Two really bad things happened to me in the beginning of 1993.

1. I found out that there was an X-men game on the Sega Genesis, and being a comic book junkie I had to have it.

2. One of these new stores opened up in my area that bought old video games and systems.

See where this is going yet? Yeah. . . I went to this store and brought along my SNES, FF II, Secret of Mana, FF: Mystic Quest, and Spider-Man & the X-Men and made the trade. All of those for a Genesis and The X-Men (which was just a horrendous game). Yeah that was kind of dumb.

I won't say I hated the Genesis. There were some fun games on it, like Sonic and Streets of Rage, but as an RPG junkie the Genesis was totally lacking so I never really got that into it. For some reason I rented a lot of EA PGA games, so 15 years later I can't help but still associate the Genesis with golf.

I was also introduce to the evils of 3rd party controllers with the Genesis. Some genius at Sega decided that 3 buttons was more than enough. Unfortunately when the fighting game genre came to fruition the standard controllers didn't cut it. When Street Fighter II Championship Edition came out you had to press the start button to toggle back and forth between punches and kicks. Made for a real effective system as you can guess.

I ended up picking up these special controllers for the Genesis with 6 buttons. I can't remember who made them (if there's a god they're out of business) but they were red and black and just the biggest bulkiest controllers I've ever held. They made the old X-box controllers look small. Not only were they uncomfortable, but both broke within 1 use so that only 5 out of 6 buttons worked. But it wasn't even the same button on both controllers. One controller couldn't do strong punches and the other couldn't do weak kicks, so dependng on who I was playing with I had to switch out controllers.

That kind of sums up my thoughts on the Genesis. . . more trouble than it was worth. About 9 months after purchasing it I ended up going back to the same used game store and trading everything back for a SNES. Of course the bastard only gave me $35 for the Genesis, so I wasn't able to get much. But it was a good lesson to learn about the evils of trading in game systems, and at the end I had a SNES again so all was good. And in the process I learned how to get cheaper games at a used game store, so now my collection was about to grow by leaps and bounds.