Gamers' Dreck

You know the Gamerz Tek Minigen HD which got so much critical acclaim on YouTube? Yeah, I'm not seeing the attraction. I purchased the system from a seller on Mercari, and its performance leaves much to be desired. Here, let me show you what I mean. This is the system trying (and failing) to run Streets of Rage 2... a partially visible rolling Sega logo appears on the screen for a few seconds, and you get a warning that the game won't run in your territory. Yes, I tried both the Overseas and Japan settings. Yes, I cleaned the cartridge with a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol. No, it didn't make a damned bit of difference.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ran, which is an improvement, but maybe not so much when you consider how slow and glitchy it was. I mean, this is Sonic the friggin' Hedgehog! Slow should not be part of this equation! The split screen mode runs especially poorly (frankly it's amazing it even ran on an actual Genesis, which was shouldering the performance burden of two systems), but even the single player mode was unacceptably sluggish. It was bad enough to make me consider breaking out the AtGames Genesis Flashback HD instead. Okay, maybe just the Super Retrocade.

The other games in my currently slim southwestern collection run well enough, but playing underachievers like Jeopardy! or Tommy Lasorda Baseball instead of Streets of Rage 2 misses the point of owning a Genesis. I dread to think of what the Minigen HD would do to one of the more demanding titles I have back in Michigan, like Gunstar Heroes or Dynamite Headdy!

Word on the street is that Sony- yes, the entertainment and tech giant who's been in the video game industry for nearly a quarter of a decade- whiffed its own attempt at a plug and play console, filling the Playstation Classic with slow-running PAL games and including an emulator that can't even do those justice. Why Sony didn't just repackage its own capable Playstation TV hardware instead of starting from scratch with a budget Android chip is a mystery so puzzling even Robert Stack couldn't solve it, but hey, at least that's a hundred dollars I won't have to spend this holiday. If I had an ounce of damn sense, I'd stop buying these crappy plug and plays entirely and just be happy with my Raspberry Pi.