Rhomaios

To me, only the Saturn and the PS2 are sexy consoles. Consoles generally looks too plastic or wooden for me to think they look good. But these two in particular still look good even in 2024.

Oh, not arguing that. If anything, it clearly shows a lack of taste in the reviewer!

Your experiences are just that: your own experiences. They definitely are not universal. I was a bit younger than you, but all my siblings are older. I, the young one, got the Genesis and this new game called Sonic. My eldest sister, on the other hand, who was also an adult during this time, bought herself the Super Nintendo instead. I distinctly remember my other sister's boyfriend, who was some guitarist in his late 20s (or 30s?), and all of his friends playing Jurassic Park on the Super Nintendo, next to a huge stack of games. No Genesis in sight. My older brother and I played Madden only on the SNES. In fact, as I got older during this time, I grew out of the Genesis. The Genesis was the platform of colorful sprites: Sonic, Earthworm Jim, Mickey and the rest of the Disney licenses were ubiquitous. And it reeked of 'tude, which was seen as less cool as the 90s wore on, something that the corporations were trying to sell us. Meanwhile, the SNES had some classic-looking games: Castlevania IV, Contra III, Gradius III, and Super Metroid were definitely not childish, and these were some of my early staples. For every chibi Mega Man X, you also had Demon's Crest. I will say that everyone played on the Genesis when Mortal Kombat was released, but by Super Street Fighter II, the benefits of the SNES pad was apparent. This isn't to say that we were all actively participating in some console wars. I never remember anyone being "Team Nintendo" or "Team Sega" growing up. We just went to houses to play that kid's games. If one friend had Super Smash TV, we went to his house for it. When another friend got the Sega CD, we went to his house for it. And then the Genesis started feeling a bit irrelevant. Sonic 3 + Knuckles was cool and all, but hey, have you heard of RPGs? I discovered there were even more complicated games than Zelda, like Final Fantasy II and Secret of Mana, and despite the graphics of the latter, it was much more interesting than what I owned on my Genesis. So by the time the PS1 and N64 were getting their releases, the Genesis was rarely played. But not for any reason than that's just where my interests lied. The N64 (with Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and especially Goldeneye) and PS1 (with Final Fantasy VII, Twisted Metal, and Oddworld) were the consoles to play (if we played any games at all -- most of the time, we did everything except play video games; I played football and band and was more interested in girls, bikes, and hanging out), and Sega was just forgotten, a relic of when we were young kids. So yeah, your experiences might be true for you, but that doesn't mean they would have been shared by everyone else.

Ah, I had already stopped paying attention to them when Kraut Buster came out. I think I wrote it off as a Metal Slug rip off, but that might not be a fair assessment, I don't know. Neo XYX was a decent shooter.

Shmups were definitely "out" in 1992. It was the rise of fighting games, the pinnacle of platformers, and the era of weird experimentation. A genre that had its origin in the very beginnings of video games (with Space Invaders) was seen as passe. As far as turn-based RPGs go, that was seen as a weird Japanese thing. I was young enough to not realize that, so I thoroughly enjoyed what JRPGs I had access to, but FF2 and FF3 were definitely outliers until FF7 came around and changed things and made the genre respectable again.

This is one of the better Neo Dev games imo. While I sold all my Neo Dev stuff years ago, this was the last one to go.

Given that the Xbox was basically the Dreamcast 2.0, the most current Xbox was have is likely where Sega would have ended up. Hard to see them doing something radically different a la Nintendo given the market's taste and their trajectory.

The cover art is better than the in-game art. It definitely needed more neon. The NYC stage was pretty cool, though.

https://psxdatacenter.com/ntsc-u_list.html And there are corresponding links for PAL and NTSC-J.

I had several days of fun with this as a kid. A friend had it and we played it for the novelty factor, I think. It still holds a soft spot in my heart, but you know, there's a reason we leapt back into Genesis classics like Mortal Kombat, Golden Axe II, and Crue Ball. Oh, yeah, that's my addition to this thread: Crue Ball is fun, and Motley Crue tunes lick! I think another Genesis game that I love that no one else did was WWF: Royal Rumble. Way better on the Genesis, in my youthful mind, than the SNES one, too. Undertaker ruled! I didn't realize this one was supposed to be bad. It's obviously not anywhere near Metroid or Super Metroid, but it's a great Game Boy game imo. I'd rather play this than the railroaded Metroid Fusion.

I like my racers, and the PS2 has one of my favorites: Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2. It's the last of the great NFS games before it jumped on the customizable bandwagon with Underground. I don't want to buy decals. I want to race in the gorgeous Italian countryside. I wish more games had come out like it. The two other most-played racers on the system for me are Extreme G3 Racing, which is an excellent futuristic racer with a good soundtrack, and OutRun 2006. Two other non-racing games I love are NBA Street Vol. 2 and Red Faction (chiefly the first one, though the second one wasn't that bad).

Ah, I don't have Facebook. Glad to see it's not permanent. Thanks!

I haven't really checked in there in a while, but I go today to Sega-16 and it seems the forum is missing. The Discord link doesn't bring up anything either. Does anyone know what's happened there?

The PS2 was the actual good looking console of that era. Before that the Saturn reigned as the sleekest and most modern.

This is seriously cool. The whole package of it. I wish there was more!

Emu or are you a Rockefeller who owns a MUSHA cart? I will say that Sonic 1 is underrated. Glad to see it get some love still.

I wonder if it's because you saw it first right at the beginning of lockdowns? By June or July, there were some people starting to creep outside, but there's only so much of a single place one can take before they need variety! I've not really noticed a plunge in activity over the years, at least not to the point that this place feels abandoned or anything. But I do agree that more activity here would be better.

I want to buck the trend here and actually speak up in favor of more Nintendo (NES and SNES) activity here. AtariAge surely represents Atari, which started the whole gaming at home movement, but with the death of all the other major consoles, it's the last home for this type of discussion. I will never play a new console (never played anything newer than a Wii already), but if those machines can get some love, so can the Super NES. A few points: NintendoAge was always garbage. Garbage community, garbage leadership, the place was the antithesis of AtariAge, with a stronger focus on collecting and encasing in plastic than actually playing any games. A better site was FamicomWorld, but it's very quiet in comparison. That AtariAge was different, broader, more in-tune with the classic forum style discussion board, meant that it has powered through the storm that took down most forums. And it's better for it. Reddit, etc. is awful, and I'm so glad for an oasis here. There are just so few proper discussion boards left. Here feels less of a relic and more of a treasured old haunt. If anything, I wish more, targeted classic gaming discussion took place at AtariAge, and more users of dead forums come here instead of migrating to Reddit or (gods forbid) Facebook. Here is that perfect balance of anonymity, moderation, and preservation that the others can't get right. I think you'll find plenty of us casuals lurking about. There are a bunch of die-harders in the board, but they'll also be likely to offer guidance and helpful advice, even if sometimes it might seem like they're endlessly ribbing ya. It's overall a good-natured board. IRC bots used to do all that and was a free and open source protocol. Discord is proprietary garbage. I think the issue is that a lot of people treat Discord like a message board and can't be bothered to spend more than 5 minutes of their brainpower writing up a response. It's casual conversation, but subversively undermines actual conversation at the same time. As a veteran of IRC, email list groups, forum software, and messy takes like Reddit and StackExchange, there is simply nothing better than a traditional, well-run forum, especially if it contains long-form articles, Wikis, or other ways of getting the best information in short format. I think that will save the forum more than anything else (and why forums like Racketboy can plod along, even if a bit zombie-like).

A lot of good contenders, but H.E.R.O. is a perennial favorite.

Necro- is Greek, vita- is Latin. The proper opposite would then be bio-bump.

Not to defend Tanooki (really, truly, honestly!), but I never felt that the angle was "bad" per se. Just not optimal. But thinking about it, yeah, absolutely, I always preferred the rectangle and use Y B as my mains on the SNES controller. It really makes you wonder why on earth they designed it that way. One guess is that making it more difficult (even if just slightly) to reach, going from B to A takes more conscious effort, and they want to encourage that? It's easy, I suppose, to accidentally hit the wrong button if it's too convenient to do so? I'd love to see some justification for the design. But either way, I'm sticking with the original controllers for each console.

Somehow I managed to nab a solo HuCard (Edit: US, not JP) all by itself years ago. I wish I did have it complete, but I think I missed the boat on that one.

Yeah, Special is also what I have (especially since I got rid of my Neo-Geo). I do think SW2 is good, but with all the NG ports out there, it makes little sense to have one unless you're a die-hard fan.

I've been preaching this for years. Classic shooters > bullet hells any day of the week. Although I guess people call these extreme shooters "manic shooters" now (Tatsujin, Strikers 1945, even Twin Cobra), but they're not easier than bullet hells. Neo Geo's actual great STG games though are Sonic Wings/Aero Wings. You can get SW1 on SNES, SW2 Remix on the Saturn, but 3 is only on the Neo-Geo, I believe.