Comparison of 4th generation ("8/16-bit") system hardware

[saturndual32]

LOL at all of you fanboys praising those gay consoles SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, Neo Geo, etc. My Funcom Super A Can blows them all out of the water, now that 16 bit power. I am at the top of the 16 bit food chain with this wonderful console.

[Drakon]

LOL at all of you fanboys praising those gay consoles SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, Neo Geo, etc. My Funcom Super A Can blows them all out of the water, now that 16 bit power. I am at the top of the 16 bit food chain with this wonderful console.

It's not about "power" idiot it's about how fun the games are. Why don't people understand such a simple concept...

[Kamahl]

It's not about "power" idiot it's about how fun the games are. Why don't people understand such a simple concept...

... You need to go read about the Super A Can to get the sarcasm .

Also to agostinho and evilevoix. You guys are mixing up library quality with graphical quality. If we stick to the genres that are well represented on both consoles, the PCE wins out graphically (shooters, fighters, strategy games).

On RPGs if we count crusader of centy, brave battle saga and beyond oasis (So the MD has a fighting chance, I won't count Pier Solar since it's a homebrew and a freaking 64 meg cart), the PCE still wins.

If we go to sidescrolling adventures, the PCE can do them rather well, one only needs to look at blood gear which is pretty much on par graphically with MW 4 (surpassing it in certain areas, worse in others)

If we go to action games, the PCE has a few that look great (Castlevania Rondo of Blood and Kaze Kiri). These games can't hope to compete in animation with western developed games on big carts. You might fault the PCE hardware here but the Arcade Card or a big cart could do them, since the level of animation in games like sapphire is actually superior.

You can't fault the hardware for lacking "animation" in some genre, when it showed that level of animation in another. If it can do it, it can do it.

Now if we go to platformers, it loses, badly. It's the one genre where a lack of a second BG layer kills it completely (though there are tricks that can be done to fix this, I really need to write a demo sometime). Interestingly enough, that demo would be abusing the processor and the animation capabilities. The 2 things the system is considered poor at.

Remember, this is "Comparison of 4th generation system hardware", not who has the better library.

[Drakon]

Oh sorry I tried looking it up and found nothing. Think I found it now. A taiwanese company actually tried to make a 16 bit console at the end of the 16 bit era....uhm...whoops?

If we're just going to compare hardware then why not just pull out spec sheets and call it a day? How games made use of the hardware is kind of important too.

[Kamahl]

If we're just going to compare hardware then why not just pull out spec sheets and call it a day? How games made use of the hardware is kind of important too.

Of course you gotta use games, but you can't focus on library omissions. If you're comparing "animation", it doesn't matter in what genre it is. If a game does crazy amounts of animation, then other games could too. The capability is there. Saying "It's worse because it can't do animation like Earthworm Jim", and justifying it with "Earthworm Jim isn't there", doesn't make much sense.
Kinda like saying "The mega drive can't do mode-7 like in axelay" when it can because it's not mode-7 at all (Sonic 3D blast, the clouds in High Seas Havoc). Or the less ignorant "The mega drive can't do scaling like Bowser in Super Mario Bros" when you have a scaling boss in puggsy.
If it exists, it exists.

[Barone]

Also to agostinho and evilevoix. You guys are mixing up library quality with graphical quality.

WHAT? I made a simple comment about animation, you disagreed, told me to look at the dates and I pointed them to you.
You showed no examples, neither defended what you said in the first place... And a lot of bullshit now? C'mon!

If we stick to the genres that are well represented on both consoles, the PCE wins out graphically (shooters, fighters, strategy games).

Well, wrong. Aside from PCE fans, the rest of the world pass fighters with flat backgrounds and prefer to go with the ones that have parallax and some animation in the backgrounds.

On RPGs if we count crusader of centy, brave battle saga and beyond oasis (So the MD has a fighting chance, I won't count Pier Solar since it's a homebrew and a freaking 64 meg cart), the PCE still wins.

I never questioned that. YOU said that the MD RPGs looked like crap... Again, you said shit in the first place and now invented a new point.

You can't fault the hardware for lacking "animation" in some genre, when it showed that level of animation in another. If it can do it, it can do it.

Again, I didn't fault the hardware. I just said that for platformers it was not on par with MD and SFC in terms of animation; and it is not.
Now, read the shit you wrote in the first place and go back if you have arguments to defend that. Otherwise, I don't care...

Now if we go to platformers, it loses, badly. It's the one genre where a lack of a second BG layer kills it completely (though there are tricks that can be done to fix this, I really need to write a demo sometime). Interestingly enough, that demo would be abusing the processor and the animation capabilities. The 2 things the system is considered poor at.

The examples that I provided were not talking about parallax but I think you failed to understand and/or admit that PCE also loses in the foreground after 1992.

Demo? lol.
You can't consider PS in arguments but you want to use your demos...

[Kamahl]

WHAT? I made a simple comment about animation, you disagreed, told me to look at the dates and I pointed them to you.
You showed no examples, neither defended what you said in the first place... And a lot of bullshit now? C'mon!

Except I did.

Well, wrong. Aside from PCE fans, the rest of the world pass fighters with flat backgrounds and prefer to go with the ones that have parallax and some animation in the backgrounds.

Animation? Sure. Parallax? No. Which is why later Neo Geo fighters have barely any.

I never questioned that. YOU said that the MD RPGs looked like crap... Again, you said shit in the first place and now invented a new point.

No I said MD RPGs looked like crap and they do. PS IV looks really lame and so does Surging Aura, and those are the 2 best looking ones. Beyond Oasis and Crusader of Centy aren't RPGs, Brave Battle Saga came out in like 1998. Even if you count those, The color repetition in Crusader of Centy and Brave Battle Saga is really obvious, with BBS extremely so during the battles.

Again, I didn't fault the hardware. I just said that for platformers it was not on par with MD and SFC in terms of animation; and it is not.
Now, read the shit you wrote in the first place and go back if you have arguments to defend that. Otherwise, I don't care...

The first statement I made was that platformers weren't up to par, and only the really early stuff (like legendary axe) beat what was available on the genesis.

The examples that I provided were not talking about parallax but I think you failed to understand and/or admit that PCE also loses in the foreground after 1992.

Because the HuCard format died and the CD doesn't have enough ram. (With the arcade card it wins again, there's nothing on the genesis besides Soul Star that can compete with Sapphire)

Demo? lol.
You can't consider PS in arguments but you want to use your demos...

Just like PS proves the genesis can do mode-7, I can prove the PCE can do multi-directional parallax. This is different from proving the system held it's own at the time graphically.

[Barone]

Animation? Sure. Parallax? No. Which is why later Neo Geo fighters have barely any.

No PCE Arcade CD fighter is more impressive than Yuu Yuu Hakusho on the MD.
As for animation:

No I said MD RPGs looked like crap and they do. PS IV looks really lame and so does Surging Aura, and those are the 2 best looking ones. Beyond Oasis and Crusader of Centy aren't RPGs, Brave Battle Saga came out in like 1998. Even if you count those, The color repetition in Crusader of Centy and Brave Battle Saga is really obvious, with BBS extremely so during the battles.

I can't argue with mindless people...

(With the arcade card it wins again, there's nothing on the genesis besides Soul Star that can compete with Sapphire)

SoulStar is more impressive. You also disagree with that?
I also don't know anything similar to Wing Commander, Thunderhawk, Silpheed and Starblade on the PCE CD.

Just like PS proves the genesis can do mode-7, I can prove the PCE can do multi-directional parallax. This is different from proving the system held it's own at the time graphically.

I really don't care about such "proofs", really. If you make a game using that on the PCE for something "good", I will say "awesome" to you but if it's just a gimmick like the PS mini-game I don't care.

[saturndual32]

[QUOTE=Kamahl;505217]... You need to go read about the Super A Can to get the sarcasm .QUOTE]

Sarcasm?!..., i was dead serious Kamahl, LOL! Just kidding.
But seriously, have the A Can capabilities been well documented yet? And should we include it with the 5th generation systems, just like the Amstrad GX4000 was included in the 4th gen topic, due to release dates instead of overall capabilities?

[Kamahl]

No PCE Arcade CD fighter is more impressive than Yuu Yuu Hakusho on the MD.

In gameplay no, yu yu hakusho is better for sure, graphically? Yu Yu Hakusho has plenty of color problems and small sprites. PCE Arcade CD fighters are the best ports of their Neo Geo counterparts.

As for animation:

Really? Eternal Champions? The stiffest looking fighting game of all time? It surprises me there's so many frames of animation for it. And please, If you're gonna harp about animation like that I'll just point and laugh at the horrible color.

I can't argue with mindless people...

I know you guys have a lot of nostalgia for PS IV, I don't. If I see extreme tile repetition it looks bad to me.

SoulStar is more impressive. You also disagree with that?

No, which is why I explicitly stated it. But still, that's a game using addon hardware, while Sapphire could be done on a big cart.

I also don't know anything similar to Wing Commander, Thunderhawk, Silpheed and Starblade on the PCE CD.

Those games are using a scaling chip from a 1991 machine (almost 1992) with a 12.5 MHz 68000 (and look rather poor despite being 3D).
Silpheed looks great but it's still just an FMV game.

I really don't care about such "proofs", really. If you make a game using that on the PCE for something "good", I will say "awesome" to you but if it's just a gimmick like the PS mini-game I don't care.

It would actually work during gameplay, but it wouldn't be anything impressive compared to the genesis or worse, the SNES.

Sarcasm?!..., i was dead serious Kamahl, LOL! Just kidding.
But seriously, have the A Can capabilities been well documented yet? And should we include it with the 5th generation systems, just like the Amstrad GX4000 was included in the 4th gen topic, due to release dates instead of overall capabilities?

It's a 4th gen system anyway you look at it hehe. The GX4000 has 4th gen looking sprites, and the audio can be 4th gen too. Heck it's probably a better machine than the Atari-ST (and that's 4th gen).

[Black_Tiger]

I still like the last two backgrounds' effects.

They're neat, but could both be done as good as or better on a cart. The final boss bg is a waste since it is super repetitive and choppy and the entire fights chugs. If it just went with a pre-rendered animated bg, then it could look the same but run smoother/faster. The swirly background near the end doesn't do anything that Genesis cart games haven't done. Star Parodia for PCE does a similar swirly background effect, only with an extra swirling background layer of scrolling on top of it.

I'm thinking: "Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images to create an illusion of movement."

Yes, but those early games you listed don't have anything special animation-wise. Many NES games are on-par animation-wise.

Valis II, definitely no IMO. Neither Cyber Cross, but Bonk's Adventure looks good (certainly better than Alex Kidd on the MD, for an example). SonSon II doesn't look as good as Bonk's but the design is neat.

I don't think that those games are special animation-wise, they're just in that basic category of the games you listed. I think that the Genesis and SNES crush the PCE for platformers. I'm just pointing out that for the platformers the PCE does have, they do meet the low bar of animation quality for the time.

Anyway, thanks for the examples. Didn't know some of those games and now it's clear to me that in terms of platformer/action games MD only surpassed PCE/PCE CD after 1992 with the 8Mbit carts that were already using some better compression schemes than the earlier games.

No problem. I think that the MD surpassed the PCE/CD earlier than that, it's just animation-wise that the PCE had average examples up until then. But after 1992, the PCE received very few platformers at all.

IDK, I think you and Kamahl have a different concept of "good" animation. You're probably comparing it to the usual stuff on the PCE CD, like giant bosses with many moving parts and a lot of particles coming from them... That's also great in my book, but in this case I'm referring to how fluid each particle is animated in some spots of Bio-Hazard Battle. You won't find a screen full of them (most of the time), scrolling super fast but each object has several frames. That's what I'm talking about. The bosses don't look as good (well, they don't look good) as the regular enemies.
You ahve some good examples of what I said in this video.

Bio-Hazzard Battle does have nice consistent animation. I'm only responding to the 'nothing as good for PCE' comment. There are many PCE shooters that are at least on-par with BHB for overall animation and many that have more detailed, less abstract artwork.

This is true. That's one of the reasons that pushed me to build a circuit for overclocking. At least it's possible to overclock it, can't say the same about the SNES...
Bio-Hazard Battle is one of the games that I couldn't enjoy 100% before the slowdown, especially in the 2P mode which is really plagued.
The same for Steel Empire and Grind Stormer (this one is broken without extra power).
Not only for shooter but in all genres. And that's also thanks to one of the side effects of western support; several companies just didn't give a fuck about the game looking colorful, scrolling smoothly or running above 20fps (!!!).

Personally, I don't mind the kind of slowdown that Genesis games tend to have. It doesn't ruin the experience at all for me. I don't hate the SNES or its games with really bad slowdown, but games like Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts really do break the experience with that degree of slowdown. Games like that really would be more enjoyable with less slowdown.

I do think that this is one more factor which helps put into perspective how the unique strengths and weaknesses of the Genesis, SNES and PC Engine balance out. Contrast the difference in slowdown between the PCE and SNES and it's much harder to argue that the PCE is less 16-bit-console-class but the SNES is fully 16-bit quality.

Rainbow Islands on the MD sucks IMO but most of the MD fans overhype it all the time. The "exclusive" extra mode is a flickering fest and looks really bad IMO.
Surely PCE has more and better games in this genre, I was just saying that MD had more than nothing.

Yeah, I've heard people say this about the MD library in the past. One thing is that so many people don't even know that Snow Bros even exists. The other is how far anyone wants to stretch the definition of the unclear genre. Buster Bros for example would fall within this group of games better than any other genre I can think of.

I think you got it wrong. I was just defending a point. I like PCE's library a lot and put the system above SNES easily.
MD appeals more to my taste, of course, but it doesn't mean that I don't like PCE games, no matter what genre.

Yeah, but this tangent started as 'the PCE is somewhere between 8-bit and 16-bit quality". All three 16-bit consoles have libraries balanced in different ways, with the Genesis favoring popular genres of the Western regions where it was a success. That doesn't discount how impressive the PCE games from other genres are.

And many people would be wrong as the PCE is just an 8-bit console. A very very good 8-bit console, but 8-bit nonetheless.

I'm not going to go far into the explaining yet again what the term 16-bit means in these kinds of discussions. "16-bit" is the name of a generation of consoles that we are talking about. Once you get into classifying consoles by something irrelevant like the type of bit-ness of only the cpu, the Genesis and SNES are instantly terrible consoles compared to so much other "true" 16-bit hardware and the Intellivision becomes 16-bit and the Xbox becomes 32-bit.

If we're just going to compare hardware then why not just pull out spec sheets and call it a day? How games made use of the hardware is kind of important too.

There is so much more detail to how the hardware works that goes beyond any spec sheet. In discussions like this, programmers who know the hardware intimately often discuss the pros and cons of the inner workings that never come close to appearing on spec sheets. Even when hidden strengths and weakness are uncovered, in the end there is no clear cut across the board superior console and even if there was, that wouldn't be nearly as interesting as hearing about what makes each console unique.

Well, wrong. Aside from PCE fans, the rest of the world pass fighters with flat backgrounds and prefer to go with the ones that have parallax and some animation in the backgrounds.

I would have thought so, but am still surprised how much non-PCE fans still praise SFII'CE and all the mags bitd went on and on at how "arcade perfect" SSFIIT was for 3DO. The reason SSFIIT was so impressive is that the most important aspect of graphics is the actual graphics. Fighting games are a genre where layered backgrounds are the least important, as the screen barely scrolls at all. I think that if you sit the average person down and show them a few versions of the same game, that they will almost always be more impressed by colorful, shaded, detailed art with large and well-animated sprites over plain, lower-detail layered backgrounds with smaller choppy sprites. I really don't think that anyone would look at SSFIIT 3DO and SSFII for Genesis and SNES and not choose the 3DO version.

Anyway, the ACD Neo Geo fighters do have line scrolling floors and the Fatal Fury games have some parallax and all of the ACD fighters do have animation in the backgrounds.

No PCE Arcade CD fighter is more impressive than Yuu Yuu Hakusho on the MD.

The actual graphics of Yu Yu Hakusho, like the shading, color, detail.. barely looks 16-bit quality. It's still impressive for what it does well, but the graphic quality is terrible and it looks like a 16 color computer game depicted with dithering more than solid shades. Eternal Champions CftDS is impressive animation-wise. Personally, I don't like the art style, but it does have a lot of frames and well-done animation. But it also has more dithering than solid shades. The ACD fighting games are also loaded with animation, but it's used for large detailed colorful sprites. The Fatal Fury games are animated well, but also feature a second set of frames for the second play field, so it's actually double what you see.

No I said MD RPGs looked like crap and they do. PS IV looks really lame and so does Surging Aura, and those are the 2 best looking ones. Beyond Oasis and Crusader of Centy aren't RPGs, Brave Battle Saga came out in like 1998. Even if you count those, The color repetition in Crusader of Centy and Brave Battle Saga is really obvious, with BBS extremely so during the battles.

Those games still look good. Just because there are some PCE games that look better overall, it doesn't take anything away from other games. Genesis games still use lots of real artwork and arrange it in ways that looks more like an actual picture. SNES games almost always have very repetitive backgrounds that are arranged to look even worse than the bland non-art-looking artwork. Too early on, Square popularized abstract cgi-looking non-art and too many games ran wild with it. But even when games like Breath of Fire do use some nice looking art, it is repeated so much that at best, it looks like a cookie-cutter backgrounds and at worst simply a mess. Beyond Oasis always looks like a scene from a beautiful animated film. They also did a good job balancing out the low and dull colors and it perfectly suits the game. The most important part of visuals is how good they look on their own, not just when compared to other games.

[Kamahl]

Those games still look good. Just because there are some PCE games that look better overall, it doesn't take anything away from other games. Genesis games still use lots of real artwork and arrange it in ways that looks more like an actual picture. SNES games almost always have very repetitive backgrounds that are arranged to look even worse than the bland non-art-looking artwork. Too early on, Square popularized abstract cgi-looking non-art and too many games ran wild with it. But even when games like Breath of Fire do use some nice looking art, it is repeated so much that at best, it looks like a cookie-cutter backgrounds and at worst simply a mess. Beyond Oasis always looks like a scene from a beautiful animated film. They also did a good job balancing out the low and dull colors and it perfectly suits the game. The most important part of visuals is how good they look on their own, not just when compared to other games.

The point is that you can't go "The PCE is between NES and MD cuz there's no Earthworm Jim" when it beats the MD graphically in other genres. Not to mention the Amiga and the Atari-ST, both considered by everyone to be 4th gen.
Beyond Oasis is one of the best looking MD games and it still only goes toe to toe with Legend of Xanadu 2. How is that "Between the NES and MD"?
How is this between NES and MD?

Where's the "NES" part?

[Black_Tiger]

The point is that you can't go "The PCE is between NES and MD cuz there's no Earthworm Jim" when it beats the MD graphically in other genres. Not to mention the Amiga and the Atari-ST, both considered by everyone to be 4th gen.
Beyond Oasis is one of the best looking MD games and it still only goes toe to toe with Legend of Xanadu 2. How is that "Between the NES and MD"?
How is this between NES and MD?

Where's the "NES" part?

Well, the PC Engine can do as good as or better graphic quality (color/detail/shading) as the SNES (much better than Genesis). It can handle lots of action with minimal slowdown compared to Genesis and SNES. Fill screens with sprites of any size... I don't know why some people still try to discount it other than carrying over magazine-fueled prejudice from bitd. If these people hadn't been told by someone that the type of cpu inside is called "8-bit" and that that means something somehow, would they even be saying these kinds of things? I know many ignorant people play a few simple games (usually small HuCard roms) and then judge the entire library, but you could do the same thing with Genesis and SNES, which are capable of more than Ms Pac-Man and Space Invaders. So many hyped SNES games slowly move around only a few small sprites on par with NES and SMS games, but rarely do people say it's between NES and Genesis. With PC Engine though, even people who are aware of the hundreds of impressive games will still use the underutilized ones as proof of potential. It's totally backwards.

[Barone]

They're neat, but could both be done as good as or better on a cart. The final boss bg is a waste since it is super repetitive and choppy and the entire fights chugs. If it just went with a pre-rendered animated bg, then it could look the same but run smoother/faster. The swirly background near the end doesn't do anything that Genesis cart games haven't done. Star Parodia for PCE does a similar swirly background effect, only with an extra swirling background layer of scrolling on top of it.

Agreed.

Yes, but those early games you listed don't have anything special animation-wise. Many NES games are on-par animation-wise.

PCE's 1989 games don't have something like:
@29:32

I don't think that those games are special animation-wise, they're just in that basic category of the games you listed. I think that the Genesis and SNES crush the PCE for platformers. I'm just pointing out that for the platformers the PCE does have, they do meet the low bar of animation quality for the time.

Sure and I was agreeing with you.

No problem. I think that the MD surpassed the PCE/CD earlier than that, it's just animation-wise that the PCE had average examples up until then. But after 1992, the PCE received very few platformers at all.

Yep.

Bio-Hazzard Battle does have nice consistent animation. I'm only responding to the 'nothing as good for PCE' comment. There are many PCE shooters that are at least on-par with BHB for overall animation and many that have more detailed, less abstract artwork.

Yes, I knew that for "overall". But I was just pointing that specific kind of stuff (the "organic" animation).

Personally, I don't mind the kind of slowdown that Genesis games tend to have. It doesn't ruin the experience at all for me. I don't hate the SNES or its games with really bad slowdown, but games like Super Ghouls 'N Ghosts really do break the experience with that degree of slowdown. Games like that really would be more enjoyable with less slowdown.

Some Genesis games are hard to enjoy with the default amount of slowdown, like Zero Tolerance. The game is a solid FPS but not enjoyable at 10fps.
SNES... Well, I don't have patience for its loadings during the intro screens/logos in the games to begin with.

I do think that this is one more factor which helps put into perspective how the unique strengths and weaknesses of the Genesis, SNES and PC Engine balance out. Contrast the difference in slowdown between the PCE and SNES and it's much harder to argue that the PCE is less 16-bit-console-class but the SNES is fully 16-bit quality.

Sure, the SNES is the underdog in terms of performance most of the time IMO.

Yeah, I've heard people say this about the MD library in the past. One thing is that so many people don't even know that Snow Bros even exists. The other is how far anyone wants to stretch the definition of the unclear genre. Buster Bros for example would fall within this group of games better than any other genre I can think of.

Yep.

Yeah, but this tangent started as 'the PCE is somewhere between 8-bit and 16-bit quality". All three 16-bit consoles have libraries balanced in different ways, with the Genesis favoring popular genres of the Western regions where it was a success. That doesn't discount how impressive the PCE games from other genres are.

But that was not my quote...

I would have thought so, but am still surprised how much non-PCE fans still praise SFII'CE and all the mags bitd went on and on at how "arcade perfect" SSFIIT was for 3DO. The reason SSFIIT was so impressive is that the most important aspect of graphics is the actual graphics. Fighting games are a genre where layered backgrounds are the least important, as the screen barely scrolls at all. I think that if you sit the average person down and show them a few versions of the same game, that they will almost always be more impressed by colorful, shaded, detailed art with large and well-animated sprites over plain, lower-detail layered backgrounds with smaller choppy sprites. I really don't think that anyone would look at SSFIIT 3DO and SSFII for Genesis and SNES and not choose the 3DO version.

I totally disagree. Games are about movement not a beautiful static picture (except for point-and-click stuff).
SFIIT on the 3DO vastly benefits from the fact that both SNES and MD versions were poor and sounded really bad.

Anyway, the ACD Neo Geo fighters do have line scrolling floors and the Fatal Fury games have some parallax and all of the ACD fighters do have animation in the backgrounds.

Fatal Fury 2 backgrounds don't look good IMO. Andy's and Terry's relied a lot on the layered backgrounds, unlike you said above.
And, please, don't come with SNES and MD versions 'cause they look horrible thanks to Takara.
I'm not, by any means, denying that the PCE CD versions of the SNK fighters were MUCH closer to the arcade than the ones released for MD or SNES. I'm just pointing some problems.

The actual graphics of Yu Yu Hakusho, like the shading, color, detail.. barely looks 16-bit quality. It's still impressive for what it does well, but the graphic quality is terrible and it looks like a 16 color computer game depicted with dithering more than solid shades. Eternal Champions CftDS is impressive animation-wise. Personally, I don't like the art style, but it does have a lot of frames and well-done animation. But it also has more dithering than solid shades. The ACD fighting games are also loaded with animation, but it's used for large detailed colorful sprites. The Fatal Fury games are animated well, but also feature a second set of frames for the second play field, so it's actually double what you see.

Oh, man. You guys from the PCE world have this problem... You always use static images to defend the PCE versions. Really, you don't need that with me.
I know that 99.9% of PCE games look way better than the MD ones in terms of colors when you use screenshots from emulators. But you can't ignore that those games were played using composite and I play the dithered ones using it in my CRT TV, so they don't look like that. It doesn't make them any better than they are pixel per pixel, but I'm just questioning the way you're using those images as arguments since most of the players didn't see MD games that way.
And, again, games are always in movement. Yuu Yuu has way more dynamic content on the screen than any of the Arcade CD games, and the effects look neat when you're playing it on real hardware, with CRT TV and bla bla bla. And you can have 4 fighters on the same screen doing their special attacks all the time.
I never said that the colors were any great in Yuu Yuu.
MD games were dithered to appear more colorful on CRT TVs using composite, not to look great in emulator's unfiltered screenshots.
I will always agree with you if you say: "Arcade CD fighters will look awesome using component video while Yuu Yuu and EC will look like shit". But since I still can use composite the dithering doesn't break the graphical appeal of the game to me.
I also don't like the EC art design style at all. But we agree about the animation.

[Kamahl]

So many hyped SNES games slowly move around only a few small sprites on par with NES and SMS games, but rarely do people say it's between NES and Genesis. With PC Engine though, even people who are aware of the hundreds of impressive games will still use the underutilized ones as proof of potential. It's totally backwards.

Which is precisely my problem. Though agostinho isn't that at all, he just kinda showed up for the discussion for some reason.
Yes the genesis has better animated games. No the PCE doesn't have any problem animating games. My whole argument was that you can't really see the PCE's animation capabilities since the HuCard died and the CD-ROM doesn't have enough RAM. So saying stuff like "no game has animation on par with Earthworm Jim" is a bit meaningless, as no game under those circumstances could. Sapphire does animate a lot more things a lot faster than Earthworm Jim though, which should be enough "proof" that it's possible. You only need 1.

TL ; DR this whole thread, the PCE isn't anywhere near the NES. It lacks parallax while the genesis lacks color and the SNES a proper CPU.