Quote Originally Posted by j_factor View Post
When you're talking about the experience at the time, you can't include games like Kirby's Adventure, which came well after the fact. He wasn't talking about 1993. Also, I'm not sure why you'd compare the average game for one system to the top games for another.

I think if you compare contemporary releases, the SMS does come off as a lot more "advanced", but only up to a point. From 1990 on, the difference is much less pronounced, with the 16-bit era underway, the NES having more support, and more advanced mappers taking hold while the SMS has no change in hardware. Circa 1988, the SMS is decidedly "ahead" of the NES, though not necessarily in terms of having good games, of course.
Saying "compare the average SMS game to the average NES game" would be a pretty ineffectual point, and it would be pretty tricky to come up with specific "average-looking" NES titles. I chose those games off the top of my head as good-looking NES games that look quite a bit better than the NES launch crop. I don't see how release dates matter in this context. There are plenty of late NES releases that look like garbage as well.

Either way, you're not seeing the forest for the trees here. The point is that the SMS isn't hugely different from the NES, not to the extent of the Neo Geo to its contemporaries. Even Art of Fighting, which was fairly early in the Neo Geo's run, was tremendously more impressive than what the SNES and Genesis could do, and then if you look at the later titles, they're not remotely in the same league (even the 32/64-bit machines couldn't handle its games). For something similar yet opposite, it would be like saying the Neo Geo ISN'T much beyond the SNES and Genesis based on the very early releases like Blue's Journey and Magician Lord, which weren't all that impressive on a technical level. Comparing the SMS to the NES based only on the black box titles isn't a fair assessment of the NES's capabilities.