Sega Genesis SAGAIA (Darius II) rocks hard!

Joined Jan 2005
18K Posts | 0+
Waco, TX
The soundtrack alone is worth it. This lost Genesis classic being the sequel to Darius and renamed to SAGAIA in America still baffles me! Yet the game packs a punch for any fan of the DARIUS series. I'm sitting here playing it and by the time I got to stage 5, I'm still wanting to go on! Alas, no more continues by 1:20am :( Regardless, play this game!!
 
I love this game. I have to play it everytime I pull out my retrogen or my Nomad. There are a hand full of shooters I keep together with this one. Zero Wing, Bio Hazard Battle, Hellfire, Gaiares, Wings of Wor, Lightening Force, Truxton, and Sagaia. Whenever the urge hits to blow something up. But really Sagaia can easily become an obsession in itself. Everything is just right in how it is put together. The different pathways adds to it and creates diversity. Sagaia is one of my classic favorites.

And I do love the Darius series. I think that the Saturn Darius Gaiden has my favorite sound track of the series. The music is so hauntingly good.
 
MegaDrive20XX said:
Oh god I loved Hellfire <3
Hellfire was the very first game that I purchased for my HDG Genesis 1. I still remember bringing it, and my Genesis, home from the store and spending all day with it. It was the Sonic one bundle. I didn't play Sonic until the next day. :)
 
My first Genesis was a tragedy. I fell into the Sonic hype of 1992. I was about 12. Sonic 2 was in stores and Sonic Genesis bundles were selling like crazy at a cheap price. I got it, played Sonic 1/2 like a madman. Afterwords I didn't buy anything else, just rented games from 1993 all the way until late 1994 only bought one game. Sonic & Knuckles. :lol I blame the Sega of America marketing for shoving SONIC down our throats and ignoring every other game on the system.

It collected dust for many years and the box started to fall apart. Even caught one of my old cats chewing ON the box...I sold it off and never saw it again...I did end up buying a cart of Batman Returns for $5 back in 1993 (which was a STEAL back then!) I luckily played and beat the game after 4-5 months of practice lol

I also had STRIDER II for Genesis which ended up at my house because my brother's good friend brought it over and he never came back to our house to get it back. o_O Not to mention the free mail-in offer from Cookie Crisp Cereal in 1995 for a free Sega Genesis game, which happened to be COLUMNS. :) So yeah 5 games for a system I kept from 1992 until 1996.

I didn't reunite with the Genesis until I was 19 and a Junior in High School. I met my best friend at the time and he had a very solid Sega Saturn collection. However Toys R Us was still selling Genesis 3 systems and games at the time. He picked up CastleVania Bloodlines and Contra Hard Cops. I've never played them, only read about them in SEGA VISIONS magazine back in the mid-90's. I sat down and played CastleVania Bloodlines, only to realize that holy cow I can't believe how much I missed out! So I spent the summer of 2000 and 2001 tracking down every tidbit of what Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X had to offer. Which gave me greater respect for the system that is treated like a Rankin Bass production of the Island of Misfits Toys compared to the NES and Super NES. :( There is so so much the Genesis and it's foreign brother the MegaDrive had to offer that went COMPLETELY ignored due to weird marketing schemes. Since most game purchases I made as a kid were from word of mouth or from what was popular among the neighborhood kids.
 
MegaDrive20XX said:
So yeah 5 games for a system I kept from 1992 until 1996.

o_O sad....really...sad

I have always been sort of a rebel, so I was a heavy Genesis fan. I favored it over the SNES. I had the Genesis before SNES landed on the US shores. Later I did get an SNES and still have it. But my memories of the 16-bit era are the Sega Genesis and the Turbo Grafx 16. I still enjoy Sega hardware and miss their presence in the hardware wars. My Genesis library of games probably was close to 100. At one point I did sell and traded a few which reduced my haul to 75. I have begun to increase that number with games that I missed because they never was anywhere locally, even buying back some of the those games I got rid of. EGM and Gamefan was my magazines back then and they was where I got my info, there was no net.
 
I almost came close to getting a Turbo Duo for $50 at Toys R Us circa 1992. Except, I was blinded by the hype of Zelda Link to the Past back then. Nintendo knew how to market their products well. Whenever I was growing up all I was reading was Nintendo Power. Which probably screwed up my way of thinking, but I would buy at least 1 issue of EGM every 3-4 months. EGM & GameFan didn't come into play until the PS1 and Saturn era for me.

Yet I'll say it again, Sega of America never mentioned their games as much after the "Genesis Does" commercials. You would always see SONIC, SONIC, and SONIC. I just felt like "Hey what other games exist on this?" When I went to the rental store I would see obscure titles that made no sense to me or ports of the same game from SNES like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Which made me too prejudice towards the Genesis. Oddly enough, the first Streets of Rage I ever played was 3. SOR2 I never touched until 2000 I think?
 
I tried to get a Turbo CD through mail order for $150.00, but they sent me a Turbo Duo instead which were going for $299.00 at the time. They didn't know the difference between the systems. :D Those were some good times.