Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. I was born in 1986 right when the NES was huge. And the Master System existed. By the way. My Dad had gotten into games before I was born because my Mom had bought him an Odyssey when it came out originally. He then bought a Colecovision (a system that had better graphics than the Atari 2600 but used the absurd number pad controllers the Intellivision used). After that, because he thought the graphics looked better, he bought a Master System instead of an NES. So, I should have grown up playing a Master System. But, I actually spent all my time playing the Colecovision instead.

For those that have never played an older system, pre-8-bit era, the game design was really different. Most games didn't end and the goal was to get the highest score. The games themselves were really one trick ponies. Pitfall had three to four platforming puzzles and one goal; collect gold. Tapper was about serving drinks to customers before they reach the end of a counter and collect tips along the way. The games were great but they are a far cry from modern game design. They are what one might expect from mini-games in modern games. Then the SNES and Genesis came out.

I went straight from the Colecovision to the Genesis and what a huge difference. Not just technically but in terms of design. Games had multiple mechanics, stories and endings. They were long and detailed. That change led me to dive head first into longer, more detailed oriented games. Games like Shining Force, Phantasy Star and Dune II. I became obsessed with games that required focus over reflexes because, with the Colecovision, nearly every game was reflex based. But the Genesis wasn't exactly a breeding ground for the types of games I really gravitated towards. If I would have had a PC I would have been locked to that monitor 24/7. But, instead, we got a Sega-CD. Which, oddly enough, has more in common with the PC then some people might expect.

The Sega-CD gets a bit of a bad rep as a FMV box. Games like Prize Fighter, the Scottie Pippen game, Sewer Shark and Night Trap set a tone for a lot of games that came out on that system. As a result, those are the games that are remembered minus a few exceptions like Sonic CD and Snatcher. But what people over look are the PC ports that came to the system and the original games that may as well have been PC games because of their design. How many of you have heard of Thunderstrike? Thunderstrike was an action game made by Core Design, pre-Tomb Raider, where the player controlled a helicopter from the cockpit taking out objectives within a mode-7 like 3D environment. The helicopter had multiple weapons, objectives took many forms and there were side objectives as well and the graphics were top notch...for a Sega-CD game. Like Colecovision to Genesis, this was a jump in design that couldn't have been realized to this extent on the Genesis.

What about Dune? Dune is still one of my favorite games because it is just so weird. It was a PC port based, kind of sort of a little bit, on the David Lynch film. Except the story, characters and events are different. Basically they got to use film clips here and there and had the likeness to Kyle Maclachlan. The game was a mix of a first-person point and click adventure with a resource management sim. It was hard, very PC like and minus graphical and sound differences was a perfect port of the PC game on Sega-CD. It was great and offered an experience that would have been so hard to do on the Genesis.

Games like Thunderstrike and Dune pushed what that system and what 16-bit design was capable of. The original Sega-CD games (Lunar, Blast Corps, Soul Star) along with the PC ports (Wing Commander) and ports from other consoles like the MSX (Snatcher) the Sega-CD offered players experiences that allowed for game design and worlds that consoles rarely saw. I remember Jeff saying that a huge number of European developers had adopted the Genesis and the Sega add-ons and I have to wonder if that different perspective is what lead to the change in design language (at least for me as a consumer in the US). Regardless, the Sega-CD was more than a FMV box and did what Sega's second add-on, the 32X couldn't do minus a few exceptions that prove the rule (Metalhead, Shadow Squadron). It pushed the console beyond what it could have been capable of prior to its creation. And, to me, mimics, to a very small degree, the type of design you see in games on current systems and the PC.

But like I said, nostalgia is a hell of a thing. I'm mostly writing this because I found myself feeling nostalgic and went down a youtube rabbit hole looking up old Sega-CD games and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw My memory served me better than I had hoped. Or I'm blinded by nostalgia. Either way, I love the Sega-CD and I'm not ashamed to admit it. And to celebrate my remembered love of that system here is a bad ass song from the Sega-CD version of Terminator that I used to think was the coolest song in the world.