Though the music for Alien 3 and Lemmings does sound awesome.Īs far as NES goes, I have never even seen one, none of my friends (I'm in the UK) had one.
It sounds better to me than SMS sounds in general. I agree with the earlier posts that the sound is a little crappy for the SMS I came to 8 bit console gaming with the Game Gear, and while I was amazed by the graphics I was always a bit puzzled by the fact my old Commodore 64 could make such great music. I like it when the 8 bit version is markedly different from the 16 bit. I've never seen the above Aladdin game for MS, it looks very nice, and the perspective effects look ace on those level one buildings. (all three US ones), Kirby's Adventure, Startropics, Gradius, Mega Man 4, Mega Man 2, Crisis Force, Zelda 1, Metal Storm, Rolling Thunder, TMNT III: The Manhattan Project SMS - The Ninja, Zaxxon 3-D, Ys I, Golvellius, Power Strike, Outrun, the light-gun games (better than the NES ones overall!), Sonic the Hedgehog (1 only, others are subpar), Power Strike II, World Grand Prix So yeah, at its best the SMS is okay, but the NES won for a reason, that's for sure.Īs for my favorite games on each platform. This is a horrible, annoying design decision! It's worst for games like Golvellius that want you to actually use the pause button for stuff (switching items in Golvellius's menu, for instance), but for any game, it's a problem. But even with a Genesis controller, it's still got the same bizarre design flaw that the Atari 7800 also shares, of putting the pause button on the console itself. and yeah, those few SMS games that require SMS controllers are kind of annoying. The SMS is okay, and has some good games, but compared to the NES, or the 4th gen consoles it competed against in Europe, it doesn't match up.Īlso hurting it is its controller - the SMS controllers are all awful! It's fortunate that most SMS games work with Genesis controllers, because the SMS's own pads are really quite poor. I generally do prefer the 4th gen consoles to the 3rd gen ones, though - I'd put the SNES, Genesis, and TG16 all ahead of the NES, for instance. There are some greats there for sure, maybe most notably Power Strike II, though. well, we got some of those games on the Game Gear, and I at least don't like plenty of them - Sega outsourced a lot of its '90s GG/SMS games to mediocre teams like Aspect, after all. And even including the Japan/Europe/Brazil exclusives. Well, at least Sega eventually turned things around with the Genesis.īut anyway, the US SMS library is okay, but is pretty mediocre compared to the amazing NES library. The SMS had a better game library than the Atari 7800, for sure, but the 7800 sold probably twice as much as the SMS did anyway.
In the US it lasted a year and a half past that, but still the system did poorly, of course - Sega was well behind in third place (out of three) that gen.
This is very definitely true in Japan, where the SMS (Sega Mark III) only lasted four years, seeing its last new game release in late 1989. The FM addon helps, but that was only released in Japan, and not all games support it.Īs for games, the NES crushes the SMS no contest. It is disappointing that its audio hardware isn't so great, though the NES has better audio than the SMS. The SMS was a much stronger effort, but given that it released in in Japan 2 1/2 years after the SG-1000. Remember, Sega's first console, the SG-1000, had released the same week as the NES did in Japan in '83, but its dated Colecovision-based hardware wasn't even close to the NES in power, and Nintendo quickly crushed Sega. but it better have! The SMS released two and a half years after the NES, and was made specifically to compete against the NES. Well, as far as the hardware goes, the SMS has better graphics than the NES, of course.