I received Streets of Rage 3 last night and, disconcertingly, it initially didn't work with my Genesis setup. After power on and the Bios screen, the game would hang on black for a few moments before the screen turned bright red and hung. I gave the cartridge a thorough cleaning and disassembled my setup, wiped for dust and put it back together.

After making sure everything was positioned firmly, I tried running the game again and it worked! Some googling had suggested that the problem might be incompatability with the 32X, which was a bit unnerving, but that didn't seem to be the case. I was going to test the game without the 32X but then I realized I don't actually have a Genesis 1 A/V cable! I did have an R/F box at one time but I ended up giving that away to a friend when I gave him a spare Genesis I had. So at least it was an opportunity to go grab the cable off of eBay so that I'll have one in the future.

I was sure that I wouldn't have any actual problems with the game itself but I was very disappointed to discover that most of the online reviews who say that SoR3 isn't very good are right. The tacked on story scenes do little to endear me to the game and the overall gameplay is considerably inferior to the previous two games. Excessive swarms of enemies (all of which enjoy wandering off screen) plus some of the other gameplay refinements such as (extremely small) durability bars on the weapons make the game a bit more of a chore to play. And the bosses, rather than simply being difficult, are mostly just annoying.

Still, visually the game is decent but the music is just ok. I think it will be fun to play through with some friends but overall I am disappointed with it. Still, at least I have it for the collection and it is my first genuinely rare Genesis game, so that is kind of cool.