Category 3: Games

Now we'll get into the debate that plagued all playgrounds in the mid and early nineties: which one of the two competing offerings had the better games. In terms of the number of options you had to play, the Genesis would win by a longshot with a full 915 titles compared to 784 for the SNES. Still I'm more of believer in quality over quantity, so before we go any further let me establish that that is the grade I will be operating under.

While it is certainly hard to push all games for one console into a neat little bin, I'm going to try my best to do that here. In terms of the content on the Genesis, from my experience it certainly seems as if what many users ended up getting was a lot more of a close emulation of what we saw at the arcades. This in a lot of ways meant there were a whole lot of beat em ups like Streets of Rage to have fun with. However, no matter how awesome these kinds of games were, they didn't offer too much that was entirely unique to consoles, and that is where the line gets drawn for me.

Let's take a look at Donkey Kong Country for example. By sheer numbers it is actually one of Nintendo's most successful games to date with plenty of good reason: it gave us something we hadn't seen. Sure the Genesis also had its more in-depth offerings like Phantasy Star, but that was a lot less common. While less games were made for SNES over the years, I personally got the feel that every game that was made had that extra layer of difference to make the experience entirely its own. I love Sonic as much as the next guy, but I just think Mario and pals gave us something more unique for the time.

Winner: SNES

In the last major category, let's take a look at how the overall sales broke down.

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