Back in the early nineties, I was a total Sega fanboy. This devotion was based on little more than the fact that I was the proud owner of a Sega Mega Drive. This 16bit black beast was the envy of the gaming world at the time, and owning one made me the coolest kid in school...well, okay, maybe the coolest kid on my street.
When the Super Nintendo was released, I remember feeling very defensive and threatened in my own childish fashion. I read all about its amazing specs, and this new fangled "Mode 7" gimmick, and about how its graphics could choose from an amazing array 32,768 colours ( compared to the Mega Drive's paltry 512 ). And then Super Mario World came out, and despite the fact that it was one of the first games to be released on the SNES it looked better than anything that had come out on Mega Drive, which by this point had been out for a couple of years.
How did I react to this attack on my beloved console? Well, I did what any self respecting immature boy of 12 years old would do...I denied the obvious. I staunchly defended my console, and totally bought into Sega's marketing spin about the Mega Drive's hidden technical power which meant that it could still slug it out against the newer SNES. All this despite the fact that only a few years earlier I had been the proud owner of Nintendo's first generation machine, the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Whenever a game was released on both the Mega Drive and SNES, for example Street Fighter 2, I would pore over my favourite games magazines for who came out on top in terms of graphics ( it all came down to graphics for me back then ). Invariably it was the SNES
I actually hired a SNES out from a video store back in the day. If memory serves me correctly, the game I got with it was Super Mario World. Despite its obvious greatness, I managed to convince myself that it wasn't any great shakes. By this point, I was the proud owner of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my Mega Drive so I actually had a definite high water mark to compare Mario to.
In the Mega Drive's later years it had a few last hurrahs. Particularly impressive technically was Gunstar Heroes. The ending had already been written however, and the ol' black box was discontinued in 1997. This meant little to me by that point, however, as I had already moved on to the Sony Playstation. Ah, the fickle nature of the fanboy-ism.
Due to the wonders of emulation, I have since had the opportunity to experience the Super Nintendo with a more level headed attitude. My verdict? Super Nintendo, FUCK YEAH! There are so many great games to play on this machine. SNES owners certainly seemed to be spoiled for choice when it came to RPGs, in particular. At the moment, I'm rather addicted to Chrono Trigger. This game is brilliant. Can somebody please tell me why every RPG since this game hasn't done away with random battles? The only RPG I can think of recently that followed this early ancestor's advice is Final Fantasy XII. I'm sure there's been others, but that's the only one that I've played anyway.
In the end, the war between the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo wasn't really won or lost based on who had the better machine. It was won due to the quality of the games. And now that I'm older and wiser, I can honestly admit that overall the Super Nintendo simply had better games...but the Mega Drive was still cooler.
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