FLips' Sega MegaDrive Thread

[Fog Dude]

On 1/1/2024 at 1:50 PM, Mr_Danger said:

Mega Drive was for the cool kids whilst Nintendo was for babies. Fact.

Ah, that would explain why the much more streetwise/wayward kid in the year above me who lived diagonally opposite got an original Mega Drive first. Think he had a Game Gear too. On the other hand, a different mate who lived round the corner also had one years before I did and was spectacularly uncool (and went onto head up the Boundary Commission for Wales). 

Then again, the former played Moonwalker a lot and the latter Columns so the relative coolness factor still checks out. Although it was via said second friend that I discovered how much better the football sims were on Sega. 

A different pal again from the poor side of town owned a Master System (and yes, Alex Kidd being built in blew my mind too), but I'd been a hand-me-down Atari kid before migrating to the Amiga and then firmly planting my flag in the Nintendo camp with the NES. 

Eventually my Dad got me a Mega Drive 2 dirt cheap at Argos with a discount voucher, but I only ever used it for a trio of Sonic games plus borrowing Toki off a girl in the year below for a couple of weeks. By the end of that generation I'd swivelled back to the SNES thanks to Donkey Kong Country 3, Yoshi's Island & Street Fighter Alpha 2, then mooched off of my stepbrother's PS1 until I got my own N64 for my 13th birthday and my MD was chucked away once I'd stopped playing it for a while, as were all my pre-GameCube systems. Never had a Saturn or Dreamcast but in truth like most gamers I probably didn't come to appreciate either until it was too late.

I then got another Mega Drive II about 15 years ago but it's rarely even been plugged in. I've built up a small collection of used titles, most of which I didn't already own originally in the 90s - the exception being Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which I must've purchased at least 10 times across various consoles by now. 

[Keith Houchen]

Back in my youth it was Speccy vs C64. The cool kids like me had speccys and smoked and fingered girls while the commobores like you were doing extra maths and crying about teachers strikes because you didn’t want to disrupt your education. 

[SuperBacon]

16 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

Back in my youth it was Speccy vs C64. The cool kids like me had speccys and smoked and fingered girls while the commobores like you were doing extra maths and crying about teachers strikes because you didn’t want to disrupt your education. 

Yeah we had a Spectrum ZX (as did a lot of our block) and only one lad on the estate had a 64 which to be fair, he would lug round to ours so we could play Championship Manager.

[Merzbow]

What does that say about the BBC Micro or Dragon 32 kids..?

[FLips]

I don't think I was ever really aware of any console wars during most of the big ones. Sega vs Nintendo, PS1 vs N64, etc. Everyone either had one of them and played the other round a mates, or had both at some point.

It wasn't until maybe Xbox 360 vs PS3 or just after where there was a lot more focus on big blockbuster exclusives that I noticed it, and even then it wasn't much because everyone I knew had a 360 except one person and all of us thought the PS3 was shite.

[Keith Houchen]

3 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

What does that say about the BBC Micro or Dragon 32 kids..?

Home schooled. 

[SuperBacon]

8 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

I don't think I was ever really aware of any console wars during most of the big ones. Sega vs Nintendo, PS1 vs N64, etc. Everyone either had one of them and played the other round a mates, or had both at some point.

It wasn't until maybe Xbox 360 vs PS3 or just after where there was a lot more focus on big blockbuster exclusives that I noticed it, and even then it wasn't much because everyone I knew had a 360 except one person and all of us thought the PS3 was shite.

I remember the magazines making a massive deal out of PS1 v N64 and the "console wars" but it wasn't really a thing in real life, unless you were an absolute dweeb. 

Apart from the one boy who bought a Dreamcast and was mercilessly (and quite rightly) bullied for it.

Of course he is justified now with hindsight, but the battle cries of "Gaystation" and "DreamLast" live long in the memory.

[FLips]

1 minute ago, SuperBacon said:

I remember the magazines making a massive deal out of PS1 v N64 and the "console wars" but it wasn't really a thing in real life, unless you were an absolute dweeb. 

Apart from the one boy who bought a Dreamcast and was mercilessly (and quite rightly) bullied for it.

Of course he is justified now with hindsight, but the battle cries of "Gaystation" and "DreamLast" live long in the memory.

I think the biggest thing to happen to our circle of friends was two of them traded consoles for keeps. One lad swapped his Gamecube for the other's Xbox. The one who got the Gamecube got cold feet and wanted to swap back but it was too late, we were all playing Conflict Desert Storm and Halo on it and he wasn't keen on going back to Wrestlemania X8.
The parents got involved but somehow came to the binding decision that it was for keeps so no givesies backsies. The lad who got shafted (in his opinion) with the Gamecube promptly left our friend circle and only kept in touch with those of us who weren't part of the trade and took his side.

[BomberPat]

I was aware of console wars because I read Sega Power and Sonic The Comic, but I'm struggling to remember many people who owned Nintendo consoles when I was a kid. I had maybe one friend with a SNES and one with a NES; the first time I played a SNES, it was in the kids' playroom at the hospital. Not many people I knew owned consoles at all pre-Playstation; I think I knew one other person with a Mega Drive, and one with a Master System. People had Game Boys and occasionally Game Gears, but looking back the main kind of gaming I can remember at friends' houses in the early/mid-'90s was home computers of one kind or another, and not really knowing what most of them were; we had the C64, someone had a Spectrum, somebody had an Acorn Electron, school had a BBC Micro with some games, if you're lucky somebody had an Atari, and later on people had PCs or Apple Macs, and not knowing much about what computers were actually available, it just felt like there was endless variety and that every time you went to a new friend's house and were allowed to play games, it wouldn't just be a game you'd never played before, but on a system you'd never played either. And then you'd read about things like the Jaguar and Neo-Geo in magazines, so my sense of gaming in the '90s was that Nintendo and Sega might have been the big boys, but that it was a much bigger world than all that.

I was a big-time Sega kid, though, until the Playstation. The first Nintendo console I ever owned was the Game Boy, and I never seriously got into playing NES or SNES games until the late '90s and early '00s, when I figured out emulators and ways to play old JRPGs in particular. 

Getting away from the topic, but from memory, the consoles I've owned over the years, in order, were something like this:

- Commodore 64
- Master System
- Mega Drive
- ZX Spectrum - briefly, I don't remember the story behind this one, but almost certainly another pub/back of a lorry situation as my Dad's mate just showed up with it one day, it was ours for about a week, and then it was gone. I mostly played the Spider-Man text adventure.
- Game Gear (I somehow even ended up with the Master System Converter, and the ludicrously expensive TV adaptor, which I can only assume either fell off the back of a lorry, or my Dad got dirt-cheap from a carboot sale or off someone in a pub when they realised it never fucking worked)
- Game Boy
- Playstation
- Playstation 2
- X-Box 360
- Gamecube
- Wii
- DS
- 2DS
- Dreamcast
- PS4
- Switch

 

Getting this somewhat back on track, I'm currently reading a book about the Bitmap Brothers, and it's got me itching to play the Mega Drive port of Speedball 2. I have the Mega Drive mini with a USB dongle thing to hack more games into it, so that might be how I spend my evening.

[Merzbow]

19 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Mega Drive port of Speedball 2

Sega ports of Amiga games were generally really good from what I remember, the elitists would tell you the computer originals were far superior but it's just not true in many cases and I say that as an Amiga fan boy.

Even a true classic like Sensible Soccer could be argued was better on the console, although SWOS came along and ruled over them all. If anyone likes Dizzy then the Mega Drive versions are a must, too.

But yeah when it came to consoles I was a pure Sega lad when I wasn't handling a mouse playing Champo or Monkey Island. Master System, Game Gear and then Mega Drive while hardly anyone I knew had a Nintendo, it only changed when both me and my parents saw the PS1 was far cooler than the Saturn and to be honest I tried Virtua Fighter and thought it was awful compared to Toshinden..

Edited January 3 by Merzbow

[RedRooster]

28 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I was aware of console wars because I read Sega Power and Sonic The Comic, but I'm struggling to remember many people who owned Nintendo consoles when I was a kid.

Where I lived, no one had a SNES - literally no one. It was a rural area, and we all knew one another - so we were all kind of influenced by one another. One child got a Megadrive, so we all wanted one. Some had to settle for Master Systems, I had to settle for an Amiga - but that was a blessing in disguise given how much cheaper the games were.

We also ALL read Sonic the Comic. I had every issue, and given how much they sell for on eBay now, I bloody wish I’d kept them!

[King Coconut]

As far as I can recall the commobores went on to become nintendicks. 

Can you confirm, @Loki?

Edited January 3 by King Coconut

[Loki]

Most CommoBores I knew went straight to Amigas @King Coconut.  NintenDicks tended to be people whose parents travelled to Japan and brought those consoles back.

I went 48k > 128k Spectrum and then stuck with that well beyond its lifespan (I bought the last editions of Your Sinclair AND Sinclair User!). I thought I’d be clever and jump straight to the next generation of consoles, so I took the leap into the 64 bit world early and bought an Atari Jaguar.  🤔

After a year of playing the one decent game (Aliens V Predator) I admitted defeat and swopped it for a Playstation and Wipeout.  I nearly swopped the Jaguar for a Sega Saturn which would have been out of the frying pan and into the fire!!

Edit: hang on, at some point I had a Game Gear as well?  That must have been between the Jaguar and the PS.  That was actually a good games machine.

Edited January 3 by Loki

[BomberPat]

14 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

It was a rural area, and we all knew one another - so we were all kind of influenced by one another

Pretty much the same deal here. Tiny village where the school closed due to lack of numbers, and you'd know every kid who lived there by name. Throw in the aforementioned youth club having a Mega Drive (and, in later years, a Playstation, with the same set-up that it belonged to the youth club but came home with us) and I suspect many parents used that as an excuse to not buy their kids consoles at all - you get to play Sonic once or twice a week, you don't need any more than that. The only person I can remember having a SNES was someone I knew through school, which is in another village, and I only went round to their place once or twice ever.

There was a family that moved to the village with two sons that I became friends with, who may as well have come from Mars; they went to a posh public school, their Dad was a university Philosophy lecturer, and their Mum was American and a Japanese translator. Just a completely different world to farmers' kids and council houses. They were the first people I knew to have a proper PC, and the first thing I ever played on it was Monkey Island, which blew my mind, and later a bunch of RTS games and Civ 2, and it was like a whole world opening up. But they also had a Game Gear, and they used to spend every summer in America, and they would come back with games like Tails Adventure that had never been released in Europe, and that all felt super-exciting. But often those games also came with little flyers and leaflets of upcoming releases, and back then I hadn't figured out that the Sega Genesis and the Sega Mega Drive were the same thing, so seeing all this stuff advertised for the Genesis got me absolutely convinced that there was some other Sega console out there. After all, I didn't know anyone who owned an Atari Jaguar or a Neo-Geo, and even on the Sega side of things I knew the Mega CD was a thing but had never known anyone to own one, and I'd played the Sega Pico in Toys R Us and then never heard it mentioned anywhere again, so it wasn't outside the realms of possibility for there to be a whole other Sega machine available. As you do when you're a kid and left to your imagination, I obviously assumed that the Genesis was some uber-powerful world beater of a console, better than anything else you'd ever play. I think eventually I saw an ad for a Sega Nomad, and in my head conflated the two and assumed that was the Genesis. 

[SuperBacon]

8 minutes ago, Loki said:

bought an Atari Jaguar.  🤔

 

On 1/1/2024 at 6:52 PM, SuperBacon said:

Who had the Mega CD? To me, this was the pinnacle of wealth, along with a Atari Jaguar and a Neo Geo. If you had either of the latter two...my word. You were mega rich.

Confirmed.