Console Debate #26 Super Nintendo/Super Famicom

[fcgamer | 4,719]

SNES RPGs are good, but otherwise the console does little for me. Outside of Castlevania and Super Mario World, there's nothing on there I'd generally want to play.

My problem with the machine is that NES did it better. What the NES had, felt lost when moving to the SNES. Despite the "better" graphics and "better" music, I feel as though the soul of the games was lost somewhere. 

I'd much rather play Sega MD, and I never even had one of those during its heyday, though I did have a SNES.

[OptOut | 8,881]

Just now, elprincipe said:

You must think there are tons of crack smokers around

Sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear you over the PHAT RIPS I was just toking off my crack pipe!

[fcgamer | 4,719]

12 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Anyone who thinks Symphony of the Night is better than Castlevania 64 is smoking CRACK!!!! 

I quite liked the Castlevania games in N64 , at least back in the day. I also liked SotN. My problem with the latter is although it was fun and unique for its time, the format eventually turned into what Castlevania now is, which imo ultimately ruined the series.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,509]

Well I'm certainly not gonna sit here and write a dissertation on how Super Metroid destroys Metroid's puny little ass, or about how Link to the Past makes Zelda and Zelda II it's bitch, or go on about all of the Super Mario Karts and Tetris Attacks and Kirby's Dream Courses and all of that.  Because that would be a waste of time because it's all subjective and everyone can have their own opinion.

But, no, what I will call out is that you basically undermined yourself right off the bat   

19 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

21 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

SNES RPGs are good

[Californication | 1,477]

57 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Well I'm certainly not gonna sit here and write a dissertation on how Super Metroid destroys Metroid's puny little ass, or about how Link to the Past makes Zelda and Zelda II it's bitch, or go on about all of the Super Mario Karts and Tetris Attacks and Kirby's Dream Courses and all of that.  Because that would be a waste of time because it's all subjective and everyone can have their own opinion.

But, no, what I will call out is that you basically undermined yourself right off the bat   

The nes has more natsume though. 

[Estil | 1,261]

2 hours ago, elprincipe said:

You must think there are tons of crack smokers around

OMG, please don't make me post this again...

 

 

 

[Estil | 1,261]

1 hour ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Well I'm certainly not gonna sit here and write a dissertation on how Super Metroid destroys Metroid's puny little ass, or about how Link to the Past makes Zelda and Zelda II it's bitch...

Well now wait a minute, they're on much more powerful systems and they by then have several years experience working with those franchises, that isn't really a fair fight.  

[Estil | 1,261]

2 hours ago, fcgamer said:

SNES RPGs are good...

My problem with the machine is that NES did it better. What the NES had, felt lost when moving to the SNES. Despite the "better" graphics and "better" music, I feel as though the soul of the games was lost somewhere. 

I'd much rather play Sega MD, and I never even had one of those during its heyday, though I did have a SNES.

Just "good"?  I thought the SNES was the Golden Age of RPGs?  And I do in fact agree that I'm much more impressed with what they was able to get out of the NES and have it be able to do things that weren't even imagined.  Remember how from the very start Shiggy wanted Mario to ride a dinosaur but didn't think it could be done on the NES?  Well in 1993 (Mario is Missing and that homebrew Super Mario World NES port), he got his wish!    I mean the NES had what, 5-6 of those MMC "helper chips"?  True the SNES had some too (most notably the famous FX and Capcom's C4 for MegaMan X2/X3) but they didn't have to be used nearly as much or as often as the NES's "helper chips".  So yeah, they had to be far more creative to make the most of what the NES could do.

Come to think of it, I don't think the Donkey Kong Country games needed any helper chips in the cartridge as opposed to say, Mario World 2 (Yoshi's Island) and Mario RPG...

Edited May 5, 2021 by Estil

[phart010 | 1,705]

3 hours ago, OptOut said:

Anyone who thinks Symphony of the Night is better than Castlevania 64 is smoking CRACK!!!! 

Good crack or bad crack?

[Sumez | 2,931]

The SNES has one redeeming feature, so I think it's definitely a 2/10.

Here is its redeeming feature: Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Contra III, Kirby 3, Kirby Super Star, Turtles in Time, Super Metroid, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Sparkster, Goof Troop, Romancing SaGa 1-3, Kirby's Avalanche, Mario All-Stars, The Firemen, Skyblazer, Super Bomberman 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, X-Men Mutant Apocalype, Legend of the Mystical Ninja, King of Dragons, Go Go Ackman, Earthbound, Final Fight 3, Mega Man X 1-3, Soul Blazer, Batman Returns, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Pocky & Rock 1+2, Dragon Quest 5 and 6, Super Punch-Out, Final Fantasy 4, 5 and 6, Chrono Trigger, Magical Quest 1, 2 and 3, The Ninja Warriors Again, Breath of Fire 1+2, Wild Guns, Lufia 1+2, Yoshi's Island, ActRaiser 1+2, Plok, Kirby's Dream Course, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Donkey Kong Country 2+3, Super Mario RPG, R-Type 3, Super Aleste, Axelay, Lost Vikings 1+2, Shadowrun, Majyuuou, Magic Sword, Violinist of Hamelin, Cybernator, Hagane, Front Mission Gunhazard, Psycho Dream, Metal Warriors, Biometal, Demon's Crest, Prince of Persia, Tiny Toon Adventures, Super Smash TV, Super Bonk, Magical Pop'n, Super Mario World, Dracula XX, Super Castlevania IV, Aladdin, Addams Family, Starfox

I admit, it's just one point in its favor, but I think it's definitely worth at least 2/10, maybe even 3.

[DefaultGen | 5,397]

5 hours ago, Sumez said:

The SNES has one redeeming feature, so I think it's definitely a 2/10.

Here is its redeeming feature: Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Contra III, Kirby 3, Kirby Super Star, Turtles in Time, Super Metroid, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Sparkster, Goof Troop, Romancing SaGa 1-3, Kirby's Avalanche, Mario All-Stars, The Firemen, Skyblazer, Super Bomberman 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, X-Men Mutant Apocalype, Legend of the Mystical Ninja, King of Dragons, Go Go Ackman, Earthbound, Final Fight 3, Mega Man X 1-3, Soul Blazer, Batman Returns, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Pocky & Rock 1+2, Dragon Quest 5 and 6, Super Punch-Out, Final Fantasy 4, 5 and 6, Chrono Trigger, Magical Quest 1, 2 and 3, The Ninja Warriors Again, Breath of Fire 1+2, Wild Guns, Lufia 1+2, Yoshi's Island, ActRaiser 1+2, Plok, Kirby's Dream Course, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Donkey Kong Country 2+3, Super Mario RPG, R-Type 3, Super Aleste, Axelay, Lost Vikings 1+2, Shadowrun, Majyuuou, Magic Sword, Violinist of Hamelin, Cybernator, Hagane, Front Mission Gunhazard, Psycho Dream, Metal Warriors, Biometal, Demon's Crest, Prince of Persia, Tiny Toon Adventures, Super Smash TV, Super Bonk, Magical Pop'n, Super Mario World, Dracula XX, Super Castlevania IV, Aladdin, Addams Family, Starfox

I admit, it's just one point in its favor, but I think it's definitely worth at least 2/10, maybe even 3.

Suck it DKC1.

[Estil | 1,261]

8 hours ago, phart010 said:

Good crack or bad crack?

There's no such thing as "good crack".  Remember, it's not just wrong, it could be dead wrong.

[SpoonMan Abrams X | 697]

19 hours ago, OptOut said:

Anyone who thinks Symphony of the Night is better than Castlevania 64 is smoking CRACK!!!! 

Opty clearly high as fuck as he typing that shit lol

Edited May 6, 2021 by SpoonMan Abrams X

[Estil | 1,261]

Remember in the olden days you could much more easily know how fast a computer is by its MHz/GHz?  Ever since that whole multi-cores thing it has become, much much more complicated.  Sorta like how it used to be based on "bits" but apparently even now they don't bother with anything past 64 bits hardly anymore?  I think the Dreamcast and PS2 were 128 bits though?  BTW, would you believe that the first 16 bit console was technically the Intellivision??  Imagine how their commercials could've went:

INTELLIVISION DONES.  16-bit arcade graphics!

You can't do this on Atari!

INTELLIVISION DOES.  16-bit sports action!

You can't do this on Atari!

INTELLVISION DOES.  16 button percision controller!

You can't do this on Atari!

INTELLIVISON DOES.  INTELLIVISION DOES.  INTELLIVISION DOES.

What Atari A'int!  

[Sumez | 2,931]

2 hours ago, Estil said:

Remember in the olden days you could much more easily know how fast a computer is by its MHz/GHz?  Ever since that whole multi-cores thing it has become, much much more complicated.  Sorta like how it used to be based on "bits" but apparently even now they don't bother with anything past 64 bits hardly anymore?

Same logic.

As a consumer, none of these numbers should mean abolutely anything to you, and they definitely don't tell you how "capable" a console is, and it also didn't do so in the 80s or 90s.

Yes, if two consoles use the exact same CPU architecture, the one that's clocked at the higher "mhz" number will expectedly be faster, but even then two different designs might require CPU performance for wildly different things, and the primary bottleneck for most games might not even be related to the CPU at all.

Like I said only a few posts ago, the MegaDrive using a 7.8mhz CPU and the SNES using a 3.58mhz one reveals absolutely nothing about how fast those two systems are in relation to eachother. If you think that means the MegaDrive is "twice as fast" that's either misinformation or intentionally misleading marketing. Because it definitely isn't.

The same thing goes for bits. This is a drum I've been beating over and over in here, and I'm going to keep doing it until people realise it.  A console being "8 bit" or "16 bit" means absolutely nothing to you. It might mean it does certain things better, but unless you're programming for it, it's irrelevant. They can still do the same things, and depending on your approach as a programmer, whether they do so effectively might come down to entirely different and unrelated parameters.

For example, the SNES gets a massive advantage by being able to DMA anything to video memory, while the NES actually has an advantage over the SNES from having the PPU data bus mapped to the cartridge port. But how often did you hear people advertising that? It's not as simple as promotion material saying our number is higher, therefore it must be better.

How do you even define what's a "16 bit cpu"? You could easily argue that the MegaDrive is a 32 bit console by the same metrics the SNES is 16 bit. But the SNES only has an 8 bit data bus compared to the MegaDrive's 16 bit one, so why isn't it an 8 bit console?
It's absolutely 100% marketing buzz. It was never anything else, sorry.

[Tulpa | 3,488]

3 hours ago, Estil said:

I think the Dreamcast and PS2 were 128 bits though?

Dreamcast was 32 bit.

PS2 situation is more complicated. By raw numbers, you could say there are 128 bits there, but It doesn't add up to a full 128 bits in any practical application. It reinforces what Sumez is saying.

Edited May 6, 2021 by Tulpa

[koifish | 555]

On 5/5/2021 at 3:17 AM, Estil said:

Just "good"?  I thought the SNES was the Golden Age of RPGs?

PC and western RPG gamers would have a word with this statement.

[koifish | 555]

@Sumez

 I'm not one to compare clock speeds and decide a victor just from numbers nor one to fall for marketing hype ("bit count" was always a sales gimmick just like blast processing). I wanna know if you can answer this: Why do SNES games show more slowdown? Just off the top of my head are Gradius 3 and Super Ghouls'n'Ghosts. Sure, the two consoles are each capable of things the other couldn't do, but I see more fluid action games sans slowdown on MD or PCE than on SNES. Moreover, SNES relies more on cartridge add-on chips. MD probably couldn't handle Yoshi's Island, but then neither could a stock SNES.

[Estil | 1,261]

44 minutes ago, koifish said:

PC and western RPG gamers would have a word with this statement.

I mean the real RPGs.  The JRPG's of course!    Not the cRPGs or crap RPGs!  Nor the wRPGs or wuss RPGs!  

I'm kidding of course...  

[Sumez | 2,931]

2 hours ago, koifish said:

Why do SNES games show more slowdown? Just off the top of my head are Gradius 3 and Super Ghouls'n'Ghosts. Sure, the two consoles are each capable of things the other couldn't do, but I see more fluid action games sans slowdown on MD or PCE than on SNES. Moreover, SNES relies more on cartridge add-on chips. MD probably couldn't handle Yoshi's Island, but then neither could a stock SNES.

Well, first of all, slowdown is absolutely CPU related, you're right about that. And on a system like these, it's never directly tied to graphics (though lots of action in the game does tend to be tied to more visible sprites, etc.).

Second, the SNES is generally slower than the MD, but not a whole lot - and there are certain actions that can be performed faster as well.

That said, slowdown is mostly inexcusable though, and IMO always the fault of the programmer (or the person managing the budget and distributing work hours anyway).
They are working on a platform with a perfectly predictable hardware profile, which will never do any simultaneous tasks while running the game, so they can always design the game around the known limitations, and optimize places with issues. The MegaDrive being faster shouldn't result in games having less slowdown, it should result in games being more "busy" in ways the SNES wouldn't have been able to without slowdown. And no, Sonic scrolling fast isn't a demonstration of a fast CPU, the NES can easily scroll just as fast.  

I also don't believe slowdown is more common on the SNES than on MegaDrive, I think it might just have a few more prominant examples. Castlevania Bloodlines is also famous for slowdown, and the most common reason for that is the unnecessarily amount of collision detection it does on certain attacks.
Likewise, the slowdown in Super Ghouls n Ghosts also has an explanation. psychopathicteen on the NesDev forums looked into the code, and found out that it actually writes the whole sprite buffer in a different format than the SNES hardware uses, and then for every single frame it runs a second routine that would rewrite every sprite to fit the correct format. That whole step could be skipped if they'd just write the sprites correctly in the first place, and it creates a massive overhead when it's trying to draw a lot of sprites! Even then though, the SGnG slowdown is much worse on the first stage, there's not that much of it in the rest of the game.
It seems like a last-minute programming hotfix, maybe because Nintendo changed the hardware compared to the early dev systems Capcom had? It's worth remembering that SGnG and Gradius 3 are both launch titles, which might have affected both the developers' experience with the console, and their expectations for what it could do.
Gradius 3 is also an arcade port, which gives the developers less wiggle room for redesigning the game for a console less capable than the powerful arcade hardware. And even the arcade version of Gradius 3 has slowdown!

[YOURTURN | 1,256]

On 5/4/2021 at 5:46 AM, Tanooki said:

Not sure what to say about that last part but ugh, that's not right and rough.

Sorry for the delay. All I can say about the Transformers scenario is that it was part of a chain of events that had me begin my quest to start a business in 2013.

The rest I faced before and after that should have been signs that collecting sealed video games was a good move for me. Because the only mistake that was bigger than getting rid of a few gems I did have would be having either @fcgamer or @OptOut grow their own Deniz Khan-style ponytail. Because for all we know it might be a HA created parasite that caused Deniz to be a fart sniffing market machine that thinks HA-induced shit prices are signs of success. 

As for the Resident Evil part... I will buy a plushie if they have one that reminds me of you. 

Otherwise, I am hoping to find a way to rebuild that part of my collection this year. Maybe also get everything I want from the PS4 library. No clue because looking back, both the GB and GBC tend to be my favorite consoles.

[fcgamer | 4,719]

1 hour ago, FenrirZero said:

The rest I faced before and after that should have been signs that collecting sealed video games was a good move for me. Because the only mistake that was bigger than getting rid of a few gems I did have would be having either @fcgamer or @OptOut grow their own Deniz Khan-style ponytail. Because for all we know it might be a HA created parasite that caused Deniz to be a fart sniffing market machine that thinks HA-induced shit prices are signs of success. 

Lol, wut? I'm so lost it ain't even funny.

[YOURTURN | 1,256]

41 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

Lol, wut? I'm so lost it ain't even funny.

What part? 

The first part has me say that both you and OptOut growing Deniz Khan ponytails would be a mistake. Because you guys are not the type to smell bullshit and claim it is a freshly made $100 USD. But feels like a lesser mistake if you knew what games I got rid of.

The second part has me claim (as a "survivor horror" joke) that his ponytail might be a parasite that HA convinced him to wear. Which would explain his 'marketing-before-doing the job right' appearances on Pawn Star. Because I spent that amount of time and energy doing something smart. Like looking for SFC games that never came state-side.

[fcgamer | 4,719]

2 minutes ago, FenrirZero said:

Like looking for SFC games that never came state-side.

There were a bunch it seems, maybe 1000?

[YOURTURN | 1,256]

3 minutes ago, fcgamer said:

There were a bunch it seems, maybe 1000?

According to Wikipedia, 978. Which fits more three scores for both the SFC (9) and SNES (7-8). The U.S. had 111, Europe had 34, and Canada had 0. Which is the same number of games I would own graded if I did not have CAS as an option.