To all the old school Sega fans

[goatlll]

I was thinking the other day about why we Nintendo fans hated the stuff Sega was doing back in the 16 bit era, and wrote a little send up to it. I am not as opposed to Sega today, in fact I am a little upset that I wasted so much time hating them. But do you remember getting into fights with the other kids when you were in school about Sega vs Nintendo? Do you miss that people don't seem to have that level of passion today? And finally do you still feel as though Sega had better products than Nintendo? I am dying to know cause I am actually writing a book about it. Here are the four parts I wrote, if you are interested
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 and Part 4. I am not trying to flame or anything, but it is a little unkind to Sega in places. But I am more interested in your thoughts than anything else.

[Ziggy]

Do you miss that people don't seem to have that level of passion today?

Yes.

The most I hear these days is if Xbox is better than Playstation, and honestly, who cares? It's nothing in comparison to the SNES versus the Genesis!

[Shabba]

Yes, I remember the arguments and the stupid battles over the manufacturers. It was, as the kids say now, epic. Gamepro and the other game rags were all on the bandwagon too touting which system had better graphics and games. It was all over when the SNES came to town though. Super mario on the SNES? It was the pinnacle of gaming as we knew it

When I bought my Lynx (which I still have, box and all!), I rubbed it in my friends faces. "16-bit handheld AND color! Eat it gameboy nerds. The Lynx will defeat the Gameboy!" I lived to eat those words...

[goatlll]

The book I am planning is looking at that mindset, the us versus them aspect. I miss those getting together with friends to talk about how much we hated the other guys, and actually looked forward to hearing from the Sega guys to hear what was on their minds. And man it got heated. I miss that aspect today. No one wants to be passionate about their hobby anymore, and I don't think that will ever come back.

[Golgo 14]

There's a big difference between being passionate and being angry. Being passionate about something you love is great, but being angry about something you hate (especially if the subject is something trivial), is not a good use of time and energy, imo.

[benderx]

Sega console was better for adults and teenager while nintendo was category towards to young children and teenagers. I went from atari 7800 > nintendo NES > Sega Genesis >N64 >PS1>PS2>Wii>Dreamcast> finally PS3. Sega was mainly into arcade games to the sega genesis. Of course I had the original gameboy>gameboy color>GBA>phat DS


in my opinion
For instance sega genesis (black is better) model was better looking compared to Snes (purple layout button, white/yellow). Genesis had a headphone jack good feature and snes didn't.
One of the coolest thing my bro did to the Genesis was hook it up to my dad stereo speakers and living room blasted awesome genesis music. I was like wow. Sega Genesis video game packaging was a lot better than Snes box. Usually snes game boxes were thrown out.

I love super Bros. 3 way more than Super mario world.
I still love Ghouls 'n Ghosts (Sega) than super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, the snes version was harder and slow in gameplay. Of course both games are different. I didn't like starfox or super mario kart 3d graphics than the N64.

One last thing I hated about the nintendo was censorship in their games. But I still play both consoles.

[goatlll]

There's a big difference between being passionate and being angry. Being passionate about something you love is great, but being angry about something you hate (especially if the subject is something trivial), is not a good use of time and energy, imo.

I agree. That is one of the things I find so fascinating, that people could get so attached to a company, to a brand name as it were. I find it funny when a big company makes a change to a series and people take it personally. Nintendo doesn't owe me anything other than what I pay for, but there was a time I did not think like that, which would have been during the 16 bit age. I guess I was lucky, cause my friends and others would discuss things with a great degree of civility and honesty. That is a little odd for kids, to be sure, but it was all good. Your right, it is all trivial, but thinking from the mind set of a kid, or young teen, it seemed to matter a great bit.

[aeon]

Like many SEGA fanboys I found solace in the ever embracing arms of 90's retro triangles and 'hip' attitude that SEGA fed to to me. The 'coolness' of the SEGA brand was what really stuck with me the most, and oppressing Nintendo kids was so easy when the cool factor was brought into the mix. At first, when the Genesis had no 16bit response from Nintendo, we really put kids to shame with how awesome the system was compared to the NES. Once the SNES hit the market though, things really took a different spin.

Once the SNES hit the shelves, in my opinion, the real debate took a turn from SEGA vs. Nintendo to Sonic vs. Mario. There was a bit of mascot hate going on before the SNES, but it really peeked once Super Mario World appeared. I put kids to shame with my love for Sonic, and because SEGA was so much better at marketing the 'cool' factor than Nintendo it really hit hard. I remember arguments at school going something like this:

KID: "Super Nintendo is so awesome. Have you even played Super Mario World yet?"
ME: "That game is so slow! Sonic 2 is way faster and tons better."
KID: "No it isn't! Mario can totally run that fast if he wanted to!"
ME: "HE'S A PLUMBER. Sonic would totally beat him in a race."
KID: "Yeah but Mario can shoot fire!"
ME: "So what? He can't catch Sonic."
KID: "...What about Yoshi? He would totally kill Sonic!"
ME: "NO WAY! Yoshi is dumb as rocks and have you even SEEN Sonic dash?"
KID: "..."
ME: "He would totally run right into Yoshi and murder him before he even saw it coming."
KID: "...Whatever..."

None of these arguments were ever really intelligent (we were kids, eh?) but the number one thing that helped SEGA fanboys was the pride fed to us by SEGA marketing. Nintendo just didn't have anything to compare, really. Our system was just more mature, faster and cooler than the SNES- and most of the Nintendo kids knew it. We had Road Rash, Sonic, Shinobi, Afterburner... what did you have? Mario Kart? Super Mario World? Castelvania? PILOT WINGS?! Ugh... Those games are slow and stupid.

Things started getting hard later on, especially with games like Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country and Starfox hitting the shelves. Those three games were what really made me get dirty with Nintendo fans. I memorized EVERYTHING about the Genesis from the CPU up, and would quote all these fancy facts that I understood nothing about to naysayers. And if I ever met someone intelligent enough to debate I always had my Ace: BLAST PROCESSING. Nobody knew how to argue that one away (although, no one even knew what it was or what it did!).

And don't even get me started on the 'different versions' debate (Mortal Kombat, Earthworm Jim, etc...)

In the end it didn't matter though. If a Nintendo kid came to my house, no matter what argument we got in, we still had a blast playing my Genesis. The same was true for me- I enjoyed the hell out of my friends SNES. The fact was when you went to a kids house you played what they had, no matter the brand. This is why I look back on those years with such sentiment, because we were all kids and we just wanted to play video games.

...And I just typed for one hour. Fuck. Well, I guess that's what happens when you work overnights and have nothing to do!

[Original_Name]

I mean, if you want me to be honest -- the last thing people should be doing at this point is writing a book about how much they hated Sega for mostly-insignificant reasons -- that's what the general gaming public has already been doing for a long time now, and if you want others to REALLY contemplate the quality of series like Panzer Dragoon, I wouldn't recommend publishing a book on how shitty the company who made it was. From what you've written, I can tell you're not completely irrational (save for your childhood years, of course ) but I think your premise could use alot of work. What exactly are you trying to do here? Just show how you feel about the company while still acknowledging the level of subjectivity and that somewhere out there someone is doing the exact same thing about Nintendo? Because I felt like that was what you were probably trying to get at, but it was never explicitly stated, making this seem very much like an autobiographical propaganda piece than anything else.

The thing about Sega that doesn't click with you back in the Genesis years was their development process. They never liked to take a long time with a game -- now, if you're the kind of person who wants each game in your collection to scream hyper objective quality, then Sega is not your company -- if you want a game that you can't get anywhere else, and that, for all its little flaws, does everything you want it to, then Sega is a great choice. Ecco the Dolphin is not a perfect game, but honestly, Zelda-meets-Thunder Force II-meets underwater/sci-fi adventure constitutes a must-buy for me, and I fucking love that game because it's a bunch of badass factors that I never knew I would've wanted thrown together until I played the game. While Nintendo bested Sega in individual quality of their games, Sega's rapid-fire pace in creating video games meant that there were more games worth playing on the Genesis, and if you were "with it" subjective factors of personal interest might have made you favor a game for its Sega-like concept over its Nintendo-like execution.

And your argument about processing power is obviously supposed to be a joke, but it's the only argument you give, so its all anyone has to work with. We weren't not trying to fly to the moon on our MegaDrives, we were trying to play fast-paced games on them (shmup, sports, and action titles) which increased processing power IS effective for. Your argument could have been, "Do your games REALLY need to be faster than Axelay and F-Zero?" and it would have at least been based on logical constructs, but as it stands I get some bizarre Blackberry metaphor which makes sense, but can be refuted in no time at all. Also: citing that the graphical and audio capabilities of the Genesis were inferior is kind of a mute point when you realize that the Genesis is around two and a half years older than the Super Nintendo. The fact that programmers still managed to keep up at all on the aging hardware was incredible -- Gunstar Heroes, Sonic & Knuckles, Shinobi III, Comix Zone, Beyond Oasis and a host of other titles look just as good as high-quality Super Nintendo games, and sound fucking great -- and in Gunstar Heroes and Sonic & Knuckles's case, I'm not so sure the SNES could have handled how much they were processing at once. See? It is significant!

The fact that you can see the high quality of the Saturn releases (good on you for that!) but not find the charm in the Genesis games is confusing to me. Alot of the Sega Saturn's classic library really feels like logical expansions of existing Genesis game-design ideologies to me: Space Harrier > Panzer Dragoon; General Chaos > Dragon Force; Golden Axe > Guardian Heroes; M.U.S.H.A. > Radiant Silvergun; Ranger-X > Bulk Slash; Shining Force II > Shining Force III (duh), and so forth.

And your point about there being a glut of great Dreamcast games at the start and then having to scourenge through titles like Silver, Time Stalker, Re-Volt, and EGG (which is actually a great game, but whatever) and then having huge waiting periods between significant titles is just... it's just not true. Sega worked REALLY hard to make sure that there was a significant title released every two weeks -- like really, I don't know how you can forget things like Shenmue and Skies of Arcadia coming out within a week of eachother. The entire year of 2000 was packed with great Dreamcast releases coming out within weeks of eachother -- like really, what are you even talking about there?

To get back to my original point though, all kinds of stupid fucking slandering has been thrown Sega's way for way too long now. I'm sick of a legacy of great games and a relentless drive to innovate even at the company's own cost being shrugged off in favor of saying, "HEY, BUT FMV GAMES!!" and having an interesting market campaign. It may have made you frustrated, but it made me want a Sega Genesis (well, that and more specifically seeing a screenshot of Shinobi III's level 3 boss on the side of a Sega Genesis box). And to be perfectly honest, I have a healthy respect for both companies for very different reasons -- I think that while you're not completely irrational, you should at least try and respect the company for all the things that it did, whether they're your cup of tea or not. I could go on lambasting Nintendo for pulling a bunch of bullshit legal tactics to keep Sega in the ground, censoring games, refusing to grow up with their audience, and producing the Virtual Boy, but that doesn't outshine the good things they did -- the same goes for Sega. Nintendo made games as perfectly as possible slowly, and Sega made games as uniquely as possible quickly, and every once in awhile they played just as damn good -- if you can't get hep with that fine, but you don't need to write a damn book talking about how shitty they are unless you recognize that your opinion is equally flawed. That's the humor of the whole Sega vs. Nintendo business -- it's humorous to us now, the fact that we took two great companies competing so damn seriously. Once you start taking it seriously, then it's just trolling.

[aeon]

I'm sick of a legacy of great games and a relentless drive to innovate even at the company's own cost being shrugged off in favor of saying, "HEY, BUT FMV GAMES!!" and having an interesting market campaign. It may have made you frustrated, but it made me want a Sega Genesis (well, that and more specifically seeing a screenshot of Shinobi III's level 3 boss on the side of a Sega Genesis box).

Hell yes.