Video: Genesis Power Team Volume 2 Has A Distinctly Nintendo Feel To It

Lots of lovely imports, too

by Damien McFerran Mon 28th Sep 2015

Long-time followers of this site will know the name Tyler Esposito - not only have we covered the excellent video content he has created in the past, he's actually contributed to Nintendo Life as well.

Esposito's latest project is iretrogamer, a YouTube channel which he hopes can become a resource for all kinds of retro gaming goodness. He's using the channel as a platform to show off his incredible collection of home movies, taken during the height of the Sega and Nintendo console wars.

Volume 1 showed the amazing love of gaming that Tyler shared with his father - who sadly passed away a few years ago - while Volume 2 shows that elder Esposito was a massive fan of importing, and the Super Famicom in particular. Now who can say, hand on heart, the same of their own dad?

In the clip, you'll see a whole host of imported releases, including Rushing Beat (the original version of Rival Turf) and Taito's Runark (also known as Growl), the latter of which is quite expensive these days.

While the video doesn't contain any game footage - it's just the intro and outro for a VHS tape which Tyler and his dad would mail out to his family in New York to keep them up to speed on what games they were playing - the enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious. As Tyler himself notes, this was YouTube before YouTube existed.

Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot Media's sites from an editorial perspective. He's also the editor of Time Extension, the network's newest site, which – paradoxically – is all about gaming's past glories.

1
mudmask
Mon 28th Sep 2015

this seems like a really sweet memory.

2
johnodaz
Mon 28th Sep 2015

Awesome videos my friend, brings back really good and fond memories of the golden era. Your dad seems a really cool guy upsetting too know is has passed.

3
rushiosan
Tue 29th Sep 2015

I loved it. He just got a subscriber.

4
Kirk
Tue 29th Sep 2015

@WaveBoy Oh, the Genesis/Megadrive comes close, but I still think Super Nintendo is the winner. For me personally, the clear winner.

5
Kirk
Tue 29th Sep 2015

@WaveBoy Yeah, I basically agree, but I've recently realised that for many years I never gave the Megadrive enough respect for what it did do well.

Speed, for example. And I'm not just talking "blast processing" either. The higher default speed of the CPU, 7.67Mhz of the Megadrive vs. the 3.59Mhz of the SNES, really did make a difference in many games. Using something like Streets of Rage vs. any of the Final Fight games for example: You can see the Megadrive is just superior at pushing more sprites on screen at once, and without any slowdown. With Streets of Rage 2 vs. Final Fight (any of them), I think it's something like up to 5 bad guys max on screen on Megadrives vs. only 3 on SNES.

https://youtu.be/9uUnZMxgpbo?t=2222 (many baddies on screen in Megadrive beat 'em ups)

This extra processor speed under the hood really helps improve the experience in certain types of games, shmups for example, which on the Megadrive generally ran rings around those on SNES in terms of the general amount of action, explosions and particles going on, and moving background "layers", without slowdown.

Go really study games like Streets of Rage 2 and Thunder Force 4 and watch how much stuff the Megadrive is throwing around compared to the SNES, such as layers, total sprites and also explosions and stuff, without any slowdown. This kind of thing was actually a lot more prevalent than I ever realised back in the day, and I certainly never gave the Megadrive enough credit for what it did do well.

SNES did more layers of parallax by default, 4 vs. the Megadrive's 2, but the Megadrive could do an effect where it basically adjusted each horizonal line on the fly and this allowed it to create a kind of parallax effect that was used in countless games to great effect but was rarely seen on SNES. Thunder Force 4 again being a great showcase of this, with levels that look like they sometimes have up to 8 layers of "parallax" or something like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDpWMyZnaCM (check out all the layers going on here)

What I realised recently was that the SNES did all the surface level graphics better--the really obvious stuff like the amount of colours and cool visual effects like transparency--but the Megadrive actually did a lot of stuff under the surface really well, which actually helped its games in ways that maybe aren't quite so obvious, if you're not paying attention.

So, while I still think the SNES was the better system all round, and in some ways very clearly, I still like to give the Megadrive its fair due too.

6
Gameday_J
Wed 30th Sep 2015

Haha i love how people say Sega Genesis didnt compare to the SNES. I never owned the Snes but i love that system just as well, but would have to go over friends and family to play it. Sega definitely didnt compare to Nintendo with RPG back in the day.Yes Super Mario World was epic and still brings about a great nostalgic feeling every time i pop it in. This applies to Sonic games as well for me, there was nothing like turning on the game and hearing SEGA followed by those magically chimes. Still this makes me want to ask alot of you what games did you play on either systems ?

I had the Sega and i over 40 games. I'll show you some of my favs and you guys counter them with Snes titles im interested in seeing your top picks. I tried to exclude games that were on both systems to my knowledge.

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