Steven Pendleton

Nomad

Tec Toy systems are officially licensed and I'm pretty sure the Famiclones aren't, unless you want to count the Famicom and NES mini systems Nintendo made a few years ago, but other than that, yep. Edit: "a few years ago"... that was 7.5 years ago! I feel old now.

Tec Toy will ensure that the MD and Master System live for a long time. They aren't really Master Systems or Mega Drives, just fancy emulator boxes as of some time ago, but the idea that they are still in production is nice. This probably doesn't really make them modern game consoles, but close enough, I guess.

Mega Drive is still (kind of) being produced in Brazil, so I choose MD, obviously. It still has more exclusives than PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series combined lol

I really miss Terry's original voice actor.

That reminds me that I need to go buy a Mega Modem eventually. Yes, it is completely useless, but my Mega Drive tower isn't complete without that. Don't remind me about the Mega-CD Karaoke, though. I don't even want to think about how expensive that thing is.

I don't think I ever actually played a console game that could save until some kid brought his Dreamcast to school and I played either Sonic Adventure or Sonic Adventure 2 on it for about 3 minutes. No idea which game it was, but I know it was one of those and I am almost 100% certain that was the first console game with a save feature that I ever played. Actually, no, now that I think about it again, it was Sonic 3 (without Knuckles because either I didn't have it or it wasn't released yet).

Don't forget about the Saturn, arcade games, and various old PCs. MSX, X68000, Mac, Windows and others have a lot of great games that you can't play anywhere else.

Now that Kirk is finally banned, I can finally come back to this section. SFC Tales of Phantasia is a cool game and one of the most advanced games on the system, but it's also a very rough game compared to its PS1 remake, which was released just three years later, and yet at the same time I like SFC Phantasia more than the PS1 version of Destiny. Some of the voice cast changed between SFC and PS1 (Cless and Chester share the same dude on SFC, who was also unmistakably Elwin in the Saturn version of Langrisser II, but they gave Chester a different voice actor on PS1), and Dhaos also changed between PS1 and PSP because his original voice actor died. If you like the SFC version I feel obligated to extremely highly recommend the PS1 and/or PSP versions, which are still considered to be some of the best games in the entire franchise. It's kind of weird to play SFC Phantasia after any other game in the series except probably PS1 Destiny due to how much more control you are given even as early as PS1 Phantasia, but SFC Phantasia generally holds up well enough and the remakes can be a bit too easy because it's really easy to prevent bosses from attacking you when you can do combos and stuff. Phantasia also has one of the best endings in the entire series even now.

I wasn't alive for the Atari Shock and I also wasn't alive for the Nintendon't thing. I just have it as my avatar because of reasons, mostly to troll Kirk. I basically grew up in a post PS1-world and nobody cared about any of the older systems anymore except me, and even then I was mostly on computers anyway. I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted a Super Nintendo, but then as an adult I finally bought a Super Famicom 11 years ago and I've played it maybe three times in total since then. I somehow acquired two more Super Famicoms since then. One of them is a 1CHIP, but I don't remember which one it is and even if I did I don't have good cables to take advantage of it. Speaking of my evil nemesis Kirk, it seems Kirk, a microcosm of everything wrong with Nintendo's completely awful fanbase, was banned while I was gone. I am almost disappointed in myself for not being present for the glorious occasion. It's like telling your younger sibling to STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY SAVE FILE and then while you aren't looking said younger sibling proceeds to play it anyway, kills the last boss, and then saves, and upon returning to the game you find that you don't even really care that much anymore either way. ...what is the purpose of this topic again...? Yes, that's right. Slap Fight MD is good and cool and so am I.

The Saturn is the best console anyway, so in the end it really doesn't matter.

In Japan the Mega Drive was known as and is still seen as a console for smart people and hardcore players. It wasn't marketed that way. It got that reputation because it had a lot of simulation and strategy games, so this is how it was seen by the players, not how it was positioned by Sega. This eventually lead to Sega Hard Girls depicting Mega Drive as an intellectual. Of course, real gamers laughed at both Nintendo's thing and Sega's thing and played on their X68000s instead.

I played MD City Connection last year at an event. They had it for sale there, but it was expensive and I didn't have any cash on me, so I didn't buy it, but it's really good. The dude from Habit Soft that I spoke to said they improved the controls over the arcade version, so it's arguably the best version of the game.

Dracula XX has disappointingly poor graphics and the music is so badly arranged that whoever arranged it should be in jail for crimes against humanity, but the actual gameplay is mostly pretty okay! Unfortunately Richter's movement speed is AGONIZINGLY SLOW. The walking animation also plays way faster than it does in Dracula X, so you get this weird combination of an animation that suggests he's trying to be Sonic while also moving so impossibly slowly that I constantly jump just to make him move even the slightest bit faster. Like damn dude Dracula's going to go enslave the entire world or whatever and you're just barely managing to move faster than a slug moving through freshly-placed tar or something. Hurry the hell up Richter! Other than that, yeah, the game's mostly pretty okay where it actually matters. Lol you don't need a map for either of them. I didn't, anyway.

A small number of Dreamcast games don't work in VGA and as far as I know they can't be forced to do so. As far as I know, you'd have to use S-video to get the best video quality from those games, as that is the highest-quality analog video thingy that works with everything. Not even sure what DCDigital does with those games.