My "travel system"

Somehow, I wound up working as the director of media relations for a trade association. My job requires me to travel at least three times a year for statewide meetings, and I tend to pack up my Sega Genesis 2 and take it along on trips. On those trips, people tend to revert to their college years, and I spent a lot of time drinking beer and playing my Atari 2600 and ColecoVision in college. Since the ColecoVision gave up the ghost years ago and the Atari 2600 isn't as wonderfully portable as the Genesis, I tend to lug the durable little Sega with me on trips along with a duffel bag full of games.

Most television sets in hotels, motels, inns and the like have RCA plugs, so I just hook up the power to the Genny, use the RCA video/audio out adapter I have (you really need one of those to enjoy this thing as the RF adapter for a Genesis is downright unreliable) and I'm off and running. Yes, there's nothing like a room full of beer swilling folks playing something from the Sonic series, running through a game of Tecmo Super NBA or anything else from the impressive Genesis library.

The great thing about the Genesis is that it features a lot of games that are easy to pick up and play, are addictive as can be and provide hours of entertainment for those of us who still recognize the 16-bit era for what it was -- the absolute pinnacle of two-dimensional gaming. This little system, released in the U.S. in 1989, was Sega's attempt to topple the mighty Nintendo (which was still riding high with the Nintendo Entertainment System) and the company provided something the video gaming world sorely needed -- some competition. Nintendo and Sega slugged it out for years and we gamers all benefited with the top notch games and downward pressure on prices that come as the natural result of competition. Ah, beautiful capitalism!

The question people argued over for years was this -- is the Genesis or the Super NES the better of the dominant 16 bit systems? Honestly, I'd say there was no clear winner of that particular console war as both systems were very, very good at the time and were unique in their own way. The Genesis was the first 16-bit system of the two and had some great exclusive titles available (the Sonic series and those Road Rash games come to mind immediately), was the system to get if you wanted a lot of sports games (the Madden franchise started here) and had more of an "adult" image than the Super NES (the bloody "finishes" in the first installment of Mortal Combat was on the Genesis, but not on the Super NES). Meanwhile, the Super NES was faster, featured smoother animation, rendered limited three-dimensional games better, had some very good exclusive titles and offered a better selection of role playing games.

And, frankly, I like the Super NES controllers better, although that six-button arcade pad for the Genesis is a respectable controller. Still, the shoulder buttons on the Super NES were very convenient and offered more comfortable control on more complex games than the Genesis did.

The heart of this little system is the Motorola 6800, the 16-bit CPU that gave the old Apple Macintosh life. That old Motorola ran at a whopping 7.67 MHz, but the true workload fell on a dedicated graphics processor which pushed up to 64 sprites (independently animated images) around the playfield and could display up to 512 colors (only around 51 colors could be on the screen at a time). The graphics were trumped by the Super NES, as was the sound (the Genny could play midi-based soundtracks and bleeps and bloops well enough, but digitized voices almost always came out scratchy).

Of course, it's the games that make or break a system, and the Genesis had those available in spades. There were plenty of sports games available, but those simply haven't aged well. Platformers like the excellent Sonic series made up the bulk of the "good" library available for the Genesis, but you can't overlook top notch titles like Rock N' Roll Racing (an excellent isometric racer), the Road Rash games (ride a motorcycle and beat up on folks) or a host of great horizontal and vertical shooters. You've got some excellent strategy games (Centurion: Defender of Rome and the always welcome Risk, for example) and some assorted bits of oddness you just can't find anywhere else (the Toe Jam & Earl series, for example).

What the system did lack was the great role playing games that were on the Super NES. For example, the Final Fantasy and Zelda games, alone, are worth the price of admission. And then, of course, there's Super Mario Kart for the Super NES that's one of the finest games of the 16-bit era. Fortunately, there's a lot to choose from for the Genesis and it also has some games that aren't available for the Super NES. Still, you know how gamers are -- what's not available for their systems is often as important as what is.

And, most games for the Genesis are dirt cheap through sites like eBay and you can find plenty of reviews of games for the Sega over at VideoGameCritic.net (your source for reviews of both new and old games). The "dirt cheap" factor of collecting for the Genesis is certainly appealing because you can get most of the great stuff for the system for next to nothing.

There are some things to keep in mind when buying a Genesis or shopping for peripherals for it, however. First of all, you probably want to get the Genesis 2 -- the first generation of the Genesis has reliability problems and the Genesis 3 has compatability issues. Also, stay away from the Sega CD add on (it's almost worthless) and the 32-bit add on (it's almost useless) -- both of those are bulky, buggy and don't add that much to the enjoyment of the system.

Sadly, this system represents the first -- and only time -- Sega got things right. The Sega Saturn was a great system, but Sega angered so many fans with the shenanigans involving the Sega CD and the 32-bit add on that a lot of people fled to the Sony PlayStation camp. The Sega Dreamcast is still my favorite of the 128-bit systems, but it wasn't marketed well and the trust issues left lingering from the Sega CD and 32-bit add on days (Sega charged a lot for those but didn't support them well at all) still lingered.

Still, for a brief moment, the Sega Genesis was one of the most respected and best supported systems out there. If you want to grab a console that is easy to collect for and is a lot of fun, it's hard to go wrong with it.