Going Sega crazy is definitely not a bad thing to go. I've been Sega crazy since age five.
Ah. I remember it as if it were yesterday. Christmas, 1994, and we were at my Aunt Paige's house. She's the younger of my grandmother's two daughters by about seven years, so she's a Gen-Xer and my mother definitely isn't. As a child she had an Intellivision and an Atari 5200, so she knew just how fun video games were. She later bought herself an NES, and I'm pretty sure this year she's buying "her kids" a Wii for Christmas. Anyway, I'm five years old, and my family is going through a strange phase. The excuse is that Dad is off building our new house, so me and Mom are staying at grandmother's so he can finish. The only thing is that he never comes home or visits us. Of course, at five years old, this made perfect sense to me; looking back, its pretty obvious now that it was actually their "considering-divorce-but-were-not-sure-yet" period. So we're at Aunt Paige's house, and all the gift-giving is through, except for one giant box. I didn't think it was for me; this was the first Christmas my sister would really be able to remember, so there were a ton of gifts for her. Then, Aunt Paige hands it to me. "From: Aunt Paige, To: Clark", reads the tag. I slowly tear it open, trying to recognize the blue figure smirking and pointing his finger at me. I open the entire thing and realize the awesome truth: Aunt Paige bought me a Sega Genesis. She connected it to her television, and we spent the next 8 hours playing Sonic The Hedgehog on the "6-Pak" cartridge that came with it. The twists, turns, loop-de-loops, Chaos Emeralds, and small fluffy animals mesmerized us to the point where we didn't even think about discovering any of the other games on the cartridge (which is a bit of a shame, since I imagine smashing street thugs in Streets Of Rage together simultaneously would have been rather fun). Suddenly, the power went out. We would later find that a tree had fallen on a power line and caused it, but that isn't the explanation Aunt Paige or I believe. No, to this day, we still tell people that we played Sonic The Hedgehog so long and hard that we caused the power to the whole house to go out.