How the Genesis Failed to Beat the NES

SEGA vs Nintendo, Coke vs Pepsi, McDonalds vs Burger King, Atari vs Intellivision, etc. It’s no wonder we’re so divided today, advertising trained us!

I and a few friends had Genesis systems back then, this is our favorite period in the system's lifespan. Playing games like Super Shinobi, Thunder Force III, Golden Axe, Ghouls n' Goblins, Gaiares, Phantasy Star II, Strider, etc. while the others still had only their 8-bit NES was mind blowing at the time!

I remember as a kid being drawn into the arcade titles at home, but when I finally got to play them, they felt way too short.

I was so in love with my NES at the time I didn't really care about the Genesis commercials or what I saw about it in magazines . I didn't actually buy a Genesis until after I had an SNES for a while . Even then , I am not really sure why I bought it because I loved my SNES too . But I had a job and I loved Gaming. The Genesis model 2 was out by that time so I finally bought one and I rented a Sega CD . Great video as always , POJR !!!!

A minor point, but just like Punch-Out, Buster Douglas boxing is an arcade port (Final Blow). My favorite "unauthorized" graphic in Revenge of Shinobi is freakin' Sonny Chiba on the title screen! Guess nobody noticed until decades later.

I wasn't a big Sonic guy, but I thought Golden Axe and Altered Beast were really cool back when they released. Cool idea for a video, Pojr!

I think that Sega's mistake in the 80's was thinking that people would be so enticed to their newest console because of accurate arcade ports, which was just wrong. The NES was the first console that has shown, that home consoles can offer vastly different experiences from the arcade. Porting arcade titles was slowly becoming a fruitless endeavor, since the main draw of these was the technological display of what can be done with hardware worth thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, the home console titles started to head into the territory that was not possible on the arcades: storytelling.

I can see myself parking Mickey Mouse behind all sorts of things and waiting for his idle animation to kick in...

there was a span of time where the Genesis' competition was the NES, so it's interesting to see how the Genesis handled things before we saw the blue blur. great retrospective pojr!

One thing to keep in mind was the price. The Genesis was almost double the price of the NES at the time. I was a Sega kid so my first console was the Master System (Weird I know) and it took me forever to save up for the Genesis. Everyone wanted one but at the time the Genesis was around $189.99 and the NES was between $99 for the base console and around $129 for the Action Set. A second side note was the NES was dominant between 1985 - 1990, like 1 out of 4 US households had an NES dominant. It was a crazy time.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts is one of my favorite Genesis games. Somehow, I can beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts in one sitting without too much trouble... yet somehow, have never been able to beat any Sonic game on the Genesis. Bonus fact: The ill-fated Japan-only console, the SuperGrafx, was basically just a PC-Engine/TurboGrafx 16 with slightly beefed up graphics. One of the five games that supports it is Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and it looks really nice... feels really good to control.... it would be even better than the Genesis version... if they didn't give you limited continues.

When I shopped for a new game console in 1990 I NEVER considered the NES. It was old news by then. I only considered the Genesis or TurboGrafx-16 and bought the Genesis due to TG16 costing more to add multiplayer TurboTap & RCA video via the TurboBooster

Beating Super Mario 3 with the same Sega of Japan who thought Super Thunderblade was a great showpiece? Good luck. They needed to be humbled, before they could be relevant. And they'll prove it again with Virtua Fighter on Saturn. And the way they sabotaged Time Warner's Virtua Racing port.

11:35 I think not. All the great Arcade ports is what made me want a Genesis. The arcade scene was glorious back in the day, and the thought of a home console that could bring the arcade experience home faithfully was quite enticing.

Revenge of the Shinobi as a pack in game for the genesis would've been badass

I would have traveled to the future where Titan had just released their Overdrive 2 demo for Megadrive - acquired a copy of that and then traveled back to show people what Genesis is capable of

Great video. Been waiting for this topic to be covered for a long time. My sister owned a genesis and i loved the games but I played my friends NES much more. Sonic really was a game changer.

Also didn't SEGA remember that 80's Nintendo commercial where they say YOU CANNOT BEAT US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it looks like Nintendo was right

The first two years of the Genesis were kind of rough. I got one for Christmas, and had Altered Beast and Last Battle. Neither of which really blew me away. The video store soon started renting out Genesis games, and I got to play more games as the months went by. I still had a NES back then, too, and with how dry the Genesis catalog was at the time, the NES saw more play. It really came down the kinds of games on the Genesis at the time. I wasn't much for sports, and while the arcade ports were passable, they didn't live up to what you got if you left the house and took a walk.Then I got Phantasy Star II. That's it, I knew I hadn't made a mistake in asking for the system at that point.

Sega had some difficult choices early on. From the 8 games available at launch, Altered Beast would prolly be the obvious choice at the time, but I would now lean towards Space Harrier 2 as a better pack-in. I would have had native backwards compatibility for the Master System instead of using an add-on to make the older games playable so that they could have advertised two game libraries at the same time, and launched a budget line of Master System re-releases to push this, perhaps with a Genesis cart that had multiple Master System games packed on it as a secondary pack-in title. Hindsight being 20-20, the six button controller would be standard instead of a later made controller instead of the default 3 button.