Jump to:
Comparisons || Perspective || Games ||

Color counts listed are the max color count of the shots shown, not the game's max color count. For example, Super Metroid's title screen has 200 colors in it. They are also not representative of what appeared on the TV screen, especially if an interlace palette swap or any other software technique were used to increase the apparent colors on screen. The Emulation vs Console page has a gif image demonstrating the illusion of more colors created by the video output of the Genesis.

System Specs

Game Title : Hardware Color Count On Screen

Introduction

It was in 1989 that the Genesis was released, and it was in November of 1989 that I had saved up enough money to buy one. No rental companies in San Antonio, like Block Buster video, or what eventually became Hollywood Video, rented out Genesis games until months after the SNES was released in September of 1991. So, naturally, I couldn’t play games unless I bought them myself. That was something my child laboring budget couldn’t do more than about four times a year at $60-80 a pop. I occupied most of my first year with Revenge of Shinobi, Golden Axe, Ghouls N Ghosts and Altered Beast. 1990-91 brought me time and money to own Super Monaco GP, Strider, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe II, Shadow Dancer, ToeJam & Earl, Shining in the Darkness, Phantasy Star III, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Game after game poured in, and I bought as many as I could, completely failing to notice that they were all designed or published directly by Sega. Streets of Rage 2, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Shinobi III, and a few backlog games like Sword of Vermilion, and Phantasy Star II wrapped up my 1st party Genesis library for years, until I started gem hunting shortly after the Dreamcast's finale.

While I had owned an NES, having already played through most of its vast library at friend's houses, I had only bought about five games for it in the two years it was in my possession. When I bought my Genesis I had completely stopped using any of my other systems. While I had started gaming with the Atari 2600, and continued with the NES, it was games like Double Dragon, Bad Dudes, Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Strider and, even more so, Galaxy Force, Outrun, Space Harrier and After Burner in the arcades that sealed my fate as a gamer for nearly two decades. The closer it was to the arcade, the better, I still don't care about extras as much as I care about core gameplay. I have generally had more fun playing through a game over again just to master the gameplay, than I have ever had with a game's alternate mode or menu extra.

As much as I enjoyed NES and Sega Master System games, once I could actually play arcade games, or at least very close translations of arcade games, at home, I didn't want to play anything else. This is also why I had focused my gaming budget on Sega Master System games more than NES games prior to the Genesis' launch. More games came out on the NES that were made for home audiences, and I was always waiting for my favorite arcade games to make it home in good form. In fact, to this day I would rather play arcade style games or action games than even the best home exclusive titles that have come out over the years. So, it should come as no surprise that I didn't "get" most exclusive console titles, or particularly crave 3rd party titles that were not arcade titles, at least in style.

Irrational thought / Popularity

It wasn’t until the SNES was released in 1991 that I was enlightened to what full 3rd party, retailer, and rental support was. The game magazines at the time, EGM, Gamepro, and NEXT Generation all praised the SNES for it’s third party support, but the key words they repeated most often was in regard to the SNES’s sound chip, hardware colors on screen, and ability to somewhat smoothly scale sprites and backgrounds larger. The later most created an animated zoom effect, that the Genesis didn’t have available to it without skilled software tricks.

Review after review continued to drive out that the SNES had more colors on screen than Genesis games, something which even the screenshots above show wasn't plainly visible, except when comparing the best SNES games, against the worst Genesis games. Early SNES games stuck to the 90-120 colors on screen range, except for the special effect screen here and there, such as the last boss in Final Fantasy II. Before long the Genesis had overcome it’s color limitations in games like Ranger X, Gunstar Heroes, Sonic and Knuckles, and others through simple palette choices accompanied by art design.

Furthermore, most of the shots on this page are straight from the video RAM via an Emulator, whereas these games were made for the Television, which had a significant amount of blur from the video output. The Emulation vs Console page listed above shows dramatically how much of a difference this makes for the appearance of color transitions.

While the Genesis hardware was technically limited to 64 colors on screen, the real limitation to both systems was the cartridge technology that the games were released on. More of anything, like digitized sounds, colors, levels, or sprites required more expensive memory on the cart. Arcade proprietors were willing and able to pay more money for games, but home audiences couldn't. This amounted to bigger arcade games, that spanned more than six times the memory their home counterparts did.

For example, Altered Beast’s Arcade version was 2,430 KB, while the home version was 513KB, and Golden Axe was 3,340 KB while the home version was also 513KB. To put this in perspective, the common marketing term for cartridge size at the time was the “Meg”. Altered Beast and Golden Axe were called 4 Meg carts, Strider was the first 8 Meg cart, and the original Street Fighter 2 on the SNES was the first 16 Meg cart. A Meg was a Mega Bit, or Mb. The arcade version of Altered Beast was 19.4 Mb, and the home was 4Mb, while the arcade version of Golden Axe was over 26.7 Mb, while the home version was scaled down to only 4 Mb.

In addition to this limitation, which was very significant, both systems had a limitation in their on board memory. While the system memory limitations could be overcome through the speedy cartridge to system bus, and data streaming, it was still a factor in how much detail could be displayed on screen at once, if the central processors and bandwidth weren’t already. The SNES demonstrates this limitation the best. With a CPU speed of less than half of that of the Genesis, pushing around two to three times the colors at once only added to its issues, and limited how many background layers and sprites could be on screen before slowdown.

So, flying in the face of public opinion and the media’s free advertising of the SNES’s advanced capabilities, there are games like Revenge of Shinobi, Galaxy Force II, Streets of Rage 2, and Shinobi 3. For comparison, I chose games in a similar genre, made the same year, or the same generation for the SNES. Super Castlevania IV, Star Fox, Final Fight Guy, and Super Metroid. These SNES games were chosen as examples not only because they were extremely popular and well thought of, but because they are great games in their own right. What a direct side-by-side comparison of these games shows is that neither system really had an edge in the graphic department. Artistic quality existed in games on both systems. Moreover, it wasn't until the release of the Dreamcast that 3D games reached the image quality per frame that these 16-bit games had.

Yet popular sayings about the Genesis include that it couldn’t display as many colors as the SNES did, and therefore looked worse in every game. While it may be true that there were more SNES games that technically displayed more colors on screen than Genesis games that displayed similar numbers, this was not a factor that distinguished SNES games from Genesis games. At these system's color counts, more colors at once typically only meant more shades of the same color in a color transition, which is impossible to count.

The biggest distinguishing graphical factor that could be picked out of most SNES games was the pastel colors that many of its games used. This was thanks to the SNES’s higher color palette than the Genesis. While most of it’s games appeared to be displaying the same number of colors on screen, SNES games could display colors that the Genesis simply didn’t have available. The Genesis color palette was limited to only the more bold primary colors. Like it or not, different colors makes for a different looking game. It’s unfortunate that different often gets changed to better or worse in people’s minds.

The Sega CD

Sega had a CD add-on console planned for the Genesis for years, and a year after the SNES's launch in the States, the Sega CD hit the market along with a slew of what was supposed to be the next level of gaming, Full Motion Video (FMV) games. Speaking strictly on specs, the Sega CD had additional scaling and rotation hardware, and a CPU four times as fast as the SNES CPU to combat the SNES's scaling and rotation and mode 7 special effects. The Sega CD also had a special sound chip and the CD-ROM medium's massive storage capacity for the audio advantage. Unfortunately, cost factors, apparently, prevented the Sega CD from having more colors on screen or a larger color palette available without software work arounds. This meant that early FMV titles dealt with 17 colors on screen, which meant that, much like NES games and early 32-bit titles, they were just ugly compared to what people were used to looking at, and the interactivity of an FMV title was very limited as well. There's much more to be said about the Sega CD add-on, just a click away in the Console History section.

Comparisons

It was Street Fighter 2 that I recall starting all of the media describing the Genesis as “aging” visibly to the SNES. With Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition, Sega released a new control pad with six face buttons. This made gameplay differences between the games, because there was not a controller with six face buttons available for the SNES. The SNES controllers only had four face and two shoulder buttons. The Genesis controller was more like the arcade configuration of Street Fighter 2, and was much more easy to use for this particular game. Since there were joysticks available for both systems that could compensate for this problem the gameplay debate can only go so far. In a similar way, the graphics are not better or worse on either system, in spite of the fact that the Genesis version appears to be a port of the SNES game, and not a ground up rewrite of the Arcade game as the SNES version was.

This is where I think the sound debate came in as well. The Genesis version of this game has very garbled and low quality voice samples when compared to the SNES ones. Whether this was because the voice samples were down sampled from the SNES version, or the SNES had a better digital audio compression system than the Genesis did, I don’t know. However, ToeJam&Earl 1+2, Streets of Rage 2, the Sportstalk Football and Baseball games, and even Mortal Kombat II and Eternal Champions proved very well that the system was capable of much better digital audio than displayed in SFII.

Later on down the road Super Street Fighter 2 came out on both systems. Again the SNES version was claimed as the victor by game magazines. Both version were very comparable in sprite size and gameplay. The Genesis version of SSFII had slightly better audio samples than Special Champion Edition did, but they still had less audio depth compared to the SNES samples. In addition to that, the Genesis game, while still graphically comparable, has a noticeably lower color count on screen, and a few levels suffer from very unfortunate color choices by the developer.

The gaming magazines were eager to exploit the differences between the Genesis and SNES versions of another game that was released around this time, Mortal Kombat II.  After Nintendo turned in a video of the Genesis version of MKI to Senator Lieberman, effectively forcing Sega to start what would eventually become the ESRB rating system, Nintendo turned around and allowed an uncensored MKII for the SNES. The SNES game was very well converted from the Arcade game while the Genesis version was missing most of the hoops and hollers, even though almost all of the character specific voice samples were there in good quality. The difference between the two game's graphics was noticeable, but even when displayed right next to each other, one game could easily be mistaken for the other.

I remember talking to a video game store clerk about the two conversions. He had been publicly claiming that the SNES version “blew the Genesis version away”. I felt foolish actually, because when they switched between the two on the TV set while I wasn’t looking, I didn’t notice until they told me it was the Genesis version on the screen and not the SNES version as it had been when I walked into the store. The screenshots linked to above took away this feeling because I felt at the time that the two versions were very comparable. Note that comparable means just that, the two games are good enough to be compared to the other. There have been many debates over which version was better over the years, mostly because the Genesis version had more of the arcade combos than the SNES game did. Unfortunately, when the 32X version came out, three months later, with more voices and colors than the SNES version and all of the arcade version's moves and combos intact, the media simply ignored it. Arguably the best version of the game, until the Midway Collection in 2004, went nearly completely overlooked by the consumer.

One instance of a game being highly publicized for being completely original is StarFox, which came out in 1993 on the SNES. It was a good game with an excellent soundtrack, but StarFox was not the first polygon based console game as people might think, thanks to the multi page spreads in many popular gaming mags describing the game as such. Hard Drivin’, Race Drivin’, F15 Strike Eagle and several other Microprose simulators had all been out on the Genesis in 1992 and 1993. Moreover, they all ran straight off the Genesis hardware, rather than a special on cartridge chip like StarFox’s SFX chip. Gameplay wise, StarFox might as well have been Galaxy Force 3 with cute animal pilots, because it is virtually identical to Sega’s Galaxy Force II from way back in 89’. I liked StarFox quite a bit, and am an Argonaut fan to this day, but the arcade version of Galaxy Force II, which included a moving cockpit and great graphics and sound, simply has no comparison.

Add-ons

StarFox marked the first SNES SuperFX chipped game. Retailing for $70+ a game, the SuperFX chip added, only to the cartridge it was installed in, a mild polygon count. The other notable SuperFX games were Stunt Race FX, also by Argonaut, Dirt TraX FX, and Yoshi's Island. Games like Pilot Wings, Mario Kart, and Street Fighter Alpha also had on cart chips to handle additional processes.

As an alternative for pricey chipped carts, Sega of America released the 32X add-on in 1994, which retailed at launch for $160. The 32X has over 30 titles available for it, at least half of which are worth owning for being better than their Genesis or SNES counterparts, or as original 32X exclusives. Buying only ten titles would bring the cost of the 32X per game down to $16. Since the 32X games retailed for only $50, those ten games would cost less each than a single SuperFX chipped game. Consider also that you would not have to buy any new controllers to play 32X games with, and the cost advantage of add-ons verses entirely new consoles really starts to come into focus.

With the cost factor out of the way, it is fair to say that the 32X was far and away more powerful than the SNES, even with the SuperFX 2 chip in a cart. Comparing the, ultra rushed, 32X launch release of Doom, to the Sculptured Software SNES conversion of the same is a great example of this, as is comparing Mortal Kombat II for the 32X, with the SNES game.

The 32X is reviled as Sega's greatest mistake, by Sega fans, game fans, and the media. The actual fact of the matter is that it was a more powerful, and potentially more cost effective, alternative to costly chipped cart games. Comparing the SVP chipped Genesis version of Virtua Racing with the 32X's launch game, Virtua Racing Deluxe, shows this very clearly. As an alternative, the 32X succeeded quite well at its function. As a stand alone console, 1 year of support and less than 50 games is, of course, probably a record low for any console save Nintendo's Virtual Boy.

Conclusion

Each of the 16-bit systems had games that were technically comparable to what the other was offering. Beyond that, both the SNES and the Genesis libraries focused primarily on different types of games altogether. Sega had always been a maker of fast paced action games, and Nintendo always focused on younger audiences, while 3rd parties focused on action games, with a healthy dose of RPGs on both systems. Nintendo experimented with new types of special effects through hardware both in the SNES and in the carts themselves, and Sega allowed the Genesis owners the option to upgrade to the SegaCD and/or the 32X, as well as using software taking advantage of the Genesis' processing advantage with software special effects in Genesis games themselves. Because of that experimentation, this generation of console had more variety in gameplay styles than any generation before it, and possibly even after it.

Popular history, however, uses the same measuring stick for all success stories. Sales is what most ill advised people look to in order to validate or invalidate their purchase decisions. It is as though their own pockets were lined by the perceived success of one product over the other. The Genesis outsold the SNES in the US overall up until its discontinuation in 1995. The SNES managed to more than catch up in the two years before the Nintendo 64 launched however, and it clearly won out in sales worldwide. The truly important thing is that the war between the two companies produced some of the best games to ever be made. The game player that has only owned one system to the exclusion of the other has definitely lost out.

Month to month games

These lists are representative of what came out on each console, month to month, that people considered worth mentioning for unique gameplay, or highly polished gameplay. Both lists were checked by whether two or more reviews on gamefaqs.com mentioned unique or particularly highly polished gameplay. As such, these lists are not definitive. They are comparable to each other only because they were made in the same way, from reviews on the same site, and from exposure to Usenet gamers.

Looking at the lists as a race to which console got the most "good", "fun", or "best" titles is not the way they are intended to be looked at, and is a flawed way of thinking. These are not lists of games that you will think are great, these are not lists of games that everybody does or should think are great, these lists do not have every game worth noting on them, and these lists have games many may feel are not worth noting on them. To the later two of which I say E-mail me and let me know what you think about the game in question, and why I should add it/remove it.

// Year 1 // Year 2 // Year 3 // Year 4 // // Year 5 // Year 6 // Final //