i'm just going to interrupt your genesis list with a little rant devoted to it for one minute.. i remember when the genesis came out,i had been such a super-devoted NES fan. Sega Master System always seemed so half-asse dby comparison (yah the gfx were nice, but it had absolutely NO games in the league of metroid, Zelda, SMB, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, etc) Suddenly Geness came out and games actualy looked like they were ripped out of an arcade. The jump from 8 to 16 Bits was immense.. I became a convert right away.
When SNES came out, this solidified it even further (8-bit was history!) as it's color palette/sound chip/etc bew the fuck out of the Genesis right off the bat. SNES games still look and sound gorgeous in hindsight.. But for me, Genesis was first (by two whole years!) I will never forget when I first brought home Ghouls n Ghosts, Space Harrier II, Thunderforce II -- oging from playing fucking Anticipation and Sky Shark on the NES to these mothers was like being kicked in the teeth over and over. It wasn't just the graphics upgrade either, it seemed like Sega was finally getting some depth of gameplay a little more in line with te 8-bit NES games. It wasn't anything super-revolutionary, but enough to finally make those flickery slowdown NES games look really, well, dated.
some games which really touched me, besides those mentioned above:
Castle of Illusion (when I bought this, it was just a beautiful and tight game)
Gaiares, Musha (2 of the best shooters on any system, to this day)
Columns (I would play ti for hours, it was stupid and simple but so damned addictive)
Herzog Zwei (my favorite game of all time. EVER.)
Super Monaco GP (dated as hell by now, but at the time, the first game I played which really made driving games seem interesting, you could tell there was a lot of love put into there)
Shinobi games (like I said.. finally a comer to the quality of the Ninja Gaiden games. These games oozed production value with lots of little touches..)
Thunderforce III (the height of shooting goodness on just about any system, those soundtrack tunes still reside in my head somewhere.. I should mention IV as well but i never really gave it much of a chance, oddly enough)
ESWAT (no one talks about this game anymore, in fact it kind of showed up with little fanfare, but it seemed right in line with the Shinobi games, just a different theme. Such a great little example of what the 68000 processor was capable of, I used to lve playing through it)
Sonics of course (1 was the best, overall)
Gunstar + treasure games
Genesis is a system I kind of ran out of gas on, but I always knew there were plenty of games I could dig up and sink my teeth into still.. (TF4, dynamite headdy, some other shooters/patformers, hell maybe some of the weirder RPGS.. old EA games like Budokan..) I think I got tired of the system when the CDRom came out and it was such a shitty letdown. I am so glad I didn't buy that thing. Also the 32X was just garbage. They totally lost me at that point.
Anyway, sorry to ruin your list everybody. Feel free to continue now.
