BoneSnapDeez wrote:Beyond Oasis is one of those "secret" 6-button games. It's not mentioned anywhere on the box.
Hm, interesting. I never noticed this. It's in manual. Also looks like it was released a good bit after SFII CE, which IIRC the 6 button controller came out alongside.
Yesterday I pre-ordered my Sega Genesis mini on Amazon. I've never pre-ordered anything before. I usually just decide that I'll buy something whenever I happen to buy it. Not this time. Can you tell I'm caught in the anticipation?
Hopefully Amazon will drop the Genesis mini on my doorstop tomorrow.
It's a shame it was delayed in Europe. I want mine now!
Own: Sega Mega Drive, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Playstation 1, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, PS Vita, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Nintendo Gamecube, Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo New 3DS, Nintendo Switch
Mine came earlier today! I don't really have much time to dig into it tonight (or this weekend, as I'm actually on vacation for the first time in a long time), but I messed around with it a little bit. Granted I have the Mega Drive Mini, not the Genesis Mini.
It lines up with the previous shared on here pretty well. The six-button controller isn't that familiar to me, but it's nice to have over the 3-button because it can play all the games properly. The D-pad is indeed far too sensitive in the menus, and changing the language does indeed change the region of the games (but only sometimes, as I don't think Bonanza Bros changed for whatever reason).
The only game I tried out was Wily Wars, and MY GOODNESS, it is indeed a bad port. And the way it's bad is so sad, because it's ALMOST good, but the like quarter-second delay in the latency between pushing a direction and Mega Man actually moving makes it so much more awkward to play than it should be. You also can't fire as fast either. The music remixes are really cool and the 16-bit graphics are pretty, but there really just isn't any getting past how rough it controls for me. An interesting oddity, but falls far too short to really justify me spending much more time with it compared to other stuff on that system.
I also have realized I don't really have a place in front of the TV to put this thing, so that's another problem I'm gonna have to address at some point
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
I'm super happy! I've wanted a quality Genesis clone for a lot of years. I went home on my lunch break just so I could unbox it.
The mini console itself is high quality with attention to detail. The sculpt is very accurate to the model one Genesis.
The Controllers fell a little... different. Not bad mind you. Obviously brand new controllers are going to feel different from well-worn controllers. There's something else though; it's hard to verbalize. I guess I would say that the D-Pad reminds me more of the D-Pad on the six-button controller. You know how the six-button controller had a D-Pad the "floats" a little farther above the face of the controller? I suppose that made it easier to execute half-circle moves in Street Fighter. Well, that type of D-Pad has found its way onto the stock three-button USB controller for the Genesis mini. I suppose the word I'm looking for is "travel". Both the buttons and the D-Pad have a little more travel than I would normally feel in a standard three-button Genesis controller. Overall, I think this is probably a good thing.
I'm sitting at work right now flipping through the manual. There's not much to it. I like the retro-style illustration in the top margins. It looks like a hand-drawn graphic of a Genesis console with a smiling face. It looks like the kind of thing you'd find in a manual from 1989. Otherwise it's just a few pages of generic information repeated in a few different languages. The REAL interesting tidbit is on the back. Sega included a url to see the manuals of all the games!
I know that Nintendo has done something similar in the past. The part I find especially interesting is that we get brand new, full color manuals for Tetris and Darius! The Tetris manual even contains a couple illustrated pages about how to properly handle a cartridge. The style of the illustration looks like it's straight out of 1980s Japan. I had to double-check the copyright date on the Tetris manual just so I could know for certain that it was really a new release.
I've spent quite a few hours on Saturday and Sunday messing with mine, and I like it over all. I have to nit-pick a few things, though.
I like how they included a way to pull up the in-game menu (why Nintendo didn't do this on the NES or SNES Classic is beyond me) by holding the start button for 5 seconds. However, after a while, 5 seconds seems to be too long and it gets somewhat annoying.
The sound effects in the in-game menu are super annoying! Boi-yoing-yoing-yoing! The main menu and in-game menu are both louder than the games themselves. So when you turn up the volume of a game and then pull up the in-game menu, it's loud and annoying. I got very sick of that sound effect after 2 days of use.
After using the NES and SNES Classic, I've gotten use to the way saving and loading save states works on those consoles. On the Genesis mini, you have to select save or load and THEN select the save state. But the screen shots are staring you in the face, like you can just select one and hit A. But nope, you have to select load first, then the screen shot. It gets me almost every time. I see there's a way to lock saves, but there doesn't seem to be a way to delete a save slot which is kind of annoying.
The emulation seems great, over all. I had a few areas of minor glitches, but that was a rare occurrence. The gradient effects that the Genesis is known for seem to stand out a lot more to me here than they ever have. And I've gamed a lot with a Genesis on an HDTV via the Framemeister. I'm not sure what the deal is, maybe it's me, but I'm definitely noticing it a lot more than I ever have. I've also noticed in a few games that they somehow messed with the fake transparencies. The spot lights in Streets of Rage 2 are missing. And in Castlevania Bloodlines, the boss fight on top of the tower of Pisa, the clouds looked transparent at times instead of a hash pattern the entire time. I didn't see any of the YouTubers mention anything regarding this (unless they did and I missed it).
I think the 3-button controller feels great. The cable length is longer than the SNES Classic, although I wish it was still a few feet longer. I was using a short (~4 foot) USB extension cable.
I also got the 6-button controller. It also feels very nice. The first thing I noticed was that the wire is much longer. Long enough that I didn't need an extension cable. The console detects when you have a 6-button controller and changes a couple of things. No longer will it give you the "hold start" message. The mode button will bring up the in-game menu, and holding start wont. Pressing the mode button brings up the menu immediately, you don't have to hold it. Which makes me wonder, I guess you can't use the mode button as normal then.
But over all, I like it. I had a blast playing it. I would definitely recommend it to anyone that was thinking about getting one.
The only thing is, to me, it's really $100 because the $20 6-button controller is a must buy. $100 is kind of steep, but I like to also consider that you get really awesome quality Sega Genesis USB controllers that you can use on PC and other consoles.
I played my Genesis Mini this Weekend. I finally set down and played the Genesis version of Strider. I had always heard that the Genesis version is better than the NES version, but I never tried it out for myself. To be honest, Strider on NES is mediocre at best. I never felt obliged to pay a better version of a mediocre game. I'm embarrassed to admit that I even own the Genesis cartridge for Strider, but I never played at because the cover art did not lead me to believe that this was going to be anything special. I was totally wrong. On a whim, I decided I wanted to try a Sega Game I had never played. WOW! Strider for Genesis a completely different game, and it's totally flipping GONZO! I'm so glad I finally took the time to play Sega's version of Strider.
Strider for Genesis is one of the best arcade to home ports (of it's era), I'd say.
So any truth the the double input/button presses on the controllers of was that all hogwash? I'm not getting one (happy with my flash carts and physical collection), but just curious.
I'm going to sneak home on my lunch break so I can snag it. 
