Genesis 'classic game console'

So this was an interesting find by my wife - but she found an emulator-like Sega Genesis with 80 games included for $25 for Christmas for me. I spent quite a bit of time with it - and it does come with pluses and minuses:

Pros:

- Small. Like half the size of the original console. It fits very neatly among all my other tech stuff
- It plays most Genesis cartridges
- Wireless controllers
- Ports for plugging in classic controllers
- 80 games

Cons:

- the wireless controllers NEED to have the tops pointed at the unit. It uses IR not radio, which means they can lose signal very easily.
- Not all cartridges apparently work (according to the manual. The handful or so I tested were fine)
- There is a menu button placed precariously right over the start button. Hitting that immediately bumps you out of your game, so if you were trying to pause, you might actually quit instead
- There are 80 games, but about 1/3 of them are not true Genesis classics but like homemade ones (with copyright dates of say, 2006 or 2008) like chess or checkers. Not bad titles, but do not go thinking all 80 are of the classic Sonic or Streets of Rage variety

All in all, I thought it was pretty cool, especially since my Genesis finally died this year and I still had quite a few cartridge games. The remote controllers would have been better with radio than IR though - I use my classic controllers more as a result now.

I've always found these systems to be pretty neat. They're not particularly something I would invest in since I'd rather not hook yet another system up to the TV when I have most of my regularly played Genesis games in disc or download form but for those who never experienced the era, have deteriorating consoles they regularly use, or sold all their stuff back in the day and want a nostalgia buzz this is a huge deal at that $25 price point. Granted, it sounds like you'll have to invest in a better controller than the cheap pack-ins but even then it's hardly going to break the bank considering how cheap the old wired ones go for. Nice find.

By the way, have you noticed any strange emulation issues or discolorations? That tends to be a theme in some of these as despite having official Sega licensing behind them they're designed to keep things as cheap as possible.

The sound seems a bit off - a bit deeper than I recall some of the games like Sonic being. The audio/video is only mono sound - a yellow and a white cable, so the quality is not fantastic on the audio front. I really haven't noticed the video being too bad, though I have to give credit to the team that wrote the manual - they had suggestions in there about what to set your TV's values at for that input for the best viewing experience. I did tweak it just a bit from their recommended settings, but it provided a pretty solid baseline to work off of.