Back in ye olden days on GameFAQS and other such sites no one cares about anymore, I had to bear with a lot of propaganda that was spouted by Nintendo trolls who weren't satisfied with their corporate master outlasting Sega by surviving the landings of the first two PlayStations.

"every genesis game sounds like a rhinocerus shittin in a grocery bag"
"only sonic and madden chump console"
"the sega genesis was the biggest disappointment since my son"

You could hear the crunch of the potato chips underneath the keys being pressed by their cheeto dust-infused fingers from over your computer monitor. Console wars as a concept was space alien martian language to me as both a child and a teenager with a laptop, and it's absolutely because I lucked out on my gamer dad buying every major console that came out, including the Virtual Boy and the Sega CD. It's a shame he never bought a TurboGrafix-16 or kept the Sega CD games that would've gone for triple their value currently. Aw well. Nowadays, console wars is an even bigger waste of time when 95% of their libraries are the exact same damn thing, except maybe they run like shit or play at a slightly less uneven framerate. I miss when consoles had their own look, their own sound, their own personality.

Normally this is where I would awkwardly segue into a Sonic the Hedgehog review, but instead I'm seguing into his second cousin twice removed. Me and all the young Sega pals used to think Ristar was directly related to Sonic thanks to all the artistic similarities, and the very obvious audio files that were lifted from Sonic's Genesis games. Unfortunately, the idea of Sonic being the "legendary hero" that was captured at the very beginning and making Ristar some kind of "20 years in the future" sequel has long since been debunked. It's a shame that the American localizers demanded that Ristar be constantly frowning in his idle stance, and made all the enemies constantly scowl disapprovingly at the player. Maybe Ristar would've sold better if they had actually drawn Ristar frowning on the cover, I mean they did it for Rocket Knight! Surely it woulda worked! .-.

We love playing another 8-way attacker platformer after Super Castlevania IV, except this time we're playing a grappler instead of a mid-range zoner. We love grapplers in this household, we can't get enough of them, especially when they're little guys who could've been Sega's answer to Kirby. Ristar's ability to swing from pillar to pillar and launch himself like some kind of shooting star of sorts off a bar is the kind of gorilla style platformer I seek. The music stage is adorable, and I have no idea how smashing a metronome over a bird's head suddenly makes them sing and become a part of the background music, but it's a damn cartoon in video game format. I'm a child again, and I don't care. I sing. I sing, I snap my fingers in my idle pose, and then I grab you and headbutt you in the face.

I need to talk about someone other than Ristar now. Kaiser Greedy. I love this motherfucker. We've got this happy game catered towards a younger audience, then suddenly this guy teleports in and drops a 1-frame laser blast on top of their heads out of nowhere and spawns OHKO black holes like an SNK Boss. He begins the fight sitting on his chair where he's been chilling the entire time you've been spoiling his plot, not giving a single shit to bother fighting you directly despite all of that. He knows there's an intense power gap between the two of you, he's got all of the confidence in the world! Me and my fellow Sonic Mega Collection Pals couldn't beat him! Fuck them kids style of game design. Props to you Greedy, you greedy son of a carpenter. Probably a top three final boss of it's era for me now. This is how you do a tough final boss, hard hitting attacks out of nowhere and plentiful opportunities to hit if you can manage it. I'll take this over the boss flying into the background and throwing useless projectiles at me for two hours before presenting an attack of opportunity. Cool fucker.

It's here that I state my love for the Genesis/Mega Drive. It's library is no doubt not varied as much as it's rival system the SNES, which would eventually share shelf space in my childhood bedroom, and even with it's army of shmups it's arguably nowhere as good as the PC-Engine/Turbo. At the end of the day for me though, while library no doubt is a deciding factor for many, it's sometimes a feeling of home. To me, home is that FM synth and those popping colors of limited variety. Mindless explosions, way too many sports games, and a polished black system with a giant "16-BIT" on it to remind you what it was all about. While my childhood system has dulled it's edge and lost it's luster, it stays on my shelf in a retired state. No longer capable of functioning to a satisfactory degree as it's current replacement, but as a heirloom to remind myself of where I came from.

Home.

The only begrudging thing I have to say, is that while I look forward to playing the Game Gear version of this tale, I can only reluctantly be prepared to hear it's rendition of "Du-Di-Da!!". One of my closest friends sings it to tune of "peeeenis~ peeeeenis~", thus ruining all seriousness I can take from it, but at least it reminds me of her now.

Those Nintendo trolls would've been less mean if they had played Ristar.