Of Hedgehogs And Bombermen

In the mid-1990s, video games were quietly pushing boundaries and reaching pinnacles that had been unthinkable. The Super Nintendo stole all the headlines with its revolutionizing of classic characters like Mario and Donkey Kong, and its ugly stepsister, the Sega Genesis, was the last truly successful platform from that company.

After two more ill-fated systems – the Saturn and the Dreamcast – Sega folded and sold the rights to its few beloved characters to Nintendo. Retro revivalists look to the halcyon days of Nintendo as a beacon and barely pay any attention to the Sega Genesis, which was in its own right a revolutionary system with a number of indisputably classic games.

But I was a Sega Genesis player, and after rediscovering some of those old games a few years ago, I’m happy to report that I’m a Genesis gamer once again. Without further ado, here are the five Sega Genesis games you need to be playing.

"Vectorman": A hugely underrated and hard to describe platformer where you play as a green robot made of floating green balls. You fight other robots in a futuristic world. The plot isn’t great, but it’s difficult to care when you’re a green robot who can shoot energy out of his hands.

"NBA Jam": Perhaps the greatest and most influential sports game of all time aside from the "Madden" franchise, "NBA Jam" set the stage for "NFL Blitz," "NBA Street," and a dozen more “hey, that can’t happen” titles. Easily the most fun game for the system, and it birthed the “three shots and you’re on fire” rule that has since been applied by not only video game programmers but beer pong aficionados.

"Sonic the Hedgehog 2": Some will argue that "Sonic and Knuckles" was the superior title, but Sega really hit their stride in every way with the second installment of the original "Sonic" series. Everything was streamlined and simplified while the Mario-esque gameplay was pushed to a higher level than Mario himself had ever been.

"Bomberman": A game about a guy with a black face scarf strategically bombing people probably wouldn’t go over quite as well in the post-9/11 world, but that’s a shame because this was one of the best puzzle games ever made and provided for hours upon hours of addictive gameplay.

"Shaq Fu": Now, I’m not an ironic hipster or anything like that, but this is one of the greatest “so bad it’s good” games of all time. That’s right, the first game Shaquille O’Neal ever lent his likeness to was not about basketball but about…ninjas. If taking Shaq Diesel on a ninja ass-kicking rampage isn’t your idea of a fun afternoon in, you should probably steer clear of this one.