I bought a Genesis and a few games last summer in the hopes to start a decent collection (I was always a Nintendo and Sony guy back in the day, so I missed out on a lot of the great Sega systems and games). One of the games I bought with the Genesis was Thunder Force 3. I had no idea what "Thunder Force" was, and had never played an actual shooter before. I expected a pretty crappy game to be honest, but boy was I wrong...
Dat music!
Those backgrounds and level design!
Dat shootin!
All I really came in here to say is that TF3 is great, and was a really cool way to introduce me to the Genesis, and shooters in general.