In 1989, at a time when the NES was increasing even more in popularity, Sega, who already had some popularity in the United States with the 8-Bit Master System, and Arcade games such as Altered Beast and After Burner II, released a video game console that was meant to take on Nintendo's NES, the Genesis, which became one of the greatest 16-Bit consoles of all time.
At the time of it's release, Sega's main success was in the arcades, and overseas in the UK, where the Master System was extremely popular. On October 29, 1988, Sega release the MegaDrive in Japan. About a year later, on August 14, 1989, Sega release the Genesis in the United States. Sega pushed the Genesis on American consumers with the classic "Genesis does what Nintendon't" commercials. Those who paid the money for the system got the system, controllers, hookups, and the arcade port of Altered Beast. Many of the games released at launch were arcade ports and sports games. These include: Strider, Pat Riley Basketball, James "Buster" Douglas K.O. Boxing, and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. The graphics of the system made people question why they were still playing on the old 8-Bit NES. Some kept their Nintendo's, and some took the leap into the 16-Bit era. Early in the Genesis' lifetime, Sega released a peripheral for the system called the Sega Power Base Converter. This peripheral slid into the cartridge port of the system an allowed the user to insert Sega Master System games into the converter, giving it backwards compatibility with practically all Master System games, and game Cards.
As the years went on, the Genesis saw some fierce competition coming from Nintendo, with their Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and NEC's TurboGrafx-16. Sega held on, however, and gained even greater popularity with the release of the game Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic was, as most today know, a blue, bad ass, in-your-face hedgehog, and was much more fierce when compared to Nintendo's little Italian plumber, Mario. Also, Sega was able to beat out Nintendo with one fighting game, Mortal Kombat. While the Genesis version of the game didn't look as good or sound as good as the SNES version, the Genesis version had full blood, and no censored fatalities.
As the Genesis passed into the 32-Bit era, Sega tried to keep up with the graphics of the more advanced systems. They began to push the games to their graphical limits, and even released a couple of add-ons to make the system more powerful. The first of the two was the Sega Mega CD, released in Japan in 1991, and released in the United States in 1992 as the Sega CD. As the name states, this add-on was a disc drive that attached to either the bottom of the model 1 Genesis or on the side of the model 2. The add-on also enabled the Genesis to play audio CDs. Most of the games on the Sega CD were crappy FMV (full motion video) games. Some of the better ones, however, were Sonic CD, Snatcher, The Terminator, and Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD featured the same Genesis graphics, but arcade sounds, speech, and music. Later on, in 1994, Sega released the Sega 32X, which was inserted into the cartridge port of the Genesis, could play all of the regular 16-Bit games, and also had its own line of 32-Bit games such as Mortal Kombat II, Knuckle's Chaotix, Star Wars Arcade, Doom, and Virtua Fighter. These add-ons are infamous for their low amounts of killer titles, and extremely high prices at launch.
In closing, Sega made their greatest benchmark on the video game industry with the Genesis, and many gamers of today swear by the old Blast Processor. This system gets a 8/10.
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