One Man’s Quest to Review Every 16-Bit Game

I’ve played, reviewed, and documented my thoughts about every single game that was released in North America during the 16-bit era. Crazy, right? That’s 716 Super Nintendo, 704 Sega Genesis, and 95 TurboGrafx-16 games, for a grand total of 1,515 fourth-generation titles.

Obviously, this begs two questions:

• Why would anyone undertake such a time-consuming and fruitless project, and
• What did you learn, you NERD?!

Why would you do such a thing?

My goal in playing all these games was to create an ordinally ranked, best-to-worst list of every 16-bit game. I also wanted to answer age-old questions like “Is Inspector Gadget better than Burning Force?” I began the project on a whim and initially set out only to play and review every SNES game. Before long I realized that this was an opportunity to complete a task I had begun 30 years earlier when I wrote a book called The Good, the Bad, and the Bogus. 

Published in 1994, my book reviewed 728 games for the SNES, Genesis, and Sega CD. This was long before emulation became a thing so I was operating under the constraints of print and physical media: I only knew about games that were mentioned in gaming magazines, and I could only play those games that were available to rent at my local video and gaming stores. Let’s just say I wasn’t able to track down copies of Hagane or Crusader of Centy.

Thankfully, those constraints are a thing of the past!

Emulation made it easy to track down and review every game from that generation and complete the project I started all those years ago.

Keep in mind that I got started on this project in 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, so it was also motivated by profound boredom. We won’t talk about those lip sync videos I made around the same time.

The Review Process

At first glance, reviewing every game from one of the earlier gaming generations doesn’t sound like a daunting task. They’re games, after all, and games are fun, right? And there aren’t that many to review. It’s a finite list, at least.

I pity the fool who seeks to review every game that can be played on the Switch, or every movie or episode of original content created for Netflix, but taking on the SNES, Genesis, and TG-16 libraries can’t be all that bad.

To be honest, that’s all true. One-thousand five-hundred and fifteen isn’t an inconsequential number, but it’s doable.

My goal was to give every game at least 30 minutes of playtime before rendering my righteous judgment upon it, so we’re only talking about a minimum commitment of 760 hours, plus the time it takes to take notes and contemplate my ratings. Some genres like Adventure, Strategy, and RPGs required an hour or two of playtime but every game was given at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted playtime. Any less and I don’t feel I could give a proper evaluation; any more and I would never finish the project.

Methodology

Each game was graded against five categories, which I feel are self-explanatory so I won’t, yaknow, try to explain each one:

• Gameplay (x10)
• Level Design (x5)
• Theme (x1)
• Art Style (x2)
• Sound Design (x2)

The number next to each category is a weighting which acknowledges how much that category affects a game’s quality. Gameplay is by far the most important factor in a game’s quality while the Theme of a game (story, characters, setting) is an order of magnitude less important. And so on.

Each game was graded against the five categories using a 0 to 5 scale. Only the worst offenders were given a zero while truly exceptional examples were awarded a five. These scores were then multiplied by the corresponding weight and then totaled up to arrive at a final score. It’s possible for a game to earn a score that is any whole number between 0 and 100. No more, no less, and no decimals.

The Best…and Worst

At this point you’re probably wondering which game earned the highest score and thus is “da best.” For that matter, which game sucked so hard that it earned the lowest score? If you’re anything like me, you probably paged down a couple of times to look for a top X games list to comb through and get angry about.

As tempting as it is to launch into that argument, that’s not really the point of this post. Instead I want to share the journey that brought me to this chart:

That mess of green lines isn’t a Game Boy screenshot – it’s a visualization of the number of games which achieved every score from 0 to 100. Or to be more exact, from 2 to 100, as no 16-bit game was insufferable enough to score 0 or 1 in my eyes. On the other hand, six games scored a perfect 100. The exact list of games at each rank would require an entire tome to share, so let’s just focus on the process and I’ll share a few meta observations I observed from this project.

You Cheated, Didn’t You?

What?! I would never! Well, maybe a little bit here and there, depending on how you define “cheating.”

• Did you use “real” hardware?  Nope. I’m a collector so I do have the original hardware, but for this project I used emulation – I played the SNES games on an Analogue Super NT with an FXPAK PRO flash card, for Genesis it was Analogue Mega SG with an Mega Everdrive X7 flash card, and for the Turbografx-16 (and some SNES and Genesis) it was an Anbernic RG351P handheld running 351ELEC. To further discredit me, I played the Super NT and Mega SG on a 48-inch, high resolution flatscreen display. My CRT in the basement did not participate.
• Did you use save states?  Sometimes. The 30 minutes per-game limitation didn’t always permit me the time necessary to git gud at each game so in some cases I used save states to access more than a single impossible first level. So sue me.
• Did you use walkthroughs/FAQs?  Again, sometimes. The adventure, strategy, and RPG games oftentimes got the best of me although I’d say I used a guide infrequently and only on the most baffling titles (I’m looking at you SOS, Battle Master, and Herzog Zwei). I can only hope that these titles came with a massive instruction manual back in the day.
• Did you beat every game?  Heck no! Are you nuts? That’s a project for someone far more dedicated than me. Hit up TheMexicanRunner with that idea.
• Did you use cheats?  Nope.
• What a minute, how did you play lightgun games on an HD monitor?  Ok you got me. I played them on my PC using RetroArch and a mouse.

Fascinating. So what did you learn?

Oh yeah! I nearly forgot. Without further ado, let’s jump into a few things I learned after 800+ hours of playing 16-bit titles.

The Upper Echelon

Maybe this is true of all console generations, but truly great 16-bit games are few and far between. For every stone-cold classic like Super Mario World, I had to slog through dozens of mediocre-to-awful titles. That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of good games, but the true crème de la crème from this era is sitting atop an enormous pile of unremarkable plastic.

Hidden Gems

Even with a glut of bad games, there were quite a few hidden gems that I either didn’t remember from back in the day, or I had never given a proper chance. Games like Lufia 2, Run Saber, and Phantasy Star IV are awesome and not well-known, but the likes of Inspector Gadget, Mr. Nutz, Street Racer, and Dynamite Headdy have been in my blindspot for 30+ years. Heck, the entire library of TG-16 games may as well be considered hidden, so every good game on the system qualifies as a hidden gem. Even so, there were a few games that came out of nowhere to surprise me, like Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, Cratermaze, Side Arms, and Legend of Hero Tonma.

The 90’s were weird

The video game industry was barely in its adolescence when the 90’s rolled around. Genres were popping in and out of existence during this era as developers experimented with new and sometimes nutty ideas. Unfortunately, experimentation and novelty didn’t always equate to fun. Sega’s first-party library is particularly eclectic, with a number of games that defy genre norms. Titles like Ecco the Dolphin and Comix Zone left a strong impression, but for the most part didn’t score high on my rankings.

Have, or Have Not Aged Well

When it comes to aging well, they say you should embrace a healthy lifestyle, stay socially connected, and nurture a positive attitude. For 16-bit video games, I’d say that all you really need is impeccable gameplay. Also, leaving out the 90’s edgy attitude is also highly recommended.

The gameplay in many genres is as playable today as it was back in the twentieth century. Platformers and puzzlers are standout examples. On the flipside, the technology of the day simply wasn’t ready for genres like strategy, racing, flight simulators, and first-person shooters, among others. This was several years before full motion video, true 3D environments, and analog controls would appear on home consoles. Even some genres like RPGs, which had numerous standout titles, aren’t as playable as their modern counterparts due to the lack of quality-of-life features that we take for granted these days.

Not many RPGs 

Speaking of RPGs, I was surprised by how few there were in the fourth generation! The SNES is fondly remembered as an RPG powerhouse, but it turns out that there are only 27 total RPGs and only 15 of those are JRPGs. Several of those JRPGs are timeless masterpieces, but anyway you look at it, there aren’t many of them. The Super Famicom’s library was absolutely flush with RPGs but the SNES had more quality than quantity going for it. The Genesis, meanwhile, had half as many (only 14) and only 5 were JRPGs! Poor TG-16 gamers only saw two dungeon crawlers.

Pet Peeves

When you perform a task repeatedly, you start to notice trends. This happens even while playing video games. Over the course of this project I noticed a lot of common features, behaviors, and quirks showing up in a lot of different games. The most annoying of these became soul-crushing, rage-inducing pet peeves. I even wrote a long explanation of each one, with notable examples for each one. If I can muster the courage I might even write an expanded blog post about them. For now, I’ll just list off a few of the key offenders:

• Respawning enemies
• Poor hit detection
• Enemies without collision
• No i-frames after taking damage
• No map
• Damage from water drops
• Short draw distance
• The David Perry camera
• Digitized or prerendered sprites
• Blind jumps
• Poor visual language for platforms and enemies
• Bosses and other enemies with no health bar or other indication of taking damage
• Unreadable HUDs, especially a face for a health meter

I have another dozen annoyances I could add, but my blood is boiling at this point so I’ll stop. Let’s pivot to something happier, shall we?

A handful of developers and publishers ruled the generation

This will shock no one, but Konami made some seriously great games in the 16-bit era. In fact, the collective library produced by Konami and their unofficial offshoot studio, Treasure, are arguably the best output of any publisher. Contra 3 & Hard Corps, TMNT IV/Hyperstone Heist, Gunstar Heroes, Castlevania IV & Bloodlines, Dynamite Headdy, Tiny Toons, Ristar, Sparkster/Rocket Knight, and yes, even McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure are all wonderful titles with incredible graphics and engaging gameplay. The list goes on and on. Capcom and Nintendo were also publishers who cranked out hit after hit, minus those awful sports titles, of course. It’s a shame that there weren’t more publishers as talented as this trio producing games in the early 90s.

TG-16 is the Gamecube of the 16 bit era

The PC Engine was massively successful in Japan, but it struggled mightily as the TurboGrafx-16 over here in the States. Its lack of success and poor third-party support resulted in a higher percentage of its games being good when compared to the SNES or Genesis. Much like the Gamecube after it, there were a bunch of great exclusive titles that were missed by a generation of gamers.

Wrap-up

I could go on but I’ll wrap this up.

It wasn’t always fun, but I’m glad I completed this project. I might even recommend it if you’re a massive fan of a given console or generation of video game history. Drop a comment below, or hit me up if you want some advice on how to get started.

I’ve long said that the Super Nintendo is my favorite 16-bit console of all time, and now, having sampled everything that the SNES, Genesis, and TG-16 have to offer, I can make that statement with conviction. That’s a satisfying feeling. 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, Inspector Gadget is better than Burning Force. But surprisingly, both games are fun!