Sega Genesis

While I like Super Nintendo a lot, I also like the Sega Genesis. It had some pretty cool games aside from Sonic.
You have great arcade ports such as Golden Axe, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Strider, Altered Beast; pretty unique games such as Kid Chameleon, Decap Attack, Ristar; Popular games such as Streets of Rage, Gunstar Heroes, and a nice 3rd party support with games such as Contra Hard Corps, Castlevania Bloodlines, Street Fighter 2, and it goes on.

Not as awesome as the SNES, but Sega Delivered with this console.

Genesis was my first system, believe it or not. Switching loyalties to SNES didn't do good things for my opinion of it, but I worked that out long ago. Rocket Knight Adventures, Splatterhouse 2, and TMNT Hyperstone Heist are some of my favorite games for it not already mentioned. Atomic Runner (! That's going in the obscure games article), Toki, and Dynamite Heady are some good lesser known games for it.

Genesis was definitely a worthy competitor, having some of my favorite games ever like Sonic 3 + Knuckles and Gunstar Heroes.

But nice 3rd party support is a stretch. It had alright third party support, but companies like Capcom and Square Enix were practically adhered to the SNES. Konami was more mixed but even their games were better on SNES for the most part. Genesis did have Treasure though....and better Disney games....

In my experience, Genesis' library is competent but really doesn't compare to SNES. I don't know if Treasure is a fantastic argument--it really seems like they were just getting their stuff together. Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy both could've been a lot better. Come to think of it, I'm a much bigger fan of their N64 run.

In general... I own like 40 SNES games and 20 Genesis games, and my Genesis collection is a lot more spotty in quality. Not to rag on the console unfairly, I love it, but SNES is the man.

But maybe this is dragging the conversation in the wrong direction?

Rocket Knight Adventures is one of my favorite 16-bit platformers, I think it might do a better job than Sonic, really. RKA2: Sparkster is pretty neat too, not as robust, but still worthwhile.

I still need to look into Toki...!