>Mega Drive gets tons of homebrew to this day
>back in the day all the Western developers were eager to make games for it while the SNES less so and most of them never did get that good at SNES coding
my theory is MD was better suited to American and European creative process because the architecture was a bit less constrained. Nintendo on the other hand have always designed their systems with fairly rigid rules and that's more suited to the Japanese mentality which favors strictly following instructions. on SNES they even deliberately banned developers from going over the sprite scanline limit because they thought sprite dropout was unsightly while Sega dgaf.
I had a similar thought process as well. With the Nintendo Mentality, you get well crafted but somewhat samey games, like Secret of Mana, Chrono trigger, the Final Fantasies, and the like, where's on Sega you'd get Sonic, the Ooze, Comix Zone. Then again, some creators could push the limits with creativity, like Earthbound or Ranger X respectively.
You listed three RPGs that play and feel very different
There's a bit more to it than just that. SEGA developed tools like GEMS specifically for western devs who were unfamiliar with the hardware and made a lot of deals with American celebrities to help market the hardware. Nintendo did none of this, because they basically didn't have to, but it ended up working out in SEGA's favor in the long run, especially for western devs.
EA decided to develop MD games before any of this even happened. I will note that Western-developed SNES games are really shit, arguably worse than Western NES games which at least still had some decent efforts here and there.
Rival to Nintendo’s COALS system
The SNES had a modern sound chip, musicians didn't need some software hack job to make music with it.
>The SNES had a modern sound chip
lol
Reminder to anyone in this thread that this is just cherry-picking and that you can do the same with any retro console
Sounds fine on real hardware.
>This is the full soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball on the SEGA Genesis. It was recorded from a real SEGA Genesis model 1 for the best audio quality
It doesn't matter how modern the SNES sound chip was because Nintendo didn't release sound tools, programmers had to send in their midi tunes to them and Nintendo sent them back binary blobs with the music.
Western devs didn't have sound programmers, they had musicians who came up with tracks on their synths but didn't know anything about coding. So Sega made GEMS which basically allowed them to make a music on their synth and immediately have it play on the Genesis. This sped up development greatly.
The problem was that the musicians still did not know how to program and 99% of them never bothered to also create custom instruments for their songs. The few ones who actually did do this ended up making the most baller music on the console (Ecco 2, Comix Zone)
>GEMS
>specifically for western devs who were unfamiliar with the hardware
What? The Z80 that drove the sound system was very well known. The PSG chip was one of the more common sound chips used in computers prior to the SoundBlaster, and the Yamaha FM chips weren't uncommon either. No dev in the 80's who dealt with audio would have been confused by any of the audio hardware in the Genesis.
So tell me why they made GEMS then
Western devs sucked ass at FM (witness Doom’s farty OPL2 FM driver) and preferred pitched sample playback, especially yuro devs. Japan had some real talent when it came to FM
>Western devs sucked ass at FM
Not really. They just preferred music with hard hitting bass sounds. The FM had shit sounding bass that sounds like fart on emulators.
>witness Doom
That port was just shit all around.
>Japan had some real talent when it came to FM
They had little talent when it came to music writing unfortunately.
>The FM had shit sounding bass
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
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If you’d said GEMS bass sounds like shit, you might have more of a case. But EWJ was GEMS.
>i only ever played games on shitty emulators
(You) problem
Dooms OPL2 music is great. Even when playing source ports, I always choose OPL2 emulation.
>The Z80 that drove the sound system was very well known. The PSG chip was one of the more common sound chips used in computers prior to the SoundBlaster, and the Yamaha FM chips weren't uncommon either.
In Japan. This is about western developers.
I'd say this is the main reason.
Yeah exactly, off the shelf components and well known development tools. Same reason it is easy to code for today.
I was always under the impression that apart from devs like EA doing rush jobs to port Amiga games or Euro devs doing the same but with better quality that most devs bet that Snes would take over so supported that more and then did stuff for Sega when they realized they weren't just going to go away.
Ocean and Acclaim seemed to make games for Snes first then do a rush port if at all.
I think the reason the Genesis has more homebrew is that it was neglected after the Saturn while Snes kept going and fans want to fix that.
EA already had dev tools from Amiga since they expected Amiga to be more successful.
C64 and Snes have almost the same cpu instructions so C64 would have jumped over easily. Super Turrican series is very nicely programmed.
>le cpu instructions maymay
lmao that in 2024 homosexuals are still outing themselves as codelets with this
MD just has more raw power and is easier to code for. Couple that with huge cart sizes and you can get some pretty modern-indie-looking games. You started to see the console going this way in the last couple years of its life, with brilliantly animated titles, but then 32-bit came along.
Any Western developed computer or console was usually fairly free-form and offers you a lot of leeway in how it can be used. Atari systems, C64, Amiga, PCs, etc. Either they have custom chips with a lot of exploitable bugs or it's like a PC or ZX Spectrum with a simple frame buffer you can use however.
The SNES had the bad luck to come out at the point where they had the Japanese market figured out and what they determined is that Japanese wanted to play a lot of slow, tedious RPGs and strategy games.
That's underselling it. It was no different in the West where everyone played slow tedious grognard dungeon crawlers on home computers. Japan however gravitated towards consoles for several reasons one of them being cramped Japanese homes.
The Mega Drive has a much faster CPU (several times faster), higher resolution, better sprite capabilities, and better audio. Not to mention the far better development tools and communities. What's the point of developing SNES games instead? It will just be more difficult, take more time, and you'll just end up with a shittier game than you would have had on the Mega Drive.
>better audio
I love Sega Genesis but that’s really not true until you get to Sega CD or if you mean the digitized samples/voices that were seldom used on the SNES.
>What's the point of developing SNES games instead?
Ask Japanese devs and consumers. The SNES won that gen hard in Japan, which is why it has tons of games that reflect nip taste (jarpigs for example)
i agree, i also think the games were suited to the american and european audience though as well which is why it ended up being so successful
>recommend Genesis games
>kid chameleon and vectorman 2
Not a bad list overall but I would swap a few of those out
I like this format but not this list. I'm gonna try to make a better one later today.
please do it was taken from the recommended wiki
like the jurassic park games are kinda shit, and stuff like that i'd replace with stuff like rolling thunder 3
>jurassic park games are kinda shit
Haven't played Rampage but the other JP is alright especially when playing as the raptor. Wouldn't call it shit but also wouldn't recommend to someone trying to play the best the system has to offer.
>tidying up the list
I think we need to land on a number like 20 or 25 and not 44 like the pic shows.
There is very little snes homebrew, period, so I don’t know what kind of comparison you’re trying to make
there's hardly any Japanese SNES homebrew either, they mostly only do Famicom stuff.
Most American and Euro programmers also didn't especially love the NES and were often on record as calling it outdated early 80s shit. A rather disproportionate amount of Western NES games were licensed titles showing that a lot of them viewed it as a quick money-making opportunity more than anything.
Cool theory brolet. It's like the flat earth theory of console warring.
I disagree it's well documented that western developers came up with an SDK because they couldn't afford an original one or the Japanese wouldn't release the official kit to them everything changed when EA became a system seller
there was no official Sega or Nintendo SDK, they just gave you a console and a programming manual and it was up to you to design your own tools
you're a moron and you can't code
I fricked your sister last night and tonight she’ll take it up the ass.
it's true btw people complained about NES sprite dropout so Nintendo banned SNES developers from going over the scanline limit while Sega and NEC dgaf
it's easier to get stuff up and running.
and yet most of the good games on Megadrive are from Japanese devs