Hey G1s! Tonight I'm going to take a trip back in time 17 years, and hopefully bring you with me. The scene: Toys R Us. The time: January, 1992. The cast: Myself, my father. By early 1992, I'd had my NES for about five solid years and played the hell out of it. I was beginning to get lots of problems, especially a recurring problem where green and gray screens would flash rapidly no matter how much I blew on the cartridge (I know, I know, never do that) or wiggled it or cleaned it (my dad just sprayed Formula 409 on the pins and it would work almost every time). So I begged and pleaded and begged some more for one of the new 16-bit systems that all my friends were getting... and for Christmas, I got an IOU for one!! I had a friend who received a Genesis almost as soon as they came out in the US, back in 1989 or so. He was the envy of everyone, and we were just blown away / enchanted by the new graphics. I don't think people these days realize what a monstrous impact minor improvements in graphics had back then. From NES to SNES was like going from a biplane to a turbo jet. The same with PC: from EGA to VGA was like driving a Mazda Protege and then driving a Porsche 911. Those increases in colors and palettes and sprites and who knows what else was absolutely huge back then, maximal impact. But although that friend had a Genesis, and I'd played it and had fallen in love with The Black Beast in all its sleek, glossy sexiness, I was also something of a Nintendo geek and had faithfully nursed my NES through those final months, and was very attached to it. So I had a big decision to make. So there I am, in Toys R Us on a cold January Saturday morning with my dad, trying to decide between the Genesis (which came in a giant box) and the Super Nintendo (which came in a smaller, more modest box). Essentially I had to choose between the known and the unknown. Compounding the problem was the reputation the two systems had - the Genesis was known for fast-paced, pulse-pounding action games, and especially known for its sports titles. In 1992 I was really heavy into sports, and was playing three different sports and talking about them all the time with family and friends, collecting cards, you name it. My choice? The Sega Genesis. It had boxing, baseball (including my pick for the best baseball game of the 16-bit generation, SportsTalk Baseball, which I'll get into a bit later), football (Madden! Montana! which was better? I still maintain Joe Montana '93 was the best 16-bit football game, even though the Madden franchise is now an unstoppable, if boring, juggernaut), shooters, you name it. Plus, my sister loved the fast-paced glitz of Sonic the Hedgehog. The Altered Beast scandal was long over (thank god), and Sonic was cute and non-threatening and easily digested by my violence-worried parents. Looking back, I really regret my choice. I was twelve in 1992, and along with sports I was also really engaging my imagination for the first time, especially through sci-fi and fantasy books (Eddings, Brooks, Anthony, Asimov, etc.). And frankly, the SNES had better titles for thinking gamers. It was much closer to the PC that way; and, ultimately, I got my thoughtful-gaming fix from adventure games on the PC at the time (discussed in previous blogs). So I used the Genesis to satisfy my action fix... and for that, it was perfect. I had all the classics: NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Sonic 1-3, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Golden Axe, etc. I rented or borrowed most others. But I never played the RPGs I longed for: Shining Force I and II, Phantasy Star, etc. And I regret that too. Now, all these years later, I'm really pissed that I missed the 16-bit Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Link to the Past, Castlevania IV, etc. Argh!!! All those classics... maybe it's a case of "the grass is greener," but I think I missed out on the best of those years. But going back: the Genesis really cleaned up among me and all my friends due to the amazing sports lineup. Among football fans, there were only two real options: Madden or Montana. You were either one or the other, and nobody I knew owned both. I had Montana '92 and '93, and I think '93 was the best of the bunch. It had a slew of useful and well-presented camera angles, all the stars you knew and loved, deep playbooks, great gameplay, colorful graphics, decent commentary for the era, it had it all. I had more fun with that game than any other excepting possibly Mortal Kombat 2. I remember that I played it so much, for so many hours, I discovered that there were, in fact, some unstoppable plays. With the Eagles, for example, there was a play where Fred Barnett would go up ten or eleven yards and then cut directly across the middle of the field. If you timed the pass the same way every time, and passed just as he made his cut, the play was impossible to stop. It was, essentially, an automatic first down. And in one version of the Montana series I discovered the 16-bit version of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl ... Andre Reed, the receiver for the Buffalo Bills. He could literally ring the field over and over and over until time expired, while the ENTIRE ELEVEN MAN DEFENSE would chase him around. So, unfortunately, as soon as the player who had the Bills got the ball and successfully completed a pass to the always-wide-open streaking Andre Reed, the quarter was over. He could loop the field, and usually even outrun and outfox a human player. ARGH!! And then there was SportsTalk Baseball, probably also around 1992/1992. I was/am an Oakland A's fan (although this has been significantly tarnished by all the steroids revelations, especially since Canseco - the epicenter of the steroids - was their biggest guy back then), and I can recite from memory, to this day, the SportsTalk Baseball roster for the A's (Henderson, Blankenship, Canseco, McGwire, Steinbach, Weiss, Lansford, Baines, Bordick, Welch, Stewert, Honeycutt, Eckersley, Moore, Slusarski). And back then, live in-game commentary was brand spanking new. In fact, I think that game might have been the very first to feature it. I also learned how to crash the game: there was a button on defense to move your infiend in, out, or leave it normal. You can press the button MUCH faster than the commentator could say "Infield IN! Infield OUT! Infield NORMAL!" and so if you pressed it enough, the game would run out of memory trying to queue up all the talking, and the game would just glitch out and die. And, of course, there was Mortal Kombat 2. I played that game for endless hours, could beat it with every character, could beat all of my friends hands down, and even as recently as last year was able to pick it up cold and beat a friend who still had a working Genesis. I'll leave the Mortal Kombat series for another blog, but suffice to say it was the last major title for the Genesis for me. Eventually a lot of my friends either switched to the SNES (I got to play, with extreme jealousy, Mario Kart, Star Fox, and the first stage from Super Mario World about a hundred times) or stopped playing games altogether. I did too. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was done with consoles until the PS2, and switched my allegiances full-time to the PC. I can't help but wonder: what if, standing in that Toys R Us gaming aisle, I had chosen the SNES box? Would I have played all the games I drooled over (Super Star Wars, for example)? Or would they have been like Shining Force, and I would have never even known they existed as I went for all the high-octane titles? One of these days, I resolve, I'll pick up a SNES after all these years and get to work. I'll pick up all the major titles and dig in. Right now my main gaming system is my NES, and I'm starting in on another classic I wanted badly but couldn't get at the time - Final Fantasy. The moral of my story? I'm not sure. But maybe it's that if you wait long enough, new opportunities arise for the past to be recaptured, if only just a little. You can take those old memories, wipe them off, polish them off, and even build on them a little bit. So that's my tale of the 16-bit era as I experienced it. For better or ill, I chose the Genesis over the SNES, a decision that has colored future decisions: I deliberately chose the Wii because it seemed to have more offbeat titles (as the SNES), rather than the XBox360, which seemed largely action-based (even though I know that's a gross simplification). Stay tuned for more memories and commentary, and thanks for reading!