Comparing the games the pc engine dominates(im only comparing to the snes and genesis) in a couple of areas, and these superiorities came along with the introduction of the cd especially the super cd format...it completely thrashed the competition when it came to action games, when I say action games im talking about games like horizontal and vertical shooters, side scrolling games like shinobi, castlevania, and contra, contra type games are only theoretical though.
Lets compare what many people believe to be the best 16 bit shooter,Thunderforce IV, it has around 450 frames of animation, give or take and about 13 back ground variations, now lets take winds of thunder, it has around 930 frames of animation and 44 back ground variations. The problem with card or cartridge shooters is that they range from 2 to 8 megs in memory, there is one exception and that's the 2nd paroduius game for the snes, it has a whopping 16 to 18 megs of memory, it has around 750 frames of animation and between 15 and 18 back ground variations, so as you can see much better than Thunderforce IV, there is another factor, size, sprite size, big sprites take more memory than tiny sprites, below are the regular enemies from WOT and Parodius 2, no bosses.
WOT
Parodius 2 snes
The most impressive action games are around 16 or a little over megs, like Batman & robin for the genesis, Dracula xx for the snes(yes Dracxx is one of the most impressive when it comes to sprite frames, Back ground variation and sprite size) etc, Castlevania Blood lines and Super castlevania both have around 650 frames of animation in total, the above games have about 1020 and 1030 total frames. The Batman game has between 1020 and 1050 frames of animation and 17 or 18 back ground variations, Rondo of blood has over 3000 frames of animation and 59 back ground variations, lets not forget that the pce has half a meg of memory for adpcm soundfx, which I have heard could also be used to store graphic info like sprite and tile sets, what that means is that these card and cartridge games have a good number of soundfx Rondo has a huuuuuge number of unique soundfx.....Rondo also has far more BG tile animation, on top of all of this, you also get what cds are known for cut scenes.
The sprites in Rondo are huge, SCIV, Bloodlines, Batman and robin etc don't even come close, the closest one infact is Dracxx, a lot of the enemies that were cut from dracxx were some of the largest sprites in rondo, the largest animated fx were also cut out, enemy attacks in Rondo of bloodl like lightning, skull projectiles, wave attacks and item crushes are much larger than any sprite found in SCIV, in other words Rondo of blood is pure magic.
Rondo
SCIV snes
While the PCE is my favorite system because action games are my favorite type of games, im not saying its the best system, because other genres are lacking on the super cd format, like side scrolling brawlers, one on one fighters, platform games like Yoshis island sonic 3 or ristar and platform shooters, which actually fall in the action game category, amazing games of this type could have been produced for this system like a contra game, but the system didn't get one nor did it get a brawler of the same quality of streets of rage 2 or 3 for the genesis or final fight 3 for the snes.
I haven't talked about the ACD, which took this crap to a whole new level, Fatal fury special is probably the most impressive game for the ACD, no gen or snes fighter even comes close when you look at sprite size, animation and so on, im tired but I might go into some of this furhter a little bit later.
