Road Rash 3 is definitely the star of this video. That series is part of my very modest Genesis collection, along with other greats like all the Street of Rage.
Long time subscriber here, John. Great video. I really enjoyed Coach K and NHL '96 back in the day and still do today. Over the last few years I've regretted selling my original Genesis/Sega CD many years ago and just this last April, I visited a local retro game store and bought a little portion of my childhood back. I got the Genesis (no Sega CD, though) and a few games, and now currently up to 12 games. I still would like to get three or four more games to complete my collection, as I'm only getting ones that I know I love and will play over and over. Just recently i had a new battery installed into my copy of NHL '96, so now the save feature works again just like it was brand new. ps. Oddly enough, (but thankfully) I did not sell my NES toploader. I broke that out of storage and now it, along with the Genesis, look great paired together on my old 20" Toshiba CRT, with new shelves beautifully displaying my NES and Genesis games. Strangely, I'm missing three NES games- Contra, Super Mario 2, and the Adventures of Link Zelda 2. I've no idea where they could be!
NHL 96 is the best in the series it had it all fast game play, fighting and you get a cool little stanley cup ceremony when you win . None of the other games has that , truly the year everything came together
I really enjoyed Theme Park. There was no way I was gonna afford an Amiga at the time so the Genesis version was a great cheap alternative. I don’t remember having issues with the controls personally, but when you’re a kid and you only got about 6 games I guess you deal with it. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
I had Theme Park for the saturn. I got it in high school and my friend knew I had a saturn and he had a friend whom was given a saturn game (theme park) but didn't have the sega console, so I was able to pick it up. It's a pretty fun game.
You can really see the transition of EA in these videos. In the first few years it's a nice variety of different titles but in 94 and 95 it's almost all sports games.
EA was a much better company in the '90s than it is now. I don't touch anything they've made anymore because 1) they swallow up smaller studios (i.e., Maxis) and then shut them down, and 2) they gouge people with microtransactions. They've lived long enough to see themselves become the villains.
@NALTO I received The Sims 3 as a Christmas present sometime in the early half of the 2010s. I haven't touched it in years because of the microtransactions involved. Also, I want to like The Sims but there's too much micromanagement. The more people you have in your household, the more tasks you have to assign to each one. It gets very exhausting after a while, so I quit playing it.
ARL 96 was the follow up to this game on PC with decent graphics and real time commentary from Ray Warren that's the game that will always hold a place in my heart :D !!
He missed the best part about NBA Live ‘96- the fact you can go into create player, enter in the name of several NBA legends or rookies from that season and play them in the game. So you can add Michael Jordan-who is not in the game by default because he was still playing baseball- or Jerry Stackhouse, one of the top rookies from that year. Also-at least on the SNES version because I owned it and only rented the genesis version- you can enter in an existing player and change his stats. My brother was a big Hawks fan so we would do this to give Dominique Wilkins his proper #21(He was on the Celtics that season and wore #12 for some reason) and put him back on the Hawks.
Theme Park would probably sit towards the lower end of my top 20 Megadrive games, although admittedly I haven't played another version to compare it. I was a bit too young to understand how to do well when it first came out, and got more joy out of Rollercoaster Tycoon when that came out but I played this version of Theme Park a few years ago and found the micromanagement elements more enjoyable now and the controls didn't stick out as particularly bad.
Road Rash 3! I have loved the Road Rash series ever since the first time I played Road Rash II on the Genesis at a friend's house not long after the game was released! Such fun and challenging games with tons of replay value! I have beaten Road Rash II once as well as the PS1 version. I have yet to beat the other ones. lol
Fifa96 was my favourite, played the crap out of it, still regret selling my og megadrive with the Fifa cartridge that I got as a gift from my grandpa. NHL 96 was great too.
Got to completely disagree with you regarding Theme Park, I put a lot of hours into that game and still occasionally play it to this day. It's not the best Theme Park in comparison with computer versions but it's a much more laid-back casual version of the game. The controls aren't anywhere near as bad as what you make them out to be but it's a fun little business simulator.
@@FoxUnitNell Yeah, I kind of agree, or at least when I was a kid. I had the PlayStation version of Theme park and for my young self it was really hard. I just wanted to build giant theme parks. I finally understood it when I came back to it (on the computer) years later. Edit : Same story with Sim Isle, except I barely understood that game and never went back to it.
I also wanted to post about nhl 96 which was one of my most played games ever for any system - tons of hour long games, and maybe I even played a full season. It had a nice create a player so a lot of the guys on my team were created and some were friends even. The game had some nice dek moves and the spin o ramma move which are more modern features of hockey games. I think I had 2002 or 03 which were some of the first to start using polygons and I recreated the characters in it. Spot on with the A ranking and I'm sure that it best on the sega with likely better screen resolution. edit: I also believe 96 also brought back fighting, and may have introduced knocking the players into the bench and through the glass.
FIFA 96, played so much of that years ago but had forgotten the name. I'm sure we would button mash and somehow could make players fall over with referee calling fouls when nothing happened. Realistic Soccer indeed!
You forgot the name of FIFA the football game that releases every year as well as tournament releases for Euros / World Cup and is also the name of the IRL football organisation. Didn't look very hard.
I theorize that the life of the Genesis was extended just a bit thanks to a group of gamers who just wanted a fun sports game and didn't care so much about having the latest graphics.
Some very nice presentation graphics in these sports titles. Technically I think grass needs at least 3 to 4 shades, 2 shades is grittier and more primitive looking than most Genesis graphics imo. :\ It was an era where golf game draw-in speed was a benchmarking tool for PCs, slow pace but golf isn't exactly fast paced lol. But hey, software rendered polygons. Another game with video digitized sprites and another grumble comment about it heh. If people could define better what was so bad about that technique it might sound less like white noise to my ears. ;) RR3 sprites could use a few more frames of animation but other than that they look fine to me. It is a real shame that a mouse and support for them came so late and sporadic on Genesis and SNES. They basically started porting these point & click games over well before 16-bit console mice were released. PS1 had a mouse but I think 16-bit and early 32-bit consoles were out when that type of game was most popular. True it's no Punch-Out but some excellent Genesis graphics in Toughman Contest, one of the better "big sprite" games for the platform.
john giving theme park a F feels like being stabbed in the heart! ya the controls arnt the best, but its not unplayable, and the base game is still great
Rugby League and Rugby Union are two different sports. There 2 different games with same engine. Rules are way different, different about of players on filed, different ball weight and size and different scoring system.
I really don't understand why they changed the graphics from NBA Live 96 and Coach K, to that horrid new engine for NBA Live 97 and above. About Coach K, even without skill move button, it's a really cool game to play with all settings on the hardest and trying to play realistically. And as long I don't know the name of the players, I could be more imaginative about each team roster.
Personally I think they missed a trick with Australian Rugby League. The actual Rugby game is different here. League and Union have quite the different rules and the World Cup game was Union. Rugby League is a fast paced game with a lot less nuance than Union. It’s kinda like comparing regular basketball to NBA Jam. So it’s a shame they made this game so slow paced. It totally doesn’t match watching the game on TV, or playing it in the schoolyard back in the day.
@John Hancock I Have NBA Live 96 For My Mini Sega and I Enjoy Playing It As a NBA Fan Besides Being a Philadelphia 76ers Fan and College Football USA 96 To Me is a Good Football Game!
Ugh- I actually rented Theme Park. Back in 95, I was expecting the sort of experience we have now with Roller Coaster Tycoon. That was a waste of my $5 back then. I also rented Toughman Contest and thought it was quite good and pretty fun at the time. I also remember that summer of 95 (not quite old enough to drive yet) where the Saturn had just come out, and those of us with a Genesis knew the support was starting to dwindle.
Thanks for a new ranking video! However, I strongly disagree with you on Theme Park “F” grade. F is for a turd and theme park on Genesis is Not! I only played this game on the sega genesis/megadrive and love it to this day. I had to get use to the controls first but never felt it was a shore then. I understand you played it on over machines w a better menu screen but come on give it at least a B.
For its flaws, I appreciate what EA tried with PGA 96. They tried to squeeze their "next gen" golf engine on to an old system rather than taking the easy option and updating PGA 3, and I think that's to be commended. The putting was crap though, and the Genesis/Mega Drive really couldn't display enough colours to do the scenery justice.
Disagree about Theme Park. It's not the best version but it was solid for the Genesis. It was one of my favorite Genesis games back in the day because it was the version I had.
The closest I have to any of the games shown here is the original Road Rash. I don't have any of the sequels, neither the original cartridges nor ROMs. And sports games have never appealed to me; hell, I don't even watch IRL sports. The only exceptions are kart-racers such as Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing and wrestling games such as WWE's Attitude Era games on the PS1 and WCW/nWo Revenge on the N64. I have only one EA sports game other than Road Rash, though: Knockout Kings 2000. Even then, I've only played it ONCE and then never touched it again.
Was 1995 the final year when EA still innovated with its Genesis titles? I get the idea that the EA Sports games for the Genesis from 1996 and 1997 were just the usual minor upgrades with team lineup changes, a new title screen, and not much else. In Toughman Contest, there's a boxer named "Hiro Sokitome"? I guess it's supposed to be a pun on "Sock it to me", but, if you're pronouncing the surname properly, it's more like "Sew Key Toe May".
Hi o g john Hancock I got another original sega genesis off ebay it was a bundle it came with sonic the hedgehog 1 and sonic the hedgehog 2 I cleaned fixed inspected refurbished repaired restored and sanitized it and it works excellent I cleaned the top and bottom of the system shell the rf shielding the motherboard and cartridge slot took about 10 q tips I got all the dust out
@@johnhancockretro I Like These Videos John and I Have a Mini Sega Also I Watch These Videos Close So I Can Get Games That I Should Either Get or Not Get!
why do people praise the 16 bit FIFA games so much? it was difficult to pass, difficult to shoot, and overall not that fun. Other than the licenses there was not much to them gameplay wise. When ISS Deluxe came out that was it for me, I never played a FIFA game again, not even nowadays on the PS4 (I play PES, which is the evolution of ISS)
Here are my other EA Ranking videos: EA 1990-1991 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-p4Zu9_MU3fo.html EA 1992 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H7Lo7Eak1qI.html EA 1993 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Nz_IGDf8whs.html EA 1994 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-OXa_4zz_a6Q.html EA 1996-97 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iDm8YABUGnE.html
