There's a specific spot that Granada occupied in my mind that also currently encompasses a lot of edutainment PC games I played when I was young, and it's that it was a part of my childhood, but I didn't know what the hell it's name was for over a decade.

This scenario was brought about thanks to Sega Channel, a game service device you plugged into the top of your Genesis like a regular cartridge and had it hooked up to your cable to get access to a rotating library of games you could play. Granada I assume was a game that would regularly make the rounds on it, because I recall my dad playing it a ton and I would watch him make it pretty far, but don't recall him ever beating it, meanwhile I could barely figure out how to get the first boss to spawn. As you could tell, this was also a specific enough part of my life where I could play games, but couldn't really read well either or at least not well enough that I could remember the title of a game I tried to play back then that didn't have Sonic's name in it. So to me it was "that Genesis game with the little blue tank you drove around until the first boss appears and scares the shit out of you".

I remember trying to find it on emulation sites for a while to no avail, because the name "Granada" just didn't really click with me that it could be it, unlike M-1 Abrams Battle Tank or...oh lord no Heavy Nova. So for a longass time I just could never find it, because I was also using sites that didn't display screenshots, and retro gaming youtubers was a fledgling concept back then, especially when everyone was too busy copying the AVGN. For a while I was flat out convinced I was making it up, or worse the game was just not dumped online and was lost forever. It wasn't until I started grabbing everything to maybe find other games that would jog my memory of playing them back on Sega Channel, until eventually I would suddenly be met with that familiar title screen with the blue tank on it.

"Oh my god, it's real!!!!" ~ My live reaction probably when I booted it up on my PSP

That was it! Granada! That was the name! The little blue tank that could!

Intense tank shooting action, destroying big-ass jets that make up the stage itself, getting jump scared by the first stage boss who can instantly jump to you the moment you clear the objectives, that iconic Motoi Sakuraba Genesis/MD music style with DA CLAP. Perhaps a bit too intense later with slowdown that would kill five Super Nintendos, and a stage four boss that kinda smells even when I know what to do. Hard to put down, easy to revisit and "get good" at with strafe mechanics and a power shot that double as additional movement tech. Good stuff, still aggressively overlooked to this day.

For a while I thought I may have been overhyping it in my head due to attachment, but perhaps I shouldn't have doubted my dad's taste. Was happy to finish the story for him, he was always the realest. Goodbye Granada, until next time.

I remember the dudes at Game Sack saying Renovations games didn't stand out for how they looked but for how they moved.

Excuse me? You seem to be forgetting the fun
Motoi 👏 Sakuraba 👏👏 Soundtracks
https://youtu.be/8gIeGmnvUNM
https://youtu.be/T4-_OlVop3k

I don't understand how the guy with the claps in his tunes got to make the first Dark Souls soundtrack

Granada is a top-down tank-based shooter game developed by Wolf Team, who later became the Namco Tales Studio, responsible for the development of every Tales game. Wolf Team was loyal to Sega Genesis, responsible for the El Viento trilogy, Arcus Odyssey as well as Sol-Feace. The game has you fighting a war in futuristic Africa, you are a mercenary piloting an experimental high-tech tank called the Maneuver Cepter, after learning you had been used by an entity called the "PEID" - Private Enterprise Intelligence Department to tilt the war, you board the Maneuver Cepter once again, this time to end the war and defeat the PEID's plan. Unlike other shoot-'em-ups of its time, the game has you free-roaming through the levels much like a maze, destroying enemy generators, a small radar shows the location of the generators, after each generator is destroyed: a boss appears. The game often dwells into bullet-hell territory with its boss battles, our only complaint is that we wished the tank was a little faster, as well as the gameplay.

Wolf Team is probably one of the secret best developers on the Genesis, and I'd suggest this is their apex (this or Arcus Odyssey). Not only is this game a quick and crunchy action game, the setup is just fantastic. In days where most games would tell you what your quest is, this game just describes this tank you see on screen like it's a horror movie and you are the monster. "Somebody calls it 'God of African Continent.' Another calls it 'Ghost of Soldiers.' Only those who actually happen to see it know the truth." NOW PRESS START AND GO RUIN AN ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH THIS HAUNTED TANK. I'm pumped up just thinking about it.