Retro Stuff

Thinking about the Genesis library: Part I

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The Genesis of the Idea

I’ve been sitting with an unfinished version of this post for half a year. Making up incorrect theories about the Master System is fun because few people actually care enough to be mad at me, but the Genesis is the big leagues. I’ve settled on splitting the ideas I have about the Genesis library into two main parts, one about their first party output and one about third party support. This gets a little muddled because I cover internally developed, developed by a company Sega owns, and at times third party games published by Sega in this first post that’s supposed to be on first party efforts, but I try to clarify what is being discussed.

Similarly to the thesis of my Master System writeup, Sega did the majority of work supporting the Genesis with games – Sega developed 80 titles internally for the Genesis, while Nintendo internally developed 24 SNES games. This was done both by direct development but also a large number of publishing deals. →  Katamari Damaread

Wednesdays with Andrew Gaiden – Sega CD

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA

Long before Andrew came to me, tears in his eyes, confessing his immense regret for not buying and exclusively playing the Saturn – which resulted in the world famous Wednesday’s with Andrew series (everyone on Neptune has read it) – we spent significant time (upwards of 3 hours) playing Sega CD games. Or more like he would come over and have an adult conversation with my wife while I would force the controller into his hands and demand he play whatever new disc I had just popped in. Whatever the case, we played a fair number of Sega CD games and even enjoyed some of them even if I deliberately focused on inflicting pain with most of my choices – as any good friend would. What follows is the chronicling of our time spent playing together, or at least some random observations and jokes. →  Beyond Read & Evil

My growing collection of game collections

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My friend Shota and I were arguing the other day about what is to be done. He took what I would describe as a mild and possibly self-defeating attitude regarding ideology and he accused me of an all or nothing approach that was ultimately more likely to paralyze than inspire. I see value in clearly defining the mountain we are moving towards regardless of if we ever reach it. It provides direction and can keep us from chasing waterfalls, or even making phony calls. Our conversation was vague enough to be applicable to the desire of achieving world socialism or the viewing of every episode of Double Dare. Of course both of us are much more mired in the academic than actual praxis because we generally desire to be seated on couches rather than interacting with strangers.

Shota’s incremental position may seem politically defensible to cowards unwilling to have grandiose, unprovable ideologies that implode the moment they meet reality but it has been my experience that the absence of a grand vision hampers coherent video game collecting. →  Sonic the Readhog

How many games does it have?

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In the olden days, the number of games on a system was an important consideration for prospective customers. Magazines would track this information and ads would sometimes mention numbers. Children on the street wouldn’t stop telling you how many games their console had. There was a time when the early 16 bit (and 8 bit masquerading as 16) consoles came out and only tens of games were available. This was partly the result of the 8 to 16 bit console changeover being the first generational shift in the modern game system era as we know it. The Atari 2600 to NES transition was atypical in that, at least in the US, the console game market was in ruins. Plus, as opposed to Atari during the market’s adoption of Nintendo, the NES was still making companies a bunch of money – Sega and NEC were less proven, especially in Japan and the states respectively.

Today, it’s understood that a new system may launch with only 10 or 20 or however many games but more will be coming soon, so competitors rarely boast of the number of titles available on their platform. →  Knock knock. Who’s there? This article.

Wednesdays with Andrew – Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more

Another day, another 1/7th closer to the day Andrew and I play Saturn games. Our playing is getting far ahead of these write-ups as sitting on the couch, controller in hand is moderately easier than telling chatGPT to write these things then performing deft copy/pastes, so let’s say this session took place in November of 1986.

Fighting never felt so virtual

The first time I remember playing Virtua Fighter was at Six Flags Great Adventure in the new Jersey. It may have been the visit I was finally tall enough to ride Lightnin’ Loops and Free Fall. My brother repeatedly told me in vivid detail about the woman who was scalped because her hair got caught in the gears at the top of the Free Fall cage before it dropped 30 trillion feet or so. Virtua Fighter was fun and smooth, and not at all like losing your scalp to a ride malfunction. →  Keep it warm.

Arcade Planning for People without an Arcade

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Some time in 2005, I bought a Golden Axe arcade cabinet for maybe $200 or $300 from Craig’s List, which with inflation comes to about $36,000 today. My brother and I, mostly him though, got it up and working nicely with some replacement sticks and buttons from HAPP. This was back when they were good, apparently – the internet says they were acquired and then started putting out mediocre equipment. The machine followed me to a few different apartments before I finally convinced my sister to keep it at her house along with boxes of console games. 15 or so years passed, I accomplished little, and then out of the blue my sister tells me it is time to take Golden Axe back (I had already taken the other boxes to add to my Closet Full of Games™). I told her to keep it, she said no. I told her I would find someone to give it to because I didn’t want it thrown away, then I didn’t. →  Let’s get read-y.

Committing to 2026 video game commitments

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Sometimes the videolamer staff always makes a commitment to play specific games in a new year and then fails to uphold that commitment. 2026 will be no different, in that it is a year in which we will or will not (in this case will) commit to playing some video games and then most of us will shirk the responsibility to play said games despite having sworn, hand on a Kid Klown in Night Mayor World manual, that we would in front of the entire internet. It is healthy to have aspirations, and it is even healthier to know your limits after initially not knowing them.

Jay

Calculating the exact proportion of new stuff, indie darlings, niche games, and retro titles to play in a given year is an exact science that I refuse to perform hastily or sloppily. So let’s say I’ll play 11, 8.4, 26, and 93 of those in 2026, respectively. Here are some more specifics, including large, non-specific categories:

2026 is the year of the arcade
More on this later through the medium of blog posts, but for now be content knowing I will be playing a lot of arcade games and then forgetting to take notes and either writing vague impressions or joke posts about the games. →  All your posts are belong to us.

Wednesdays with Andrew – Virtua Racing and Panzer Dragoon

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams

Another arbitrary amount of time, another entry in the ‘guy makes another guy play Saturn games’ series. This time we played a little of a promising shmupper (this term is useful as it pleases neither the ‘shump’ nor ‘shooter’ crowds), and a little more of two absolute classics by Sega.

Layering Attack Rays in Sections of Galactic Force

Should Galactic Attack have music? Does Attack Galac have a second stage? Why is there so much audible rattling under the hood of my minivan while I drive? Until these questions are answered satisfactorily, we decided to put aside Galactic Attacktic for a future date. In the meantime I will find a new bin/cue file and not speak to a mechanic. We did play enough to realize the game is good and for Andrew to compose his requisite haiku, luckily for you. Only time will tell if I demand he write another after we play more of the game. →  It was the best of games, it was the worst of games

Thinking about the Master System library

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This post is unlikely to exist. If you’re reading it then it must, but just barely. I originally began writing about Saturn games that needed to be better than they were. That will still be written, I think. Then I decided I’d need to dig into the Genesis’ games to really figure out what happened between Sega’s most successful console and their first publically named planet console. But then it would be important to understand the Sega CD and even 32X. I still want to write about all these things 47 other people care about, all of them with strong opinions that contradict my own.

Moving back to the Master System seemed inevitable, but only after I decided I would write about it. I suppose inevitable things are always evitable at first and then something happens to make them into things that were always going to happen even though up until then they weren’t going to happen. I was doomed to write this, but was happier when that doom was pending. →  Tokyo Xtreme Reader: Drift 2

Wednesdays with Andrew – NiGHTS into Dreams

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(For context, see the introduction to this series here.)

We’ve all seen movies, read stories, and played games where if you die in the game you die in real life. But where are the games that if you die in real life you die in the game? Sure there are some games where if you stop playing an enemy may kill you or, if for some reason you play multiplayer games, another human. But it’s not really the same. I propose a game that detects a lack of player input and then sends pop up boxes in game every four minutes asking if you are still alive. If you take more than ten seconds to confirm your existence, you die in game. This ensures that dying in real life does in fact kill you in game. Maybe you think this is a harsh mechanic and you shouldn’t lose a video game just because you died, but I see it as respectful. →  [do not click]