Fanboy wars throughout the ages - Settled at last!

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We decide the winners of 27 years of system rage, so you don't have to

SNES. Mega Drive. Grey. Black. Mario. Sonic. To many of us, this match-upwill forever be the quintissential console war. We bled from our eyes with the volume of our support and detractions. But what many forget is that particularly in Europe, another 16-bit heavyweight also stomped through the fray, and while packed with games, it wasn't just a console. Yes, the Commodore Amiga was also a great big pile of deal.

Mega Drive games might not have always been as pretty as their SNES counterparts, but the machine did a better job of processing sprites at high speed and had a whole host of steamingly exclusives. It matched the SNES' revolutionary FX chip with a 3D processor of its own to create Virtua Racing. Its horsepower and storage capacity were expandable via the Mega CD and 32X. And of course, the Mega Drive had Sonic.

While the Amiga missed out on a lot of the AAA games afforded to the other two, it did things they just could not, by simple nature of being a computer, and its hardware was expandable with different drives, hard discs and RAM. And it had a wealth of quirky, brilliant games from the premiere UK and European devs at the time, most of which were cheaper than their console equivalents. And of course, the Amiga had Monkey Island.

But what happens when we apply scientific fanboy analysis to these three?

So the Doom test then!

The fact that Doom got up and running on the SNES at all is an FX chip miracle. Though it lost textures and was rather stiff and chuggy:

The 32X-powered Mega Drive version was much prettier and slicker, but it was missing a few levels and enemies, andthe music was mighty tinny:

The Amiga version is a fan port, but it's lightning fast, slick as a creosote sea lion and benefits massively from enhanced mouse control mods:

Verdict:

David Houghton
David Houghton
Former GamesRadar+ Features Writer

Former (and long-time) GamesRadar+ writer, Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.