Did you know that fishing games make up 1% of the entire Super NES Western library? Or that sports games make up nearly one over five of the category? What about TG-16 without any football or fishing?
Data like this makes the project of playing and comparing every Western-released game in a gamer’s SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, and TG-16 game library fascinating.
The man behind this fourth-generation chaos is Nathan Lockard, a video game and data enthusiast. who wrote a book about the game before working at Nintendo Power in the late 90s. And if his name sounds more familiar, it might recall His recent article on Nintendo Life.
A veteran of the 16-bit era, he decided that the existing data sets were not enough and took it upon himself to play and score 1,515 games—that’s 716 SNES games, 704 Genesis games, and 95 TG-16 games—released between 1989 and 1998, recently uploaded to entire archive into a blog. (And yes, we know, the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine’s CPU is only 8-bit, but the 16-bit GPU puts it well ahead of the NES and Master System, so let’s get started!)
Nathan has reviewed the best and worst home console games of the fourth generation, along with a ton of trivia, by assigning weighted scores to Gameplay, Level Design, Theme, Art Style, and Sound Design, which add up to a score out of 100, along with a ton of trivia. The short reviews are presented in note format, with the scores and data gleaned from them often taking precedence over the prose.
“The reviews are full of typos and incomplete sentences, but I don’t care. The notes are just an addition to the graded score assigned to each game.”
So, does this effort mean playing every game?
Well, no — that would take an unmanageable amount of time for over 1500 games. His details MethodologyEach game was given “at least 30 minutes of playtime,” with some genres (Adventure, Strategy, Role-Playing) requiring more time. “Any less, and I wouldn’t be able to give a proper review; any more, and I’d never finish the project.”
