A Mega day for my console collection

This morning I bravely ventured to Dorset street to collect my new (old) Sega Megadrive from a nice old lady in a hardware shop. A total steal at €40 off adverts.ie! I lugged it back across the city in a cardboard box, defying rain and curious stares on the bus until it was safely back in the screen tools room in college. Included in the sale was the console and all required cables, 2 controllers (one official, one third party), 2 decent games (Sonic 2, Mickey Mania) and a collection of random sports titles released between 1990-1995 according to the carts. With everything unpacked, I enlisted the help of my good friend Alan and set about rigging up this piece of gaming history.

What followed was a 40 minute exercise in frustration. Myself and Alan engaged in a highly technical examination of the Sharp Aquos HDTV which mostly involved fumbling blindly between the TV and the wall in search of the correct input port. Alan maintained that all TVs must come with an RF input in order to allow those with standard arial as their broadcast receiver to actually watch their TVs. I was unconvinced, but then a stroke of luck located the rogue input hidden away shamefully in an alcove placed as far away from the standard port hub as possible. 

Megadrive plugged in, game inserted, we eagerly took our seats and powered on the console. No joy! The TV needed to be tuned in. As the Hertz and the minutes crawled by we began to despair of ever getting the console working. This was almost as scary as the prospect of doing the actual work we had planned for the afternoon... Suddenly, the screen flickered to life and we were greeted with one of the most iconic jingles in the gaming world:

SE-GAAAAAAAAA!

The next hour was spent revisiting childhoods and getting ridiculously excited about low resolution textures, a stretched aspect ratio and noticeable performance issues in multiplayer modes. We thoroughly enjoyed a few games of NBA Action '95, despite the awful production values and dodgy sound, before settling into the main event: Sonic 2 multiplayer battles. The exercise proved that it doesn't matter how old or low tech a game is, it can still be enjoyed even stripped of the sheen of nostalgia that made me purchase the console in the first place. 

The original Sonic games worked because they were simple and hugely playable, something which can't be said about the recent offerings from Sega Studios and Team Sonic. The release of Sonic 4, a HD return to the original side-scrolling format of the older games, shows that Sonic's best moments can be found on the retro sega consoles and haven't been recreated with the same success since then.