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 precedence over the prose.
"The reviews are full of typos and incomplete sentences, but I don't care. The notes are gravy on top of the categorical scores assigned to each game." So, did this endeavour mean playing every game to completion? Er, no — that would be unmanagably time-consuming for over 1500 games.
Detailing his methodology , every game was given "at least 30 minutes of playtime," with some genres (Adventure, Strategy, RPG) demanding longer. "Any less, and I wouldn't feel I could give a proper evaluation; any more, and I would never finish the project.".
