Review: SEGA Genesis Classics (Nintendo Switch)

As mention in my profile description, I grew up with my first gaming console being the SEGA Genesis. When I first booted up SEGA Genesis Classics I definitely felt my nostalgia swell with happiness. Not only does this game collection have most of the Sonic games I knew and loved, but it also had some minor ones that I remembered playing like Columns and Toejam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron. Also, when you select a game to play, you see the cartridge slide into the Genesis slot! I really thought that was a nice touch. But let’s take off the nostalgia glasses and try to review this game collection with no biases.

Like most classic game collections, you start off in a room where you can go through your library of classic games. The layout isn’t really anything new and the graphics for the room you play in could look better. With your bedroom decked out in Genesis swag, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be a cool feature to provide a store in-game where you could buy more Genesis merchandise to decorate your room. But that isn’t the point of a game collection, what is important is the library.

Your game shelf holds 52 Genesis games for you to play and also try to complete achievements with by doing certain feats. I like how you can favorite games in the collection, which puts them at the front of the library. However, being the organizing freak I am, I chose to keep them in alphabetical order and not favorite any. I was surprised to find out Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles were missing, as well as Ecco the Dolphin, which I thought would have definitely made it as part of SEGA Genesis Classics.

When playing the games in the collection, you can rewind if you lose unfairly or just do it for whatever reason; I used the rewind feature a lot in Sonic Spinball. Does rewind make you a cheater? Sure, but it’s still a cool feature to me. There are also four save slots per game that you can load from and save to, which I liked. Maybe that save feature is why Sonic 3 didn’t make it since it has a built in save feature? I really need to get over Sonic 3’s exclusion, but it honestly makes no sense to me.

Overall, SEGA Genesis Classics is a neat collection to have on the go and on your Switch. However, quite a few games are missing, probably even more than I have mentioned that people would want to play in a Genesis collection. It’s priced at $29.99, which could be worth it depending on if you like the games in the collection. I would recommend, before you decide to buy this game collection, you look up the games included in the library to see if you have enough games you would want to play for that price.