Megadrive Monday
Megadrive by Sega, 1988
Megadrive Monday by Hinge Problems, 2024
The Megadrive wasn’t really a part of my personal history. By the time I got my NES, the Genesis was just around the corner, and my parents were not going to shell out for another system on top of the one they just bought. It seemed like almost everyone else I knew had one, though, so I played my share of Sonic and NBA Jam, but that was about it. As I got older, and the whole Internet Thing happened, emulators made some catch up possible, so I played most of the Sega canon, the 20 or so Megadrive games that everyone has played, even shmucks like me who didn’t own one.
If you know Rudie though, you know he’s a Sega man. My man even owned a 32X. So Rudie lived the Genesis library, and was more than happy to “inflict” it on me. So we started doing streams every Monday night where Rudie picked from a giant list of everything for the system, and made me play them while he and a bunch of our friends made fun of how terrible I am at these games, or how terrible some of them are. Then at the end of the session, I rank the games only in comparison to the other games we’ve played.
Megadrive Monday Lesson 1: Having a regularly scheduled time to hang with friends is a good thing.
For almost a decade, I had a very close friend who I had a standing weeknight time to hang out with. What started with a planned Monster Hunter Freedom Unite meetup eventually morphed into doing so many other things, including watching most of the filmography of Steven Seagal (36 movies at the time, never do this). Eventually, sadly, we had a huge falling out and I haven’t talked to him in years.
For most of my adult life, since I came back to Cleveland from college in 2005, I had one night a week that I hung out with my mom. Usually, it was Wednesdays. It initially started out as a two person book club to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, but eventually we didn’t need that excuse. I would grab some dinner and head over to hang out with her, spending hours and hours talking about anything and helping her around her apartment as her health faded. When she died in 2023, that was gone from my life. Unless I am careful, Wednesday nights still feel incredibly lonely.
For most of this past year, I spent my Monday nights in the Hinge Problems with a bunch of friends and a seemingly endless pile of games. And it felt good just to have that, to be able to rely on that. Whatever else was going on in life, Megadrive Monday could just get me through.
Megadrive Monday Lesson 2: Fuck the Amiga.
When I was 12 or so, the local rec center had, for some reason, the idea to let me use their Amiga and a program called Music X to make my own song. A local musician/producer showed me how to use it and gave me his sample collection and basically said go wild, and I did. Here’s what I made:
This is the only real memory I have of the Amiga itself. They just weren’t a thing in my area of the planet. But it brings me no great joy to announce that I wasn’t missing much. Judging by the ridiculous number of Amiga ports to the system, the Megadrive seems to have had some relatively comparable hardware to the Amiga. And judging by the absolute dogshit quality of the vast majority of these ports, Amiga gaming sucked. I’m sorry, Europe, but it’s just true.
I mean, the music could be pretty good though, right?
Megadrive Monday Lesson 3: The Yamaha YM2612 whips ass.
This seems obvious, but I don’t think people know how good it can be, outside of the Streets of Rage games, and maybe some Sonic, but the Megadrive has just the perfect sound.
So many just wonderful funky soundtracks squeezed out of that machine. Even on the accursed GEMS, a music system made for Western devs that didn’t want to learn how to maximize that FM sound, a talented composer could pump out some jams.
If you want to see how amazing this sound chip is, load up the SNES and Megadrive versions of Wanderers from Ys. Tell me that chip isn’t a gift.
Megadrive Monday Lesson 3: Always trust Rudie (to laugh at me).
Rudie and I have been part friends for long enough that if I put a number of years on it, it is going to make us both feel old. So let me start by saying I trust Rudie. I will always trust Rudie. But as I learned many times during Megadrive Monday, I can trust Rudie to enjoy my suffering.
Some of these games are awful on their own, others of them I am just awful at, but either way, Rudie is there with a good solid laugh at my many pratfalls with poor game design or poor reflexes. And that’s great, actually, because at times when I would get frustrated if I was playing on my own, Rudie’s laughter makes me laugh, and makes me feel a little better about the silliness of doing all this. I can start laughing through it all.
Megadrive Monday Lesson 4: You Are (Definitely) Just Going to Buy a Megadrive
I probably should have figured this going into this project, but I definitely now own my own Genesis, a Model 2 that was bequeathed to me by an online friend, that now is permanently set up next to my desk, hooked to a small CRT I inherited from my mom, and ready to go. With as cheap as you can get an Everdrive for at this point, there is no reason not to.
Hinge Problems 
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