Why would anyone do this? And how?

When I was a kid, there was nothing I coveted more in the entire world than a Sega Genesis. I had an NES with a handful of games, maybe five or six tops, but that Sega Genesis kept me up at night. My uncle was one of the first people I knew that owned one, and when we stayed with family when I was 5 or 6 I would itch to get to the house before he did to have just 30 minutes alone with Sonic the Hedgehog 2. To me Sega Genesis was gaming, pure and unadulterated.

For years I craved this 16-bit beast of joy and power. The Christmas eve before I finally got one, I still remember dreaming I was accepting it at an award show with a list of people to thank for making this magical moment possible; a dream that to this day is recurring. Of course, in recent iterations, it is frequently interrupted by Kanye West snatching away my microphone.

"I'm real proud of you, and I'm gonna let you finish, but for real, the Super Nintendo is the best video game console of all time!"

Be that as it may, you never forget your first. I actually got mine very late in its life, the same year Saturn and PlayStation launched. I was impressed by those as well but I still loved my Genesis and wouldn't replace it until the Dreamcast, which I also loved, in my teenage years. For a long time now I have experimented with how I could best relive those Genesis memories, explore the depths of the console beyond what my meager allowance could afford at the time, and turn my gaming into an outlet to expand my writing craft. For this purpose I have created this blog.

So here is the mission in a nut shell:

I want to play every single North American Genesis cart ever made and master a fair bit of them.

For simplicities sake I've had to make a few ground rules. I also had to make some rules to ensure I really got value from these games and spent serious time with them, not just flew through the library in a lightning flash. For me this is just as much about enjoying my favorite console as it is creating an entertaining and informative blog. Oh yeah and there is one more factor that makes this mission special:

I want to play all of these.....In roughly chronological order! 0_0

As if that wasn't enough, I want to review every single one of them for you, the blog readers, with a mixture of product style reviews, commentary, strategy, and parody. This task was so huge and daunting I really had very little hope it was even possible till I discovered Dylan over at Questicle. His blog of similar design that tackles the entire NES North American Library alphabetically was an inspiration to my own ambitions leading up to finally launching this blog. Please check him out as well, his commentary is hilarious and insightful - quite a task to keep going for well over 500 reviews now.

To clear up how this works, these are the current official mission rules, which are subject to change:

1. The official guide to games for the purposes of this project is Wikipedia’s list of Sega Genesis games which can be found here. The release dates as played here will be based on the release dates as shown there at the time the review is written (for example, at one point before it was corrected there were actually quite a few more launch titles listed), regardless of the fact that some of those dates are Japanese release dates and the American version, which I will be playing, may have come out a year or more later. This is for the sake of simplicity. It is also practical however, because one of the fun parts about this is seeing how the games evolved as developers mastered utilizing the technology. So a game's time of production says more about it than its actual release date, and therefore the earliest available release date, which is what Wikipedia uses, is the best to go by.

2. Chronology is based on year only, for the most part. It is hard to get a fix on the EXACT date of release for every game, so I can usually play whatever I want within a year, but cannot move on to the next year till all the objectives for the current year are done. For example when I'm still in 1989 I cannot play a game from 1990 or higher till I complete everything for 89.

3. 32X and Sega CD count and they will be included when we reach the appropriate year for them. The Game Gear and Power Base Converter do not - though I am not ruling out a guest appearance or two.

5. Every game has to be given a fair chance. I try to play them in a good mental state with an open mind even if I have played them before. Each game gets a 2 hour rental run. After that I decide if I want to keep playing to master the game or move on (if i haven't already in two hours!). In each review I will be stating what I chose to do and why. My hope is to beat more games than I pass on so I will try not to be too picky but this is a far-fetched goal.

6. Every game must be reviewed before I can move on to another one. Reviews can be a few paragraphs or a few pages. But they must be done for every game in the library or it's the same as having never played it at all.

  

If this doesn't make any sense, don't worry. It will once we get started.  

Enjoy the blog as I head down a long, arduous, and hopefully entertaining road through the Sega Genesis Library!