I stopped reading right there...and not just because it was the end of your post. And Genesis > SNES, but N64 was a heck of a video gaming memory.
What makes Genesis > than SNes? The crappy graphics? Lack of great gem games? Awful FM synth-sound without good sample capability? Lack of memory?
Lack of colors? Awful conversions?
Mega Drive / Genesis had some good games, of course. And some of them even had almost tolerable music and/or sounds. But come on.
You can't just make a statement like that and expect people to simply blindly accept it as the truth. It's like saying that a bicycle is faster than a
Ferrari, and leave it at that. Sure, a bicycle can have it's moments, it can certainly be better than Ferrari if you are going to travel inside a
forest on a narrow path, or if you want to exercize while moving. If you want to see the sceneries, if you want to be able to go at your own pace,
taking a break any time you want, etc. Bicycle can even be faster in situations where you can take shortcuts that are too narrow for a car to fit, and
so on.
But to just make a claim like that.. so typical, and so annoying. Something is better than something else. That's often not how it works, because
there are many ways to compare those things.
Genesis can be better if you want to play Sonic and Streets of Rage games, and it certainly deserves it's place in the console world. I like the
console and many of it's games, and play those games from time to time.
Overall there's really no way anyone could rationally say that Genesis is better than SNes. SNes had Zelda, all the Mario games, F-Zero, and the best
Castlevania versions. On top of that, it had a lot of other things that the Genesis just couldn't compete with.
Let's look at FACTS now:
1) Memory.
GENESIS:
Memory: 64 kB + 64 kB video RAM + 8 kB work RAM
SNES:
Memory: 128 kB + 64 kB video RAM + 64 kB Audio RAM
What do you know. That 'inferior' machine has more memory than the machine you said is better! Well, maybe it's just an isolated incident (though
memory matters a LOT in the 16-bit console world!)
Winner: SNES!
2) Palette.
Genesis: 64 or 183 (shadow/highlight mode) out of 512 possible colors
SNes: 256 or 2048 out of 32768 possible colors. That's more than 32 thousand.
Again, SNes wins clearly. Hm, a weird "inferior" machine, when it simply keeps winning all the battles. Shouldn't something that's so easily a worse
console be actually LOSING these things? Weird.
And of course the number of colors and palette make a HUGE difference in the 16-bit console world, and in the visual graphics and effects. More
colors, better-looking games, more fun to play. Together with larger memory, this would already guarantee the win, but let's go on, because your claim
was indeed annoying and based on pure ignorance. I won't deny ignorance, I will try to enlighten you so you wouldn't HAVE ignorance anymore.
Winner: SNES!
3) Resolutions.
Genesis: 256 x224, 256x448, 320x224, 320x448, 256x240, 256x480, 320x240, 320x480.
SNes: 256x224, 512x224, 256x239, 512x239, 512x448, 512x478
These games didn't really utilize the higher resolutions much, so this comparison is slightly irrelevant. Nintendo always uses such weird resolutions
anyway that it's a pain in the ass in the modern times, except with a real machine or a really capable (supporting really low resolutions) gfx card.
But..
Winner: SNES!
4) Maximum amount of sprites.
GENESIS: 80 or 64 (depending on the mode)
SNES: 128
On top of all this, SNes has EXTRA effects that Genesis simply doesn't have (and consequently, you don't see much in the Genesis games).
- Up to 4 planes of backgrounds, each up to 1024x1024 pixels in size.
- Pixelization (mosaic) per background
- Color addition and subtraction
- Clipping windows (per background, affecting color, math or both)
- Scrolling per 8x8 tile
- Mode 7 matrix operations
WINNER: SNES!
5) Sound.
Genesis: A crappy and obsolete 5 channel Yamaha YM2612 FM synth chip, and TI 4 channel PSG. End result: horrible sounds that lack in number of
channels, sound quality, and every darn thing. Even the early PC Adlib games have super-fantastic sound world compared to this atrocity. The worst
sound thing ever invented after the Atari ST and Spectrum sound chips.
SNes: Sony SPC700, Sony DSP (an actual DSP, do you hear?).
16-bit ADPCM, 8 channels - that's EIGHT CHANNELS of 16-bit sound!
Output: 32 kHz 16-bit STEREO (Genesis can't even dream of stuff like this)
Effects: ADSR envelope, frequency scaling and modulation (gaussian interpolation), echo (!), 8-tap FIR filter, noise generation (gotta love the SNes
noise sound, masterfully used for example in Chrono Trigger, another superior game that the Genesis doesn't have)
So. SNes is better in EVERYTHING, and it has basically better game library as a result - or anyway. Genesis only has slightly faster CPU, which can't
compensate.
SNES is vastly better. Apart from faster CPU (which doesn't mean anything, because it can't compensate for all the "lacks"), Genesis doesn't have
ANYTHING that would even compare to the SNes.
You can take any angle - the game library, visuals, sound world and musics, game styles, critical reviews, audience reception, units sold,
playability, "feel/atmosphere", you name it - and SNes has beaten Genesis in all of those. It doesn't even come close! They are not even equal
combatants! It's like Antonio Inoki vs. a random feminist who thinks he's as good as the 'boys'. Yeah, the liars and disinformatists will be loud and
spout all kinds of clichés and lies, but when the fight starts, it doesn't really take more than a second to see who the real winner actually is.
Don't believe the hype. Check the facts, familiarize yourself with the systems and then see the truth without any personal 'nostalgy bias'. Then you
will see that Genesis never had a chance.
Btw, you might also enjoy the slightly biased (towards Genesis, that is - it is shown to being close to equal with the SNes, which it of course isn't,
wasn't and can't ever be) AVGN 'review' of both systems. He is wishy-washy, 'not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings', so it's not completely truthful a
video, but it should give you some idea as to what you are dealing with.
Genesis is a fun machine with many good games, but it certainly cannot beat SNes in any area (having a faster CPU isn't really an 'area' that
mattered, because it never influenced games in a way that SNes couldn't have kept up with).
SNes > Genesis.