Notable Launch Games: Altered Beast Space Harrier II Tommy Lasorda Baseball Super Thunder Blade While Sega would have had to admittedly come up with something pretty special to match the all-time great launch lineup that the NES came with, the Genesis' initial offering of games is pretty embarrassing considering that the system was released as a direct challenge to the success of Nintendo's console. Not only did the Genesis launch with a paltry selection of six games at the time of its US debut, but the biggest names it had to offer (Altered Beast and Space Harrier II) were inferior versions of two rather mediocre Sega arcade games. Things didn't get much better from there as the only other games available were the "meh" Thunder Force II, the painfully bad Last Battle, the surprisingly boring Super Thunder Blade and the sports game with the least athletic cover model of all-time; Tommy Lasorda Baseball. Had Sega been able to release the Genesis with a game like Sonic then perhaps the rest of this mediocre lineup could be forgiven. Instead, the company went into their battle with Nintendo with little more than Tommy Lasorda in their arsenal.
