Growing up were you a Nintendo or a Genesis household?

Tofu I could tell you what I think the differences are, in ethos, but deep down I think they are really minor, like the way sports teams stand for totally & radically different things until you speak to someone who doesn't know the rules.

Also I do not understand why Nintendo can still make good Mario games while Sega are now inescapable of not ruining Sonic titles with stupid slow tedious keyfinding fucksakism but that is maybe for another thread.

My soft spot for Nintendo is maintained by witnessing what 2nd-party developers like Capcom, Square and Enix have been producing on N platforms. There's very, very little that I consider to be totally indispensable on the Sony platforms, by any of those houses; but on Nintendo, it seems to be nothing but gold all the way. I could write a thesis and a half on Nintendo's brand management and how they're fit to last through the maelstrom, but I'm not in Video Games Industrial Management, so you'll have to settle for the short version:

1. Good Companies don't go branching out into industries beyond their core competency just because they find capital out of nowhere.

2. Good Companies don't change their mission statements because their competitors have profited massively from a recent fad.

3. Good Companies don't launch new projects at a loss just to steal marketshare from established competitors.

Hi, Nintendo. You'll still be here when my children are born. Sony won't. MSFT might be, but not in the games business, except as a spinoff. I love you, and I always have, except for that short period when I was playing with action figures, because you didn't make video games. Fanboy patch? Fuck that, I want a job.

it worked out well.

When I got older, it became completely clear that the SNES was the better console of the two, but I still get a lot more use out of my Megadrive than I do my SNES which I bought later on.

but yeah, i fell out of console gaming sometime in the early 90s, and never really got back into it except for one game: Metal Gear Solid. Playing that on my brother's psx when i'd come home on holiday breaks got me back into wanting a cosole again.

I agree with this, but the 6-button Genesis controller is perfect! The original Saturn controller sucked, too; it was way too big. These are the same people who neglected to make a first party lightgun availible for the release of House of the Dead 2 on the Dreamcast. Yeah!

SEGA are fuckups but they have been so consistently weird and original that I admire them. Plus the consoles have good games. Their response to Super Mario Bros. was to publish Westone's Wonder Boy on the Master System, which was also published by Hudson on the NES as Adventure Island.

http://www.vgmuseum.com/images/nes/Adventure%20Island%201%20-%20Ingame.gifhttp://www.vgmuseum.com/pics4/Wonder%20Boy%20-%20Ingame.gif

Hey, the Master System version looks and plays better! But that isn't my point. The game itself is totally brutal and psychotic; it's unbeatable. You need to be constantly running at full speed, collecting mysteriously floating fruits before your health drains to zero, making impossible and unpredictable leaps of faith that will often end in diaster. The image that comes into my mind when I play this game is the designers playing Super Mario Bros like this and thinking, "Hey, let's copy that." They are beasts.

Look at Bio-Hazard Battle, Thunder Force IV, Alien Soldier, Alisia Dragoon, and Gunstar Heroes for the Genesis; they are the loudest, fastest, and most artistically abrasive games of the 16-bit era, period. It has something to do with the Genesis synthesizer, which is only capable of producing bizzare, sludgey drones. These games are too dark, serious, and intense for Nintendo; they would not have fit in with their marketing scheme at all, but they also wouldn't have played on the SNES without substantial slowdown.

But they're just different, and that's okay!

Nintendo had exclusive US publishing rights with the big developers, which is why, for instance, none of the Konami PC-Engine games (Gradius, Castlevania) were published there. Street Fighter II Championship Edition was actually published for the PC-Engine three months before it came out on the Genesis in Japan, but nope, not in the states!

Ridiculously OTM. It's as if Sega never really knew what they were doing, just had lots of half baked ideas in their heads. That's what made their consoles so great! As long as the game developers know what to do, that's fine, and Treasure, Codemasters, Capcom et al clearly did.