 SEGA DRUNK Got an interesting request courtesy of Chris from my Patreon page, so today let's take a look at the old Sega Genesis lineup of first party celebrity endorsed sports games. See Sega did a really smart thing back in 1989, they knew they had a system that featured more powerful hardware than the NES, so what's a good way to get noticed and lure in the average Joe? By bringing in people like Joe Montana, Mario Lemieux, Arnold Palmer, Pat Riley, Tommy Lasorda and the like to lend their name to a line of sports games, and for the most part these were all developed by Sega themselves. As a result of this kind of campaign, to this day people still say, oh if you want to play 16 bit sports games you gotta play them on the Genesis, but is that really true? Do any of these games still hold up today? Now bear in mind most of these came out in 1989 and 1990, so the Genesis main competition then was still the NES, not the Super Nintendo which hadn't been released yet. Also bear in mind real quick, I'm only going to be covering a selection of games here that came out early on in the Genesis lifespan, mostly the first-party developed games, with a couple exceptions that I'll point out. So let's start with the first of these games, Sega released Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf. Now take note of how this game looks, I know looks and graphics and visual style aren't everything, but this was the best at the NES at the time. Just at a quick glance, Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf was a quantum leap ahead of what was on the NES, okay that's nice, but how does it play? Now I did a video talking about every single SNES Golf game a long while back and now lamented that most of the games were slow, unintuitive, and definitely not worth your time today, but Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf is surprisingly accessible with an easy-to-use player-friendly layout, a self-explanatory swing meter, and the pace of play here is comparatively really fast. In other words, this game made well before the SNES was released is every bit as good if not better than any Super Nintendo Golf game. I'm not saying this game is great necessarily, I mean it does have its flaws, like it'd be nice to have the yardage associated with each club, plus it's really hard to putt, but still, Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf is a surprisingly accessible game featuring three different golf courses and it holds up well today. I'd rather play this than most Super Nintendo Golf games. Sega's next sports project was Timey Lasorda Baseball. This was actually released in arcades a little bit before it hit the Genesis. No real teams or players here, but again, it can't be overstated what kind of effect the visual upgrade over the NES here must have had on gaming audiences back in the late 80s. There's a 30 game season mode here which is nice, and there's kind of an unusual difficulty setting where you can make it harder to hit or to pitch. Either way, I found hitting to be pretty dang tough here. It's like the ball is only on the screen for a few frames after it leaves the pitchers hand before I know if I should swing or not. Timey Lasorda Baseball is pretty good, I think I'd still rather play stuff like Baseball Stars than this, but it's definitely not a bad game and it holds up fairly well today. After that came Pat Riley Basketball, again no real teams or players here, and the game looks, sounds and plays a lot like a beefed up version of Double Dribble for NES, the same camera viewpoint, the similar cutaways when you dunk, and even a similar sound when you dribble. Pat Riley Basketball is pretty good, there's a tournament mode and you can substitute players during the game which is cool, but other than that and the graphics there's not much to differentiate it from Double Dribble, so really either one of those games are worth playing today. Then we have World Championship Soccer, our first game that didn't have any kind of pro athlete associated with it, but it was developed by Sega released in 1989, so I gotta include it here. This is an interesting one because there's basically no fouls, no offsides, no cards, basically anything goes. I guess they weren't exactly shooting for realism here. I think for that reason alone this game might be worth playing today, just for the fun of slide tackling everything in sight, but if you don't play this one you're really not missing out on a whole lot. Next we have Ayrton Senna's Super Monaco GP2, which is very, very similar to the first Super Monaco GP game, one difference of course being the addition of Ayrton Senna. This is still a really good racing game with a great sense of speed, too much speed in fact to the point that you really have to get a good feel for both your car and the track itself to be any good at this game. There's the usual Grand Prix mode, but in addition there's a feature you can enable where you can challenge a rival, and if you finish ahead of that rival at least a couple times you get to take over their car and their pit team, which are almost always better than what you have, so that's always pretty cool. So yeah, Ayrton Senna's Super Monaco GP2 is definitely worth playing today, the lack of music kind of sucks, but the rival feature is really cool. From a first party development standpoint, that's about all SEGA created themselves in terms of sports games, but there are a few others that they publish that are worth mentioning like Mario Lemieux Hockey, again no real teams or players here, but this is the rare hockey game that takes on a horizontal viewpoint instead of a vertical one like EA's NHL series, and it works pretty well. This plays a little like Blades of Steel where you kind of have to aim your shot as you're shooting, so that makes this already slow paced game even slower, so that's kind of a bummer, but as far as 16-bit hockey games go, this game is still pretty good, it's not bad, but there's no way I'm playing this over NHL 96, sorry. SEGA turned to Taito to make their athlete-licensed boxing game in 1990 with James Buster Douglas knockout boxing. While I'm sure the graphics here were stunning back then, especially compared to the NES, the boxers just look goofy now with overly detailed muscle definition. They look like flunkies in a Final Fight game or something. Anyway, the gameplay here is just button-mashing, and it feels like the input time is super slow and unresponsive. That's, uh, not a good thing for a boxing game that's based on timing. I'd pass on Buster Douglas knockout boxing and instead check out ACME Interactive's Evander Holyfield real deal boxing, which came out a few years later. Last we get to one of the names closely associated with the early Genesis advertising campaign, Joe Montana. For those who weren't around back then, Joe Kool was seen as a big deal and a great catch for SEGA, since he was essentially the Tom Brady of his time. In an odd chain of events, SEGA had two completely different Joe Montana football games released in 1991. The first by EA is your standard-looking Madden camera perspective. It seriously plays almost exactly like an early Madden game, but a little more streamlined and easier to approach. There's not as many plays to pick from, and it's very offense-friendly. The game most people remember, though, is Joe Montana 2 Sports Talk Football. SEGA went to Blue Sky Software for this one, the same company who later went on to create the Vectorman games. Joe Montana 2 is memorable, of course, because, well, listen. I'm telling you, this was amazing at the time. The game itself, though, is completely different from the first Joe Montana game, this time using a horizontal perspective that zooms in once the play begins. That creates kind of an odd rhythm to the gameplay here, but you do get used to it. So yeah, while the first Joe Montana game is kind of ordinary and paid by numbers, Joe Montana 2 Sports Talk Football remains a unique throwback. It has an arcade-style pick-up-and-play kind of approach that works well today. Again, no real teams, no real players, but it doesn't matter. This is easily one of the better 16-bit football games. So yeah, that's all for now, and yes, I'm well aware there's tons of other sports games like Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey. Those games already got their own video. And there's the other Joe Montana games. There's Tony Louisa Baseball. There's Jerry Glanville Pigskin Football. I just wanted to dig into the early Sega Sports lineup because it was such a big part of their strategy to differentiate themselves from the competition. So it's an interesting look back at what games really made a difference, which games hold up today, and which just kind of fall by the wayside. Thanks for watching, and have a good rest of your day.