Did you know that fishing games make up 1% of the Super NES' entire Western library? Or that sports games made up nearly a fifth of the catalogue? How about that the TG-16 didn’t have one single fishing or soccer game? It's data nuggets like this which make one gamer's project to play and compare each and every Western-released game in the SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, and TG-16 game libraries fascinating. The man behind this fourth-gen mayhem is Nathan Lockard, a video game and data enthusiast who wrote a book about gaming 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 uploading the entire archive to a blog. (And yes, we know, the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine's CPU was only 8-bit, but the 16-bit GPUs elevate it over the abilities of the NES and Master System, so let's roll with it!) Assigning a weighted score for Gameplay, Level Design, Theme, Art Style, and Sound Design, which totted up to an out-of-100 review score, Nathan has evaluated the best and worst home console games of the fourth generation, along with a metric ton of mediocrity. The short reviews are presented in note form, with the scores and data gathered from them generally taking.