I'm the opposite. Grew up in Australia (with a 64, to be fair), love the US design. Our ones can't be stacked, and are missing top labels. A collector's nightmare!

Given its age and considering early games on the system, it's amazing how good the street fighter II’ port is.

NEC made some good looking console hardware for the Japanese market too.

Sega was also the pioneer of online gaming, in a sense. SEGA channel was a service provided by your cable company. You got an adapter that went into your SEGA and had a coax that went to your tv box. Every month you get access to 20-40 games, all of which were a range of titles everyone could enjoy. There was no multiplayer, except locally. You could even plug in games you owned without removing the adapter. Also had the bonus of the ability to play the sonic version with the red sonic, by plugging in one of your sonic versions, when the adapter had the red sonic game expander available in its game list.

To me it still holds as one of the coolest technologies (aside from a computer of course) from my childhood. Managed through tv channel sideband data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Channel

Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.

To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.