SNES vs. Genesis: A Battle for the Ages! [Part 1 is over, platformers coming up next]

[A Black Falcon]

Super Castlevania IV utterly destroys Castlevania Bloodlines, Bloodlines is nowhere near as good as the great SCIV... far worse graphics, far worse sound, far worse controls (the 8-way whip is amazing!), and perhaps worst of all, the miserably awful password system which saves the limited continues that you have, unlike any other game in the series... ugh.

Castlevania Dracula X SNES is even worse, but there's a huge gap between SCIV and Rondo of Blood TG16 and Bloodlines and RoB SNES. The former two are two of the best action/platformer games of the entire generation, the latter two... average at best.

Hard Corps is the hardest Contra of all!! Contra III is a much more balance and enjoyable experience.

Eh, I don't agree. Hard Corps has a plot and a decent one at that, cutscenes between levels, many more levels, branching paths, a whole bunch of endings, four playable characters who are truly different, and more... Contra III feels very basic in comparison. Hard Corps also pushes the Genesis hard, and is a stunning graphical achievement for the system. Konami was obviously responding to Gunstar Heroes with the game, and they did a good job of it.

As for balance, well, I did say that it was designed for you to have three hit points and infinite lives... but even so in the US version I've gotten at least three levels into the game before. Sure, often I get game over in one of the level 2s, but sometimes I have gotten farther. I don't know if I've even gotten past level 3 in the SNES game... it's just not quite as good, and it's just about as hard I think, though it's been a while since I've played either of them so I'm not certain. Oh, the topdown levels are pretty easy, and kind of cool looking too.

GR, I have to say I still can be floored when I play a game that does way more with a system than I would have expected. Sure they can't compare to today, but considering what they had to work with...

Let me put it this way. When I found out about a little fan made game called Skeleton Plus for the 2600, and then played it when a friend won a copy at some convention, I was shocked to find someone had managed to make an FPS on that dated system.

I agree completely, stuff like that is really amazing...

I can appreciate the effort and say "Hey, that's pretty cool", but it's not going to get me to run out and buy the system and/or game and then show if off to all of my friends. And the "that's cool" factor is more of a momentary thing, it's not going to keep my occupied for hours or days.

Well then, we don't agree, I think. Each generation of systems is much more powerful than the last, pushing older ones into doing things they weren't designed for is really cool stuff...

Some things don't really work well, like 3d SNES and Genesis games (polygonal Super FX games, stuff like Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin', etc). Those have framerates too bad to be fun these days, for me, and I'm pretty tolerant of low framerates. How playable older games are now can vary from game to game. But still, when you push hardware it's impressive. It must have been far, far harder to make Contra Hard Corps on the Genesis than it would have been on a system which actually had sprite scaling, etc! That they managed to do all of that stuff in hardware is one reason why it's so impressive...

On that note, The Adventures of Batman & Robin for Genesis is a top-order technical achievement. It's a beat 'em up/platformer with some shmup segments, and its visuals and audio are among the best on the system. The freeroam flight combat game (sort of Desert Strike style I guess?) Red Zone is another amazing technical accomplishment. Both games do have one major downside that makes them not that fun, though... they're INSANELY hard. I haven't gotten far in either one.