Racketboy

Are you wondering if your Sega Genesis collection has any valuable treasures in it? This month we take a look at Sega’s most popular console of all time and its most desired games. Since the console wasn’t a huge success in Japan, we will find quite a few rarities in its library, but […]

Note from racketboy: Special thanks goes to Scooter for putting this guide together!
The RetroGaming 101 series is aimed at gamers who are just starting out in the classic gaming scene or are curious about an older console that they don’t know much about yet. Those of you that are especially knowledgeable about the […]

Remember my post, “If Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Was in HD“? That image got salivary glands working overtime for old-school Sonic fans and turned into one of my most popular posts of all time. Now is turns out that a number of people in the Sonic homebrew community are working on bringing […]

Presented by: Fastbilly1, Marurun, & Racketboy
New To Together Retro? Check out the introduction to the club
Welcome to the second entry in the Together Retro Game Club. After the challenge of the first two club installments of Defender and Kid Icarus, we thought we would have something a bit more lighthearted but still full of […]

The Sega Genesis was the first console I ever owned and as a young teenager, I bought into the hype of all of Sega’s technological promises such as the Sega CD and 32X.    OK, so I didn’t actually buy all the add-ons for myself since they were way out of my video game budget, […]

As a child of the 80’s, the NES and all the great games it brought to the 8-bit generation littered my elementary school days with many fond memories. However, I can still remember the fall of of 1989 when the Sega Genesis (known as the MegaDrive outside of the USA) and its initial […]

While most of us probably just boot up an emulator to try those MegaDrive games that were never released in our native countries, there are sure to be some retro gamers that insist on playing the real cartridges on the real machine. I’ve had a couple of people email me recently about how […]

I have been recently been fascinated by the history of the various machines that have battled for our living rooms. Each machine has had its strengths and weaknesses, and as a programmer, I’m amazed by some of the ways developers have harnessed the power of consoles and pushed them to their limits resulting is […]

When there are a number of home versions of a classic game, you can’t help but wonder which version is the best. For older games, it is very hard to find some solid comparisons of various ports. Fortunately, every now and then I stumble across someone who is dedicated to a certain game […]

Those of you who have been around the site for a while may remember me mentioning this little device a couple of times. Much like many of the other plug-in-and-play TV Games available, this little Sega Genesis comes with a few built-in games (including my favorite, Sonic 2). However, those of you who like […]

It looks like Sega is helping the XBox Live Arcade show up the Wii’s Virtual Console again.
According to SegaOnline & XBox360fanboy, Sega will be releasing a series of their Genesis/Megadrive titles on the XBox Live Arcade under the name of “Sega Vintage Collection”.

The collection will be started with the release of the original Sonic the […]

Note from racketboy: “For those starting out in the world of classic gaming, emulation is one of the first places people start out in order to get their feet wet. While emulators may be a bit more work to set up and use than the original console, it lets curious gamers play around with […]

Over the last few months I’ve been complaining about the lack of interesting titles on the Wii’s Virtual Console — at least to the point of making them worth paying for them again. Well, for Sega fans, this drought may be coming to an end soon. OFLC has updated its website with […]

When you add a console to your collection, the first thing you want to do is get a handful of games to keep you busy with your new toy. However, most of us can’t spend afford to spend fat pile of cash for a few games. This budget-friendly list should help you quickly find which […]

Even though the Super Nintendo and Genesis both have a number of forgotten gems in their library, Phantom 2040 has to be one of the most under-appreciated games from the 16-bit era. In fact, I was not even aware of its existence until recently. If you enjoy action games with exploration elements such […]

With so many unique and interesting games from the past out there, I obviously don’t have time to review them all myself. This time around we have racketboy.com contributer, Mega-Dan reviewing one of his favorite under-appreciated gems, Forgotten Worlds for the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive.
Introduction
Forgotten Worlds is similar to a horizontal scrolling shootem’up style (shmup) space game, […]

The Sega Genesis Collection has apparently emerged as one of the best classic game compilations of all time. (If there was a Gamecube version, I would buy it for myself). I was pretty happy to see our friends at X-Play have taken the time to share the Genesis Collection with its television audience and […]

Usually, when you get a new-to-you console, you can usually find or remember the major games to check out. But what happens when you need something different to play? This is where the “Hidden Gems” come in.
Read More About My Criteria For Hidden Gems
See All The Hidden Gems Articles
Platformers
Obvious Choices:
Sonic the Hedgehog,, Toe Jam & […]

With all the praise we give the Dreamcast for staying alive with new commercial releases, we sometimes forget about other older systems that have a new game released. In this case, racketboy.com contributer, retrogamer, shares his review of the recent Sega Genesis release of Beggar Prince.
Introduction:
Beggar Prince is a rare and obscure title that […]

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s the case, The Legend of Zelda has been flattered many a time. Starting with Golden Axe Warrior on the Master System and Beyond of Oasis on the Genesis, Zelda has had many a clone.
Landstalker is yet another action RPG from Climax Entertainment that […]

As any classic gaming fan knows, Sega and Nintendo had quite a rivalry in the early days of console gaming. Even though Sega had some great franchises of its own, it was still envious of some of Nintendo’s franchises like Zelda and Metroid.
Near the end of the Genesis’ successful lifespan, Sega attempted to capitalize […]

Most Sega Genesis fans remember Gunstar Heroes as the premier run-and-gun shooter from Treasure. Inside the US, this is definately the case, but our friends in Europe and Japan were priveldged to experience a challenging and impressive game by the name of Alien Soldier.
The cartridge is very difficult to find in either region […]

The Sega Genesis had a heaping spoonful of quirky yet delightful titles and one of the first Sega titles to set this standard was Toe Jam & Earl.
This cult favorite broke the monotony that the glut of side-scrolling platformers brought. This uniqueness is the primary reason that fans were so dismayed by the format […]

Castlevania is possibly the best example of a classic franchise that, for the most part, has stayed true to its two-dimensional roots and has pushed the limits of the 2D power of a number of consoles.
While Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the new Dawn of Sorrow have received most of the praise, Castlevania’s […]

Sega has developed a small handful of solid RPG franchises such as Shining Force and Skies of Arcadia, but if there is one Sega RPG series that has the largest cult following, it would be Phantasy Star.
The Phantasy Star series made its debut on Sega’s 8-bit Master System, but it had 3 sequels on the […]

It looks like Sega finally got a clue. They realized they need to capitalize on their most valuable IP and will be bringing a generous collection of their 16-bit Genesis titles to both the PS2 and PSP.
Perhaps this was inspired by the excitement over their announcement to have Genesis games availible on the Wii’s […]

The first magazine scan I posted a while back was mistakenly labeled as the first issue of Sega Visions. However, this weeks PDF is the real deal. The June/July 1990 issue of Sega Visions is the publication’s premiere and carries on the tradition of early gaming magazines by serving as a booklet of […]

After the success of the Genesis/Megadrive, Sega tried a little too hard to come out on top in the 32-bit generation. Even though they had the CD-Based Saturn in development, Sega also tried to offer existing Genesis owners a way to “upgrade” their console to a 32-bit machine that could offer more arcade-quality games.
The 32X […]

If you grew up in the late 80’s/early 90’s like me, your life probably was saturated with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those Heroes-In-A-Halfshell appeared just about everywhere including a number of video games.
In the early 1990’s, two of my favorite arcade games were Street Fighter 2 and Konami’s TMNT arcade side-scrolling brawler. […]

Over the last decade or two, we have seen a wide variety of gaming hardware — each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I would love to be able to play with just about every unique piece of hardware at least once. However, some of the most interesting gaming machines are both difficult to […]

With the recent announcement of Genesis games being playable on the Revolution, I thought this would be a wonderful time to review some classics. Ever since Super Mario Bros was released on the NES, the platformer has been a constant genre in the video game industry. While many of the platformers were simply Mario […]

The new Gunstar Heroes Treasure Box for the PS2 is out now and my friends at Siliconera are already on top of the situation with a full review.
As many of you may know, this is a special installement of the Sega Ages series in which the 3 Sega MegaDrive/Genesis gems developed by Treasure are combined […]

Treasure was founded When a number of developers working for Konami broke away to found their own company to pursue their own dreams of creating original games. Their first commercial project from their new development house was an original run-and-gun game named Gunstar Heroes.
It’s ironic that such a revered title could be so simple in […]

I have been recently been fascinated by the history of the various machines that have battled for our living rooms. Each machine has had its strengths and weaknesses, and as a programmer, I’m amazed by some of the ways developers have harnessed the power of consoles and pushed them to their limits resulting is some […]

With the combination of Sega’s acknowledged interest in Nintendo’s virtual console and the fact that the Gamecube (which shares hardware architecture with the Revolution) already has an excellent Genesis emulator running on it via the Sonic Mega Collection, it is very likely that, in time, Sega will publish downloads of some of its classic game […]

Here’s a new attempt at combining more than one classic game system into a single box. This time somebody has combine a Nintendo Entertainment System and a Sega Genesis/Megadrive into a single, black box.
From the project’s site:
“I’ve got to say, I’ve got nothing against emulators, I love them, but nothing compares to holding the real […]

Here are some additional pictures of Kotami’s Mini Sega MegaDrive/Genesis
It all starts with a Genesis Mini Console (like this one on Amazon.com)

Here you can better see the cartridge adapter:

And here it is with a game attached:

With Sega’s

Combining elements of real-time strategy and resource management into a shmup, Herzog Zwei (“Duke 2” in German) is possibly one of the best games on Sega’s 16-bit powerhouse. Herzog Zwei is a two-player game in which the object is to destroy the enemy’s base. To accomplish this, the player was able to construct an […]

I was wondering how long it would take somebody to take one of those “TV Games” and hack it to play other classics…
Silver and Kotomi have taken the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive TV Game (like this one on Amazon.com) which originally only had a handful of games built into it and turned it into what appears to […]