Anyone remember the console wars? Oh man it was something. The marketing through the 90s forced kids to choose a side between Nintendo and Sega, being inundated with phrases like "Sega does what Nintendon't" OOF burn. And Nintendo managed to fire back with "Nintendo is what Genesisn't" (someone better have gotten a raise for that).

I of course despise commercialism, and this was all a stepping stone to the kind of media nonsense we have today, itself being an extension of the commercial deregulation in the 80s, which of course can be traced to the insane marketing tactics of the 60s and before. But I have happy memories of watching commercials that seemed to have been conceptualized while someone was on salvia (did salvia even exist back then?).

So I was definitely a Sega kid. My cousin had gotten me an NES in the very early 90s, but my brother had a Genesis in his condo that everyone enjoyed playing. Sonic the Hedgehog was something else and completely changed things for me. My brother would have these big parties and folks would be playing Madden on the Genesis, and then Sonic, and later on Mortal Kombat. It's hard to imagine now, even being there, these old games being cutting edge and drawing such an excited crowd.

The night before my 7th birthday, my Dad comes home late in the pouring rain with a huge box- a Sega Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog. I played Sonic so very much, you would not believe it. It was the first console game I ever finished (the first game I ever completed was probably Duke Nukem or Commander Keen the year before), and I was so proud of myself for being able to navigate the final boss. I used to play the game in front of my Mom to impress her.

There was a special promotion at the time, that if you sent in the barcode from the Genesis box, they would send you Sonic 2 for free. You remember those old tv ads selling stuff? Usually CDs? And at the end they always mention a 6-8 week delivery time? Yeah, let me tell you that was agonizing for a seven year old. I checked the mailbox every day until I forgot about it. I was so excited anytime I saw the demos of the game playing at the mall, and I so so so needed to get my hands on it. Eventually, my Dad came in one day with it, it having arrived and me not having checked the mail.

It was everything I hoped it would be, absolutely. It was longer, and harder, and had a new character who got all the kids super happy. But I gotta say, there were things I didn't like about it so much. I felt it was too long to finish in a single sitting, and the last levels were frustratingly difficult.

But that all was resolved with Sonic 3. You may have heard me ramble about Sonic 3 now and again. It has a fairly complicated history, being split up into two games that were released 6 months apart (and could be combined into a mega game), Michael Jackson (or his sound team) making some of the music, how the creator wanted to work with an exclusively Japanese team after having a bad time with the joint American-Japanese team on Sonic 2. You can go and watch a video about it, there is no shortage of hyperfocused infodumps on it out there. It is Sonic after all.

When my 8th birthday swung around, my Dad got me Sonic 3, and that pretty much doomed me to be a Sonic fan forever.

My favorite thing about Sonic 3 was the save feature. You didn't have to do it all at once, the game would save after every two levels allowing you to pick up where you left off. In addition to that, every level ended with a direct transition into the next, really heightening the immersion. In addition to that, a new character that got all the kids super happy.

Now I didn't really intend to ramble about Sonic, but it is rather inevitable when talking about Sega. Originally, Sega's mascot was Alex Kidd, a cutesy little dude with big ears who practiced martial arts and played rock-paper-scissors. He had a long string of arcade games in the 80s, ranging from okay to weirdly mediocre. When Sega released the Genesis in the late 80s, their big claim to fame was how much closer the at-home games seemed in raw power compared to the arcades. They weren't quite there by a long shot, but it was leagues ahead of what Nintendo was doing.

Alex Kidd had one game on the Genesis, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle. It's an alright time, but the cutesy image wasn't outdoing Mario, and the marketing of the Genesis all centered around being edgier and more "mature" for the "cool kids." So Sega set about making a mascot with attitude, and ended up with Sonic; the rest is history etc.

About a decade later, Sega made a game (only released in Japan) showing that Alex Kidd had been shoved out of the spotlight by Sonic and was now forced to sell his games at a GameStop. Don't believe me?

Yeah I don't know why they'd canonize that either.

As the 90s pressed on, Nintendo shot back with the Super Nintendo, greatly leveling the playing field. I'll ramble all about my favorite things on the SNES eventually, but it really made Sega step up their game as well.

They came up with this service called the Sega Channel when I was finishing the 3rd grade. It was a big cartridge that connected to the cable line, and every month it would have 50 games for you to play as you pleased in a rotating lineup (that was kinda random, popular stuff tended to stick around). I must have played hundreds of different games on it over the years.

At first I stuck with platformers like I was used to. Things like Kid Chameleon, Earthworm Jim, and especially Gunstar Heroes, were all my jam. But I did branch out over time, to things like Ecco the Dolphin, Golden Axe, Outrun. But things really shifted when I discovered RPGs.

So I didn't play a lot of RPGs. The first one I tried was called the Immortal, which if you know anything about the game you'd know the title does not refer to you. It is a death slog, and the animations were not afraid to be as graphic as they could be in the early 90s. Giant worms that eat you alive, exploding goblin heads, entirely too much blood for a pixelated exploration game. It put me off of the genre for a bit, me being afraid that all RPGs were hard and for smart people, of whom I did not count myself.

But it all changed when I discovered Shining Force.

Shining Force is a turn based strategy game with RPG elements. You get a small army of charming characters in this extremely cliche fantasy world full of late 80s styled anime characters. I was instantly hooked. I think I wrote about it the other day.

Shining Force 2 improves on the game in almost every conceivable way. It is superior in design, the graphics are higher quality, the game is bigger, it emphasizes exploration, but the story is somehow even more cliche than before and the ending pisses me off.

And so Phantasy Star 4 might be considered the first real RPG I ever played, certainly the first JRPG (yeah I'd never played Final Fantasy at that point, believe it or not).

The game itself is like playing through a manga, with the cutscenes all being done with still images. It was (and in many ways still is) an extremely ambitious game, taking place across multiple worlds and focusing on an immersive epic adventure.

It was very difficult for me to finish the game. I went onto the internet and depended on the Phantasy Star Pages to get me all the info I needed to learn the game and how to get past its various challenges. I poured more effort into learning how it worked than just about anything else in my life at the time.

In more than a few ways, it felt like the characters in Shining Force and Phantasy Star 4 were my only friends.

There are too many games from this era I can talk about as you have no doubt noticed, so I'll mention only one more. Ristar was one of the last games made for the Genesis and specifically by the Sonic Team before they moved on to the Saturn and then the Dreamcast.

The character sprite was based off Sonic's beta design, before he was even a hedgehog, and they took this character in a completely different direction. He's a shooting star with elastic arms capable of grabbing onto enemies and launching himself at them, taking them out without getting a concussion as you'd expect.

In the game, you explore a series of vibrant levels with a lot of wonderful upbeat music and all kinds of charming characters. The game gets very difficult though, and I wasn't able to complete it until 2013. The ending is very sweet though, and felt totally worth all the trouble.

Since the game came out as the 16-bit era was on its way out, not too many people bought it. These days Ristar makes very few appearances, and last I heard he was the flag waver in some kind of Sega racing game.

Ain't Sega nice keeping their old characters around like that.

So yeah, the console wars were a lovely time for me. The Sega Channel wound down in the late 90s, and I kept my Genesis on for months in order to finish Shining Force 2 after the service ended.

By 1999 I was considerably more into PC gaming, especially Starcraft. In 2000 I got a Playstation and in 2002 a Dreamcast, which I feel was the coolest system to ever come out.

But I never did forget my time on the Sega Channel and the Genesis. I still play those games fairly regularly, always remembering the good times. Hell, I would say I never stopped playing them.