I only just realized that the NES’s standard display resolution is higher than the SNES’s.
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For what it’s worth though most NES games actually have the playfield at 256x224 so they effectively have the same resolution.
It’s amazing what a higher color palette can do for making graphics look higher res though.
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I don’t find that works for me.
Hm let’s see. For the games I care about at the current time, with black border areas cropped, the resolutions are:
NES:
Double Dragon 240x214
Double Dragon II 244x218
Double Dragon III 232x220
Mario Bros (EU Classic Serie) 256x207
Ms. Pac-Man (Tengen) 224x240
Ninja Gaiden 256x207
Renegade 248x223
SMB 256x240
Tetris 256x240 (although I actually viciously crop it down to nearly just playfield+score area size 256x159 ; D)
SNES:
Final Fight 3 (with “Optimized” romhack, which adds a few vertical lines to the playfield I think) 256x194 (that’s cropping the black borders off during actual beat-em-up gameplay, which probably cuts off a bit of the title and character select screen top and bottom)
Mr. Do 256x224
So eh oh my NES average resolution is 246x223, SNES is 256x209 – 54858 pixels vs 53504 pixels.
If I counted what I actually use for Tetris it’s…214 nes vertical average…52644 vs 53504 OOPS. ; D
Although uh okay getting desperate if I count just the games I’m actually playing ie not MB or SMB or Mr. Do and adding Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (J version of Renegade) then uh uh it’s 244x213 vs 256x194 ie 51972 vs 49664 whew my NES games win. Ahem. >_>
So apparently I’m just mad at Final Fight 3 for having a kinda small gameplay screen. ; D
If it had only put its HUD elements above the playfield rather than obscuring it by overlapping them it would’a been closer. ; ) Ooh actually it might’a eked out a win 'cause its HUD is a bit taller than Renegade’s there.
Now that I see them side-by-side like that, I think maybe also I’m subconsciously chalking Final Fight 3 up as fuzzy and low-res-looking due to the added colors giving it a somewhat blurred anti-aliased effect, vs the higher contrast forced by the smaller color palette in Renegade giving that game a comparatively sharper appearance. So I guess that’s an example of fewer colors kinda making a game look higher resolution to me.
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it sounds like the thing you’re actually mad about is the crime that the SNES was 256 wide instead of a good and pure resolution like 320
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The SNES has a register that can enable a 240 239 line display mode, but it’s rarely used since it greatly reduces vblank time.
https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/PPU_registers#SETINI_-_Screen_Mode/Video_Select_($2133_write)
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look I’m just saying that if you make games target 320x240/224, you don’t have nerds arguing about if the moon in the background should be round or not 20 years later
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as a person who has played multiple amiga games I can assure you that nerds absolutely do argue about the shape of circles displayed on 320x256 display areas
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border areas are part of the console’s effective output resolution whether you crop them or not. i think some of what you’re seeing is actually developers more aggressively blanking areas which were already in unsafe overscan areas instead of letting borders of various colors/garbage fill additional pixels
the effective output resolutions used by NES and SNES are usually the same (256x224) assuming the SNES isn’t using one of its less-common modes (e.g. hi-res modes used for seiken densetsu 2 menus, RPM Racing’s deranged interlaced, the 239-px-tall mode referenced above used by DQV, etc.)
it only follows since the choice of Ricoh 5A22/65C816 in the SNES was aimed at allowing backward compatibility with the 6502 in the NES. thus the 256-width number is a sensible default, established before the backward compatibility was dropped.
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I think I’m okay with 256 horizontal–NES is as well and I like the NES look.
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I crop them because that allows the actual game graphics to be drawn larger on my screen when run in emulators like Mesen. So, that’s just the part that matters to me. ^ _^
(Specifically, I’m talking about Mesen’s “Game - Game Settings - Overscan - Use game-specific overscan settings” menu option where you can set how many pixels to crop off each of the four sides of the screen on a per-game basis. Combined with running the game full screen, this can give a game’s graphics a lot more room on the screen. : D)
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“onus” was internally derived early in the writing / concept stage; chosen if not conceived by kojima, which is why it stands out as his choices tend to. the game was mostly done by the time jay visited the studio, which as i recall mainly involved smoothing over/naturalizing the way pmc units communicated in the field
edit: that said i did just find an email where he used the word in 06 so good call anyway lmao
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man, in the (IC, so kinda not) good ol’ times we had a poster that was called Rya Reisender, and he became famous (to/for me at least) for a legendary quote, along the lines of
i don’t look at graphics
which in context was meant to say that he could appreciate gameplay over pure graphics, but of course it slowly became a meme’ish quote thrown a lot around.
Unrelated, but fwiw, he also was a Romancing SaGa connoiseur, and so enthusiastic that he managed to make me play RS3, and like any good FF noob, i missed some hint/info in the first few hours, entered a dungeon and got regularly one-shotted until i gave up (even savestates only last so long when you get killed in every encounter 
)
ahhhhh well, youth is wasted on the young, innit
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tl;dr since i don’t look at graphics, the SNES wins by default because soundchip.
…… only to realise
WAIT NO, THE MEGADRIVE HAS THE YM2612, THAT ACTUALLY IS EVEN BETTER AYEEEEEEEE
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the viruses in dr. mario are completely benign. the only failure state is giving your patient an overdose.
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Are we even sure there’s a patient? It seems more like Mario isn’t actually a doctor and he’s just a pharmacist.
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he has a phd in mario, he is a doctor of mario
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I’m thinking about how weird and rushed Illusion of Gaia felt. Very weird game in my opinion. In particular I’m thinking about the pig which if you’ve played it before you know
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I think about the Quintet Trilogy all the time, especially how funny that phrase is to describe it. I should replay them soon.
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I was planning on going to Terranigma pretty soon after Illusion of Gaia, but then I learned Soul Blazer existed so now I gotta go backwards
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