Did you know that fishing games make up 1% of the entire Western Super NES library? Or that sports games were almost invented fifth catalog? How about if TG-16 didn’t have a single fishing or soccer match?
It’s data like this that makes a fascinating single-player project to play and compare every single western-released game in the SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, and TG-16 game libraries.
The man behind this fourth-generation mayhem is Nathan Lockard, a video game and data enthusiast who wrote a book about games before working on Nintendo Power in the late 90s. And if his name sounds even more familiar, it might ring a bell from his recent Nintendo Life articles.
A veteran of the 16-bit era, he decided that existing datasets were insufficient and took it upon himself to play and score 1,515 games — that’s 716 SNES, 704 Genesis, and 95 TG-16 titles — released between 1989 and 1998, recently uploaded the entire archive to the blog. (And yes, we know, the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine’s CPU was only 8-bit, but 16-bit GPUs elevate it to the capabilities of the NES and Master System, so let’s get on with it!)
Assigning a weighted score for gameplay, level design, theme, art style, and sound design, leading to a score out of 100, Nathan ranked the best and worst games for fourth-generation home consoles, along with a metric ton of mediocrity. Brief accounts are given in the form of notes, with the scores and data gleaned from them generally taking precedence over the prose.
“The reviews are full of typos and unfinished sentences, but I don’t care. The notes are the gravy of the categorical scores assigned to each game.”
So, did this endeavor mean playing every game to the end?
Um, no — that would take an inordinate amount of time for over 1,500 games. Detailing his methodology, each game was given “at least 30 minutes of gameplay”, with some genres (Adventure, Strategy, RPG) requiring longer. “Anything less, I wouldn’t feel like I could give a proper estimate; anything more, and I’d never finish the project.”