RGB bypass board - but couldn’t find any to order, so I built my own (full walkthrough/build log here: https://richretro.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/building-and-installing-a-sega-mega-drive-rgb-bypass-board/)

Got rid of all the jailbars and ghosting that was there initially.

Before:

After:

so yeah that went well :smiley: I then adjusted the resistors on the audio filtering at the underside of the board to get the audio exactly as I wanted it, and lastly desoldered the PAL timing crystal and replaced it with an NTSC spec one to ensure the video runs at exactly the right freq.

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