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Well I don't know I think they were, at least the SNES was. Everyone craps on it for that weak CPU and you can see where it started with some flicker and slowdown, to the very back end when people still had maybe a little slowing but no flicker with a lot going on screen, or even stable in some places. They had to start relying on third party chips inside the cartridges not part of the original design to eek even more. That was the wall there, and I really don't recall someone going beyond what someone had done already with the system other than the insane creation of the MSU-1 mapper to run Laser Disc games of all things.

Now on Genesis I had Zero Tolerance, and there was a sequel made that never made it out, it was multiplayer too. The developer has (had?) a solid page up about it maybe 2 years ago and even downloads for that stuff. They basically said that game for what they wanted to accomplish did push it to the extreme so you see where cuts were made to get it to work yet it did. I really did enjoy that game, it was a total gamble buy at a flea market at the time and no regrets at all. Duke Nukem is as intense and it was a legit but oddly Brazilian only title, and oddly Piko Interactive lately picked up the licensing and started to peddle it through their site as well. So that's another one people can take a peek at for pushing the limits.

Well off hand I was thinking of the mad hatter fight on Batman and Robin, the ground moves along kind of like mode 7 in and also out of the screen, bends, curves, scrolls right into the screen yet not all flat like f-zero but with elevation to it like Speed Racer did.

Castlevania in a way does something too of the sort, there is a stage which vertically scrolls and using some background trickery spins the entire stage left and right slowly some degrees off center.

As far as music goes, I'd say the team that worked with Tengen for that era - Hitoshi Sakimoto & Masaharu Iwata, (music/sound engine programmer and composer) did make full use of the Yamaha chips, IMO better than has been done since, despite them being very prevalent in other machines - keyboards and computers for many years before and after.
This composition is one of my favorites - it was made near the end of the genesis's life, for a big-name company and a top-tier licence. Check out the rest of the OST too. Amazing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3fOf-8L-IQ&index=11&list=PL532E466C1847FF92&t=0s
This took a team effort to make that Yamaha chip achieve those expressive tones. Nearly all american companies just verbatim transferred midis to generic tones built into the devkit.

Ahh Gauntlet 4, I never did get time on that one really. That there is one of those rarer cases sadly when the audio is just ear candy from the Genesis. Had that been more of a stock standard than the tinny buzzy stuff much seemed to have as it was the easy way about it, I'd think far more highly of the Genesis for music capabilities.

That's the kind of audio you'd get a taste of in some good arcade games, very very nice.


You're right about Tengen though, check out the conversion of Devils Crash (Devil's Fury) for the Genesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkMXOWFgB5M

FM was a beast in the hands of good talented composers, great stuff linked in the last few posts. Don't forget Techno-Soft's musical skills and I would say graphically as well Thunder Force IV is a titan on the console.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmO8WGx1hcE