Gadgetory

one life everything is about working on the book council wars was that you know I sort of imagined at first it would be like you know these two great heavyweight who slugged it out like Magic Johnson Larry Bird and deal they hit really like each other at the time but they had respect for one another and pushed each other to new heights but twenty eight years later talking to the people who work at say on people who work in attend oh they hated each other still people of sega thought that the people in attendance and the people at Nintendo thought people saying it were frauds who had to the stylet of substance that was all marketing I love replicates I love the ability to boot up an old-school game that I grew up with and relive that nostalgia or even find old hidden gems that I never knew existed hers never gave a shot before and there's a lot of different ways to play retro games but they're not all equal some are really accessible but don't really give the best way to re-experience these games others are more expensive and sometimes you just want to rig up an old-school CRT with a system which works too but isn't always practical these days and an option that's been really growing on me the last couple years is the analog line of retro systems they started off with the NT which allows you to play with old-school NES games then they released the super NT for Nintendo and now they're giving us the chance to relive one of the greatest and most defining moments in gaming history the console war between Nintendo and Sega this is their latest system the mega SG a console it allows you experience not only Sega Genesis games but a variety of other sega systems thanks to a number of different adapters this combined with the super NT allows you to relive one of the most intense and most important moments in gaming history when Sega went against Nintendo with two very definitions of what exactly is okay for a game something that really defined the modern gaming landscape I think a lot of people don't really give the Sega Genesis the credit it deserves I think when a lot of people talk about Sega in terms of consoles they go oh yeah they were really neck-and-neck the Nintendo back in the day and then they lost and that's not really entirely fair I mean yes the Sega Saturn did not do great and probably even more depressingly the Dreamcast failed but the Genesis was a huge deal I think the way Sega went about opposing Nintendo and the kind of tone of created for that entire console war really shaped modern gaming and to really kind of get more at the core of this where she talked to Blake Harris and author behind a book called console wars which does a whole deep dive into that entire competition and is really enlightening back in the late 80s and early 90s I was just a kid and I was a soldier on the front lines these console wars and so in 1989 when the Megadrive pan and the Sega Genesis in the United States came out Nintendo literally or almost literally had a monopoly you know they had 95% plus and Ammar get one of my favorite archival finds is an advertisement that basically says there's no such thing as a Nintendo meaning that Nintendo was becoming so synonymous with videogames like Kleenex is with tissues or jacuzzis with hot tubs the Nintendo was trying to protect the trademark and so when the genesis came out in 1989 they were just an app in Nintendo's mind there's two things that are really appreciated about the analog series of consoles one the physical design of the system's themselves and two the actual gameplay experience you get out of them now getting both of these upsides together doesn't come at a super cheap cost but no one else is really doing this kind of work for retro games first the physical build so like the Super NT the Mega SG is very much designed to be sort of like a micro scaled-down slimline version of the system it's based on it's not trying to mimic the exact appearance of it like a classic edition system but instead it just has little kind of notes and references to its design while having the small compact shell in the make s G's case it's this ring that runs along the top having different colors for the front buttons which match the designs on the Sega Genesis and mega drives themselves and one little note that I like is it also adds this little in depth info of what kind of graphics and quality it runs for the games which is very reminiscent of the old-school Genesis having that line of high-definition graphics on the top now like the Super NT this one does come in four different colors three of them are based on the different designs that Mega Drive / Genesis had in different countries and honestly all very similar they're black systems that just have light different accents this is the u.s. one but this red and white up front the Japanese version looks very much the same but is blue right here instead and the European version has more white and gray accents as a fourth option that is entirely different from all of them you can also just get a straight-up white out version visuals aside but I really want to emphasize about just the build of the system though is that it is a solid little brick it is a dense tiny system that doesn't feel frail at all and keeps everything nice and clean looking you've got the two ports up front four controllers a headphone jack reminiscent like the original Genesis and then on the back just two ports HDMI for visuals and audio and a micro USB for power something that's really interesting about looking back at that console war is that a lot of people don't realize that while it was during the 90s the Genesis is actually an older system it came out in the late 80s and just didn't really get full attention what really ended peeping everything was around the time that Nintendo launched the Super Nintendo and two things that happened to Sega here in the United States where the console wars were fierce between say you know 10 we think about this this crazy heated marketing driven amazing game battle but it didn't really heat up until 1991 so two years after the Sega Genesis came out and that was largely because of two things one was the new CEO at Sega of America tom kalinske our sales right now are up about 50 percent versus year ago at the consumer level the market is down I think that's an indication of where the consumer is going and then Sonic the Hedgehog you know sonic changed everything Sonic came out in the summer of 1991 and then the Super Nintendo came out in the fall of 1991 and that is history something the analogues really excel at is this concept of versatility where it appeals to I think two very different kinds of people you've got the hardcore enthusiasts that I've been collecting games for a long time and then you've got the other people are just like oh yeah I grew up with Sega that was neat I'd like to play those games again and the way the SG does this is with his approach to settings when you first boot up the Mega SG you're greeted by a very simple menu it has the option to run the cartridge that is currently in it the option to play ultra core which we'll talk about a little bit later and most importantly the settings menu and within the settings menu probably the most robust section is video which is how you're gonna be able to craft all the visuals about how these old-school games are gonna appear on a modern TV now by default it's designed for people that don't really want to go all that in-depth so you can do things like choose which resolution you want a few different pre-designed height and width ratios and choose whether or not you'd like to have scan lines on the other hand if you want to really get into the nitty-gritty and just fine-tune the image exactly how you want it even by a specific game by game basis you can change to the Advanced Mode options which opens up so many more choices if you're a die-hard retro fan this is all great because it gives you the ability to fine-tune each and every game as you start it up and figure out what looks best on the other hand if you just want to be able to pop in Sonic every now and then and not care about it you can just basically ignore all these options aside from maybe the scan lines and still have a great experience in fact you can even change the menu settings themselves to where every time you turn the system on it just skips the settings entirely and jumps right into whatever game is currently sitting system what I can attest to as someone who lives you know who's who's fighting this battle on the playground basically like what each company represented it was almost like Sega represented freedom and choice and then intend overrepresented control and control probably has a negative connotation a sort of authoritarian connotation and there is some truth to that with Nintendo but what I really mean is that Nintendo had you know the Nintendo CEO of quality they had very rigorous standards they wanted games to be very cartoon like family-friendly and Sega had sort of more of a burden ripping strategy which was important to develop effort because developers are in their 20s 30s 40s 50s they wanted to do more mature content they also Sega did a lot to push of licensing licensed games sports games so really Nintendo was all about Nintendo games and and developers and consumers for a Hold'em salmon a certain type of game that is on the Nintendo and Sega really did represent freedom and then they also tapped into this 90s zeitgeist sort of this MTV generation idea partnering with MTV having commercials that really resembled MTV's flash quick cut style what the heck was that I forgot what it's gonna say welcome to the next one Hope which by the way was also by practice saying it was having less money in the Nintendo and needing to do things quicker um but you know Sega their marketing campaign welcome to the next level and that is largely what they succeeded in doing they welcome gamers to it more mature current level of gaming where anything went even though you know six bit graphics maybe not all that much anything you can do but compared to you know Mario and Zelda was a little bit different I also wanna take a moment to talk about the controller that it ships with this is the m30 controller from 8-bit dough we did do a video focused on this before but this is actually technically a different model which is really easy to tell when you have them side by side you're not really so this is the 2.4 gigahertz here is that unlike the Bluetooth model which can connect to a variety of different devices including 8-bit dough's own receivers this guy right here only connects to a dedicated receiver so the downside of this is that it's not gonna be able to work with as many different things it really just works on the Mega SG or an actual Sega Genesis but the upside of this is this model is going to give you way less input lag like the Bluetooth version of the m30 this is designed as kind of a crossover between the 6 button Sega Genesis controller and the Sega Saturn controller and honestly I just love it I think this might be my favorite retro style controller I've used which is insane because like I've said I grew up with Nintendo but this is honestly just so comfortable the shaping of it is awesome especially for design that isn't a more you know kind of modern grippy one it has the best d-pad I have ever used and just all the buttons everything feel really nice and snappy on it another really interesting aspect to the design for the SG that actually separates a bit from what analogs done before the NT is there pushing this concept of also running more adapters into it now again this can play Sega Genesis and Sega Megadrive games which are basically just different region versions of the same system and you can also get up to a Sega CD sadly it will not work with a 32x on top of that however when you buy one of these it actually ships with an adapter so you can also use it with Sega Master System games and while the option hasn't been made available just yet the plan is that to be sold separately they're going to more adaptors to allow you to play things like the sg-1000 one of the oldest things Sega has made and Game Gear adding a kind of super Gameboy approach to it the experience the sense of giving you is honestly beautiful and something that's really interesting for me personally when dealing with this system is that when I messed with the NT and the Super NT I grew up in an ostendo household so it was a lot about re-experiencing games that I grew up with being able to go oh yeah this looks beautiful now on an HDTV versus with the Genesis I played some of them a little bit growing up but this has really become the opportunity for me to go back and actually explore this library that was always kinda out of reach for me so having a system like this opens up that possibility to actually hunt down these old-school games that I never played pop them in hook him up to a modern TV and actually play them like it was some modern India release that's just trying to pay tribute to retro games don't get me wrong there's always going to be that soft warm and fuzzy spot of being able to hook up an actual CRT and play games like they were designed back in the day but it's just not always the most convenient if I just want to be able to hook it up to the main TV I had set up that I also use for Xbox Playstation or the switch that's just a lot easier and super fun something that really stood out to me as being super important to is this concept of Sega focusing more on bringing games to adults it's not that there were no games that appealed to adults before but a lot of them were older I'm pretty dated when Nintendo started making their way to the west because when they did they focused along the concept of oh the Nintendo is a toy it's a kids thing here all these fun family-friendly games where as Sega didn't really want to pigeonhole the entire genre into them they wanted to make sure that there was stuff where people who were older would find things that were fun to play to you know epic time things were just perceived as childish playthings they were sold in Toys R Us they were sold in KB toys they were considered toys and Sega under Tom he helped transform them into consumer electronics you know I remember playing video games with my brother when we work must've been you know eight and six years old and we would play with our father and add and play with us because he's an awesome father but he would play with us the same way a parent would playing with a child you know having a fake tea party like he was yeah there was something kind of bending about it you know he's like video games are this kissing and and that changed with Sega the bidding was important in expanding what's what video games were all despite the fact that Sega's follow-up systems didn't do that great and eventually caused them to stop making consoles entirely in favor of just focusing on games I think it's really important to focus on this concept of how the Genesis really opened the door for all the other companies that started getting into gaming you can even see in today's landscape where Nintendo is still associated as being this sort of family-friendly more kid aimed games even though they have a little more mix going on but because of that we have Sony and Microsoft bringing a lot more attention to videogames to something that's for everyone especially focused on more adult themes and that really might just be because negative first I think that without tom kalinske Sega would have just been a blip on the radar and and there's so much that came from that battle was between Sega and Nintendo you know I think the most important lasting legacy is videogames becoming more of a mainstream form of entertainment and skewing older you know took one of tom kalinske primary strategies was to try to succeed where Nintendo was not dominating which was kids or adults older than 14 years old so going after teenagers going after adults and turning video games much more into what they are today was a little more mature content a little bit of blood as we know from the Mortal Kombat stuff and so without tom kalinske i think it's a go he would have been more successful than he's you know also-rans in the past and Sonic the Hedgehog would have been a good game but you know pac-man was a good game Frogger was a good game Crash Bandicoot was a good game didn't spawn an iconic character that 25 years later lives on and so I think that without tom kalinske we don't have the industry that we have today and and that also includes the fact that you know Kilkee idea that Sega and was able to compete against Nintendo for a certain amount of time able to surpass Nintendo they proved that the console market was bigger than just one player there was room for more than one company at a time so I don't know if we have Sony I don't know if you have Microsoft we definitely a very different landscape without top-quality