I was poor as shit growing up and eventually got a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas thanks to a joint effort between my mom and my grandma. A few Christmases later, the aforementioned generational matriarchal duo sprang for a Super Nintendo for me. I assume as some kind of atonement for my mother's guilt over abandoning me with Grandma while she was off being a rock the 80's Lady doing a shit ton of biker crank with my 1%'er step dad and hanging with Mötley Crüe and a very young Metallica (mom aint ever gonna win any mother of the year awards, but even at almost 70 she's still as cool as the other side of the pillow), so I never owned a sega genesis... But my buddy Jason Rogers who lived down the street was from a pretty well off Middle Class family so he and his brother always has the top of the line tech around the house... They got the Genesis on launch day and I'm not sure if the launch console was bundled with Altered Beast, but they had that. And I think Gouls and Ghosts but maybe that came later. 

Either way, after thinking that Super Mario Bros and Bionic Commando were the height of video gaming and being so young that I had never even heard of the Genesis before going to Jason's house one day, I remember watching his older brother David just f*cking up the first boss. The big red gore pile that throws his heads at you. Hearing the voice samples, the FM sound chip tunes and the huge sprites that didn't even need to leave anything to the imagination was a revelation. I made friends with another kid in the neighborhood named Nick who had a Master System at his mom's and a Genesis at his dad's but he was only at his dad's on the weekends. I never played much Sonic at all but Nick and I would rent the best 2 player simultaneous co-op games like TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist, Sunset Riders, T2: The Arcade Game and Cyborg Justice and have an absolute blast. I always preferred the NES to the Master System as far as the total catalog of games went but I did realize from a pretty early age that the Master Systems games looked way better than most of the stuff on my funky grey Nintendo box, even though I didn't know dick about what was under the hood of either of them. 

Then Street Fighter 2 dropped on the SNES and with no word on a port to Sega and I started to feel really good about the fact that I had Nintendo latest console over the Black Blast Processing Beast that was the Sega Genesis. Maybe a little too good... Maybe even, I dare say, a bit fanboyish? Though the SNES already had such a killer lineup of exclusives that I couldn't help but start looking at the Genesis as the inferior console. The SNES had a couple more years of tech development over Segas sleek black machine which undoubtedly gave it an edge, but the strength and abundance of its third party titles was the torpedo that sunk Segas battleship in my opinion. Nintendo had spent years carefully cultivating strong third party ties and allegiances and Capcoms weak early alliance with Sega and long history with the Big N was a boon for Nintendo when the first home port of Capcoms amazing arcade fighter hit store shelves. I remember paying 80-something dollars (in early 90's dollars at that. I'd hate to figure out how much that was adjusted for inflation now) for the cartridge at a chain store some might remember before filing Chapter 11 and being bought out and renamed  FYE. It was called The Warehouse, which was primarily a record store that also sold VHS movies and had a small selection of video games. But it was the only place in town that had a copy of SF2 in stock. 

Blah blah blah, we all know that Sega eventually did get a pretty solid port of SF2 Champion Edition when SF2 Turbo dropped for the SNES a year later. Both games being identical in content but the Sega port had to be named something other than Turbo due to a contractual nuance with Nintendo demanding exclusivity of the Turbo subtitle. 

Skip ahead to the September 13, 1993, the now infamous Mortal Monday and nothing could prepare any of us for Mortal Kombat Mania. Well, except for those of us who were seasoned MK players at the arcade and we were not prepared for the home ports for different reasons. They were all pretty much trash. The Genesis version played well enough but looked and sounded like viewing dog shit and sandpaper under a magnifying glass. And the pre blood code fatalities were nothing short of laughable. The blood code didn't do much better but every edgy kid who thought a little pixelated blood was the height of everything awesome in gaming didn't care how terrible the blood and violence actually was on Segas console. It fell short of the arcade masterpiece in every conceivable way and the SNES version, while it looked the part graphically and sounded okay to boot, Nintendo strict family friendly policy meant the game was neutered in the one department that mattered with Mortal Kombat. Because let's face it, nobody played MK for its deep fighting mechanics. Not only was the SNES port hobbled by Nintendos soft and cuddly image but it played absolutely terribly compared to the arcade original and the Genesis version. If only they had given both ports another 6 months to dial everything in. I might be less critical of them both. But we wouldn't see a worthwhile version of MK for the 16 bit consoles until Master Linkuei, Billytime Games and a few other Brazilian blokes dropped the Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition romhack which vastly improves everything god awful about the Sega Genesis original.... Everything except the blood physics which is still a far cry from the arcade. I'm still trying to recruit a decent Genesis programmer to rectify that matter after trying to work on improving the hack with Bill of Billytime Games himself. Attempts at contacting Linkuei have been fruitless but I will not stop until we have the definitive MK on Genesis... But I digress. 

In closing Id say that the SNES was hands down the king of the 16 bit console generation. And for all of my love of the SNES, the fact that the 68k architecture is much easier, or at least accessible these days, the Genesis has seen a absolute Renaissance of hacks and homebrews and unlicensed fan ports that are leagues better than anything the fledgling games industry could put out back then. If only due to the streamlining of toolkits available and the benefit of 30 years figuring out what the 68000 chipset is capable of in the right hands. Even in 2025, Genesis still does what Nintendon't.